Green flash at sunrise

The green flash!
Originally uploaded by dgans

We've been home from Kaua'i for a week now, and the feel of the island is still very much with us. Jer and I have actually been fantasizing about allowing ourselves to be sucked into one of those timeshare pitches and, this time, whipping out the Visa card and saying "yes."

I haven't mentioned one of the highlights of the trip. After living on the coast, where looking for the green flash at sunset is a routine cocktail-hour pastime, we've grown pretty blasé about the phenomenon. We and our friends saw several, this trip, from the beach right in front of our cottages.

On Kaua'i, we've developed a ritual of greeting the sunrise, too. Jer and I do our yoga sun salutations then toddle out, coffee in hand, to join whichever members of our group have also made it to the beach. The same optical and atmospheric conditions that contribute to a green flash in the evening exist in the morning as well. But it's seldom seen at daybreak because far fewer people are out of bed that early. If they are, they're usually getting ready for work; they don't have time to watch the sun come up. Makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Well, you know what's coming. Last Thursday morning, Jer and I just happened to be looking at the horizon the moment the sun popped out, and there it was -- a green flash! A sunrise green flash is much more of a surprise. You have to be ready. You have no inkling that the sun is about to appear at that particular instant. You're not waiting, waiting, waiting, as you are at the other end of the day, for that big ol' glowing ball to disappear, looking to see whether it flattens out into an omega shape (a positive sign) on the way down, and knowing that, at the moment it winks out, it either will or won't be a green flash evening. A sunrise green flash gives you no cues, no time to prepare. In a way it's a purer visual experience, because there's no after-image to confuse you. You haven't been staring at the sun, off and on, for half an hour, waiting for it to do its thing.

There's another, more subtle, difference also. After a sunset green flash, you go "ahhh," watch the sky change color for a while, and tacitly bid farewell to the day. But a sunrise flash turns into the rising sun. Your day is just beginning, and what can possibly top what you've just seen?

Well, how about another green flash? That same evening, we attended Doug and Sandy McMaster's "sunset serenade, " a low-key hour or so of slack-key guitar and uke, on the shore of Hanalei Bay. There, our pal David Gans got an excellent shot, shown here, of our second green flash of the day. Try and top that, Sea Ranch!

Yesterday, Jer and I wrestled my bike down from high on the garage wall, where we'd stowed it when we first moved in. It's been so long that we actually forgot whose bike was whose. Jerry's is the purple one; we took it down first by mistake. Mine is green. I remember feeling, back when my business, Aubergine Information Services, was a happening thing and I totally identified with the color purple, that the purple bike should really be mine. Over the years, however, I've become very fond of green. It was an unexpected little gift to rediscover that my bike is the green one; hooray!

So we re-inflated the tires, lubed it in the obvious places, and brushed off 2+ years worth of dust. Today I rode it up to Woodstock for a three-hour workshop on basic bike maintenance offered through an awesome city program called Women on Bikes. It was empowering, although I learned enough to pray that I never have to fix a rear-tire flat.

I don't normally name my vehicles but I'm moved, for some reason, to christen my bike. She's now The Green Flash. It's nice to think about carrying a little bit of Hawai'i with me every time I ride.

Aloha and talk story from Kaua'i

We're down to just three more full days on Kaua'i, and I'm a whole lot mellower, to put it mildly, than the last time I posted. Ah, the healing power of the islands, even in the face of inadequate drawer space. Who gives a damn where the clothing goes? All I know is that I brought too much, as usual. Note to self: Do not pack entire tropical wardrobe every time you go to Hawaii.

One major factor in my de-stressification was the lomi lomi massage that Rita arranged for the Monday after we arrived. She and Carol had done it before, but I was a lomi lomi virgin. Oh my. First the sauna, then the salt-scrub, then a deep and thorough four-hand massage. Now I understand where lomi lomi salmon gets its name. We have another session scheduled for later this week.

A couple of nights after we got here, the six of us decided to check out the latest incarnation of the restaurant next door. Locals and long-time visitors still know it as Charo's. Now it's the Mediterranean Gourmet. (I know, I know; beware of restaurants with "gourmet" in their name.) Our dinners were actually pretty tasty, once we'd navigated through the rocky shoals of the "market price" section of the menu. A $60 bouillabaisse? Glad I asked. But then the maitre d' (and apparent proprietor) got into an argument with a customer at another table who'd complained that the bouillabaisse was too hot -- hello? "bouille" means to boil -- and claimed that it must have been microwaved. The ensuing sound of dishes being smashed in the kitchen added nothing to the ambience. Nothing good, anyway.

A much more enjoyable dinner was one we cooked at home for an acquaintance from The WELL who maintains radio towers and equipment throughout the islands. Don is an old Kauai hand and a master at talk story, the Hawaiian equivalent of schmoozing.

Another day, we hung out for a while at a tiny recording studio in Anahola while David sang and played two or three locally made guitars. Rita, Carol and I did talk story with Tracey, who lives upstairs with her husband Jim in a simple but elegant Hawaiian-style house. One story led to another, and Tracey ended up lending us a DVD documentary about Taylor Camp, the long-gone hippie commune at the end of the road, not far from where we're staying. Our dear friends Victor and Sondra were among the original settlers, and we visited the site with them on one of our early visits to Kaua'i.

