The Green Sands of Papakolea

        Hawaii's volcanic origins are a million years old – and, with the eruption of Kilauea last year, just over a year old. Closer to the latter date than to the former, about 49,000 years ago, Pu'u Mahana, a tuff ring associated with Mauno Loa, was formed on the southern end of the Big Island. As the ocean eroded the tuff ring (which, Wikipedia informs me, is "mostly volcanic ash produced by violent interactions of magma with groundwater"), it carried away the lighter volcanic sand and left a sand made heavy by the presence of olivine, "a silicate material containing iron and magnesium," which makes the sand green.

        Papakolea is one of only four green-sand beaches in the world.

      One day while Mike and I were in Hawaii, we walked the two-and-a-half-mile trail to Papakolea,  a confusing criss-cross of eroded four-wheel-drive roads gouged in bright red dirt across a completely flat, grassy plain—the "flats" of the name, Papakolea: "plover flats." It was beautiful to walk across the plateau of grass with the ocean blue on one side and distant mountains blue on the other. When we hesitated at the criss-cross of a road, we just followed footprints in the sand, though it didn't really matter which road we took, as they all led to the rim of the tuff ring that half-circled the beach below.

        We stopped there, at the edge of the steep drop-off to the ocean, to take in the scene before becoming a part of it. A steep, curved, lava-rock wall, ash-gray, enclosed the bay on three sides. The sand on the beach was not emerald or Irish green but olive green. The ocean swept onto it with large, blue, white-frothy waves. The cliffs to the beach were almost vertically steep, and on one side the ocean had eroded the lava in long, wavy patterns.

        The trail was steep but not difficult. Once I was on the sand itself, coarse, glittering, and green, I immediately pulled off my dress (I was wearing my bathing suit) and walked to the water.

       The waves were ferocious! I had been warned about a strong undertow, so I didn't want to swim. Standing at the edge of the surf, I let the waves wash over my legs and pull at me with strong seduction, a tactile Siren enticing me deeper into the ocean. I resisted, tottering with the effort to stay on my feet, which dug holes in the sand as the undertow pulled on them.

        Two men were boogie-boarding, which looked like fun, but another man was body surfing, which did not look like fun. The waves ground him into the coarse, heavy sand, pushing him down and tumbling him around like an electric mixer. He got up to do it again, but it wasn't for me!

        When Mike and I had had enough of the sand and waves and wind, we climbed back up to the flat top, then walked on the rock-cliff tops to the high, narrow point jutting into, but high above, the ocean to stand on the southernmost tip of the United States. Looking down, we could see the white-foam waves hitting the green-sand beach far below.

From this distance there was also something beautiful about the red-slashed lines in the Irish-green flats beyond the beach, in spite of their origins.

        On Hawaii, you expect beauty because it's everywhere—ocean, beaches, mountains, blossoming trees, tropical vegetation, fish, birds—but Papakolea coupled its exceptional beauty with its uniqueness to give us an experience of one of the most beautiful places on the Big Island.

     

Mingling with Manta Rays in Hawaii

        The number-one thing to do on the island of Hawaii, I learned while I was waiting my turn to do that thing, is the night excursion to see the manta rays feed on plankton in Keauhou Bay.

        The sun was setting in a splendor of gold, orange, and scarlet as Mike and I met his niece and her husband at the headquarters of Hawaii Island and Ocean Tours, with whom we had booked this excursion. Their employee Haley gave us wet suits, snorkels, and instructions: float horizontally, don't let your feet drop, and never, never touch a ray. The oils on human hands disturb the mucous coating on the rays, causing bacterial infection and infiltration that can be fatal. The manta rays would come within inches of our faces and bodies, she said, and they might touch us, but we were never to touch them.

        Understood.

      We struggled into our wet suits, picked up our masks and snorkels, and followed Haley to the pier, where she introduced us to Captain Randy and Ola, our guide in the water. Then, the sunset still weeping its beautiful colors over the ocean, we stepped into the boat and took off.

       In five or ten minutes Captain Randy stopped the boat in Keauhou Bay, in front of the Hilton Hotel. Ola slipped into the water with a long, surf-board-like raft, then ordered us one at a time into the water to hold onto a loop of rope attached to the float. We each put a swimming noodle between our waist and our hips so that we floated perfectly horizontal. We put on our masks and snorkels and put our heads in the water.

