Hawaii Day Five

.

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

.

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

.

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.)

------------

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)

.

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.

Hawaii Day Two (Part 1)

.

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

.

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