Hawaii Day Seven

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Our condo home was handsome, airy, bright:
Glass lanai doors aflood with morning light,
While wooden shutters ushered through the breeze
Together with the rustlings of palm trees.
Our white and private third-floor balcony
O'erlooked neat lawns and villas toward the sea --
The "Kiahuna Outrigger Plantation,"
Manicured and fit to its location
Fronting on the beaches of Poipu,
But backing on some pretty country too.
Indoors, we had a tidy kitchenette,
A King-size bed, and high-speed Internet!
(Alas, my laptop balked at logging on;
The final straw, my goal of blogging gone.)
Our Number 16 villa held the rear;
We missed the sound of surf, but never fear:
I ran to fetch a nothing from the car
And Kauai mountains beckoned from afar,
Green velvet biceps flexing up a frame
For hinted vistas whispering my name.

The morning brought no flag in forward force;
I was afire to be about our course,
Wherever it might be, I didn't care,
So long as I could breathe Kauaiian air,
Explore the country, greet those magic hills,
Connect somehow with all the promised thrills
I couldn't see, but sensed, as down a trail,
An invitation through a parting veil.
But Sara (smart!) took the first morning slow,
Learning the map and plotting where to go
Throughout our week -- a necessary squeeze
Between our scheduled activities
(A dinner cruise, a helicopter ride, and, last,
An evening Féte to celebrate our past.)
The first two days alone were fully free,
With all the island loop to drive and see:
Good plan to pause, although I chafed to sit,
To groom the time and make the features fit.

Outbound at last! We honored first our host,
Exploring Poipu and the Southern coast:
Drove up through meadows to Koloa town,
The sea air fresh and clean, our windows down --
No more Big Island voggy smell or haze,
Blue skies decanted purest sunny days
With clear-cut bumper clouds of snowy white
And temperate trades that kissed with cool delight
The tropic skin. And everywhere is green!
No razor lava rivers to be seen,
Just soft red dirt abloom with fertile grasses,
Verdancy from coast to mountain passes,
Forests, fields, high peaks, all deep and lush,
From tamest condo lawns to wildest bush.
The country roads were small, speed 25,
A friend to gawking round you as you drive.
Ah, Muse! The errands of our day were few;
We touristed the towns as tourists do,
And each must get a mention in my song,
But through them, run a thread of music strong,
A background soaring, firm and sweet and high,
For this enchanted emerald land, Kauai!

In search of breakfast, first we made our way
To Kalaheo, finding their café,
A local favorite, tasty, homey, cute,
And worthy of a Travelogue's repute.

Scant miles onward, tending to the West,
We found, deserted on its day of rest,
The town of Hanapepe. Silence reigned
Upon a red-dirt strip that seemed unchanged,
Its shack-like homes in picturesque decay
Preserving a Hawaiian yesterday
In stillness, heat, and woods. The shops were shut;
We walked their "swinging bridge" over the cut
(A narrow river brooding still and brown),
And bought papayas on the edge of town
From a closed shack with dollar-payment box,
Then peeled away, back to the world of clocks
And running time, a mile down the road.

From there, we hit the beach! The bright sand glowed,
And from the rim of azure waterworld
The crystal hillocks rose and rolled and curled
In crushing softness and in silky hiss
Upon the smile of beach their fulsome kiss;
The clustered palms, like asterisks on stems,
Fringed the near headlands, while, like giant gems,
The cliff-cut mountains held the faded distance.
Here, released from all adult resistance,
Straight into the booming surf we dove,
Submitting to the bliss of Nature's love,
Embraced and tumbled, as by father's arms
Whose roughhouse bundling both wins and warms,
A power universal in its sway
Expressed in perfect trust and laughing play.
All up and down the beach, real children run,
Shrieking with joy, between the surf and sun,
And at their side, the ranks of every age,
Distinctions lost of Senator or sage,
Enjoy the same experience the same
As those newly arrived to join the game.
A lesson no philosophy could teach
Embodied here: who doesn't love a beach?

The windy sky turned grey, then quickly black,
And we were subject to a squall's attack,
Chased underneath a camp-roof with a crowd
As stinging rains blew sideways, whistling loud,
Then just as quickly blew off on its way,
Trailing a misty skirt across the Bay,
And sunlight ruled as tranquil as before --
A genuine Hawaiian-style downpour.

