Kaimusailing

On Oahu I was in a different society, more like San Diego than Pago Pago. My sister-in-law is an active person in the college community, she likes to do things and get involved, there is a crowd of friends that swarm around her, and thus she organized a pasta class. Her daughter was making lasagna in the large kitchen with her friend from college in England.
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The food preparation was for lasagna and it was strange because an Italian chef was coming over to give a food preparation class on lasagna. When he arrived he had all the ingredients and tools to make fresh pasta and build a proper lasagna. My daughter had flown in from England with her partner who flew in from New Jersey. They asked if I wanted to get lunch at a poke bowl place in the neighborhood. We went there and got our poke bowls, some wine, and failed to get the chocolate wafers for our hostess.
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The discussion was about the protests on the Big Island about the new telescope to be built there. The protesters claimed Mauna Kea, the building site, was sacred ground. It seemed to me that maybe the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, are coming back. Knowledge is not sacred, an extinct volcano is. Let's just cancel the telescope which can be relocated in the Canary Islands. Let's respect the ancient Hawaiians who held the mountain sacred. The ancient Hawaiians.
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Let's get it straight, the ancient Hawaiians were not as nice as these modern apologists portray them. They won their land by clubbing their opponents to death. You could be clubbed to death for looking at the local chief. Probably there was a lot of that going on everywhere on Earth during the 13th century. We have not progressed much since then.
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I compared the telescope protesters to the fundamentalist insurgents in Afghanistan, no respect for science or human rights. Knowledge is carried over, unquestioned, from the distant past, and who knows if the modern interpretation has the same spiritual basis as the original. I fear that the Dark Ages are coming back, fueled by reactionary religious zealots who disdain learning other than religious teaching, and aided by a populace that increasingly shies away from complicated details on the way to knee jerk reactions, simpletons. Even of more concern than the anti-telescope demonstrators are the assassins, murderers, mass shooters, who are a menace to everyone else in our society.
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I was only on Oahu for a few hours and then flew back to the Big Island. My daughter and her partner were on their way a couple days later. As usual they were up for a hike and eager to go out and do things. I had a list of things to do, hike the Puna Trail, photograph the beach road that we had already photographed two years ago, but now was a lot different, the lava had destroyed whole communities there, visit my younger brother and sister who lived nearby, and visit the restaurant Moon and Turtle in Hilo.
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We drove to Paradise Park and delivered mail from Hilo and found my nephew was unable to go on the hike of the Puna Trail. We drove to the trail head, sprayed for mosquitoes, and plunged off on a side trail, I went that way and the youngsters protested that that was not where the main trail went, but it went to the ocean and so we followed the trail down to the sea. I expected large storm waves.
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It was beautiful on the shoreline. It was rocky but not the high cliffs further to the Southwest going toward Cape Kumakahi. Mostly pahoihoi lava which is smooth with a ropey pattern, large blocks of rock that were cracked and disheveled, plus a lot of bits of rocks, gravel, small round stones weathered by the waves. We hiked and I took a lot of pictures with the cell phone. I was still trying to get a handle on controlling its focus point. When it was right the photos were incredibly detailed, when it was wrong they looked soft and out of focus. I also had to keep my fingers out of the shot and try to hold the little cell phone still. Not like the Canon EOS that was like holding a brick.
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The trail is 2 1/2 miles long and eventually meets the shoreline, but the rest of the way it is inland through a wooded area, dense, and after the recent rains, filled with muddy bogs, plus the sea breeze couldn't get in there, the air was humid and still, and in the sunlit areas it was hot, Georgia marsh like.
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I will post a link to the 60 or so photos I took. Can't be on flickr anymore, I've exceeded my limit there by 700 photos.
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We met my nephew at the trail head and went on a trip with him to Kalapana, further down the coast to the West. This whole area has been overrun with lava since about 1985, destroying Kaimu Black Sand Beach, Kalapana, and now other areas nearby. Green Lake, the largest lake in the Hawaiian Islands vaporized in 3 1/2 hours due to lava intrusion into its waters.
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We drove East from Kalapana and had to go over a couple of large lava flows that now had the two lane highway bulldozed and paved over them. We reached Pohoiki where we had left two years ago to photograph the place down the coast where the lava ran right into the sea, producing columns of steam and explosions when the molten lava hit the cold water. At Pohoiki, which is Isaac Hale Park, we were astounded to find the breakwater and boat launch ramp land locked by millions of tons of black sand, deposited by local shore currents from the sea intrusions of lava to the East and West. At Pohoiki the parking lot was surrounded by a lava flow about 40 feet high. All the access roads were blocked by lava except the one we drove in on. The road from Pohoiki to Pahoa going North was blocked. We went up it just to see and we saw. We went out through another road, through Opihikao. Opihikao means here's where they eat Opihi, a local whelk or abalone.
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We were quite tired and decided not to go out for dinner that evening. Cheese and crackers and some wine. Ibuprofen. There was more hiking to do the next day.
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The photo is of the shore, of many pictures, but one stands out, the lone blond rock on a dark shore, hanging tide pools with little fish inside, a cooling wind, very zen.