Straight Outta Compton

Years ago, when all I was interested in doing on vacation was visiting buildings and drinking beer at breweries and microbreweries, I made a map of Los Angeles. Well, "made" is probably giving me a little more credit than I deserve. I BOUGHT a map of L.A. and marked on it the location of all the buildings I ever wanted to see in and around the city. That map, which was finalized about 15 years ago between my second and third trips to Los Angeles, included a companion bound volume with information about each of the buildings. I'm a nerd, I know. Over the last 23 plus years, I've methodically visited almost every one of the spots on that map.

But not number 88. Not quite anyway. Number 88 on my map sits at the end of East 107th Street in the Watts neighborhood just across the 105 (or I-105 for those of you not familiar with the highways of L.A.) to the north of Compton. And Compton's not exactly a spot tourists flock to. Number 88 is the site of the Watts Towers and as of a little more than a month ago, it was the number one unvisited building on my map. Although calling it a building might be either stretching the truth or not giving the Towers enough credit, depending on your point of view. Today, it's no longer on the unvisited portion of the list.

I'd wanted to visit the Watts Towers almost as soon as I discovered the architecture of Los Angeles but somehow it always slipped to the bottom of my agenda for any particular trip as I opted to visit the Getty Center or one of many Frank Lloyd Wright houses or some building of Frank Gehry's or whatever else took my fancy. I did actually drive by and stop at the Towers once in 2003 but wasn't allowed to linger any longer than it took to snap a quick picture because my girlfriend at the time had visions of Crips and Bloods dueling in the streets in broad daylight. So I took what I could get then and now I know I was cheated. I don't feel cheated anymore.

Most people have likely never heard of the Watts Towers, so let me explain a little. Imagine you live on a smallish plot of land in a house you've worked hard all your life to afford. You like the neighborhood. The folks that live around you are mostly just like you: hardworking people pulling nine to five shifts (or longer) to make their lives and the lives of their children better every day. Your neighbors have pride in their properties and some of them might even choose to spend a good amount of their free time developing their garden and yard, making it into something they are supremely proud of.

Now imagine your neighbor is Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant who is employed as a construction worker whenever he can find work. Like some of your other neighbors, Simon spends a lot of time in his yard. But instead of planting his garden with perennials or annuals or maybe even starting a small vegetable plot, he does something different. Way different. In fact, he spends pretty much all his time from the early 1920s until 1954 building a series of towers out of scrap steel, concrete and broken bottles and plates. These towers over time fill his entire property, ultimately topping out at about 100 feet. And you thought your neighbors were a little odd.

That's about the best way I can introduce you to the Watts Towers.

The Towers are pretty much the ultimate work of folk art. They are simple, crude, unsophisticated, born of a single person's passion, an incredible feat of structural engineering and surprisingly beautiful and complex in their elegance and detail. As a point of reference, they closely resemble the works of the Spanish Art Nouveau architect Antoni Gaudi and not just because both men used broken tiles or pottery or soda bottles (in Rodia's case) as surface treatment embedded in concrete walls. There is a lightness and structural purity in the works of both men. But whereas Gaudi drew and others built, Rodia didn't draw but instead built the whole thing straight out of his imagination.

Simon Rodia was born in Rivottoli, Italy in the late 1870s. He came to the United States when his parents emigrated to Pennsylvania along with his older brother sometime around 1894. Eventually he made his way west, settling in Seattle, Washington. He married, had three children and then one day, according to our tour guide, he just picked up and left and never saw his family again. Not exactly the coolest thing to do. 

In 1921, after making his way south from Seattle to Los Angeles while working jobs along the way, he bought a plot of land at 1765 East 107th Street and shortly thereafter he began to build. Up. He built almost continuously for the next 33 years, erecting a monument to his new home and the ship that brought him to the United States. He called his sculpture Nuestro Pueblo (or "our town"), making towers that were also masts and even equipping the finished product with a wheel, which reminded him of the wheel of the ship that brought him and his family across the Atlantic Ocean.

The Towers, which he built with no scaffolding and only tile setter's tools, would consume his life. He poured everything he had into the enterprise. All his free time and all his spare money, even keeping it going through the Great Depression of the 1930s. He re-married but this time, she left him, a result of all the time he spent building and building.

Then in 1954, Rodia quit. He deeded his property to a neighbor and moved to Martinez, California, never to return. Within a year, his house at 1765 East 107th Street burned down but the Towers remained. 62 years later they are still there. They have been passed from organization to organization but now belong to the Watts Towers Arts Center. They have survived both sideways looks from neighbors and demolition efforts from the City of Los Angeles, who gave up after the Towers broke the crane they were using to demolish Rodia's work of art.

The Center offers tours Thursday through Sunday and they are definitely worth the trip. The tours are cheap and short. And by that I mean like $7 cheap and 15 minutes. But they are the only way to get inside the fence and walk among the Towers that Rodia created. And this experience for me was not to be missed. Despite the whirlwind tour, you can always go back and peek through the fence once the tour and the ensuing video (which shows Rodia in action and is awesome) are done.

There's real genius here. His work is almost derivative of Catalan architects of the early 20th century but it's really impossible for him to have known anything much about their work considering he was more or less a contemporary and he was an ocean and a continent away. Rodia for sure was no model father or husband but what he left to the world can be admired on its own level. If nothing else, you have to admire the drive and determination it took him to get out there pretty much every day and build something almost 100 feet high on his spare time over a 33 year period.