Our map gave Salt Pond Beach a snorkel star;
It wasn't so, and, drying in the car,
We drove instead to find the "Spouting Horn,"
A lip of ledge by heaving waters torn,
Where one small blowhole, set back from the coast,
With every slugging swell shoots out a ghost
Of milky-gowned and human-walking spray
Thirty feet tall at times, fading away
With hollow howlings and great sucking sounds
As into backwash all of it rebounds.
Great fun, and tourists leaned behind the rail,
Trying their best, often to no avail,
To time the moment of the overwhelm
And get the apparition down on film.



Sun-scalded now and hungry, back we strayed,
In quest of dinner and some indoor shade,
To Poipu Shopping Village. Here my Log
Must pause to honor humble "Puka Dog,"
A mall-hole restaurant that we both adored.
The hot dog is its one and only board,
But bratty-plump and juicy, sauced with flavors
Tasty in their bright Hawaiian savors,
Lillikoi and guava-spicy relish
Filling up a meaty bun: mmm, delish!
Honor also goes to Amy there,
The counter-girl with energy to spare,
Who with her brilliant smile made us smile too,
And tipped us off to snorkel at Poipu.

But first we visited a higher station
Fór our special dinner reservation,
"Hyatt Grand Resort," just down the road.
Amid its opulence-on-overload,
Still dressed in shorts and sandals, we were seized
By a tuxedo'd usher, who was pleased
To sit us down (quite hidden from the hall)
And show us menus from the heavy, tall
And gilded book of restaurants they command.
Each offered us a different wonderland;
We picked the one most aura'd of romance,
And booked our table three days in advance.

The sun was setting, and at my beseech
We hastened from the Hyatt to the beach,
Arriving with the sun abreast the sea
And all the evening like a tapestry.
At Poipu now, in light limpid and still
That seemed with liquid gold the air to fill,
The amber sandbar cupped in by a reef
That hushed the sapphire surf to scalloped leaf,
And other swimmers quietly afloat,
With many telltale snorkel-tubes to note,
We donned our masks and slipped into the scene
As if into a travel magazine.
O contrary desires, sea or sky,
Immerse with angels or uplift the eye
To glorious immolation of the day
In purpling clouds and pink descending ray,
Or swim with Sara's limbs dimly afar,
Or stand beside her, seeing the first star?
At last a fellow snorkeler called us down
To where a turtle of the sea, dun-brown,
In tilted hover just beneath the wave
Nosed gently in and round his rocky cave,
Nor minding our attentions, lost in grace,
Weightless of fin and dignified of face,
Pursued his great slow business till the light
Diminished into underwater night
And we stood up.

That night we drank champagne
Recumbent on our lanai, in a rain,
Almost, of starshine from the dizzied crush
Of galaxies above, as island-lush
Across the vault of moonless ocean sky
As emerald is below upon Kauai.


--Matt

Hawaii: Interlude

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Soft, Camb, and pause. Our Travellers are asleep,
So let us break the rush of things external,
Take this quiet time and touch the kernel --
Sara and myself. A subject deep:
This trip, you know, was part defiant leap
From vales of death to find the green and vernal
Source of love, lost in its pledge eternal
Somewhere up the slippery, sere and steep
Canyon of years, a promise left to keep.

And now? How this our anniversary,
Half-finished, feels a warming nursery,
Transforming grief to fragile shoots of art,
Here and her own, like sketched and cursory
Pathways from sunny nature to the heart,
An inward greening, and an upward start.

--Matt

Hawaii Day Six

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Today we island-hopped. A strange sensation,
Having airplane flights in mid-vacation.
Áll the rush and stress of journey ended,
Farewells to the places we'd befriended:
Hotel restaurant breakfast, then we sat
Beside a koi pond at the laundromat;
Our just-dry clothes we bustled into bags,
We rustled up our tickets and our tags
And for the last time rode our rental car
Across the lava fields, not very far,
To Kona airport, where we first came in --
But yet our trip was newly to begin.
A skateboard camber upward, West and North,
And hardly had our aircraft sallied forth
Than down it swung to drop us on Kauai
(By pause in Honolulu). As the sky
Went silver, pink, and settled into dark,
As if by pardon, we could disembark
Into a new adventure, all-new place,
Redoubled romance and true Traveller's grace.



