Hawaii Day Two (Part 1)

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The Royal Kona bar, hard by the sea,
This early morning shelters only me,
Tables deserted round its flagstone curve,
No waiters hovering to greet and serve;
Good private time to write, before the day
With all its marching news gets in the way.
Our hotel's built atop a thrust of rock
That roars and shudders to the endless shock
Of great Pacific swells crashing to shore.
The bar is built right at the drama's door,
Where adamant ledge defends with mountain force
Against the sea's insinsuating course:
Foaming explosions burst and seethe and surge,
Shatter in lambent teal, retreat, then urge
Themselves upon themselves another time,
Deep detonations in eternal rhyme,
And stronger blows now fountain a sunlit spray,
Brief rainbows arc, the rock swallowed away,
Only to surface, streaming from its pools,
Shrugging the cream and liquid turquoise jewels
And breasting its blackened vigor to the sun,
Unchanged and ready for another one.
Why can't I look away? Why is this all
I came to see, and whither comes the call?

The white van waited with its open doors:
We'd signed for one of these prepackaged tours,
"Waterfall Journeys," C Big Island Inc. --
I felt the Muse's freedom spirit sink.
Excursion tours, my Poet? Are you sure?
What's next? Vacation chosen by brochure?
And yet -- this Big Isle is SO big, so new,
A wandering ride to give an overview,
To take us further-fielding than we would,
Unveil us more Hawaii -- it felt good.
Now, a surprise as we approached the bus:
The "tour group" meeting here -- was only us!
A private escort; Joe would be our guide,
The "bus" his little Kia. Snug inside,
We climbed the mountain. Kona fell away,
And we began a strange, successful day.

Joe was a wiry guy, tee-shirt and jeans,
Tattoos and slicked-back hair, master of scenes,
Regaling us with facts for every sight
Or memories of his every teenage fight,
Or histories of the islands, odd but true,
And how he saw it from his point of view,
Or tales of his extended family,
Their various businesses and progeny;
We learned the breeds of guava, types of trees,
Names of his kids, when's safe to swallow seeds,
A friendly spiel, truly encyclopedic,
That left us in the back seat slightly seasick.
More power, Joe! The Muse, she likes your style,
Approves your every profitable mile;
You showed us two Hawaiis through the day;
We wouldn't have it any other way.

We drove the Saddle Road to Hilo side
Oe'r mountain landscapes withered, brown and dried,
A high volcanic desert, harsh to Man --
They train the troops here for Afghanistan --
Weird cinder cones like great red pimples rose
Across the blasted gorse and lava flows;
The shield of Mauna Kea, wide and dun,
Held dead and distant highlands to the sun;
Then down the other side through growing green,
A belt of witchy trees and ferns between,
And into viny jungle -- flowers, fruit --
And stopped to view a hidden lava chute.
The shadow of a fallen skylight gave
A steep descent into the sunken cave,
Tinkling with trickled water, hung with ropes
Of tree roots, also on the walls in frozen gropes;
The tube extended from the fall of light
Deep into darkness and on out of sight
Down forms of weird extended lava stone,
Melted like chocolate fudge or knobbed like bone,
Crumbled like cake or shelved like river sand --
I wandered in as far as I could stand,
Till, looking back, the opening glowed green,
A far-off spotlight of a foliate scene.




To "Waterfalls!" our tour then took its way,
And five of them filled up the later day.
Of waterfalls, well, each one has its name,
But in the essence, all display the same:
A river into sudden gulfs of space,
A silken ribbon on the rocky face,
Packets of water like white falcons diving,
Brutal thunder of their mass arriving
Into a greenblack devastated pool
Whose sunilt silver rings ever unspool
Across the water to the grassy mere
To draw the helpless staring tourists here.
Furious motion ever holding still --
What is it in this scene that holds the will?
But what is motion? What is solid earth?
Follow some water from its upper birth,
Down past the rock to pool, do it again,
A third, a fourth time, lift your head, and then
Reel drunken as the rocks will melt and dance,
Bend upward flows of trees; within this trance
All comes unanchored, universes wheel,
Impermanence is borne on you as real:
Our lives are water: here the river drops,
Sparkles a bit in air, and then it stops.