I love both the overall lightness of what he created and the details he used to pull it all together. It's astounding on a big picture level how he could have pulled this thing off and on a micro level he adorned every surface with detail which is either relatable in scale or content. I love the concrete corn cobs made from cornbread molds and the flowers stamped from faucet handles. I also love the array of tile colors which are really just cups and saucers and things like 7 Up bottles. It's all pop art and folk art and individual determination and strange neighbor behavior.

Number 88 is in the books and there's still a lot left for me to discover of Los Angeles. It didn't take long but it was definitely worth it. The Towers (and indeed the adjacent Watts Towers Art Center) are perspective altering. The point of travel for me is to see life from another point of view and Watts and the Watts Towers and Compton are worlds away from Arlington, Virginia. You don't need to go halfway around the world to get a different perspective. I'm glad I spent an hour or so in this world.

Walking In L.A.

If there is a place on Earth that I fell in love with at first sight, it is Los Angeles. From the first trip I ever took there in 1993 when I explored the Hollywood Hills looking for Frank Lloyd Wright houses, I've been smitten by the City of Angels. It was the first exception to the "I've been there once, I don't need to ever go back!" rule that I use to push myself to seek out new sights and experiences. L.A. is an exception quite simply because there's so much to do out there. And because there is, I keep going back. I arrived at LAX earlier this month on my fifth trip and I'm still picking things off my wish list. I absolutely LOVE Los Angeles.

One of the unchecked boxes on my L.A. list was to see the Hollywood Sign closer than I ever had before and as it turned out, 2016 was the year to start working on that. I know, what's the big deal, right? In its simplest form, the Sign is a series of nine long-ago, hastily erected 45 foot high plain white letters sitting on a hill without much of a flat spot which causes the word to look a little crooked. But on the deepest of deep levels, the Hollywood Sign represents the City of Los Angeles and symbolizes the hopes and dreams of everyone who's ever moved out west to make it big and become a star. The Hollywood Sign IS the city. It's some pretty complex stuff.

Now I had for sure seen this thing before on one or more of my vacations to the left coast but I never really spent much time trying to get near it or give its history much thought. Yes, I knew it was originally a sign that read "Hollywoodland" to advertise a housing development somewhere in the hills north of town and I could maybe pinpoint the date of its creation to sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, but I'd struggle to tell you much more than that. Now I can tell you a whole lot more (and will, if you read on) including how to get a spectacular view of the front of the Sign without a whole lot of effort.

The story of the Sign began in 1923, when Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler dropped $21,000 to have sheet metal, pipes, telephone poles and 4,000 20-watt bulbs hauled up the top of Mount Lee by a series of mules to cobble together a lighted sign that would spell out Hollywoodland. At night, the sign flashed alternately "HOLLY", "WOOD", "LAND", "HOLLYWOODLAND" and those bulbs burned out frequently so Chandler and his partners hired someone who lived nearby to go change the bulbs whenever they kicked. Good gig if you can get it I guess.

Of course, once the Sign was up, it needed maintenance, especially considering the flimsy nature of the materials used to put the thing together in the first place. And maintain it the owners of Hollywoodland did. Well, until 1939 when they just stopped altogether. Something had to be done.

In 1949, the ownership of the Sign was transferred to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce (which still owns the licensing rights to this day) and they tore down the last four letters to make it into the first true Hollywood Sign. They also restored the "H" a little bit and then let it sit for a couple of decades. By the early 1970s, it was in sad shape. The last "O" was gone, the first "L" looked like an "I" and a few of the other letters were looking pretty ragged. 

Enter Hugh Hefner, Andy Williams, Alice Cooper, Warner Brothers, Gene Autry and a couple of other characters who banded together to save the Sign and make it what it is today. Each paid for the complete reconstruction of a single letter. First the Sign was on the edge of collapse, then it was gone and then it reappeared looking shiny and new. The Hollywood Sign Trust was formed to make ongoing repairs to make sure the sign never looked anything less than brand new from then on.

When I first contemplated getting a closer look at the Sign, I of course turned to the internet. And found relatively little in the way of good directions. Sure, there are a series of amateur bloggers like me who have written about their personal quests as well as the odd newspaper article that gives some tips for a good view. But everything I read either seemed to show a whole bunch of contextless photos of dirt trails and trees; close up pictures of signs; or two dimensional maps of a place on this planet which is decidedly not two dimensional. Hopefully this post can be clearer than most of the other advice I combed through before heading west.

If there was a consistent theme about how to get a better look at the Sign, it was take a hike in Griffith Park starting near the Griffith Observatory. That was perfect for me: even if my journey didn't get me a good look at some letters, I'd never been to Griffith Park and I'd also never taken a hike in Los Angeles. Who knew you could even do that? Nobody walks in L.A., right?

The detail behind the advice I read about Griffith Park was pretty consistent: walk up Mount Hollywood starting at the Charlie Turner Trailhead for a view of the Sign and get there early to find parking. The Hollywood Sign, funnily enough, is not on Mount Hollywood; it's on Mount Lee, which is one hill over to the west (or left if you are at the Observatory parking lot looking toward the Sign). And the advice about getting there early is correct. Very correct. We got there at about 6:45 on Saturday morning and the lot was already full. We only got a parking spot because someone was leaving, having already finished their morning hike or workout, I guess. Get there early is very good advice. You can park further down the hill but a couple of hours later, all those spots will likely be gone too.

