Island Bounty

December 25, 2016, WAIKALOA, HAWAI'I—If you are a coffee lover, the Big Island of Hawai'i is a great place. Just a few miles down the coast from where we are staying, there are terrific coffee farms that grow 100 percent Kona coffee. When we picked up our rental car, Jeffrey the agent told us to buy local as much as possible to support the local economy.

We eat an enormous amount of food, said one person.

"Oh, and don't go to Starbucks," he said as we exited the building. "There's so much good local coffee that there's no need to go to Starbucks."

Nevertheless, yesterday, as I went to the market to get some local eggs for breakfast, the Starbucks was jam packed with people eating muffins and drinking huge silos of coffee or people gripping Venti Frappacinos. The price of two of those drinks would have bought nearly a half a pound of fine Kona coffee at the market that was just a stone's throw away.

"Drink local coffee," I said to a quartet of handsome dudes dressed in mainland fashions that they had obviously painstakingly selected for their honeymoons on the island.

"How rude!" one of the Style Boys retorted.

And perhaps it was, so I went home and pondered the matter over another cup of delicious Kona coffee as we prepared eggs and island potatoes. 

The locals sniffed out Captain Cook, decided he was

not a God, so they bludgeoned him to death near

here. This is the true price of fear.

For the gaggle of gay men, the coffee advice dispensed to them by an aging fat man with a sunburn who was wearing an ensemble from Kohl's probably made about as much sense to them as the story of Kamehameha I's rise to power that was written in the Hawaiian language on a plaque at the nearby Pu’ukohala Heiau National Historic Park did to me. Although there are only 13 letters in the Hawaiian language, they are all still very confusing—at least to English speakers.

What was not confusing is how, no matter where you go, mankind seems to build political and social structures that end up with the ordinary doing all the work and paying all the taxes so that the rich and privileged can continue to maintain the lifestyles to which they are accustomed without lifting a finger. Thirteen letters or not, that was the bottom line of the Kamehameha story. It's no wonder the term "Big Kahuna" remains in the English and Hawaiian lexicons nearly 300 years after the Beefy King's rise to power. Kamehameha was named king after he hefted a giant stone, fulfilling a prophesy that bamboozled the superstitious commoners into accepting "unification" that eventually turned them into slaves for the wealthy and powerful. We've seen the same thing today with the appointment of Donald J. Trump as our new leader. He pulled off a miracle, and now the ordinary rabble will march through fire against their own better judgment, working against their own best interests, for at least the next four years.

Big-Island breakfast

As we drove down the coast, I wondered whether President Obama, ensconced for Christmas with his family on a nearby island, was having a similar revelation.

The sight of a whale spout in the brilliant blue waters just off the coast shook me from my stuporous thoughts, so we pulled over and prepared to hike down to the shore—which was about a mile away downhill over unsteady lava-strewn terrain. Just as we departed, a vehicle full of young Hawaiian hooligans—all drinking Carling Black Label at 11 a.m.—made me reconsider our idea. 

"You've got quite a journey ahead of you, Brah," the driver said.

I walked up to the passenger side window. The young woman's eyes were nearly closed, the side effect of morning beers and an intense seaside Wake-'n-bake session, most likely. The couple in the back of the 4x4 vehicle giggled at me. How rude, I thought to myself. The occupants eyed our rental car as I looked on the ground at the patches of broken window glass from previously parked vehicles.

"Yeah, I've never seen whales before," I said. "About how far is it to the shoreline?"

"About half an hour, Brah."

"Good to know. Mele Kalikimaka!"

The sushi rocks at Sushi Rock!

They watched us walk toward the beach in their rear-view mirror. After they got on the road, we turned around and went back to our car.

"They'll be back just after we're out of sight and our car will be ruined," I said to Caroline, motioning to the shattered and pillaged vehicle that had been abandoned at the edge of the road below us. Broken glass, tires, and various remnants of fabric and plastic lay haphazardly next to the useless hulk. We made the decision to find a better spot for whale watching. 

Sure enough, about five minutes down the road, we saw the gray SUV and its occupants heading back down main highway toward where we had been.

We were hungry and anxious to celebrate Caroline's birthday, so we stopped in Hawi for some sushi and a cool drink. The Sushi Rock restaurant was fantastic in every way, and one of the waitresses wore a Santa hat with a faux leopard-skin fringe. Mele Kalikimaka, indeed! We ate a chef's choice sushi special, which meant they shoveled a mystery array of delicious rolls our way—44 pieces in all. It was the perfect choice for Caroline's special day.

We made our way north toward the end of the road. After visiting Pololu beach—a big hike that attracts many to the parking lot high above the valley, but not nearly as many to the stony black beach below—we headed back south for dinner. We had stocked up on tons of local comestibles at the farmer's market in Kona a day earlier, so each of our meals have been fresh feasts. A papaya, passion fruit and local lime makes for a lovely breakfast, and stir-fry is easy and plentiful here. In between we snack on nuts, local breads, and island-distilled spirits. Not only is this place a paradise for the eyes, but for the stomach as well.