--Matt

Hawaii - Day One

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Old Wordsworth never took an airplane flight,
Nor gazed with godlight elevated sight
Upon the Earth spread out in azure purity--
And Shelley never railed against Security.

Hail Muse! We travellers of the modern world,
Scoring your altitudes with wings unfurled,
Viewing your visions, sporting in your skies,
Your lofty stratas open to our eyes,
By rights should rain the world with poetry
Pure from your aery hospitality.
And yet, torpedoed in our steel machines,
Shades pulled against your grand eternal scenes,
Cramped out from windows six or seven deep,
Benumbed by droning habit into sleep,
Slaves in the hold of commerce, we sit dumb,
And Poets very few of us become.

My shade is up: the wide Pacific breast
Rolls under foaming clouds out to the West,
Over the curved horizon of the ball,
And water fills the four horizons all.
We're flying to Hawaii -— magic words!
I hear their glory mid the deafened herds.
O Muse, forgive our trespass of your space
And let me glimpse your freckled, smiling face
From out the forms and castles of your throne,
Finding my window, singling out my own:
Lend me a sniff of sky, a scrap of cloud,
To justify vacations to the crowd.

Our plane touched down in Kona at midday.
We disembarked the fond old-fashioned way,
Onto the tarmac, free to wander in,
Breathe the true air and let the trip begin.
Thus mine and Sara's anniversary
Started with open skies, humidity,
And tropic heat that reined our mainland race
And softened us into the Island pace.
We find our luggage, claim our rental car,
And, sweating, start to realize where we are.

What foreign scenes! What vast and alien land,
Hawaii, from the mountains to the sand
Stretched down across a wide and ragged plain
Under a smoggy sky of brooding rain
While yet the sun slants merciless across --
A lunar land of history and loss.
The road runs through the broken lava field,
Whose tumbled cubes seem dirt, plowed for a yield,
Almost like you could crumble it in your hand --
They're razor rocks. It's hard to understand.
The yellow gorse and palms cling for a perch,
And human structures too lick from the lurch,
Rebuilt across the wreckage, spanking new,
Or ticky-tack and lucky. From the few
Town streets descending to the island edge,
Blue ocean rises like a solid ledge,
A wall of nothingness rimming the world,
And everything's turned back and inward curled.
An Isle of Conquest: Nature's, also Man's --
The renovation of utopian plans
In ceaseless fierce replacement, rude and raw,
The hardened lava no less than the law;
Caldera's moonscapes beetling in crags,
And, at the airport, ours and unknown flags.
And this -- all this -- is beauty! First impression,
Fruit of half a day's bewildered session --
Rocks, grass, palms, the faded old hotel,
The ghosts, the muggy air, the thudding swell --
And all we did was park our rental car,
Change into shorts, drink at the ocean bar,
Nap from the jetlag to the roaring surf,
Find a shrimp dinner down the ratty scurf
Of party restaurants on Ali'i Drive --
And O! We love it all! So green! Alive!

--Matt

T Minus 0

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The bags are packed, the house is tidy, the proverbial ducks are in the proverbial row (or at least to the extent that anyone can make them BE in a row; they're forever breaking rank to go clucking after some crumb or other, the little ones especially). At this point I believe that one can say with confidence that the odds are basically in our favor for us arriving at the airport with our correct papers and at our destination with something to wear. That will have to do, seeing as our friend Terry is picking us up at 5:30 am tomorrow for the drive to the airport, and it's currently after midnight. Thank you Terry! Don't expect too much from us tomorrow.

Well, we're off. Hawaii, a "real vacation," and various experimental metatravelogical blog posts await. Hopefully they'll be fun to read. Join us!

--Matt

Errands Errands Errands

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While I've been working at the office, Sara has been handling the lion's share of the pre-trip tasks. Here's just a sample of what she's been doing:

• Arranged with the post office to hold our mail
• Arranged with our friend Terry to give us a ride to the airport
• Arranged with our friend Ayla to come over and water our plants while we're away (involved making her a duplicate key)
• Informed Chase bank about our trip (see earlier blog entry)
• Took a day-long class and renewed her massage license to prevent it from expiring while she's away
• Arranged with our car broker to take over selling our pickup truck while we're away (long story; we're trying to swap our Tacoma for a Subaru Outback)
• Arranged with the boarding stable and friends to take care of her horse Percy while we're away (involved buying oats, vitamins, etc.)
• Returned various library books
• Rescheduled various appointments
• Worked out her art supply kit for the trip (see below**)

Big hugs and kudos to my sweetie for taking care of all these errands!