Once you find a place to leave your vehicle, it's time to find the trail and start walking. This, I thought, might take some searching. The only directions I'd found to the trail, which I imagined as a barely visible path marked only by a small blue sign, was that it was somewhere towards the north of the parking lot. Well, it is in the north end of the parking lot but it's impossible to miss. As it turns out the Mount Hollywood Hiking Trail is the only trail we could find up at the top of Griffith Park and it's about fifteen feet wide, is glaringly obviously a trail and full of people. The north end of the parking lot, for those of you who might be directionally challenged, is where you enter the lot. Time to take a walk.

Roughly speaking, a walk to the top of Mount Hollywood up the very wide and very well used trail involves walking straight for a while; then hanging a hard left and walking uphill; pulling a uey then climbing straight to the top of Mount Hollywood. It's an easy hike so it's not really surprising so many people were out in Los Angeles early in the morning doing it. But even though that's exactly what we came to do and we were right there, we never did get to the top.

The closest you can get to the Hollywood Sign on the Mount Hollywood Trail is at the spot where you make a U-turn, which is sponsored by Tiffany & Co. (it is officially the Tiffany & Co. Foundation Overlook). Our objective that day was to get as close to the Sign as possible. If we kept going to the top of the hill, we would be a lot further away than we were at the Overlook and that didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. So we didn't do it. Looking north from the Griffith Observatory, you can just about make out the trail and the point where it doubles back. I've highlighted that spot with a blue arrow in the photograph above.

When you get to the blue arrow in real life, it's pretty obvious that you shouldn't keep going to get closer to the Sign. In fact, it looked like the best spot to get a great view was a rocky peak much lower and directly in front of Mount Lee. That peak, which is accessed via a path which looks exactly like what I thought I'd be looking for when I got to the Observatory parking lot (i.e. about two feet wide and not in any way flat), is really just a rocky outcropping. But it's probably the best closest view of the Sign you can get in Griffith Park. It's shown using a red arrow both in the photograph above and below.

Getting over to the red arrow takes some doing. The path that the two dudes in the photograph above are walking down runs along a ridge; it's narrow and uneven and ends in a pretty big slope (shown below) that features a chain link fence to catch rock slides (I guess although it might also catch you). We made it fine but we were careful going down and back up the slippery slope. Before you descend, remember you have to go back up.

From there, all you have to do is cross a paved road (watch out for traffic); walk around a chain link fence which is clearly in place to keep people out but which people have clearly found an obvious way around; make your way along a slightly more treacherous ridge; and finally up a gap in the rocks to the graffiti tagged top of the hill. Your reward is the view of the Hollywood Sign in the second photograph above and a spectacular look at Los Angeles to the west (shown below).

If all that seems like a lot of effort for not much of a payoff, you'd be correct. If you want a walk in Griffith Park and an amazing look at the city of L.A. drive to the Observatory, park and take a walk up to the top of Mount Hollywood. If you want a close look at the Hollywood Sign without a lot of effort, don't do what I've written above. There's a way easier way to get an awesome view. And it's so simple.

Folks living in the Hollywood Hills aren't exactly crazy about Sign seekers. Depending on how hard you are willing to look, you'll find signs like the one at the top of this post or makeshift barriers stretched across residential streets with "Road Closed Locals Only" signs and gaps barely wide enough for a single car. I guess I can understand that to a certain degree. You don't want tourists traipsing around your neighborhoods in their cheap rental cars. On the other hand, don't buy a house in this part of town if you want to get away from tourists.

But there's one spot really close to the Sign that they can't keep you out of: Lake Hollywood Park and the roads leading to it. It's a public park, after all.

The original gates to Hollywoodland.

Type "Lake Hollywood Park" into Google Maps or whatever (less effective) mapping program you opt to use and the spot pops up easily. Getting there from Griffith Park (where we happened to be) involves a quick 5.8 mile drive, although for the best views of the sign, you actually want to park before you get to the Park and walk a little bit back the way you came. Hang a right on Los Feliz when you exit Griffith Park and merge onto Franklin before making another right turn onto Beechwood Drive. Now you are heading for the Hills.

Stay on Beechwood for a bit and you'll pass through the original gates to Hollywoodland, two masonry structures on either side of the road just before it jogs left a bit and starts the climb. The structure on the left is a simple arch; the more elaborate tower with a plaque describing the historic significance of the place you have just passed through is on the right. Stop if you want and if you can find parking; it's kind of cool but you aren't going to be hanging out here too long. Besides, the real prize is coming up.

Take a left off Beechwood onto Canyon Lake Drive and things get really good. If you've never driven throughout the neighborhoods in the hills surrounding Los Angeles, you are in for a surprise. Even if you have but have not been on these roads, you might still be in for some treats. Roads and houses shouldn't be in these hills. It's completely unnatural. They are far too twisty and narrow to make any sense at all and around every other bend are views of housed perched precariously on some tiny spot of flat ground or more often than not on some silly looking columns braced nine ways to Sunday to prevent the whole enterprise coming crashing down in an earthquake. All this for a great view and a place away from riff raff like me.

