Being a Grateful Guest

[As published in Hawaii magazine]

When my husband and I moved to Kauai, we told our family and friends, it was for one year. That was in 1999.

As I write this, I am in Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge as a volunteer for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. There are 15 of us counting Laysan and black-footed albatross nests here, the largest breeding colony for these two species in the world. By the time we finish, my team alone will have counted 133,666 active nests over a two-week period. Meanwhile, my husband, Eric, is on Kaua’i putting the finishing touches on the home he built for us in the small community of Anahola.

When Eric and I landed in Lihu’e almost a decade ago, the clerk at the car rental agency asked how long we’d be visiting. When I told him we were moving, he asked where we planned to live. Even at the time, I wondered why I said, “Anahola,” a hiccup on the one road that leads to Kauai’s North Shore. I also remember the strange look the young man gave me. Then, as if my answer was prophetic, it turned out the only house we could find with landlords willing to rent to a couple with two dogs was located in Anahola.

Anahola is not a place we had spent time as visitors. We had not walked the nearby shoreline, considered by many a locals’ beach. We hadn’t even eaten at the much-celebrated roadside hamburger joint, which along with a post office and mini-mart comprise Anahola “town.” The only thing I remember about the area from our many vacations before moving to Hawaii is its distinctive mountain range, properly called Makaleha.

Many call it “Kong Mountain,” because of one peak that resembles the profile of the famous gorilla. Others see a pregnant goddess lying on her back. From my lanai across the street, I like to drink tea and watch the early morning sun paint light and shadows on the mountain. I spy animals—turtles, sharks, birds—and people—wise, hardened, bearded—in the mountain’s peaks and folds.

Storyteller Frederick Wichman shares numerous tales about Makaleha. He writes about a terraced temple at the top of one peak, a rock that was once a man who was turned to stone for spying on the bathing daughter of a chief, and a hole in the mountain that was notched out by a spear.

Now, when I tell people on the island that I live in Anahola, they often ask, “Oh, are you married to a Hawaiian man?” That explains the second glance the young man gave me at the car rental agency those many years ago.

Anahola is not exactly a hotbed for malihini like my husband and me. It is better known as a Hawaiian Homelands community. With our light skin and Standard English, it’s obvious Eric and I don’t belong. The truth is, I like that. It reminds me that I am a guest in this place I now call home.

I try to be a grateful guest, which is one reason I volunteer for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. On most Friday afternoons, you’ll find me roaming the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge—better known as the Kilauea Lighthouse—as a docent. Stop by sometime, and be sure to say hello.

Shaken, Stirred and Moved by Manta Rays

[As published in OutriggerHawaii.]

If I am ever abducted by aliens, I hope they are as gentle and peaceful as manta rays.

I have long wanted to dive with the manta rays off the coast of Big Island. In Hawai'i, dive operators claim the experience is the number one night dive in the world, and I have heard many stories about it. How the manta ray gatherings started when a hotel discovered that the spotlights it beamed into the ocean at night attracted the behemoth creatures. How manta rays fly through the water as graceful as ballerinas. How the week before my dive a humpback whale joined the dance, followed by a small school of spinner dolphins.

Other stories make my skin shiver. Like the one about Frankie. With his ever-gaping maw revealing rows of jagged teeth, Frankie is a moray eel. He lives at Garden Eel Cove, our dive site. Frankie feeds at night, weaving himself through legs and wending his way around divers as they sit stationery on the ocean’s bottom and shine dive lights to attract plankton—the food of manta rays.

Scuba Diving in Hawaii

In order not to think about Frankie, I focused on something equally unpleasant to me but not nearly as toothy: The cold.

I turned to Danny, our dive master with BottomTime Hawai'i, “You’re going to have to talk me into this,” I said, shivering in my very wet wetsuit. We had already completed one dive—a one-hour excursion at a max depth of 91 feet, and with the sun tucked securely below a voggy horizon, I was chilled. It’s hard to stop shaking once you start, no matter how much you remind yourself that you’re in tropical Hawai'i and the water temperature is 79 degrees.

For his part, Danny was diving in a short-sleeve rash guard and swim trunks. He looked more like a surfer than a diver. “Aren’t you going to put on a wetsuit?” I had asked him earlier.