The headlights of our second rental car
Show road, and little else of where we are
As through the shadowed foliage we proceed,
Guided by tourist map too small to read.
And though I swear and clench the steering wheel,
Insult the useless road signs, O I feel,
In every breath of clean Pacific air
That through the open windows stirs my hair,
In every hint of hills that upward loom
Like chunks of deeper night in darker bloom
Against the stars, a welcome and a thrill,
Excitement near too strong for sitting still,
A call, a song, my spirit in reply --
Yes, even now I know I love Kauai!
My smiling Sara understands my mood,
Discharged in verbal energetic flood
Of hot impatience at the balky roads
(And nothing is the matter with the roads);
We find our condo village easily,
With tiki torches down the lane to see
Illuminated hints of a lagoon
In a soft jungle. Registered, and soon
Directed to our cabin for the night,
At once, with Sara, I must needs take flight
And lead her down the pathway toward the shore:
In darkness, drawn on by the breathing roar
And open black ahead, we slip between
The bark and glow of indoor TV screen
In condo hamlets, and at last we reach
The open arc of empty moonless beach.

And O, the constellations crowd the sky
As barefoot down the seamless sand we fly;
And O, the surf engulfs our travel pants
As, laughing, in and out we daring dance;
My Sara, O, I write this, and we seem
Forever in our first Kauaian dream!

--Matt

Hawaii Day Five

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Come Sara's birthday in this magic place!
The morning sunlight found her happy face
Gazing from off the hotel balcony
Over the ever-scintillating sea
Bequeathing teal-green corals to her eyes
Beneath the bluest of Hawaiian skies.

That evening (it would be our last in Kona)
By arrangement prior, we'd be shown a
Classic Hawaiian luau. Oy. Til' then,
We breakfasted at local "Bongo Ben,"
A beachy hangout on our Kona strip,
And, creaky from the last day's driving trip,
Stayed slow and local here. We browsed the town:
Tourists and natives driving up and down
The single road between the boardwalk wall
And line of claptrap shop and market-stall;
Cerulean surf reared fountain-crowns of spray
And out beyond, upon the sunlit bay,
A cruise ship lay at anchor, kayaks flashed,
The tour boats hovered and the swimmers plashed;
Ashore, the crowds of Visitors meandered,
Tanned and lotioned, through the shops that pandered
Tó their appetite for flowered shirts,
Drinks, flip-flops, snorkels, shave ice, sarong skirts;
Warren of little alleys, brilliant signs
Competing in their half-askew designs,
All crammed and toppling in this tiny focal
Point of tourist pleasure: Kona local.

Through the flux of sunny revelry,
We found the stately House of Hulihee,
An 1830s residence of Kings
Replete with royal furniture and things:
We took the tour and tried our best to glean
Some culture, but the blue inviting scene
Beyond the windows beckoned us again
Outdoors. We photographed the grounds and then
We drove around the headland, found a beach,
And stayed there for some hours. There we each
Bent to our art, me writing poetry,
And Sara sketching ledges on the sea,
Companiable in silence in the shade,
Secluded in a little wooded glade,
Sand in our toes, we whiled away the time --
A birthday afternoon of the sublime.

The hotel had a saltwater lagoon
And, on returning, she and I were soon
Confronting it with snorkels on our head.
Uncertain, balancing a draw and dread,
Both having merely practiced this before,
We tiptoed to the shallow baby shore
And waded in, then, with the smallest shove,
Were face-down, breathing, seeing, and -- in love!
O wonders of the underwater world!
Discovered there in liquid sunlight swirled:
Haven of angels, creatures sweet and bright,
Unveiling grace and pageant to our sight,
Golds, carmines, neons, striped and piped in hues
Fantastic to behold, in ones and twos
Or small armadas decked with racing banners,
Delicate in flight, with gentle manners
Nosing at the reefs or rippled sand
Or vanished from a slow extended hand,
All iridescence, each a living wish,
Unearthly glory -- dare you call them fish?

Deep may we plumb the mystery of why
Such beauty seems designed for human eye.
Who placed here things of pure aesthetic pleasure?
Whát's this game, Muse, of your hidden treasure?
Whý do meteors, blazing through the stars,
Trailing their dead incinerating scars
Across the vault of heaven, flash like gold?
What ciphered story are we being told?
Why look we, seek we, travel we, to find
These things that in themselves are blank and blind?
What in us vibrates to these signals sent
Down ocean bottoms or o'er firmament,
Finding our secret souls reflected there
In truest Beauty, Art beyond compare?
We stand, we leave the tidepool, doff our mask,
Equipment fitting us to only ask.