A tired Sara at Cloud City Coffee. Shopping almost done!

I joined the non-stop preparation ride yesterday, and together we spent the whole Saturday loop-the-looping through further errands. I bought clothes for the trip...Sara got a bikini top (very cute!) to replace the one she ordered at Lane Bryant that due to a delay isn't going to arrive until after we're gone (grrr)...we bought a second digital camera...many other shops and sundries were involved. It was 10:00 pm by the time we finally toppled home and spilled our big plastic bags onto the bed.

We're almost ready to go...

** Regarding Sara's art supply kit, she's eager to do a lot of painting and sketching in Hawaii, and in fact she's going to keep her artist's blog going while we travel, posting what she draws. Yes, that's right -- we'll both be blogging our way through Hawaii! Are we a modern couple or what? You can compare our blogs as we go! Hers is at: http://flyingponystudios.blogspot.com/.

--Matt

The Longest Day

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The last week of work is done; I'm on vacation! It's Friday evening and I'm writing at Café on the Ave in the University District; I'm at a high little table by the black-framed windows with the colored curtains; the Ave and the U. Bookstore (where I bought a notebook for the trip) are thronged with returning students under a mottled muggy sky. In three days we're off for Hawaii.

The hours at the office seemed doubly leaden today, the fluorescent rooms and ancient cubicles additionally dusty and airless. A crisis arose; I sat in on an emergency meeting; it was already half-meaningless to me. Back at my desk I tried to concentrate on work; I could barely keep my eyes open; my head was sluggish and achy. I took a walk, I took a couple of aspirin, I went out for a coffee -- I used all my workplace drugs. Finally when the big clock hit the last half hour my energy returned in a surge. I wrapped up everything I had to do, shut down my computer, tidied my desk, swung my pack over my shoulder and strode out to the street, free and feeling great. Lately I've had reason to worry about my motivation at work -- the workload has been light but I haven't been assiduous in seeking new tasks; it's a decent enough company but I've been reluctant to mount those steps to the front door every morning -- and I've sought for subconscious blocks or hidden agendas but damn, with the advent of vacation I realize that, really, I'm just seriously burnt out!

This is the first actual vacation I've had since May of 2007. I've already written about what Sara and I have been through since then. I'm the kind of person who doesn't readily admit to burnout -- I tend to disparage the notion of "recharging" in favor of addressing fundamental problems, plotting dramatic changes -- and I'm not saying that I don't have subconscious blocks or real issues to address in my life, but as I sit here sipping my good bitter latté, watching the students come and go outside the café window, feeling for the first time in over three years the bracing security of time off with a job to come back to, and a trip to Hawaii in between, I realize that "recharging" is a valid effect, and I've needed it. I'll be better at even this job when I return.

This post is more like a personal journal entry; I don't know that it holds any interest for the wider world, and in general it isn't the kind of thing I want for the blog. But there will be external scenes soon enough, and the whole point of a travelogue is to intermix the traveller with the destination, so it's only fair to prop up the ash-grey participant for your initial viewing pleasure. He's by no means satisfied with his paper-pushing career; he ever feels its slow mold on the edges of his once-literate mind; he's growing old with no solution in sight for how to give his so-called true calling its due primacy. Perhaps aiming a barely-witnessed blog at an overly-brochured island is a more than forlorn hope for such, and perhaps his vacation shouldn't even be weighted with the attempt, but what the heck, tonight the traveller and the muse are both champing at the bit, and he and she are equally willing martyrs to a faith in the panacea of the new and the inspiration of the natural world. Call him a tourist if you must. But it's time to put on a loud shirt in many ways.

--Matt

Adventures with Travel Agents

Two more days to work!