After what seems like a crazy amount of twists and turns, you'll finally see the Hollywood Sign. And it's really really close. It's about three times closer than the closest point we stood in Griffith Park. Unfortunately, when you first see the Sign this close, there's nowhere to pull off and park. After all, you are still driving on a street probably a bit too tight even for two way traffic.

Keep going. About a half mile further just before you reach Lake Hollywood Park, there are places to dump the car in a parking lane on either side of the road. And there's a sidewalk heading back up the hill. Pull over, take a quick pic like the one above and start hoofing it. It's a really easy walk and pretty soon, you'll be standing in front of what you have traveled however far you have traveled to see.

From our spot on the side of the road, we got an amazing view of the front of the Sign. It's in some ways not very impressive at all. It is, you might say, just nine letters. But I'm a believer in symbolism and objects meaning way more than they appear to be. From the location we walked to we were close enough to see the letters in detail and the structure behind. We could also see far better the crazy way the letters are arrayed over the otherwise untouched slope of Mount Lee. More than all that, we were standing in front of an American icon. And that's what we came for. All of this was way worth the three or so hour investment. One more Los Angeles box checked!

From our spot on the side of the road, we could see people above the Sign looking at its back. There's an official way to hike there and probably a few more non-official ways but we didn't have time on this trip. Maybe next time we'll do that or just ignore the Locals Only signs in the roads. If you are fascinated with the Hollywood Sign and don't have a lot of time to spend finding it, I'd suggest you do what we did and head to Lake Hollywood Park. It's the best, easiest way to get a great look.

The money shot!

Under The Sea

This is my last post about my first trip to Hawaii. And I swear there's no history in this one, which will probably come as a relief to about half of the eight people who read this thing regularly.

If there was one thing I had to do in Hawaii (other than visit Volcanoes National Park, that is), it was get in the water. And not just once. Like a bunch of times. I didn't waste any time at all on this one: my feet were in the ocean hours after we landed. Less than 48 hours later, I was riding a gigantic trainer surfboard towards the Waianae shore trying to actually stand up for a few seconds. Which I managed to do. Barely. But I did it.

Surfing scratched my in-the-water itch on Oahu, which was the first island we visited. It was without question one of the best things I've ever done in my entire life, even if I wasn't all that successful at it. Sometimes, it's the journey and not the destination, or so I've heard. After Oahu, we scheduled a water activity that I knew I'd handle a whole lot better: snorkeling.

First time in a wetsuit. I like these things. They keep you warm and they float.

The last time I went snorkeling was at the Dry Tortugas National Park and it didn't really go that well, mostly because I was on an island off the coast of Florida in potential shark territory (I'm sure they are harmless) with about 12 other people (on the entire island!) early in the morning with no supervision and no practice. I swore Hawaii would be different. I'd spent the six weeks or so prior to our trip getting some of my stamina back by swimming laps at Arlington's Washington-Lee High School pool. Plus I'd be with a larger group of people in a concentrated area supervised by people generally no older than 29 years old. I knew this time I was ready.

We scheduled two snorkeling trips in our nine days in Hawaii: one off the town of Kona on The Big Island and one bright and early (or dark and early when we first set out might have been more appropriate) at Molokini Crater off the west coast of Maui. I also went armed with my brand new GoPro camera so I could record some of what I saw while I was floating on top of the water looking for fish and other creatures. So part of this post is really an opportunity to show off my practice run with my new gadget. And I think that's OK.

We boarded our first snorkeling boat in Hawaii just a bit north of where we were staying in Kailua-Kona at about 5 pm. Yep, that's not a typo, 5 pm. The plan was to sail (and I'm using sail in a metaphorical sense only since we were on a powerboat) for about an hour, wait for the sun to set completely and then all get in the water once it was dark. Sound sketchy? I thought so too but apparently we were under the watch of trained professionals and apparently you have to go at this time if you want to see manta rays feeding.

Now before you get freaked out about this being dangerous, we are talking manta rays here, not sting rays. These things have no real way to harm humans. They don't even have teeth. They eat by filtering plankton, fish larva and other sorts of small living things in the sea by just swimming into schools of these things and swallowing what they can. Plus if you are concerned about my safety, I'm sitting comfortably at home in northern Virginia blogging about all this. So there!

The feeding part of this whole thing is where we tourists come in. Apparently, the plankton that manta rays like to eat are attracted to powerful lights so all you have to do is shine some lights in the water and wait for the mantas to arrive. From there it's showtime. Just look down in the water and be amazed. Sounds simple, right? It actually is. The folks that organize these tours have some specially fabricated surfboard looking things with a PVC rail mounted around the perimeter in a rectangular arrangement. The surfboard is to keep the whole thing afloat; the rail is for gawkers like me to grab onto while we are watching the rays. The surfboard is also fitted with some powerful lights that shine down into the water to draw the plankton onto the dinner plate so to speak.

So we get to the anchoring spot; get dressed in a wetsuit; watch the sunset; don mask, snorkel and flippers; and then in the water we go. And then we just looked down and waited.

The first five minutes of our manta ray encounter was spent looking at maybe a hundred or so little fish swim back and forth in circles in the light, presumably snatching up the same creatures that the mantas were coming to devour. Then eventually we saw the topside of a manta ray maybe ten feet or so away drifting by, pretty much triangular in shape and generally black in color (or at least it looked that way in the dark ocean) with some white speckles. Some of these things are big (they can get up to about 20 feet across) and they all look extremely graceful moving through the water.

