Soon, I shall be exchanging the green of upcountry Maui for the blue of the coast. The quiet, almost rural atmosphere of Kula, for the bustling of Old Lahaina -- once a seat of Hawaiian royalty and now a locus for tourism. The wide fields of grass, sugarcane and pineapple on Haleakala's slopes for the broad beaches of Kaanapali and the miles and miles of reefs lining Honoapiilani Highway. The cool evenings and brilliant canopy of the Milky Way overhead for the nightlights of town and the street artists peddling their wares. Instead of the humming blue of the volcano's peak in the morning, the rising sun incipient behind it... I shall be watching for the translucent green of an incoming wave as it rises and peaks and curls, the setting sun illuminating behind it.

[ photo note: taken at dusk today, at the bottom of our street, Hoopalua Drive. i noticed a couple afternoons ago that the setting sun at about 5:55 p.m. was dead center on this tree, if looked at from the middle of the down-swooping road about 50 yards from the main road. so i went today, and was almost late, since the sun set a leeeeetle earlier, haha. ]

Compared to the archipelagic Philippines and the San Francisco Bay Area, the two other geographical zones that I've lived in, Hawaii is very much a youngster, geologically speaking. Here, surrounded by the ocean on all sides, I get the distinct feeling that this volcanic island I am on right now just recently emerged from the bowels of the earth, breaking the ocean's surface in a seething of fire and steam and lava, and that the land itself is fresh and new. But of course that is an illusion, as the span of a human generation, of our human civilizations, is as nothing in the natural history of the Hawaiian chain... this unstrung lei of islands stretching north to the Aleutians, most of it long gone underwater, a few of the northwesterly ones mere atolls, and the youngest half dozen or so now comprising the 50th state of one of the youngest nations in humankind's long, glorious, sorry, awesome, pathetic, fecund, bloody, thrilling history.

There is definitely something about this place which makes me wax verbose, which I don't often do when I'm in Berkeley, correct me if I'm wrong. *chuckle* And I'm not talking long-winded writing/speechifying, which I've been known to inflict on unwary readers and listeners on occasion, but more a willy-nilly dispensation of purple prose, such as the above paragraph or heck like this sentence itself. I blame it on combination of two things, really, one more evanescent than the other, which is theoretically bizarre. The more fleeting reason is the simple fact that my nomadic family is on the move again. Granted, it's only oh, about 40 miles downhill towards the coast. But it's a move nevertheless, which requires both physical and pscyhological adjustments, something we're quite used to now, thank you.

The theoretically suspect reason has to do with why the Hawaiian islands exist in the first place: there is literally a hot spot here, ergo my febrile writing style when situated along these specific coordinates and along these latitudes and longitudes. (Hey you there, stop that snickering. Now! LOL)

Plate tectonics theory has it that the planet's surface is comprised of huge slabs, or plates, of crust floating on the inner core of magma. Over the unthinkably immense stretches of geological time, these plates move against, along, with, even over and under each other, resulting in what we see today as the arrangement of land and undersea masses. Hawaii sits right in the middle of the Pacific plate, a result of an upwelling of hot magma that, incredibly, has stayed at a constant position relative to the moving plate above it.

If you look at a map of the Pacific Ocean, you'll see the Hawaiian island chain stretching northwest, with the ones farthest west mere blips and dots on the map, almost invisible atolls. Even beyond the featureless ocean surface, undersea mountains define the archipelagic line. Each of the islands on this chain is a result of that magmaic hot spot upwelling and, over time, as the Pacific tectonic plate moves northwest and dives under the East Asian tectonic plate -- which, not incidentally, explains the prevalence of active volcanoes and earthquakes in that region of the planet. I grew up in the shadow of one such active volcano, Mt. Apo, in Mindanao island, taking completely for granted the sight of plumes and filligrees of smoke constantly emerging from its perfect cone-shaped peak.

(...writing/packing)

5:30 p.m., Lahaina
will continue this tomorrow...

p.s.: damn! the penultimate sentence of the last paragraph above makes zero sense. i am missing the wrap-up clause. oh well, will fix later. gtg. yizo. 5000. and Ozzie, it's OzymandiAs. spelling, spelling!

{ net.casting }
^