Thanks to one of David's connections, a programmer at KKCR who also runs an orchid nursery, we got a quick education in island agriculture, plus the opportunity to ooh and aah at dozens of exquisite blossoms -- and a whole lot of talk story, of course.

Sandy and Doug McMaster are talk story masters, too, as well as accomplished slack key musicians. They play uke and guitar, respectively, and perform regularly in and around Hanalei. I've been getting their email newsletter for a couple of years, and Jer and I finally got to attend a concert last Friday. It was delightful; they imparted so much Kaua'i lore along with the music. We're hoping to catch them once more before we go.

Another of Rita's inspirations was signing us up for a tubing trip with Kaua'i Backcountry Adventures. You float through a series of irrigation ditches and tunnels, hand-built in the 1870s, that were once part of a sugar cane plantation. This is more scenic than it might sound, with fern- and flower-bedecked stone walls inches away, and lush jungle and mountain views everywhere you look. Every now and then you hit a mini-waterfall or a tight curve that makes for interesting navigation and occasional fun jam-ups. Our main guide, T, was a sharp and funny dude with an amusing spiel and some awesome tattoos.

My brother Larry and his girlfriend Kate flew over from Oahu, where they live, for a couple of days. We took them snorkling at Tunnels, and to Limahuli Gardens with Carol and Art, and out to dinner at Postcards in Hanalei. It was good to spend some time with them.

I've put up a few dozen shots, including most of these, on Flickr.

The single most magical moment of the trip so far, as far as I'm concerned, was Sunday's turtle sighting. I was hanging in the water at Tunnels, mesmerized by a huge school of Bigeye Scad (their Hawaiian name is akule). There were thousands of them, all moving as one. I felt as if I was in the middle of a slow, cool, silver fireworks explosion, over and over again. Then I glanced down and saw a turtle in the sand below. She was motionless except for an occasional slight head-nod or flipper-wave. I hung over her for about 15 minutes, knowing that she would eventually have to surface to take a breath. Eventually, she loosened from her moorings like a hot air balloon and floated up up up, right next to me. I had to move back a bit to avoid a mid-ocean collision. She stayed close, swimming up and down and around me. I could have reached out and touched her at any point. I've swum with turtles before (and since; two more came by when we went back to Tunnels this morning) but this encounter was long and intense and felt profound, somehow.

A crabby check-in from paradise

We're on Kaua'i again, in the spot we've been coming back to for more than ten years. It's right on the beach, in one of the most glorious locations on the island. We can see both sunrise and sunset and, over the years, we and our friends have developed appropriate rituals for greeting both.

After all this time we feel as if we own the place, which I realize has everything to do with my pissy attitude at the moment. What used to be a cluster of funky cottages is, under new ownership, in the process of upscaling. Our unit now has marble floors, dark brown West Elm-type furniture that would be at home in a trendy loft in the Pearl or Soho, a Viking range, a two-person soaking tub, and a Euro-style shower with multiple adjustable jets. Our friends Rita and David have a bidet, for god's sake, in theirs. There are sconces and uplights, giant pillar candles and tea lights everywhere you look. The soap, locally made and charmingly wrapped, spa-style, has chunks of stuff in it; I honestly couldn't tell, during my post-snorkle shower this morning, whether I was washing the sand off or rubbing more on.

Plus, we have art: in the living room, a tall urn holding three thick bamboo stalks and a basket of carved wooden balls that suggests a giant Polynesian game of cricket. Or maybe croquet. Or golf. Also a pair of Giacometti-esque figures -- I've dubbed them Anorexic Barbie and Ken -- that are just so evocative of island culture. And, in the kitchen, for some reason, a set of spears.

What we do not have, anywhere on the premises, is a single goddamn drawer for clothing. Everything resembling a bureau or dresser has been stripped from the cottages. We're here for two weeks, paying luxury hotel-room rates, and have no place to store our underwear.

I finally resorted (no pun intended) to taking the bath towels out of their chic little baskets, stashing them under the bedside tables, and using the baskets to hold our clothes. It's not an ideal solution, but it's better than piling shirts and shorts and whatnot on the closet floor.

Speaking of closets, in the course of remodeling, the handy "beach stuff" cupboards were eliminated; there's no longer a spot to store damp, sandy gear. But we do have a Viking range. And some bats and balls to amuse any giant Polynesians who might show up.

Okay, I'm aware that far worse problems exist in the world; I'm just venting. The lack of storage space won't ruin our vacation. We do, after all, have wi-fi.

And the people who bought this place are doing their best; they've improved the grounds tremendously and obviously poured a lot of money into the upgrade, inside and out. They have an absolute right to refashion what we thought was already paradise according to their own vision. But it's clear that our expectations don't mesh with theirs. It's sad to have to admit that, after all these years of what seemed like a perfect relationship with our little patch of tropical paradise, we've grown apart. Aloha.