I was prepared for all that. I'd done my usual homework after all. What I wasn't prepared for what how these creatures actually feed and how close they would come to us. I figured the mantas would sort of zoom around below us for a while just gathering whatever they could scoop up by moving through the beams of light created by our guides. My expectation then was that we'd see maybe one or two of these things move into and out of the light then be gone until they decided to turn around and come back for some more of their all you can eat buffet. But that's not how they work.

When a manta moved into the column of light from where we were hanging on top of the water  they stayed there, generally starting by moving up towards the surface then rolling onto their back before looping around again. Imagine the manta ray moving in the path of a giant ferris wheel with its mouth wide open and you'll get the picture. It was incredible to see down into the mouths of these creatures as they did loop de loops in front of us. And when they reached the top of their loops and turned on their back exposing their white bellies, they were at most two feet from the surface of the water. And us. It was short but it was amazing.

These manta ray trips are almost a sure thing. The company we went with (the very imaginatively named Manta Ray Dives of Hawaii) advertise a 98% hit rate. If you go out. And it was almost too rough for us to do just that but they decided to go anyway. I'm glad they did. I wouldn't have missed this experience for the world. It was probably the second best experience we had in Hawaii (after surfing).

Snorkeling n the main crater of Molokini...

So after raving about our encounter with manta rays, our second snorkeling adventure had to be a bit of a letdown, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, because it certainly wasn't as up close and personal as watching mantas feed. No because it was just different from the night snorkel, it got us a good look at some different fish and it got us some amazing views of the sun hitting the deep deep ocean.

For our second snorkeling trip, we elected to head to Molokini, an extinct volcano with about two thirds of its perimeter above the surface of the ocean and the remaining third just below the surface. The result is a sheltered dive and snorkeling environment which doesn't feel the effects of the ocean's currents. That means some relatively calm snorkeling once you are inside the crater's perimeter. It's located about a 30 minute ride on one of the Redline Rafting Company's big red rafts from the town of Kihei on Maui's west shore.

We chose to leave for Molokini from Kihei because it's about as close to the crater as you can get and all the tours, no matter the travel time, seem to leave at about the same time. Proximity plus the speed those rafts can move would get us there before the rest of the boats showed up. And that was actually well worth it, even if it meant an earlier than 6 am start time from our hotel just north of Lahaina. We had the place to ourselves other than one or two other small boats when we first got there.

...at the submerged perimeter...

We made two stops at the crater: one well inside it and one just outside the submerged perimeter. The first stop got us a look at a number of different types of fish but they weren't that large, that colorful or that plentiful. They also weren't that close. If they were on the bottom floor of the crater, that was sometimes 20 feet or more away and when you got into shallower water, you had to be careful not to get too close to the edge of the water to avoid (a) crashing into a rocky crater top and (b) damaging any of the protected coral. I got back onto the red raft a little disappointed. I've been snorkeling in the Caribbean before. I remember that being way better.

But if the first stop was a little lackluster, the second made up for it. At its highest underwater point, the submerged edge of Molokini's crater comes to within two to three feet of the surface. That means you are floating on top of the water really close to the coral reef (again in a wetsuit so the effort to stay afloat is minimal) and the fish that are feeding off it. You can get an up close look at the fish, the coral and the anemones that live in the crags of the craters edge without any risk of getting too close to the shore because there isn't one. For me and snorkeling, closer is better. Maybe it's the fact I can't wear my glasses and can't see very far.

There were two other plusses of the second stop. First, there is a lot more movement in the water being outside the edge of the crater. You are no longer isolated from the currents and those things can really move you around a bit. Considering the almost complete lack of danger around me that day, it was a no risk way to experience some of the ocean's awesome power. And if you can ever do that with no risk, it's kind of cool.

But the best part was the view. When you are inside the crater, you are essentially inside a bowl which is about probably 30 feet deep at its center. When you are outside the crater, the ground below you drops off suddenly and steeply and you can't see where it ends. The result is a view into some deep gorgeous blue sea that goes and goes. And the best part is just letting the current carry you out from the inside of the crater's wall and just try to find the edge as it descends to the ocean floor. At some points you just can't! This stop was maybe 15 minutes but it was the best part of the boat trip for me.

I know I have to get in more GoPro practice. I'm hoping to get some in this summer. In the meantime, that's my underwater story about Hawaii. This is my last Hawaii post for this trip. Good thing because my next trip is Friday. I'd go back to Hawaii. I loved it! Especially for someone who never really wanted to go there in the first place.

...and looking over the edge, with the sun streaming from above.

Quest For Fire

Three years ago, my friends Larry and Rachel went to Hawaii. Larry went for business; Rachel tagged along and turned it into a vacation. They ended up getting married, which was a surprise to everyone who knew them, even if it was a long time coming. I got the news at a seemingly impromptu happy hour with some of our closest friends when they got back home. The discussion that day over beers and a couple of fireballs (as I remember) was all about the wedding and marriage. How did you do it? When did you know you were going to do this? How did you get a dress? And on and on and on.

