Before dawn on the morning of my departure from Hawaii, I set out to visit the cliffs one last time. I drove away from the dark coast of Puna, up the side of Kilauea where I passed through a cloud that was filling with light. The sun broke over the horizon as I skirted the steaming crater of Kilauea Iki to glimpse the sheets of lava uplifted and buckled by recent volcanic activity. The floor of the volcano looked like an LA freeway after the BIG ONE and I was reminded how creation and a destruction often look similar.

Once over the crown of the volcano, the road to Halina Pali descended on the southern slope through the Kau desert, which lies between Mauna Loa and Kilauea. The wind was constant and strong here and the smell was fresh. Setting a standard for purity, the air flows from the arctic over thousand of miles of open ocean to arrive here.  Nearby, however, poisonous gas spewed from the main crater of Kilauea, forming a violet drift that floated down the rift toward the sea.  The stain in the air raised the issue of beauty, an experience which relies on contrast more than perfection. It’s surprising that pollution can be beautiful.  A drop of oil in clean water makes rainbows which curl like a nautilus and the effect is undeniably beautiful. Beauty is not a moral thing, a point made clear in the last century by the artists and architects who made stunning spectacles for the Third Reich.  No, beauty is just an experience, a compelling, motivating thing that has nothing to do with human notions of good and bad.

The road continued down the slope, alternately passing through dry grassland and…

young lava flows.

Once again the landscape proposed beauty as a topic of conversation. The lava confounded my senses, since it looked like a viscous liquid, but it was in fact crisp and brittle to the touch. The molten forms hijacked waking consciousness,  replacing it with a fugue of dreamy associations. “Over there, is that a cranium nestled in rope?”

“And look here, it’s the torso of a Hindu Goddess.” The shapes of frozen lava fired my imagination to see sublime, mundane and grotesque things, transforming a tourist like me into an accidental mystic.  And the richness of this experience registered as beauty.

The road ended at the cliffs of Halina Pali, which rose 1800 feet above and ran parallel to a 12 mile stretch of coast, which faced south-south east. To the left were young lava flows which poured down the slope and then stretched out to make a shelf into the Pacific. The shelf of lava is geologically unstable and may someday break off into the sea like the edge of cookie weakened by dunking and falling into the cup of coffee to make a plop so large that the wave will slosh over the rim to deposit sea shells on mountain tops.

Antarctica was straight ahead. Of course I did not see it, but only 6500 miles of empty space could account for a blue so deep and I was compulsive about that color. I found it thrilling. I could not get enough of it. I stared at it and I couldn’t describe the feeling, since it did not remind me of anything. The beauty of that blue was beyond words and I wondered if the sight was stimulating a gene deposited on the long beach of my genetic history by an ancestor with four legs, a set of flippers, and gills that converted to lungs on demand.

"Halina Pali", oil on aluminum panel, 24"x30". 2010

I took many photographs but they were all inadequate, since they failed to capture the vault of color that was Halina Pali. Painting may best embody the color of the place, since it can show how rich hues inspire thievery, compelling one to grab, hold and take away. Once again I noted that beauty is motivating, but not a moral force.

Like crochet on the edge of a pillow, a line of white surf stretched to the left, embellishing this, the southern-most coast of the United States.  And the prettiness of the scene was contrasted by weird cinder cones that poked up from the distant desert valley like canine teeth from a bottom jaw. Beauty requires a little brutishness.

Vegetation was blonde and spare, since little rain falls on Halina Pali. Uncluttered by surface detail, the beauty of the place was fundamental, derived from the four ancient elements of air, water, earth, and fire. Sound increased my perception of size. Beside the distant rhythm of the surf, I heard the wind filling both the hollow of my ear and the curve of the cliff. A large bee passed my head at full speed to demonstrate the space-stretching character of the Doppler effect. I felt very small here, an experience that was relaxing, since the perfect majesty of the place relieved me of all ambition.

And like the beautiful landscape before me, I emptied out; the cavity of self was scoured into a simple bowl, poised, and amoral.

If beauty is motivation to live, and I think it is, then the plants of Hawaii do humanity an enormous favor, reaffirming life with their sensual display. Having ten or more distinct climate zones, the island of Hawaii has an astonishing diversity of plant life to contemplate. And it’s not just the visual sensation of shape, color and texture that is so pleasing…

it’s the compound experience of sounds emanating from shapes moving in the breeze and…

the smells that slip from the colors. Plants are special to people, particularly the bloom, representing love, its blossom and loss, across cultures. Who knows how the flower became such a universal symbol of affection, but it probably has as much to do with frailty as it does sensuality.  But there is evil afoot. The potency, in fact the very meaning of flowers, is under attack.  Within Hawaii, perhaps more terrifying for daring to invade this paradise, are plastic flowers which live here, undead, in profusion.