At sunset, with our freshly-showered hair
And casual Hawaiian evening wear,
We lined up on the lawn to join the luau.
What's a self-respecting Muse to do, now?
Spectacle of unrepentant schmaltz!
But somehow, through its tackiness and faults,
Its grunting beefcake dancers, Hula girls,
Its fire jugglers trading baton twirls,
Its band that switched from slide guitar to drumming
Equal in their skill, equally numbing
Ín their flat and passionless effect,
Its grinning gladhand host whose dialect
Was kin to tones of AM radio
As, interspersing jokes, he led the show,
Its dancing based on brute athletic tests,
Its plastic shells on Polynesian breasts,
Its rows of staring tourists down each table
Slurping Mai Tais (all that you were able) --
Somehow, yes, some artistry came through,
If only in the purity of true
(I mean Historic) stamp of stereotype,
A value in the very trope of tripe,
As crystallizing a regime of mind,
Half out to conquer, half to seek and find,
That (don't deny it, Muse) used art as violence
Half to love and half to kill these Islands.

O, my sweetie, in your yellow lei,
A smiling rider on your natal day,
Let's smile together in the lilting beat
And pile our trays with pork and fish to eat;
We'll watch the sun go down behind the palms
And sell our luau dreaming back as alms.

--Matt

Home From Hawaii and Blog Plans

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We're back home in Seattle. Apologies to any readers for my lack of blogging! Two factors conspired to keep me from it -- first, the days were generally too busy, from morning till night; and second, I never did find a reliable Internet connection. At least on the Big Island I found the occasional hotspot here and there, but once we went to Kauai I was completely blacked out. It was ironic, because our condo CAME with a high-speed connection...but technical difficulties with my laptop prevented me from being able to use it.

We did have a fantastic trip after I left off. But don't worry: I plan to continue blogging it, day by day, in retrospect. What's more, now that I have the time, I'm going to do it in poetry, as was my original intention. I realize that I never explicitly telegraphed that intention, and I see (now that I have the Internet back) that my only comment has been a scream of horror, but in true Vogon fashion I'm going to continue on (sorry, Robb). My conviction is that prose descriptions of Hawaii vacations have about the same hidden ubiquity and ultimate value as tourist photos of the Lincoln Memorial, and though my verse may likely have even less to recommend it, my working theory is that this is the only way to get better.

--Matt

Hawaii Day Four

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Another strange, half-thwarted, half-magical day on the Big Island. This was our day to drive all the way to the Volcano National Park, stopping at the famous Punalu'u black sand beach. Both were a bust (in different ways), but chance encounters led to a great experience along the way.

Before heading out we bought some picnic food (a combination of fresh mangoes, bananas, and cherimoyas from the local farmer's market, and fried chicken from Safeway), and stopped briefly at a local coffeehouse where I was finally able to make a blog post (though I had to borrow an electric socket at the real estate agent next door). At the coffeehouse the barista girl recommended taking a detour to South Point, which she said had scenic cliffs.

First there was the long drive around the bottom of the Big Island, retracing our route from the day before and continuing further. It poured rain on and off as we drove. The scratch coffee jungle gave way to macadamia orchards, to black swaths of bare lava fields, to grasslands, back to jungle: a rapid series of microclimates alternating too fast to keep track of. Towns were tiny, much was uninhabited. Some parts seemed to remind us of other places we'd been -- Arizona, Connecticut -- as if donning momentary phantoms from our brains, but a second look would pierce the illusion and reveal a land totally alien. Sara and I compared notes on whether we liked the Big Island. We came to the conclusion that we wouldn't want to live here, and that it certainly didn't live up to the standard image of Hawaii, but nevertheless there was a strong reality to it. It was no theme park: aside from the water sports it wasn't really a tourist destination at all; rather it was a visit to an impoverished corner of the USA where people eked out a hard living from a harsh and fascinating land.