And all that was well and good, but I wanted to know something else about their trip: "Did you go to Volcanoes National Park?" After all, what the heck else was there to do in Hawaii? The response to my question? "We didn't go to The Big Island." Now at that time, I didn't really know what to do with that answer. I didn't know what The Big Island was and I didn't understand how you could go all that way and not go to a place where you could possibly see lava flowing into the sea and creating new land. Did you read that? Lava flowing!!! But apparently they didn't go. Either that time or the second time they went a few months later. But enough picking on my friends.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post on this blog about how un-cool I was as a kid and how I never really wanted to go to Hawaii. Turns out that's not exactly completely true. Yes, the un-cool part was right. No doubt there. But the not wanting to ever visit Hawaii was not true because for a few years now I've really really wanted to visit Volcanoes National Park. So not surprisingly, this place was the cornerstone of my vacation plan to the islands. No matter what else got in my way, no matter how much it cost, no matter how long it took to get there, if I was going to visit Hawaii, I was going to visit Volcanoes. And hopefully, God willing (although it might not be my god) see some lava flowing.

Dead white trees still standing, presumably frozen in time by a lava flow.

According to ancient Hawaiian legend, Volcanoes National Park is home to Pele, the goddess of fire, lightning, wind and volcanoes. She lives in the Halema'uma'u Crater at the summit of the volcano Kilauea which is part of Mauna Loa, the smaller of the two 13,000 foot plus peaks that dominate The Big Island. She is there because she was driven out of her homeland of Tahiti by her sister Na-maka-o-kaha'i, the goddess of water. Something about Pele seducing her sister's husband or something like that. Hawaii, as it turned out, had the first peak high enough for Pele to escape her sister's reach from the ocean. So she stopped and stayed.

Pele was perhaps the most revered and feared of the ancient Hawaiian gods because to the people of the islands, she made her power and anger obvious every time Kilauea erupted, which it did frequently enough to make people remember she was there. When she was not erupting and causing mass destruction, there were very often small flows of lava on the mountain or a bubbling lake of molten rock that glowed orange in the night to remind everyone of her wrath. It's no surprise that she was one of the last ancient gods to be abandoned after Christianity spread through the islands.

We arrived at Pele's home on day four of our Hawaiian trip, having flown over that morning on a 35 minute or so island hopper flight from Oahu. About the entire length of the flight later, we had de-planed; made our way through the airport; picked up our car; and were heading upwards from the shore in our not-very-powerful-at-all Nissan Versa Note excited to hopefully come face to face with Pele for the very first time. We hit the Park after about a  45 minute drive from Hilo airport.

First stop: the Kilauea Visitor Center to get a park map and a lay of the land and to plan our day. Volcanoes National Park is divided into two sections: a limited access upper section that covers the peak of Mauna Loa and the Moku-aweoweo Caldera, and a lower section focused on the Kilauea Caldera about halfway between the top and the Pacific Ocean. We spent an entire day and night (electing to splurge for the Volcano House hotel in the Park) in the lower section which is where most visitors spend their time. A day here is great; seeing most of everything is totally possible in 24 hours without being rushed in any way.

We got the bad news about as soon as we set foot in the visitor center: there was nowhere in the park that you could see flowing lava on the day we visited. I was crushed. I felt like I did when I went to see the northern lights in Iceland, or more accurately did not see the northern lights in Iceland. Time to make the best of it anyway, I guess.

Me standing on the 1974 lava flow.

Heading out of the Kilauea Visitor Center, we had two choices: continue straight on the road towards the crater itself or head back out of the park a little and hang a right towards the Chain of Craters Road, a winding two lane road that would take us right down to the ocean. Because we knew we wouldn't see any lava near the crater (or anywhere else for that matter), we took the road to the sea, figuring by the time we got back, the day tourists might be cleared out a little.

This was a great choice. The roundtrip drive is about 38 miles. It took us four hours. We didn't expect it would take that long but almost every minute of it was completely worthwhile, starting about thirty minutes into the trip. 

Immediately surrounding the Kilauea Caldera is a rainforest, a lush tropical canopy with chirping calling birds that you look for in the palm trees but just can't quite make out despite them repeatedly making the same noise so you can hone in on them. It's pretty and unlike any sort of forest you can find near my home near Washington, D.C. and it's good for a quick hike or two. We stopped in part of the rainforest on the way down to walk through a lava tube, a hollowed out rock tunnel caused by an old underground lava flow, and on the way back up the mountain to try to find some of the elusive nene, the ground-dwelling goose-like bird that is the state bird of Hawaii. We came up empty on this second quest.

But it's when we cleared the rainforest that the drive got really interesting for us and it was totally unexpected. The terrain after the rainforest is drier but still green (albeit a lot paler), made up of grasses and small shrubs and trees that looks a lot less hospitable than the rainforest but still live-able. Until you get to the site of a 1974 lava flow, a probably quarter mile wide stripe of devastation cutting from the right side of the road to the left and down on to the ocean. The landscape in this location is nothing but black rock and it's clear from the lack of vegetation anywhere within the flow 42 years later that the destruction was complete. It was shocking to see this and quite honestly completely awe-inspiring. Any time I get a hint of the true power of mother nature, I'm impressed. As long as I'm not in the way, I suppose.

The 1974 flow is worth a stop and a little walk over the hardened lava just to think about what it would have been like to see and feel a river of lava this big flowing over the land to the ocean, cutting down anything in its path. God forbid you were anywhere near this thing when it was moving; it must have been terrifying. And 42 years is not that long ago. The current Chain of Craters Road passes right through the flow, having been chiseled out of the lava to allow tourists like me to see it and move beyond, which we did.