The black beach at Pololu, near the northern tip
of the Big Island

Some while back when we first visited the Big Island, a friend of ours remarked that we "eat an enormous amount of food." It's a true statement. We always have, and even though I'm a big person, I will never match Kamehameha's stature, but I'll never turn into a sumo wrestler type, like the 12-year-old kid we saw sucking on a popsicle by the Kawaihae Harbor, where we watched the setting sun and the last spouting whale of the day. 

With so much great local fish and fruit on this island, it's hard to imagine how a place like the Macaroni Grill and other chain restaurants survive here. But then I think back to the encounter at Starbucks, the history of Kamehameha I, and our recent election of Donald Trump. People throughout the ages hate chaos. They like a sure bet. Why gamble on a home-made cup of coffee or one prepared at a local coffee shack when you can be sure that a cup of Starbucks will taste the same no matter where you are on the planet? Why gamble on continuing socio-economic uncertainty when a larger-than-life demigod can assign you a known place in society, even if that place is endlessly toiling in service of the Elites and the powerful?

Fear is a huge motivator, and it stops us in our tracks. It's better to erase the unknowns from life than it is to find out firsthand whether the guy in the gray SUV was coming back to smash your windows and steal your beach towels or whether, fueled by a little early Christmas Spirit and the goodwill buzz of some kind Kona gold bud, he was checking to make sure that no other hooligans were disrupting the vacation of a couple of tourists from the mainland, isn't it?

Merry Christmas, and we'll see you on down the road!

A panorama of Pololu beach near low tide.

Stop and smell the dinosaurs

ST. GEORGE, Utah—Once upon a time not too long ago, there was a marvelous eye doctor who could see things so well that he ignored the lure of big money and opted instead for public service.

Dinosaurs never walked with humans. Or did they?

You see, one day in the year 2000, sometime shortly after his retirement, Dr. Sheldon Johnson had bought a farm out in Northern St. George, Utah, that he had planned to develop so he could live happily ever after. One day as Dr. Johnson was scraping off the upper 20 feet of dirt from his farm so that he could level the land and make it easily accessible to the new road that had been carved in next to it, one of the giant machines that was scraping away at the Earth happened to accidentally drop a giant slab of stone, which upended as it landed. When Dr. Johnson and the others looked at the stone, they thought they saw what looked like imprints of tracks of some strange type of creature that had been running in the mud.

“What’s all this?” Dr. Johnson wondered, scratching his head in the warm air and looking at the stone.

Dinosaur track reliefs at Johnson's Farm.

He and his crew of merry men tipped over more of the slabs and were amazed to see all kinds of things—large and small three-toed imprints, ripples like you’d find at the bottom of an ancient lake, and even long wispy scratches between small footprints, like the tail-drag marks that lizards make when they run through the desert today. Delighted at his wonderful find, Dr. Johnson stopped work on developing the land, and instead called in a bunch of archaeologists, paleontologists and geologists so they could have a look for themselves. What they ended up finding was literally a huge page of history that had been sandwiched within the rock layers beneath Johnson’s Farm.

Dating back 195 to 198 million years ago, Dr. Johnson’s land was the location of a huge shallow lake, where dinosaurs, ancient reptiles and primitive fish lived and played. These ancient creatures walked about, some on two legs, others on four, or swam in the shallow waters, leaving marks where their limbs sunk into the mud or scratched the lake bottom. Gradually these prints filled up with sand, and over time, the sand became compressed and it turned into sandstone as the Earth grew older and more sediments piled up on top.

The Moenave Formation: a busy dinosaur landscape

Johnson’s farm held what geologists call the Moenave Formation, a layering of sandstone, siltstone, mudstone and shale. The formation is sandwiched between the Upper Triassic Chinle Foundation and the Lower Jurassic Kayenta Formation, like the chapter of a book frozen forever in time. The bottoms of upper layers of the Moenave Formation formed reliefs of the footprints, like the ones found on the original slab of stone that was accidentally turned over during that fateful day on Johnson’s Farm a decade ago. The lower layers house the footprints themselves that were sunken into the primordial mud.

Scientists have found evidence of a giant meat-eating dinosaur known as the Eubrontes, which weighed close to a half a ton and walked on two legs. They also found evidence of the much-smaller Grallator, which hunted in packs. In addition, they found evidence of some alligator-like creatures, lizards, fresh-water animals, and ripples in the mud from the ancient sea.

Perhaps most wonderful of all, the scientists at Johnson’s Farm found some extremely rare tracks where the skin of these “terrible lizards” of old can be clearly seen imprinted in the mud, as well as swim tracks in the lake bottom that show clear evidence of some very large dinosaurs swimming!

Dinosaurs had lizard skin!

Johnson’s Farm is now open to the public, and a large army of volunteers continues to work the land in search of secrets. They find more each day.

Instead of letting his land turn into a Wal-Mart, which would have sold an array of cheap, Chinese-manufactured goods made from dinosaurs, Dr. Johnson kept his land so it could be enjoyed by Dinosaur lovers from all over the globe. In a way, that makes Dr. Johnson a dinosaur himself, because these days, most people would have chosen to ignore the existence of dinosaur tracks, and instead would have gleefully sold the land to the highest bidder. Because as we all know today, money is what makes kings and queens and all other people worthy of praise, not sentimentality or an appreciation of the past. 

Thank you, Dr. Sheldon Johnson, for being the most marvelous dinosaur of them all! May you live happily ever after.

See you on down the road!