We were on a wary lookout for the turnoff to South Point, not trusting Hawaii's road signs, but we needn't have worried: the Point itself appeared ahead of us as a gigantic ironing-board-shaped plateau, yellow-walled, starting at our level and running horizontally seaward while the rest of the land sloped away alongside it. It was like the prow of a ship extending from an enormous launching slip. We took the turnoff and were immediately in a different world, the single-lane road running through tamed grasslands, thin woods, horse and dairy farms. Eventually we did descend, through a wild rolling prarie of windswept yellow turf, with here and there tortured single trees shredded backwards by the wind, the wall of ocean approaching far ahead. The land seemed totally empty as far as the eye could see to left or right, but it too was farmed; every ten miles or so a cluster of salt-eaten tin shacks went by in a barbed-wire enclosure, marking the center for wandering cows, goats, and horses.

Things then got surreal: in the midst of this hardscrabble prarie we passed a NASA deep-space tracking station, its huge radio dishes aimed obliquely off Earth; then, a few miles further, the little road ran through the rusted-out remains of an abandoned and derelict wind farm. A more modern one was visible operating far below, closer to the coast (the ocean was still miles away), but nothing could improve on these huge rust-streaked stems with frozen or missing propellors, planted amid blown-down barbed-wire fences and chewing cows. Sara and I weren't sure what world we were in -- we half-expected to find some shotgun-toting farmer building a moon rocket in his barn out here.

We finally started to run out of peninsula, and the road narrowed down to a single car-width, dirt shoulders on each side for passing. The paved strip got older and rougher, and eventually petered out altogether into craters and yellow dirt, and we were at the cliffs.

The cliffs (the Southernmost point of the United States) were not only incredibly scenic, but it turned out they were quite popular with the locals -- for cliff-jumping! We were eating our picnic and wondering what these wooden platforms built over the lip were for, when five or six jeeps and trucks came dust-storming down the road, and a whole bunch of twenty-year-old guys and girls leaped out, ran to the edge, and started psyching themselves up for the jump. We wound up watching and talking with them for an hour or so, along with some other tourists who were there. The drop was a good forty feet, I'd guess, into deep clear blue water, the cliffs being hollowed out underneath so the jumpers landed far from land. Getting back up was an act of daring too: there was a ladder hung from one platform, but it ended several feet above the water, so they had to time the swells, put their feet on a strung rope that was nearby, seize the bottom rung with their hands on the uplift and pull themselves up from there. It was thrilling to watch, and Sara and I both snapped lots of pictures. Sara especially got some fantastic action shots of the kids in mid-leap.

The area also had a big open blowhole a few dozen feet back from the edge, where you could look down and see the ocean surging and fizzing in the underground rocky cave, with great echoing sounds like a plunger working.

South Point was the highlight of the day. Back on the road we drove another long distance to the Punalu'u black sand beach, an anticlimax. (The whole island is black lava rock, why wouldn't the sand be black? And why would you go to a beach that makes you look like you've been playing in an ash dump anyway?) It was fun to be completely in sync with Sara; we both looked at it for five minutes, said "Yep," and moved on. The best part here was a wild black cat that frequented the trash can at the parking area, leaping up and nosing in with his black tail waving. He seemed the mischievous spirit of the beach, happily collecting spoils from all the lured tourists.

Then we drove even further to the Volcano National Park, and this was the worst of all. We arrived at twilight, as planned, but it was hard to tell, because the closer we got the more we were enveloped in a purple-black miasma of the vog. It got so we could hardly see a thing to either side. The smell started to get to us, and as a soupy darkness fell we wondered about the wisdom of driving towards a volcano. Then, when we got to the gate, it turned out that the park was mostly closed because of high sulfur dioxide levels. You could still go in, but they were warning people against it, especially those with respiratory problems. Since we'd come all this way we paid our $10, but Sara has had athsma in the past, and we'd hardly gone a mile past the Visitor's Center in the swirling dark (past big flashing signs and mounted placards warning us away) when she declared a turnaround. I was happy to oblige. We had one glimpse of a steam forest (mysterious white smoke rising here and there on a hillside of stunted pines in the fog dusk) and then we were speeding back down the mountain Northward, trying to reach breathable air, laughing about the idea of a National Park of toxic gases.

Night fell eerily early, pitch darkness at 6:30, which we heard later was normal for the Southern island, the mountain and cloudbank blocking the sunset. But it just added to our sense of the surreal on the two hours' drive back to Kailua.

A failed day? Well, not really. It wasn't the usual vacationing, but it was weirdly magical and educational. The Island is showing unexpected stuff to us.