Greenish and black striped landscape showing the path of past lava flows.

The 1974 flow is not the last or the most recent you'll pass by or through on your way to the water. This volcano has been very active over the last few centuries and you can see flow after flow of hardened lava as you move downhill. It's a landscape of stripes of barely surviving vegetation interspersed with shimmering cracked cooled molten rock that now looks like the top of brownies that you pull fresh out of the oven (I'm not kidding; there's no other way to describe it). And it's pretty amazing to see the path of each flow when you are at the bottom of the hill looking up towards the top. It gives you a great view of just how tenuous life is in that sort of a location and how quickly it could be wiped out.

But for sure life existed down here, including people a long long time ago who managed to find ways to grow 'uala (Hawaiian sweet potatoes) and other crops among the lunar like landscape of the lower slope of the volcano. Their memory is preserved today in the Pu'u Loa Petroglyph site that sits just less than 3/4 of a mile off the road. The crude patterned and anthropomorphic scratchings in the rock have somehow managed to avoid eruption after eruption so we can see them today. The round trip is a little less than 1.5 miles and it took us about an hour to get there and back, a reminder of how difficult it is to move over this sort of landscape. Wear a hat if it's sunny and you have as little or less hair as I do up top. You'll regret not having one. Trust me.

The rest of the Chain of Craters Road gets you a look at gorgeous vistas, fossilized white trees and plenty of tsunami warning signs. You can get good education on tsunamis and how much they might destroy by walking along the Pacific Ocean shore and feeling the spray from a relatively calm sea breaking on the back rocks some thirty or forty feet below you. The whole trip made it pretty evident what kind of destruction this volcano and the nearby ocean is capable of, which is exactly what I was looking for. Once all that was done, it was time to go see the crater.

Some of the Pu'u Loa Petroglyphs.

Prior to visiting Volcanoes National Park, my only trip to see the crater of a volcano was last April when I bussed and walked to the top of Italy's Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that wiped out the Roman towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum and some others about 2,000 years ago. The crater of that volcano is about a half a mile across. I thought that was pretty typical for one of these things. The Kilauea Caldera is about eight miles across; it's absolutely enormous. And it's active, or at least the Halema'uma'u Crater where Pele lives is, which is about the size of the entire crater at Vesuvius.

At Vesuvius you can get right up to the mouth of the crater. No such luck at Halema'uma'u. While it would be cool to get a peek at the lake of molten lava, there is a very obvious cloud of toxic sulphur dioxide gas emanating from the volcano which prohibits up close access. When we visited the Park's Jaggar Museum, which at about 3/4 of a mile away is the closest you can get to the crater, we found park rangers with gas masks in case the winds shifted. Indeed at one point, we all had to be ushered inside the building until the wind shifted directions.

The gas rising from the unseen lava is cool but in the daytime a cloud of gas is all you can see. The better view of the crater is at night, starting at dusk and ending at dawn. We got as close as we could during the day, at nightfall and the next morning and the show in the fading and emerging light was worth the trip, even if we couldn't lay eyes on or walk beside (kidding...sort of) an active lava flow.

It's amazing that this sort of a sight captured my imagination the way that it did. And way more so in the evening and morning than during the day. I couldn't hear much at all and all I could see was a smoking glow, as if someone had lit a bonfire inside the volcano's crater. But it captivated me enough to just stand and stare. We spent a total of three sessions of about 30 minutes each just watching gas rise from an unseen lake of lava. But the way the glow shifted from side to side on the left of the crater and the barely audible white noise like sound in the isolated dusk and dawn hit me was was enough to make us just watch and imagine.

If I can find places that make me stop and dream for a couple of hours on each vacation, I'll be satisfied with every one of them. Even though we didn't see actual molten rock on this trip, I'm glad we went to Volcanoes. I'm glad we got a taste for just how dangerous and angry Pele could be and seeing the dawn making the lava's glow disappear as the sun rose was a definite highlight of this trip for me even if all I did was stand in one spot and look and be silent and think. I'm still disappointed about the lava, though. Maybe next time?

Run For Your Life

Imagine you have a death sentence on your head for a minor crime, something as innocuous as oh...having a another person's shadow touch you. Imagine you believe very strongly that powerful gods exist in this world and that if their agents catch you, they will strangle you until you no longer breathe. Imagine it's dark and you have no form of light, not because you can't make fire or electricity doesn't exist yet, but because carrying any sort of light would make you easier to spot. You are scared, exhausted and anxious because your life is literally in the balance and there is nobody to help you.

Imagine in this situation that you have one hope to stay alive. If you can just make it through the jungle, traverse dangerous black-as-night volcanic rocks, avoid drowning in the ocean and somehow manage to scale a ten foot high by 17 foot wide stone wall, you might just make it to a priest who can commute your sentence and save you, allowing you to return to your family and friends. Now, if you don't like this option, you really have no other choice. You can't survive on your own, won't be able to hide and you live on an island in the middle of the largest ocean on Earth so fleeing somewhere far away is not an option. So you run. To find a priest.

