flux

- December 31, 2012

Ocean waves...they, too, are like snowflakes. They roll in like a live thing, like Wonder Twin powers--they arc themselves up and over into long bottle-green tubes, or they curl only at the thick edges and fall out in the incandescent middle. They shove forward like a dull razor blade or a snowplow, or spike into little cobalt triangles that slide playfully against each other. Watching them in relation to any landscape of rock is a feast for the eyes; it makes you feel vision itself is multiple senses. They hit a mesa corner at full swell and throw showers impossibly high up and over, or break before impact and just daintily splatter a lower rock face with foam. They advance in forceful succession like waves of intrepid cavalry; and then they disappear, the surface layers just shuffling conspicuously back and forth. The wakes they drag out behind them might be opaque sheets of milk, a mess of extraterrestrial turquoise swirls, a cauldron of stiff-peaked silvery froth.

It's a common rumination among local artists: how the view on this 533 square mile island is always in flux. If it's raining and sultry somewhere, it's clear and flatly hot somewhere else at the same time. The cloud parties are a roving, evolving caravan. Marshmallow fluff in a few spots overhead; another hour wispy gray bands across the perimeter; another hour grayer panes cut the blue in half. Their shadows bring the greens of the mountain side to life as well, tree lines sliding and receding throughout a morning. One night, the full moon rises early, enormous and gold from behind the cliff at Shipwrecks Beach, and scatters a swath of crystal down the middle of the sea as it moves unimpeded across the sky. The next night, a trillion brilliant stars shout from a pitch black sky; the moon is cordoned behind a low streak of clouds, but these clouds are the same color as the sky, so you don't even understand that the moon has risen until it reaches the clouds' edge and illuminates the outline.

Some days the wind will riot your long hair against your face so hard it stings; the next day you don't even need a hair tie. The curtain billows into the room all night and the next morning hangs motionless at the same open window. You might holler your afternoon conversation between the symphonies of gale and surf; then at 9pm you may be sitting under a still expanse of blue charcoal night, so quiet that you are really startled by a THWACK that strikes out of the seemingly empty endless space spread before you. It takes a second to situate yourself--who's out here? firecrackers? what could have fallen? THWACK and THWACK again--an invisible Humpback is slapping its tail against the oceantop, a performance that dulls the noise of any wave.

This is a powerful place, no doubt. That's probably why, on our way to a certain turtle spot Friday evening, we heard a conch blow and saw this happening:

The ceremony ended with a second, longer conch-blowing, toward the sea, for the ancestors. Including my grandpa, I guess, because we kneeled in this very spot to put his ashes in the water five years ago. If anyone is paying attention, that's where mine should go, too.

At the opposite side of thinking, Phil successfully turned 42 this weekend. The electricity in the Poipu district went out for a few hours, an event which proved totally immaterial--we spent the day celebrating almost wholly outside within a mile of our room.

Birthday night was our latest one yet, followed by our earliest morning to hit the road. North Shore adventure day included stops at the Kilauea bird refuge, Anini Beach Park, Hanalei, and some breath-taking sunset hours at Ke'e Beach--the end of the road. Let's have the pictures do the talking from here on out.