--Matt

Hawaii Day Three

(Switching to prose for efficiency's sake; I haven't had anywhere near as much free time to write as I thought I would! There's also been the amusing saga of trying to find a working internet connection on the Kona Coast. All in all call it a "noble experiment." Back to straight diary.)

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For Day Three we were our own guides, and didn't fare nearly as well. We took our rental car and drove off to explore South Kona, in search of (1) a sandy beach, and (2) Kealakekua Bay, supposedly a great snorkeling destination. We didn't find either. The main road angled at once up the mountainside and settled in a thousand feet above the water; individual roads trickled beachward without posted signs of any kind. We submitted to the whims of the travel gods, though, and wound up having an entertaining day.

First, it was enlightening just driving in Hawaii. The main road through Kona gets very narrow and winding, and the region has a rural poverty within a kind of scratch jungle. The ubiquitous black lava rocks front the road, which is then overhung with rioting fronds, vines, walking root systems -- an impenetrable tangle. Several little coffee farms thrust handwritten signs out of hidden dirt driveways, inviting us in for tastings (Kona Coffee is the wine of this region). On our right the occasional break in the greenery offered aerial footage of the island coast far below, a dust-brown shovel meeting the misty blue.

Contrary to its image, Hawaiian weather is not all sun. A perpetual cloudlid smothers the mountaintop, thick and grey and blurred smooth by "vog," the toxic gas released from the volcano; the mornings are sunny on the coast, but by midday the vogbank creeps overhead, and rain was commencing as we drove on. The vog has a certain smell that, coming and going, accompanied us throughout our stay in Kona.

We did finally find a turnoff marked Kealakekua Bay, but partway down we veered off to follow another sign for the "painted church," an attraction we'd heard about. This proved primtive and somewhat sad, and we never did get back on the road to Kealakekua. Instead, we gave a lift to a native Hawaiian whose car had broken down in the church parkinglot; he directed us on a different road to the highway, where he got out to hitch, and pointed us on a route to our bay that proved all wrong. For a while we were following a single-lane unpainted road straight through the blasted lava field near the coast; after luring us for miles it turned back uphill; we backtracked; and finally by slipping through a tiny Public Access driveway near a State Park we came out at the coast. We thought this was Kealakekua Bay, but we discovered later that it was Honaunau. Still, we parked, offloaded towels and beach bag, and I went snorkeling.

This wasn't a "beach" per se; there was no sand, just a leopard-print of black ledges and tidepools out to the fretting surf; still, it was a popular hangout, with people swimming, sunning on the rocks, and generally hanging out. As it was raining, it wasn't a great day for sunbathing, and with the surf on the sharp rocks it wasn't the best location for me to practice snorkeling for the first time. Still, Sara gamely sat down and filled her sketchbook with speed-sketches of beach people, and I plunged in and made a go of it. I seemed to get the gist pretty quickly, and saw some pretty tropical fish, and climbed successfully out on the rocks to discover that I'd grown several bleeding scrapes on my legs and an unknown spine in my heel. Three young girls were practicing their ukeleles as I walked back to Sara through the tidepools, and I felt initiated into Hawaii.

From there we continued back toward Kailua, our town, in search of a sand beach, and we still didn't find it, but we wound up for lunch at a luxury resort whose restaurant terrace overlooked a vast kept tidepool. The tidepool boasted a wealth of undersea activity, clearly visible from our table at the rail above: five sea turtles lounged in a pile on a ledge, like a bunch of stone salad bowls thrown together, with fins; there were more tropical fish, and a flounder.

And that was the extent of our adventuring for the day. The way we saw it, we'd be staying on a sand beach on Kauai, so we figured the Big Island was trying to show us what it had to offer. We appreciated it.


--Matt

Hawaii Day Two (Part 2)

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Each falls had individuality
But mainly as a window-frame to see
The different lives different Hawaiians led
Across the varied Hilo watershed.

1

The first was nestled right within the town,
A local feature with a wide renown;
Bused flocks of Japanese were smiling there
But, coming to it, one was more aware
Of Hilo's little streets and boxy homes,
All balanced on the lava's dips and domes
(Though to the eye, lush woods and lawns appear,
No leveling of earth can happen here).
Each house hode high on variegated stilts,
Accomodating to the fastened tilits,
Cheap houses with the shallow-angled roofs,
Big Government-style schools -- old hubris proofs
Of anchoring a nation to the crust
And scaring up a poor domestic trust.