After miles of pushing through completely wild terrain and with the noise of the surf masking any sound of the pursuers you fear are hot on your heels, you finally spot your destination and see the wall you need to climb over to survive. There are torches with open flames to allow some sort of visibility and give you a point to head towards but the flames also cast deep shadows that make it difficult to see clearly and exaggerate the features of the rocky shore around you. Just as you are about to reach salvation, out of the shadows lurches a terrifying monster with a wide maw and huge teeth that in your deepest nightmares you imagine is just what the gods would send to capture and kill you. And it's not alone, there are others just as grotesque and hungry for human flesh all around. You fear all is lost and you're done for. It's all over.

Now if all that sounds like something out of a science fiction or horror movie, you might be correct. But it also might quite well have happened in Hawaii about 250 years ago. And that's not really that long ago if you think about it.

When English Royal Navy Captain James Cook unexpectedly stumbled upon the Hawaiian islands in 1778, he discovered a society with death sentences for stepping on someone's shadow, or looking at someone the wrong way or touching someone's fingernail clippings. I'm not kidding here. All these were actual crimes with severe punishments in ancient Hawaiian society. Of course, these crimes couldn't really be committed by the islands' nobility, or ali'i. Nor could they be committed by the priests, or kahunas, who made up these silly rules with very serious consequences. But for the majority of the people in the island chain, the common people or maka'ainana, the possibility of sacrificing anything from their crops to their lives based on the whim of someone powerful was a daily risk.

Although some sentences could be handed down based on proclamation from an ali'i for whatever reason he or she made up on any given day, most rules in the society were issued as kapus, or forbidden acts, that required punishment. There were various types of kapus, from prohibitions on women eating various types of food (and in the presence of men entirely) to specific requirements for interacting with ranking ali'i to rules about how fishing could take place. Breaking a kapu brought a sentence without trial, discussion or mercy.

But for some kapu breakers, there was a way out. If you could make to a pu'uhonua, or place of refuge, before being caught, it was possible to have your sin purged by a kahuna and you would be allowed to return to society unharmed. Seems like a fairly straightforward concept until you think about the obstacles and dangers in place: long distances; treacherous ground to cover; high walls to climb; and people on the lookout for you. And then there are the ki'i (sometimes called tikis), carved wooden representations of men with grotesque and ferocious features that must have scared the daylights out of many a man or woman trying to reach the pu'uhonua. Or so I have already imagined.

Looks gorgeous today, but climbing that wall with people after you was no joke.

In Hawaii today, you can find tikis pretty much wherever you go. They are placed outside stores or hotels or luaus with funny expressions designed to amuse tourists who likely have no idea that their original purpose was to scare people away. Admittedly, these cartoon versions of the old Hawaiian ki'i aren't very scary at all. But there is one place in the islands where you can see tikis like they had back when kapus were unbreakable laws to be feared and respected: Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park on The Big Island. If you want to see the real thing (or more accurately reproductions of the real thing), then you have to put this place on your itinerary.

Established as a National Historical Park in 1962, the Pu'uhonua O Honaunau is the best preserved former pu'uhonua in the islands. The park features walking trails which take you through the site of a former royal village and then through and around the thick wall that kapu breakers had to get through to be freed of their crimes. Today it's just a gorgeous setting like most other spots in Hawaii but you can get a sense of how dangerous and forbidding it once was. The wall is thick, massive and seems impenetrable and the rocks on the shoreline would seem to prohibit any sort of access by water if the sea was in any way rough.

The attraction for me here, though, was the ki'i. There are a dozen or so in the Park and while they look tame today in the broad daylight of the 21st century, it's fun to imagine the impression that these would have had on people 250 years or more ago. Or maybe fun isn't the right word. Horrifying? Remember, people believed that there were supernatural beings all around them. Like the comical tikis that stand in front of tourist spots today, some of these figures seem funny but others are believably frightening to a 18th century innocent man or woman on the run. For me, it's the open mouths with their teeth showing and the strange eyes that seem to be covered over with some sort of protective shield.

The ki'i didn't survive long after the arrival of Captain Cook, whose first (and last as it turned out; he was killed less than a month after he hit town) landing in Hawaii ended up opening the door for more and more Europeans and Americans each subsequent year. By the year 1819, just 41 years after Cook sailed into Waimea Bay on the island of Kauai, the kapu system was abolished, punted forever into history by Queen Ka'ahumanu who became disillusioned with the entire system once she saw the white men repeatedly violating the laws of the gods with no divine retribution whatsoever.

So it may not have just been the lack of justice for the white man that made up the Queen's mind. She was also apparently sick of having to eat separately from the men as well as being forbidden to eat bananas and certain types of fish. None of that made any sense to her and I think she was right. Whatever the ultimate motivation, the kapu system, the pu'uhonua and the ki'i that tried their darnedest to keep people away from those sanctuaries were gone just about one generation after Cook's arrival. Christianity moved in to fill the void and Hawaii would never be the same again.

For me, visiting the Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park was a touchstone moment of my Hawaiian trip. There's some genuine history that's chilling here but I can also appreciate the ki'i, these agents of the kahunas, both as historical artifacts and a sort of folk art at the same time. I love these things so much that I have one on my desk at home staring at me as I finish this post. I opted for the "winner" tiki from one of the ABC Stores we passed while on vacation. I don't expect to ever lose at anything from now on, although I don't have my hopes up too high. At least it's not out to kill me!