“No need,” he said.

Our captain—his name is Mike but on the boat, he goes by Vinny, because, as he says, everyone is named Mike—shook his head. “Danny doesn’t need a wetsuit,” he said. “He already has an extra layer.” It’s true. Danny may dress like a surfer, but he is built more like a heavyweight wrestler.

Exploring Hawai'i’s Reefs

This past summer, I discovered 2008 was christened “International Year of the Reef.” Ah, music to my ears. So, for the last few months, as editor of OutriggerHawai'i, I had assigned myself the task of learning more about Hawai'i’s reefs. That meant, of course, I had to get wet. I had to don mask and snorkel, and I had to explore the undersea world of Hawai'i. And not just on my home island of Kaua'i, but around the archipelago, too. Oh, darn.

But first, I headed to the bookstore, because the fish ID guides that I already owned dedicated very few pages to one of the main reef-building organisms in the ocean: coral. There, I discovered two invaluable books: The textbook-like Hawaiian Coral Reef Ecology by David Gulko and the Cliff Notes version, Corals of Hawai'i by Douglas Fenner. I learned there are only five common corals in Hawai'i, all belonging to the phylum cnidaria, which means corals are related to Portuguese man-of-war and various jellies. All contain unique stinging structures called cnidae, which are the defining feature of this phylum and usually used for the capture of such foods as small, planktonic organisms and dissolved organic matter. (Hmm, plankton. That’s just what the manta rays were after.)

After the bookstore visit, I signed up with Reef Check, a non-profit, volunteer coral reef monitoring organization, and I discovered it gave me a good reason to go snorkeling or diving at least once a month. “It’s for the reef,” I would tell my husband as I headed out the door to survey the marine life living at some of Kaua'i’s most popular beaches.

Then, I visited with volunteers from the ReefTeach project at the popular Kahalu’u Bay in Kona. The program educates beachgoers on the precious corals growing there and how best to care for them and the ever-present green sea turtles that like to nosh on the limu growing in the bay. (Here’s a tip: Use mineral-based sunscreen and put it on at least 15 minutes before hitting the water. Better yet, skip the sunscreen and wear a rash guard.)

After studying the reef’s smallest creatures—coral polyps—I decided it was time to explore the other end of the spectrum. With a wing span up to 30 feet, manta rays are some of the largest marine animals to frequent the reef.

A Bounty of Coral off Big Island

I first learned to snorkel years ago in Acapulco, Mexico. In addition to forgetting to breathe, I kept lifting my head out of the water and sputtering to my husband, “Did you see that?” I’d suddenly reverted to a child at Christmas. Each colorful fish was an exciting, new present.
When I plunged into the ocean off Kona for my pre-manta ray dive, I was that child again. I popped above the surface and squealed to Danny, “Look at all that coral.”

On Kaua’i, I was used to a more monochromatic reefscape with scattered mounds of coral. Here, a carpet of coral, of all colors and kind, blanketed the ocean floor. Yellow-green lobe coral. Thickets of blue finger coral. Bushes of creamy cauliflower coral. Sheets of rice coral. It was a cornucopia of coral.

The more I looked, the more I saw. A red pencil urchin tucked among blue octocoral. A yellow frogfish draped on yellow lobe coral—Danny had to point out that one. A whitemouth eel entwined in cauliflower coral. And, peering out from the branches of antler coral, two arc-eye hawkfish.

Manta Ray Anatomy Lesson

It’s not only the smaller marine creatures that live in and around the condominiums of corals; even the big guys cruise the reef. Yes, there are sharks on the reef; some who even live there. Dolphins sometimes swim by. Monk seals visit. And, occasionally, manta rays.

Did you know manta rays are considered cousins to sharks? It’s because, like sharks, their skeletons are made of cartilage, and they have gill slits instead of gill covers. But manta rays look nothing like sharks. Rays have flattened, triangular-shaped bodies with fins as wings. In my opinion, manta rays resemble what alien spaceships are supposed to look like.

Unlike sharks and other rays, mantas are filter-feeding plankton eaters. Plankton are minute organisms that drift with the ocean’s currents. Weighing upwards of 5,000 pounds, manta rays have to eat a ton of plankton.