I should mention that I'm still employed at "Ballard Pterodactyl," and still on a contract basis, which means that my two weeks off will be unpaid. That's okay; we've saved up enough to cover both the trip and our butts when we get back. But it adds a tinge of reckless uncertainty to declarations of joy at the approaching end of work.

We'll be travelling for ten days, and not to give too much away in advance, but here's our basic itinerary: five days on the Big Island, followed by five on Kauai. On the Big Island we'll be staying at a hotel near the town of Kailua, on the Western side of the island; on Kauai we'll be staying at a condo on the beach at Poipu, Southern side. Those familiar with Hawaii can feel free to ooh and aah at these places, or shake your heads at our sad naivete, whichever is appropriate; we really don't know anything about where we're going. As far as I can tell from peering down at them with Google Earth, both locations look pretty.

At this point I confess that we arranged our trip through a travel agent. We gave them our dates and budget and left many of the details up to them. Now, I am NOT a big fan of travelling this way -- it runs against the grain of my do-it-yourself traveller heart (and the advice of my more adventurous friends) -- but, well, we'd used this particular agency once before with good results, and it was sort of the path of least resistance. The agency, which I'll call "Little Atlantis Travel," is in a North Seattle artery of run-down retail, alongside sad thrift stores and biker steak bars, and with its Bauhaus glass front opening to a fluorescent carpeted box of front-facing desks, its faded blue posters and big plastic globes, it looks like it's endured unchanged from the 1960s, complete with personnel. But the latter have experience and good contacts and basically seem to know what they're doing, and they wound up arranging a great vacation for us.

To break down our experience with them, it was: first funny, then infuriating, and finally positive.

The funny part happened because originally we were thinking of taking our vacation in Mexico, at some big resort along what they call the Mayan Riviera in Yucatan. In the immediate aftermath of Sara's mother's death, all we really wanted was a beach, ready alcohol, and a lot of pampering. As the months went by we recovered a little, however, and started to wonder what we would DO there. We realized we were open to other options. So we went down to Little Atlantis and said, "We want to take a ten-day vacation in the Fall, preferably involving a beach; where should we go?" It was a slow day at the agency and for an hour or so all the clerks cheerfully gathered ruund, piling ideas and pamphlets on us. Greece! A Mediterranean cruise! Costa Rica! Egypt! Israel! Hawaii! We circled the tropical globe a few dizzying times, and came home laden with a stack of glossy brochures and shrink-wrapped travel DVDs. A few dreamy days later we had settled on Hawaii, and it seemed natural to go back and let Little Atlantis recommend further.

That visit was on the Thursday before Labor Day weekend; we chose our islands, and we arranged to return on Tuesday, when they'd have picked out some options for us.

Then, out of the blue, they called Friday afternoon. They said they'd found a great airfare but they had to book it that day, and would we please give them $1000 down payment on the whole package. I couldn't believe my ears. WHAT "whole package?" Where were we staying? For how long? Were we supposed to pay up front for options we hadn't even been told about? Oh, they had chosen some hotels; at my request they gave me the names. Controlling my temper as best I could, I informed them that I certainly couldn't put money down on our vacation without knowing a few basic things about it. The clerk said, "Oh, OK, we'll see you Tuesday then," as if it was a perfectly normal process.

The thing is, it IS perfectly normal! That's what travel agents DO! It gradually sunk in to me. I'm sure travel agencies take money all the time to arrange vacation packages sites unseen to the so-called travellers. Book us something in the Caribbean, darling, wake us up when we're there. MY notion of travelling, on the other hand, nurtured on Eurail-Pass footloose sponteneity, is that you choose when and where you go, yourself. I figured that travel agents just collaborate with you on finding deals.

So I adjusted. In my immediate fury I spent a day online and at bookstores researching everything about the islands that I could find, as if we WERE arranging the trip ourselves -- but when we went back to Little Atlantis on Tuesday we wound up going with the hotels they had chosen in the first place. They actually had put together a good package. They did what we hired them to do. In the end we wound up quite happy with their choices, and we parted with mutal enthusiasm about the arrangements.

Still, it was good to actually DISCUSS said choices with them, and to know a little bit in advance about where we're going.

--Matt

Look Out! A Bank!

