Hilo, Hawaii - Sabbatical Officially Begins!

9-3-2008
Honolulu International Airport, Oahu, Hawaii

Stopping by Glendale College yesterday made me deeply aware that my sabbatical has now officially begun. To my way of thinking it began after my Baja class ended in June, but the trip to Costa Rica was actually during summer vacation. Obviously, I'm thrilled about the opportunity to travel and write for a full year. It's a dream I've harbored for a very long time. I remember sitting in Mr. Balogh's geography classroom at Cabrillo College fantasizing about my future sabbatical. There were other dreams too. The little house and sports car are still daydreams, but today I find myself a tenured professor of geography, wandering the world, observing and reflecting. The house and the car will come later, I think, and are less important.

9-5-2008
Puka Puka Restaurant, Hilo Hawaii

Travelling for weeks at a time is going to be real challenge now that I'm a father. I think of Catalina continuously. I've become dependent on the little doses of joy she brings to each of my days.

The house where my friend, Paul, lives is about ten miles north of Hilo proper. It's in small neighborhood of mostly native Hawaiians. The neighbors even chat to each other in Polynesian pidgin. Lots of lifted pickup trucks sit in the driveways. Nearly everyone keeps their dogs caged in tiny little wire houses with corrugated roofs that keep the rain off. Seems brutal to me, but it's how dogs are kept here, I'm told. The sea sits about 600 feet below us, maybe a mile or two down the hill. Mexico is somewhere off in the distance from the back porch. Paul and his roommates keep an impressive garden. There is so much rain and the soil is so rich that after just a matter of months, they now eat lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, okra, and other vegetables from their own garden nearly every night. Four cats of varying sizes and dispositions roam the house and the yard. At night it rains. Clouds float over the blue sea in the mornings. The neighborhood is peaceful, suburban, pleasant.

It's an interesting menu here at Puka Puka, an odd little local hole-in-the-wall place where I'm having lunch. They seem to specialize in culturally diverse tastes: tempura plates, falafel, lamb, and Indian-style curries. Japanese cheesecake and green tea are featured too. I had sautéed ahi and green tea. It came with oily seasoned rice, sautéed veggies, and salad. All of it was excellent. The green tea had toasted rice in it, Japanese-style.

I'm looking out the window at Hilo Bayfront Beach Park. This area was the epicenter of tsunami damage during the 1946 and 1960 tsunamis. After the second tidal wave killed again, homes and businesses were replaced by a pleasant grassy park with many beaches and waterways. I give credit to the city for intelligent urban planning. Too many communities struck by natural disasters stubbornly rebuild time and again, despite persistent threat of repeat disaster.

Hilo is more a town than a city. Some of the turn of the century buildings downtown suggest a time when the town was more prosperous. Sugar cane was the source of much of the wealth in town but that business finally ended in the 1990s. On Maui I saw massive fields of cane. Here I've seen none. Tourism has clearly not replaced all the income. The only movie theater in town is in a classic old building, but it's been divided up into multiple small screens and shows recent, but not new, releases for $1.

Since it lies on the windward side of Hawaii, facing the trade winds, the whole area surrounding Hilo is green and lush. There are many organic farms and cattle ranches, especially to the north. In this area many streams and waterfalls cascade off the side of the volcano heading to the sea. Thus the coastal highway must traverse a canyon every few miles as it heads north out of Hilo town. At first these crossings are made on old bridges, but eventually, the road sweeps down into coastal valleys and along small bays, gracefully carving its way across the mountain faces.

Strangely, you can rarely see the volcano from Hilo. The slope of this giant shield volcano is too slight to make it appear as anything other than a gently sloping mountainside extending off into the high distance unless the skies are completely cloud free.

Hilo is the wettest city in the United States and yet most days the sun shines at midday. Rain comes often at night and in the early morning. This is hardly typical of tropical locations. Apparently the weather patterns on Hawaii are shaped as much by the daily shifting of mountain-valley breezes caused by the massive mountain as they are by the dominant northwest trade winds. The resulting clouds and winds combine with local geography to make for distinctly different climate in each region. While this is not uncommon on mountainous islands, there are surprises on Hawaii. For example, the area near Kona where the famous coffee is grown (and where I'm sitting right now) is quite wet, despite lying downwind of the volcanoes. Warm air rising up the volcano during the day draws moisture in to the area and as this humid air rises up the mountain afternoon showers are common.

Living for a week with Paul and his college buddies is a lot like returning to the years just after college. It's a hard time for middle-class American kids. Years of extended adolescence are coming to an end. Few twenty-something’s know exactly what they want to do with their newly earned college degrees. Meanwhile there is rent to pay and college loans are looming. I remember the time with distinctly mixed feelings. After a job in Manhattan I did figure out what mattered most to me, but it was a painful process.

Moreover, college life in America (and Hollywood's various paeans to it) often instill a nasty drinking or drug habit in the four (or five) years of college. Suffice it to say that there were frequent beer runs during the week. Also a few of the roommates have medical conditions involving pain which are apparently aided by frequent inhalation of marijuana. While my tone here is cynical, I don't for a minute doubt that the drug is among the safest, if the not the safest, ever used. Still, I can't help but wonder about all the young people today who use "medical" marijuana as freely as aspirin. It's tough to figure out who's simply subverting the prohibition and who really needs the stuff. I say legalize it all for recreation use and end the confusion.

Hawaii's medical marijuana laws, while similar to those in California, do not allow for dispensaries. Instead, any one with a "blue card" from a licensed physician can grow up to seven plants and carry as much as three ounces of the stuff without fear of prosecution. As a result of these laws, some of Paul's roommates have been experts in plant cultivation and discussions of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium fertilizers were as common as discussions of popular music. Having grown up in the East, it's a little unsettling to note that some of the house and garden plants would send a Rhode Island student to prison for years.