While most mantas have solid black backs, their white bellies are often speckled. Some have just a few black dots; others have big, black, Rorschach blotches on their bellies. Like a thumbprint or even a whale’s tail, the white underside of a manta ray is quite unique to that manta. Captain Vinny said he could easily identify 20 out of the 100+ manta rays that call on Garden Eel Cove.
And while we’re on topic of anatomy, manta rays are not the same as stingrays. Mantas do not have poisonous barbs. Nor do they have teeth—except for a few vestigial remains on their lower jaw.

Abducted by Manta Rays

It was time to take the plunge. Danny astutely reminded me that I would actually be warmer in the water than standing on the boat in my damp wetsuit. I stepped into the water in a giant stride and discovered he was right.

Before I could get situated—mask snug, air in my BCD, regulator in my mouth, gauges hanging off my body and dive light and camera strapped to each wrist—I heard someone say, “There’s one.”

Thirty-five feet below, I tried to kneel, but my big fins got in the way, so I sat reclined on my air tank and watched the ballet above me. To keep me securely on the bottom, Danny plopped a rock in my lap. My dive group of seven formed a circle and pointed our dive lights straight up. This attracted the plankton, which, in turn, attracted the manta rays. Four mantas wove and dove above us. They were easily wider that the beam of our dive boat and, with their tails, about as long.

They passed so closely over our heads that, even though Captain Vinny said the mantas wouldn’t hit us, I instinctively ducked a couple times.

The mantas moved about as fast as high, cumulus clouds on a bright, sunny day and that put me in a meditative mood. As I stared down their wide, open mouths, I wondered if mantas started drooling when they saw divers slip into the sea, like Pavlov’s dogs. I wondered if they really are from another planet. If that’s why they looked like spaceships.

As a manta made another pass over my head, I wondered if the surge of water that rocked me to and fro was caused by the movement of the gentle giants—they surely displaced quite a bit of water—or if the moving tide was caused by the full moon glowing on the surface of the water.
Soon, I was shaken from my reverie, literally. I was cold again. This time, though, there was no question about my actions. I wasn’t about to leave this spot until my air ran out.

Thankfully, Frankie waited until we dispersed to come out of his lair.

Slurp. Swoosh. Spit. It's the Kona Coffee Cupping Event

[As published in OutriggerHawaii.]

Outside the verandah of the Keauhou Beach Resort, turtles lounged in tidepools. An eel chased a small fish. The sun outraced vog for attention. In the open-air cupping room, ceiling fans powered by trade winds spun haphazardly. If you’re going to cup coffee, it doesn’t get much better than the annual Kona Coffee Cupping Competition, held every November.

For the past 25 years as an importer of green specialty coffees from around the world, John King has started his day—and sometimes spent entire days on end—cupping coffee. That is, sampling coffee—not to be confused with drinking coffee, although he admits to plenty of that, as well.

Judging the Dry Grounds

On this second day of competition, John approached the cupping table on the lanai. He lifted a cup of dry grounds to his nose. Because the trade winds had picked up, he turned his back to block the breeze and inhaled deeply, fluffing the dry grounds with a pencil to allow the coffee’s fragrance to emanate. After a moment, John lifted his head from the cup, tapped it with his pencil and turned to another judge. They both smiled.

Two more cups of dry grinds sat on the white-clothed table. Some three dozen spectators lined the room. At the far end of the lanai, slack key guitar and ukulele players strummed and sang traditional Hawaiian songs. The recently-crowned Miss Kona Coffee arrived, all smiles.

This was the final day of the Kona Coffee Classic Competition, in which entrants were required to submit a 50-pound sample of beans harvested in Kona between June 1 and October 25. Sixteen of the original 56 entrants made it to the final round, where, after the numbers were tabulated, there was a three-way tie for first. Hence, a special “cup off” was underway to determine first, second and third place. Because this was a blind taste-testing, all the beans were stripped of any identifying names, placed in clear, plastic bags and assigned a number. To keep the judges sharp, new numbers were assigned to the 16 finalists.

John picked up the second cup of dry grounds and inhaled. Then, like a dog angles its ears to hear better, John tilted his head to catch a deeper scent. This time, when he put the cup down, he didn’t tap it with his pencil. Nor did he turn to any of his four fellow judges. He simply jotted a quick note and moved on to the third cup of dry coffee.

