antipodes

It was 5 AM when I tapped the Sunbeam urn for a complimentary coffee and stepped outside the Hilo Seaside Hotel. It was gray, wet and fragrant on Banyan drive as I set off to see the Pacific.

This was my first morning on the big island of Hawaii and the excitement should have made me attentive. But my mind was elsewhere, taken by a hole spewing shit into a basin of blue water. I was thinking about the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the image in the news yesterday of the sea floor pierced and furiously expelling oil. It looked like people had reversed the plumbing of the world and flushed centuries of septic mess to the surface.

I moved up the road and came upon Liliuokalani Gardens, a pretty municipal park on Hilo Bay, still gray in the pre-dawn light. The banyan trees, massive and dark, dwarfed the paths and benches.  They were, at once, both sheltering and fearfully large.

The leafy canopy of the park was full of healthy, sherbet colored flowers, but the memory of leaking crap poisoning the Gulf kept my attention on the ground of black lava stone.

Further along there was a rock garden made in the Asian tradition.  Placed on swells of grass that imitate the sea, each rock was displayed to make the most of its unique shape. As I navigated the field the relationships between rocks changed. With a step or two in any direction, boulders that dominated the display were eclipsed by others and new clusters formed, bringing what were once stragglers into communion. It was a display of gentle philosophy, finding beauty in uniqueness and wonder in small shifts of allegiance. But the mess in the Gulf spoiled the aesthetics; this rock garden was nothing more than a distraction from the operative philosophy of power and domination that created the current oil catastrophe.

A variety of foot bridges, one topped with a red pagoda, spanned the seawater pools. Another bridge, the stone one, rose in a quick arc to slow the pace and encourage a pause.

I paused and was spooked by the face made from two rocks and tree shadows in the reflection under the stone bridge. The men tossed into the sea when the Deepwater Horizon exploded came to mind.

I started back to the Seaside Hotel and came upon an empty lot full of sinks which had been retired from collecting toothpaste and hair dye and blood and sending it away somewhere out of sight.