        Blue lights on the raft shone into the ocean, all the way to the white-sand bottom. Soon they attracted plankton, which shone and swirled like bright specks of dust in the blue light. The manta rays, supposedly, would soon be there to eat the plankton. And, yes, below us a manta ray swam into view. A few minutes later a second one swam below us. Each had about a five- or six-foot wing span. Then there was nothing more. I was a little disappointed. I had expected something more exciting.

        Then they arrived. As we had been told, the little rays stayed on the bottom while the big rays swam through the plankton straight towards us and the top of the water. Intent on their eating, they ignored us and swam, as we had been told, close to and all around us. I would love one to have touched me, as one did Mike (he said it felt rubbery), but there was always that inch between us.

        The giant black-and-white manta rays swimming through the twinkling plankton of the blue-lit water, loop-de-looping, turning and rolling was one of the most beautiful sights I have seen in nature. They were so graceful! Their enormous white mouths, criss-crossed at the back of the cavity with long thin teeth to strain the plankton, were beautiful. Their snow-white backs and undersides were beautiful, patterned with black markings so individual that our guide knew each ray by name. The enormous triangular fins waved like wings. The manta rays flew through the water like eagles on wind currents, but with the swiftness and movement of swallows flying under bridges. They shot up towards the top of the water, straight through the plankton, eating all the while, then somersaulted back down, only to return with another graceful flip. I was mesmerized, enthralled. I wanted to be a manta ray and swim like that.

        "That one is Big Bertha," Ola said, pointing to the largest ray swimming around us, the biggest ray in Keauhou Bay. She was not only big; she was beautiful. I was in love with Big Bertha – her unfathomable size, her white-as-snow skin, the float and turn and dive of her body. My eyes followed her movements, up from the bottom through the blue-lit sparkling plankton, past my face, then the turn, and she came from behind my shoulder past my face again, and I did so want her to be just one inch closer before she ducked and swerved and flipped beneath me and made another pass through the plankton at the surface. There was no temptation to touch her: I could never do anything to harm these beautiful creatures

      Suddenly Ola said, "Look! It's a new pup!" He and the guide for the other raft of manta ray viewers were greatly excited. No one had seen this pup before. It was a new baby. Later, back on the dock, we were told there were 273 manta rays in Keauhou Bay—now 274. Haley and Ola hoped to name the new pup LeeAnn, after a woman who had helped found the company and who had passed away a few months earlier.

        We had watched the manta rays, enthralled, for fifty minutes. Back on the boat we couldn't stop expressing our excitement. It had been an unimaginably beautiful show. It had been an honor to witness these gorgeous giants, these graceful acrobats of the deep.

        

       

Our Forests and Our National Forest Service

        I have written many posts about hiking in the Applegate, for instance, or swimming in lakes or otherwise being outdoors in the Pacific Northwest, which means, of course, in our forests. The caretakers of many of the forests, not only in Southern Oregon but all over the country, is the National Forest Service. They are caretakers. We, the public, are owners.

        It has been a privilege not taken for granted that the public can comment on actions the Forest Service would like to take in "managing" those forests. I and many citizens in the Applegate comment frequently on actions, such as proposed timber sales, that would greatly affect our way of living, our economy, our recreation, our inspiration, and our enjoyment of life. That right of the public to provide their points of view about Forest Service actions has been invaluable to us.

        Now that right is threatened. A new set of guidelines the Forest Service is proposing would eliminate public comment on many proposed actions, including timber sales. I am so enraged by this proposal I am asking you if you would join thousands of other people nationwide who are protesting these new rules. Here is the website: http://regulationsgov/docket?D=FS-2019-0010. Click on "comment here" to add your voice. 

        Below is a poem I wrote last summer that expresses some of what happens when our forests are cut.

Walking My Usual Trail Three Years Later

When I voiced my rage

At your logging operation,

You shrugged and said, 

“In another year 

You’ll never notice.”

Not notice

How hot the sun that once tall trees held back?

How scrubby the brush that once those trees kept down?

How clunky the rhythm of the plucked-out forest?

Not notice

Bullying thistles seizing bulldozed ground?

Rain-sliced mud gutters on the uphill curve of the road?