Scoring the Wet Grounds

After judging the dry grounds, it was time for the second phase of the competition. The crowd gathered closer now. One scoop of each finalist’s ground coffee was placed in three different cups. Then, hot water was added. Because there were three contestants in this final flight, that makes nine cups of coffee.

This is how coffee cupping works. Three cups of coffee are brewed for each entrant. John says it’s easier to pick out the individual characteristics of the coffee that way. It’s like a miner panning for gold, sifting through rubble and searching for that glint. Careful, though, sometimes the glint fools you. And that’s the point of three cups.

And still: No sipping, no drinking, no tasting. Not yet. The judges are after the coffee’s aroma here in the wet stage. They rate each cup on a 1 to 5 scale, with 1 equating to “very large” and 5 to “little/no.” After a minute or two of brewing, some coffee floats to the top and forms a crust. Aroma is most potent after breaking the crust of the coffee.

John leaned in, taking in the aroma of each of the nine cups and made a note on his clipboard. On a second pass through the nine, he pulled out his cupping spoon—sort of like a deep soup spoon—and stirred the coffee.

Sampling for Taste, Acidity and Body

Now, it was time to actually taste the coffee—step three. John dipped his spoon into the first cup and slurped. The idea here is to coat the tongue evenly, all at once, giving all the taste buds a simultaneous splash of coffee. Hence, the slurping. With five judges slurping nine different cups of coffee, it sounded like the room was full of people with seriously stuffy noses.

During the sampling phase, the judges rated the coffee on taste, acidity and body, again using the 1 (very large) to 5 (little/no) scale. Rather than swallowing, after slurping, the judges sprayed the coffee into a brass tobacco spittoon.

John slurped one entrant’s three cups of coffee. Paused. Then he moved on to the second set of three cups. Paused, again. And repeated the process with the third entrant. Then, he immediately went back to the first set, slurping each cup again. He didn’t bother with palate cleansings between tastings. It was all slurp, slurp, slurp.

At this point, John stepped away from the table. But not for long. Soon, he was back, slurping from the first entrant’s three cups of coffee. He shook his head, gazing out to sea, his narrowed blue eyes contemplating. He slurped some more. Erased something on his clipboard and wrote anew.

During a typical cupping, judges sample a minimum of three cups of coffee per entrant. On day one of the Kona Coffee Classic Competition that equated to 168 slurps of coffee. Of the 56 entrants, 16 made the final round. That’s 48 more tastings for a total of 216. Minimum. As you can see, judges often dip their spoons into the same cup of coffee more than once.

A good cup of Kona coffee

John said Kona is one of the only coffees in the world that when prepared and roasted right doesn’t impart any bitterness. When done right, Kona coffee imparts a sweet melody.
Finally, John stepped away from the table where his fellow judges had gathered. They looked at clipboards, each other. John pointed at his clipboard and said, “What did you think?”

“It’s hard,” one said.

“It was really good the first time,” another said.

“That was a surprise,” John said. “That didn’t come out the first time”,

The judges milled about, then turned in their scorecards. It was over. To celebrate, the event director passed around bottles of cold Heineken. It was just after mid-day.

And the Blue Ribbon Goes to

An hour or so later, in a special presentation, Debbie Hoshide, owner of Hoshide Farms was awarded first place in the 2008 Gevalia Kona Coffee “Classic” Cupping Competition. She inherited her farm from her parents. It is located on seven acres in Honaunau at 1,700-foot elevation.

Second place was awarded to Kuaiwi Farm/Kona Old Style, located in Kealakekua. Third place went to Kona Rainforest Coffee, located south of Captain Cook.

In a press release, John said, “The winning coffee possessed the quintessential Kona floral fragrance. It scored the highest marks in fragrance, which made it stand out from the others. On the cup, it was both sweet and tart.”

Come. Join Donna Kahakui

[As published in OutriggerHawaii.]

If you were to ask Donna Kahakui where she comes from, she would answer, without hesitation, "the ocean."

“I come from a family of fishermen," Donna says. "The ocean is my best friend." Explaining it another way, Donna says, "I am more coordinated in the ocean than I am on land.”