I’ve been living in a house full of them, and they tried to destroy me!  Like zombies with a familiar shape but no soul, they invaded my space.

Blooms should crush under foot and not spring back to form. But these are sturdy constructions without need of food, light or water. They seem so normal, such good, modern things, advocating for efficiency and durability as they do.

But here is starts, the invasion that ends a life worth living; the insidious assertion made by all plastic flowers that the illusion of feeling is satisfaction enough. Without moisture or movement of their own, they feed on every nosegay of wild violets ever picked with innocence and presented with love. They suck from every prom corsage, wedding bouquet and grave wreath.

They collect dust.

It’s not just the smell of Play-Doh and benzene that reveals them as the undead, it’s also their sound which is insincere. It is the unmistakable sound of plastic, the most malleable of materials; whether in the form of a freezer container or a stamen, it makes the same lifeless thud when struck. *

Like the mutant gene on a healthy chromosome, they look normal but their expression is deforming. Protect your soul! Send these uncorrupted corpses to the landfill where they will live, undead, for a thousand years.

*Observation made by Roland Bathes in his essay, “Plastic”.

“Even before we knew the gory details about Mo’okini Heiau’s history, the place gave us the heebie-jeebies. We aren’t the only ones who have noticed that the area around the temple is filled with an eerie, ghostly lifelessness, and it’s the only place on the island that we like to avoid…Used for human sacrifices, the area feels devoid of a soul. The quiet isn’t comforting, but rather an empty void.”

Why would a guidebook author, who is usually practical, suddenly go Gothic? Was this calculated entertainment? Or an ingenuous expression of personal experience? And if it is the later, what created his reaction?  Can a landscape be haunted?

The vibe at Mo’okini Heiau is unusual and the feeling begins a few miles from the temple with a dramatic descent on a single lane, which drops 500 feet to the sea. As my Kia Sorrento and I were losing altitude, other famous descents came to mind, most gloomy, like the journey of Orpheus into the underworld to find his lost love or the descent of Jesus into hell.  Primed now for mythic interpretation of whatever came into view, I saw at the bottom of the incline a platoon of giants with faces to the breeze.

The wind turbines, whose great size was occasionally obscured by the rise and fall of hills, sent scimitars of shadow across the backs of grazing horses. The turbines were white but for one blade, which was painted the shade of marigold. The unexpected flash of color required my eye to follow and my brain to tally repetitions, which may account for the dreamy, hallucinatory feel of the wind farm.  But maybe the strangeness was created by the quiet, compound sound of the turbines, at once mechanical like a buried pump and human like the swish of ballet skirts. The association of giants and ballerinas was odd, but I left the wind farm happy, encouraged to see sustainable energy technology applied.

But the oddness continued; at the bottom of the road, edging the sea, was a well-maintained and perfectly empty airport.  No planes, no people, no cars. If it were derelict, the airport would register simply as something old and not useful. But since it’s groomed and ready for action, the total absence of humans is weird. Where did everybody go? The scene is Hitchcock weird, subtle, ambiguous and full of portent.

Now accompanied by Hitchcock, giants, Orpheus, Jesus, and the corps de ballet, I continued through the constant wind, along an unpaved track, parallel to the sea toward Mo’okini Heiau. The land here is very dry and open, receiving only a few inches of moisture a year.  As a result, it’s tan and dotted with gnarly trees whose branches turn like expressionist strokes of black on a field of raw canvas.

One approaches Mo’okini from below on a path of red cinders.

“Heiau” is the word for “temple” in the Hawaiian language. Mo’okini Heiau was for centuries the most important temple in the Big Island District of Kohala and much of it’s history has come to the present through oral tradition. The original temple was built near the end of the first millennium by Mo’okini a local priest.  It was subsequently rebuilt and enlarged, circa 1370, by Pa’ao, a priest who arrived from the south Pacific, bringing with him new gods, and the tradition of human sacrifice, a practice that endured for centuries after his death.  Reports of the number of sacrifices range from hundreds to tens of the thousands.

By legend the Heiau was built in a single day by a line of 15,000 men who brought rocks from 10 miles away by passing them along the human chain. The exterior walls of the Mo’okini are roughly rectangular, about 250 feet by 130 feet and the height varies up to 14 feet, but they may once have been as high as 20 feet.  The base of the ground hugging walls is 10 feet thick and they taper on the exterior and the interior.  The scale and the mass of the exterior is sobering; “weighty” describes both the thing and the feeling it evokes. By comparison a modern temple like the average Wal-Mart building is much larger, but it has no scale or weight, festooned as it is with light, color and signage.  For the modern viewer, the weight of the stone and the size of the walls dominate perfectly, not unlike a sculpture by Richard Serra, who is a master at creating sober reverence through manipulations of space, scale and mass.