2

Along a narrow road, we played the rube
And clicked a trickle from a lava tube.
The foliage was thick and polyglot,
The wood bridge reeked of tar, the sun was hot.

3

Akaka Falls -- a tourist destination;
Parking lot and tongues from every nation,
Herded down a stairway with a rail
That passes for a secret jungle trail
To pause upon a landing overlook
And view the scene you saw in the guidebook.
The falls itself seemed preening, across space,
Before the cameras passing it apace,
Turning its queenly ribbon like a train
The likes of which you'd never see again.



4

Joe's tour turned local; we began to rove
To private lands. First, a banana grove!
We rode a grassy track and parked for lunch
Amid a stunted orchard where each bunch
Was bagged and tied off podlike up above.
A falls was near -- who cares? I fell in love
With the vast inland grasslands, rolling high
In sussurating silence 'neath the sky
To the blue smudge of mountains. Handcut roads
With far-off flatbed trucks waiting their loads
Serviced the empty empire of food --
Hawaii in an old plantation mood.
Here in the orchard, man-size leaf-fronds made
A green-brown lace of slowly twitching shade;
The long banana aisles held the trash
Of dead leaves, trunk stumps and machete slash.
No freebies here, but Joe cut sugar cane;
We sucked it for dessert, drove on again.
(Oh, just in case this wasn't yet bizarre,
At lunch Joe pulled his bagpipes from the car,
An for a while the tropic afternoon
Resounded to the skirling Highland tune.

5

The last was best: finally we got to swim!
A steep dirt road came level at the brim
Of an enchanted deep-green sunken lake.
High on the other side, twin jets did break
And side by side plunge near a hundred feet
Down the sheer cliff that walled off the retreat.
And O, the shock and joy of getting wet,
Cleansing the hot day's mileage and sweat!
The three of us swam happy and alone,
Floating the deep or leaping from the stone
That offered lumpy platforms on one side.
Of course I set my sights, and gamely tried,
To swim beneath the falls. Easily broached,
The task turned serious as I approached,
Fighting the chop and spray with mighty strain
As if against a pocket hurricane
To face a huge continuing explosion,
Hammer of this fathomless erosion,
Inches from my nose. I lost my nerve
And, treading water, figured it would serve
To simply hold my arm beneath the blast:
I felt the skyborne pistons punching fast,
Bruising my underarm but sweetly warm,
Driving it down into the foaming storm.
I slipped "between" the bombings, Sara too,
And pressed to the cold cave wall we looked back through
The darkly backlit arcs of falling spray --
The triumph of our waterfalling day.

The long road back; two other tour guides drove,
Both charming, as was Joe, and like him strove
To entertain their charge with endless chat.
The strange result was, when at last we sat
Exhausted at the hotel bar, we found,
Lifting our Mai Tais in the ceaseless sound
Of surf, and staring at the ruby sun
Kissing the waves to end our day of fun
With warm caresses of the evening weather --
Only now could we converse together!

--Matt

(scroll down for the original prose version of the ending)













For the record, the fifth and final waterfall of our tour was the best, because we finally got to swim! This was also on private land, accessible by a steeply-descending dirt road that leveled out right at the grassy edge of a perfect sunken lake. The other side was walled in by a sheer cliff, with TWO waterfalls jetting out at the top, falling side by side a good hundred feet It was a wise decision to put this one last in the tour after the long hot day in the car, because swimming immediately washed it all away and left a joyful aftertaste.

Of course I had to try swimming under the falls, but what seemed a romantic photo opportunity from afar turned serious as I swam closer: I had to fight against a miniature hurricane and fierce current even to get close, and then I was staring at something like an ongoing explosion in front of me. I had sudden images of firehoses turned on protestors in the south and didn't care to sample the experience. So I went "between" the two explosions and got behind, where in the cold wind against the wet rock I had a great view of the two falls arcing over me.

Joe handed us off to a fellow tour guide and his wife for the drive back (Brandy and Oleathia; Brandy being the male); Brandy was just as talkative as Joe, but in a more joky vein, and the odd part of the day was that Sara and I experienced all this without really having a moment to talk amongst ourselves the whole time. We caught up in a rush back at the hotel bar, with a Mai Tai and a huge Africanesque sun flattening its rubicund sphere through bands of clouds to the watery horizon.