Not notice

The moaning stumps

Of lost tree souls?

Most Magical Moments

        My sister Laura has a cabin on Lake Lanier, in the woods of North Georgia. Last week, as she was driving out her driveway, she saw a white deer. A white deer! She writes about it on her blog, naturebasedblog.com.
        The white fawn and her mother, an ordinary dun doe, were standing in the shady gravel road that winds through the woods alongside the lake. Laura knew it wasn't an albino, since it had one brown ear and a black nose. (Later she learned that it had a genetic condition called leucism, rare but not unknown among white-tail deer.) She was fumbling to find her phone, almost incapacitated by excitement, but she managed to get a picture, which you can see on her blog.
        I can well imagine how excited she was. How absolutely magical! Were the perfumes of Arabia wafting through the air? Did the fawn's tiny hooves ring like delicate bells and throw twinkling stars as she walked? Did a lei of wildflowers adorn her neck? Was a unicorn standing at the edge of the woods?
        If Laura saw a white deer, maybe we can look for those other things, too, except for one blotch of reality—the car. What was that hunk of metal, that man-made, smoke-belching, noise-polluting monstrosity doing in that picture, in those magical woods? It doesn't fit the image of white deer tiptoeing through the forest, flower-bedecked by fairies and followed by unicorns. I don't want it in the picture. I want to rub it out.
        But there is a problem.
       If I rub out the car, Laura disappears, too, and it becomes as unimaginable to see a white deer as to see a unicorn. That won't do. I want that white deer there in the road where Laura can see it. I'll have to leave the car in the picture, too, if I want the reality that somewhere in the woods a white deer really does wander and magical moments really do happen.

Fire, Smoke, and Stupidity

        Alas! The smoke returned! 

        We had been doing just fine this summer. We had some clouds, some light rain, but no lightning, no fires, no smoke. Nothing to close down Oregon Shakespeare Festival's outdoor shows and the Britt Music Festival's theater-under-the-stars. Nothing to keep people indoors, windows firmly shut, or, if outdoors, in dust masks (which, I know now, don't protect against smoke, anyway). I saw OSF's MacBeth and All's Well That Ends Well outdoors and went to a Britt concert. I hiked in the Red Buttes Wilderness and up Mt. Elijah and, like everyone else, was thoroughly enjoying the summer. 

          Until.

        Some idiot, some stupid, stupid, carless individual, lit a campfire. I couldn't believe it! Didn't he know how dangerous that is?  Didn't he know that we're in fire season and fires are illegal? Don't people pay attention? I wanted to throttle him for ruining our fine summer, casting the gloom of smoke over all our outdoor lives.

        I don't know who started the Milepost 97 fire, but if I were to make a guess, I would say that it was a homeless man (woman, maybe, but odds are it was a man) who only wanted to cook some dinner. That's all. A homeless man with low mental capacity, who just wanted something hot to eat. Other fires, such as the one in Atlanta that burned a bridge and closed a major freeway, have started that way.

        So my hypothetical homeless man lit a fire, and the fire ran around in the dry grasses, and suddenly the forests in the deep canyons and on the steep hills of the Siskiyou were burning again, the smell of woodsmoke throttled the air, and the Rogue Valley was smothered under a gray moroseness that pressed down on our hills and our heads and our happiness. Ordinary outdoor life was suddenly sucked inward. I did see people eating outdoors at restaurants and cafes, but either they don't care or they're not very smart or they haven't read the air quality index. But that's an individual stupidity and hurts no one but the stupid individual. 

        Everyone suffers when fires burn and smoke descends. Businesses lose money. Tourists have to make new plans. Rafting guides loiter at home. Outdoor venues close. Even besides how unhappy it makes us to have to be indoors in our beautiful landscape, smoke has become a serious economic problem for the Rogue Valley.

        In a way smoke is a price we pay for living in this fire-prone and fire-dependent ecology. I accept lightning-caused fires as a natural occurrence. But when fires are caused by people, when we suffer the same ill effects because of someone's stupidity and ignorance of or disregard of the law, I become furious. Those fires should never happen. And look what they do to us!

       So I have at least a partial solution. If we are concerned about the implications of smoke in our area, maybe we should think about ways to help the homeless. It would be a lot cheaper than fighting fires.