The entrance to the temple is large enough for only one person to pass.  Stripped by the architecture of the comfort and strength of companions, you enter alone.

The thousand year old walls, assembled without mortar, block the sound and feel of the wind.  The quiet and stillness are surprising and register as a small loss, as if loved ones, who have been visiting for the weekend, have just left.

Inside across the northerly end is a raised stone platform three feet high which once held fires, statues, the alter and wood towers.

On the alter someone dropped a lei around a stone as if it were a head.

Detached stone platforms only a stone or two high, are scattered around the interior and once served as foundations for wooden temples dedicated to various gods.

At the north end of the compound situated between the main temple and distant Maui lies a flat stone named, Papa-nui-o-leka. Here human flesh was separated from bones after the body had been sacrificed. As was the tradition in many Pacific cultures, the flesh was eaten and the bones used to make tools like fish hooks, and needles.

A natural table, the Papa-nui-o-leka stone is about 6’ x 5’ x 2.5’, concave, and smooth on top. It’s easy to imagine it in use. The sacrificial stone is the tangible evidence that supports the myth that Mo’okini Heiau is full of spirits. Mo’okini is a sober place in which one feels isolated, but there is no need to resort to mysticism to account for the feeling that comes from a visit here. As with any site in which humanity slaughters humanity, like the beaches at Normandy or the World Trade Center, the visitor is moved by the loss and unsettled by the thought that killing is so often ideological. But few would claim as did the author of my guidebook that these sites are “filled with an eerie, ghostly lifelessness, … devoid of a soul”.  Perhaps it’s the cannibalism and the reuse of bone that upsets modern sensibilities to the point of hallucination. Putting modern standards aside, however, it was practical of these people to utilize the protein and raw materials of sacrificed bodies. But it’s not just history that accounts for the feelings evoked by the place, they are also created by the site, an isolated windy, dry slope as well as the architecture, which nimbly exploits the psychological effects of scale, weight and space. If Mo’okini is haunted, it is haunted by the prejudice of modern people who too quickly indulge in a fantasy that people of the past were bloody to a degree that surpasses our own.

But there is relief from the gloominess, unintentional as it is. Someone has placed several sprinklers around the grounds, which go pfft, pfft, pfft and shoot little rainbows making a counter-memorial to the monument of Mo’okini Heiau.

Most of the historical information in this post is from the following:

Russell Apple, Pacific Historian, US Department of Interior, National Registry of Historic Places Inventory–Nomination Form.

Mangos are best eaten in the bathtub with a friend.

But the people who planted several miles of mango trees along a coastal road in Puna, Hawaii probably did not have this option. According to local legend, migrant farm workers put the mango seeds into the ground a century ago to provide food while wandering up and down the coast looking for work.  I have no idea if this story is historical fact, but the thought of travelers, tired and perseverant, stopping to find the sweetness of food and shade fits the place perfectly.

People still come, mostly with family, to collect the free fruit, as do wild pigs. I saw a black sow with her spotted piglets having a mango feast, making wet and satisfying sounds.

A sign with a mysterious message hangs on the tree above where the pigs were snacking. The vertical diamond orientation suggests a warning, but of what? Waiters carrying trays of mangos in the forest, wearing feathered hats and making gestures with their hands to indicate the deliciousness of the fruit while smacking lips?

The road meanders through papaya plantations…

And passes through rain forest that has returned to untended pockets.

But the celebrities of this eco-niche are the mangos, which have grown large enough to tunnel over the road, emphasizing its curve and eclipse as it passes the next rise, refreshing the cliché, “what lies around the next bend?” It’s season and the mangos are dropping by the thousands and each fall has its own sound. When the fruit first separates from the branch, it makes an indistinct noise like the sound of someone snapping fingers with wet hands. Then there is a pause, very pregnant of a second or two, before the sugary bomb hits the tarmac with a deep wet “THWAP” or a “THWOMP” if it hits the hood of an oncoming car.  As a pedestrian there is relief  to not have been under the oncoming mango.

The impact on the asphalt is great enough to break the skin, a natural enough occurrence, since the tree is working to release its seed. But it hurts to see pleasure go to waste.

As agents of mother nature, a group of surfers in an old Corolla, a past-child-bearing couple in a red Mustang convertible and two fisherman in a Ford 350 continue the work that gravity began and create expanding galaxies…

and stretching nebula for miles along Mango Road.

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.