Friday, August 27, 2004

Tropical Tidbit Roundup

It’s time.  Time for me to leave for my conference, time for me to be back home.  I’ve been stringing this along for my own amusement for long enough.  Today I’ll wrap up my Tropical Tidbits, share the little epigrammatic notes I made for myself in the airplane back and on ensuing reflective days, all my quick notions and recollections, from which I’ve been taking my Tidbits to date.  I’m just going to go through the rest of them, unburden myself of a few more photos, and I’ll call it a day.  A workday.

Lagoons that are nothing less than lava-lined swimming pools of 90-degree water, clear and pure, so perfectly balanced to my own biology that I can float in them for two hours and my hands don’t even wrinkle.

Going into one of said lagoons for a dip after a burning session of bikram-style yoga on a humid lanai in a tropical rainstorm, and letting the warm water wash the sweat from my brow and extract the aching exhaustion from my muscles till all the energy I’d expended had been returned to me again.

Hawks in the sky by day, owls on the hunt at night.

Getting out of the car at a shopping center and unwittingly dinging the van we parked next to; Mary waited for me outside my drugstore to tell me that the other driver was angry and taking down my license number.  I stepped over with my license in my hand and apologies on my lips, professing my true ignorance and my readiness to make things right; as I spoke to the diminutive darkskinned hawaiian woman, her face lined with deep wrinkles and her dress a cheerful contrast to her demeanor, she began to thaw a little.... after a few minutes we were almost having a pleasant conversation when a sliding window moved in the back of the van and a huge voice told her to forget about it, and then we shared a few moments of relaxed conversation, the three of us - her tiny self, my average self, and the manmountain in the van whose hand, when he shook mine, was the size of a hubcap, thanking me for visiting his island.

Driving to our anniversary dinner in Hilo and getting stopped at dusk by a parade of slowmoving undecorated old pickup trucks with campaigners and banners for candidates for small local political offices; the sidewalks were lined with people who’d turned out for the dullest parade I’ve ever seen in my life but they all seemed to be having a great time.

At mile marker 5 on route 130: a public water faucet sitting yellowly on the shoulder of the highway; every time we went past it there was at least one person and often several lined up to use it, filling buckets and bottles with public water, day and night.

Hawaii’s only native land mammal is a bat.  And they don’t even barely touch the land anyway.

Geckos are ubiquitous both in popular imagery and actual living conditions.  Interesting fact about them: when one gecko attacks and eats another smaller gecko, the smaller gecko screams.  Loudly.  It’s rather disturbing. 

Weird fruits I enjoyed: starfruit (more like watermelon than I’d have expected), dragon (dramatic-looking both cut and uncut; the ones that are white inside don’t taste like much but the ones that are purple inside taste terrific), bread (a specimen of which had been left behind for us by early-departing friends; I cut it up and fried it in oil and it turned out very like a cross between green plantains and fried potatoes). 

Tom the Baker: a three-toothed character on Highway 19 north of Hilo who sells cheesecake and masaladas (portugese-style doughnuts) out of his garage; he’s garrulous and accomodating and his wares are delicious, especially the four different large cheesecakes and two masaladas that we actually bought and gleefully consumed.

Rocks on the lagoon bed surrounding geothermic vents host shimmering white algae, which gleams silver in the water-filtered light; that white algae then grows a yellow algae that turns the jagged grey and black boulders into huge gold nuggets around which magnificently colorful fish frolic in the heated streams that emit from under their gleaming confusion.

An admonition in the lisping lilting voice of a precocious and beautiful two-year-old girl: “Finish your beer, Kelly.  Don’t you want to finish your beer?”

Defending myself from the sun like poison, but achieving a healthy pallor anyway

West side graffiti, spelled out in white volcanic pebbles against vast fields of black a’a like a thousand asphalt parking lots torn up on top of each other as far as you could see: “Lita was fun.” East side graffiti, spelled out in commercially printed letters on a clean white board tied to a huge tree on the side of the road near a small creek crossing: “Bawana loves Tanglefoot.”

Swimming in crystal-clear waters with prescription goggles, watching the turtles and fish and eels and abundant life everywhere, and then having my vision obscured by a coruscating current of heated water behind which the scenery shimmers and fades, unintelligible; then, swimming through into clear water again to see that the big rock you thought you were was just beneath you is actually a huge sea turtle, its carapace four feet across and five long, covered with thick moss, chewing up the small seaplants that peek up from the ragged rocky bed of the lagoon and taking a jacuzzi on the ocean floor.

Beautiful fish - tangs and angels - surrounding the mossy turtle, feeding like toys on the moss that’s grown on its back.

Turtles, in Hawaiian, are called “Homu.” I think I grew to recognize two homu in particular who took their teatimes in our lagoon.  I named them “Hoju” and “Arigato.”

And I still have a few photos you might find interesting, and even if you don’t I’ll post them here anyway and have done with it:

Huli huli chicken and beef ribs being prepared at a roadside grill.  They were sublime - all four chickens and two orders of ribs we got.  And it smelled good there, too.

On the way to Kapoho the highway passed under an enormous canopy of monkeypod trees that form a flat lacy canopy over everything.  I do not do it justice here but I still think this is a nice photo.  It’s one of the few things I really regret not getting to see more of. 

At the Volcano there’s a lava tube that’s paved and lighted and people wander through it, it’s very cool.  At the end is a small gate that leads to a further undeveloped portion of the tube, another 300 yards or so, and that’s really cool.  You feel pretty damn underground in there.  On the way back out I took this picture of the gate back to the surfaceworld. 

At the Tropical Botanical Gardens north of Hilo we found this carving of Ku.  ALL HAIL KU.  That is all. 

Return again after this weekend break for the resumption of “Regular Chucklehut.”