Sara and I are both excited about our upcoming Hawaii trip, but Sara especially has been happy to babble on about it to any and all who come into our path. While this is perhaps a little insensitive when, say, directed at minimum wage grocery clerks, the response from most folks has been good cheer and happiness on our behalf. And yesterday it saved us from a nasty pitfall.

She was at the BECU credit union, where she keeps one account -- our others are at Chase -- and regaling the teller there with our great adventure to come, when the teller stopped her. Be sure to tell Chase about her trip, the teller warned, or else, seeing debit card transactions coming in from Hawaii, the bank will preemptively SHUT DOWN OUR DEBIT CARDS, on the assumption that they've been stolen. Sara proceeded on to Chase and asked about this wonderful banking feature, and the organisms behind the counter there confirmed it. Oh yes, they told her straight-faced, Chase stands ready to do exactly that, wilfully depriving us of funds in the midst of our vacation with no warning at all.

Banks! Are they actually clearing houses for the Devil? Discuss! We know enough to put the mail on hold and turn the hot water heater down when we leave for a trip, but I confess I'd never heard of this one before. Nowhere in the bank can one see a poster warning travellers about this feature. Nowhere in their literature have I noticed a bullet point about it. No, this one is apparently meant to be a sweet little surprise.

Anyway, Sara told the Chase employee to mark us down for a Hawaii trip (and made sure she saw the form actually filled out and filed with a manager, Chase employees being seemingly recruited from the losing ranks of high school beauty pageants), so presumably our official banking leash now extends to Hawaii. Whew.

Fellow travellers be forewarned. And more power to Sara for telling all within earshot about our trip to Hawaii. Keep it up!

--Matt

Countdown to Hawaii

A week from today Sara and I leave for a vacation in Hawaii!

As the countdown begins it seems an auspicious moment to restart this moribund blog. I plan to chronicle our Hawaiian adventures here (provided of course I can get an Internet connection on the coast of Kauai) in hopefully interesting and unexpected ways. But because the blog has been dead for SO long, there's a risk that no one will notice. Hence I'm going to "rev up" with some entries during this preparatory week, which will hopefully act as a twinkle in the window for those who care to look this way.

The week before a vacation is fully valid as a vacation topic anyway, filled as it is with exotic purchases and a mounting sense of incredulity. Even here, seven full days out, the real world is starting to become transparent around us, and the little Hawaii pamphlets scattered on the countertop seem glowing with surreal vividness, like spot-colored objects in an artsy black-and-white scene. Sara bought a snorkel. I rummaged around and found my bathing suits. Seven days to go!

The background: it's our 20th anniversary. (Well, actually the anniversary is November 4, but project schedules at my job made it more practical for me to take the time off now.) This kind of number is worthy of romantic celebration all by itself, but in truth there's a whole other level of need to it.

Over the last two years Sara and I have lost both our mothers to cancer. Sara's lost an uncle as well, and my father has had complications that have made us start arranging Assisted Living for him. It's been two years, not only of death, but of constant TRAVEL in the service of death. All our relatives live on the East Coast; we have been back and forth in airplanes more times than we can count, back to family scenes, family climates, family needs. We've managed this explosion of last-minute jetting despite me being laid off twice in these years: somehow we found the money. When you have to find it, you do.

Well, after the last two years we needed to find some for ourselves.

Our elderly East Coast relatives, of course, remain convinced that all our emergency flights and hospital stays were "vacations" for us. Grieving though they were, they still found room for delight at our "visits," yea, even at graveside in the winter rain. Likewise, the two employers who laid me off turned suspicious and no doubt envious eyes at my taking another "jaunt" to New York in the midst of their deadlines. A floating fiction has attached itself to us, ghoulish and sticky, in which we've somehow ENJOYED the last two years -- a fiction we started to half-believe ourselves -- a fiction that could only be exorcised by the holy radiance of ACTUAL TRAVEL, of a REAL VACATION, for US.

So this Hawaii trip is Romantic in both senses of the word: it's a kissing reconnection in a beautiful setting; and it's a quasi-supernatural battle with emotional forces that express themselves in gloomy scarps, walking shafts of sunlight, and implausible turrets of voluble nature.

I'll try to capture both aspects in the weeks to come.

--Matt