Donna’s dad says he didn’t have to teach her to swim; she was born knowing. She took to the ocean like a turtle hatchling that may be born on land but scrambles directly for the salty sea. And like sea turtles, Donna has spent almost her entire life in the ocean, on the ocean and on beaches next to the ocean.

When I first met Donna in June 2004, she had just paddled 82 miles from Hale’iwa on O’ahu to the shores of Kalapaki Bay on Kaua’i. It took 17 hours. Now, if I had paddled a canoe for 17 hours across an open ocean channel, you can rest assured I would have crawled ashore, grabbed some grub from the first offering available, and beat a hasty trail for my bed. There would have been no chit-chatting, no smiles, no good times. But Donna is clearly not me.

A Turning Point

A few years before, one early morning in 1997, Donna was solo paddling her canoe off the shores of Waikiki. The sun peaked over the horizon. The ocean resembled a flat pancake and was so clear that Donna could see the ripples in the sand on the sea floor. It was an epic day.

As she reached out to plant the blade of her paddle in the water, Donna saw a dorsal fin. Now, when you’re paddling a fiberglass canoe with a seat about as wide as a toothpick, a dorsal fin in the ocean can be bad news. In this case, as two large bottlenose dolphins emerged, the news was good. Donna kept paddling and the two—about as long as her boat, she judged—crisscrossed underneath her. A third, smaller dolphin appeared, swimming alongside her. The group of mammals continued on, sharing the experience, sharing the early morning and sharing the sea.
At one point, the young dolphin rolled onto its side, apparently to get a good look at Donna, and the two made eye contact. “You could say that was my ‘ah ha’ moment,” Donna says about the encounter. “Kai Makana was actually birthed in that particular experience.”

That’s when Donna knew it was time to do something. It was time to give back to the place where she feels so at home. It was time, she decided, to clean up her living room.

Cleaning up the Sea

“But what could I do?” Donna reflects. “I am one person.” She decided doing something—no matter how small—was better than doing nothing at all. So, Donna picked up empty water bottles left behind by others. She started hauling in derelict fishing lines, heavier and longer even than her outrigger canoe. She prodded her paddling friends, too. She told them, “If we see opala, we need to pick it up. That was my first stand,” Donna says.

When I met Donna on the shores of Kalapaki, she had just completed an epic paddling adventure, paddling from one end of the main Hawaiian Island chain to the other. When she walked ashore in the waning light after 8:00, after those 17 hours, after 82 miles, she looked up at the crowd awaiting her arrival, smiled and beckoned with her arm. “Come,” she said. “Come.” And we gathered in a circle on the grass and shared food, drink and story. She didn’t gobble, she didn’t grumble, she didn’t fall asleep.

Over the next two days, some 20 paddlers joined Donna in navigating canoes around Kaua’i, across the Kaulakahi Channel, and down the back side of Ni’ihau. Donna would gather our group again and again with the words, “Come, Come.” It was an invitation to join Donna as we were welcomed ashore according to Hawaiian custom, and it was an invitation to join Donna in caring for the ocean.

Protecting the ocean environment

Kai Makana is the organization that Donna created after her seminal encounter with the young bottlenose dolphin. The not-for-profit’s mission is to “take an active role in educating and mobilizing the public to better understand and preserve marine life and the ocean environment.” With hundreds of advisers and volunteers from all strata of Hawaii—public and private schools, corporations, the Polynesian Voyaging Society, The Nature Conservancy, Hawaii Wildlife Fund and members of the medical community—the group focuses their efforts on youth education and community involvement to “protect, preserve, and respect the ocean as an ecosystem central to our health, wellness and happiness.”

The organization started by raising funds to help save animals in the sea: Turtles and The Honu Project and Hawaiian monk seals and the Hawaii Wildlife Fund.

Then, Donna refocused her efforts. “You can try and save all the animals,” she said, “but what good is saving animals if there is no ocean.” That’s when Donna directed her energy and message to water quality. “Without a healthy ocean environment, we’re outta here,” she says.

World Ocean Day

Because Donna’s expertise was paddling, she figured the best way she could raise awareness of the ocean was by doing what she does best. So, she got back on her outrigger canoe. This was back in 1998. At the time, few people plied the water off Hawaii aboard one- and two-person canoes. Even fewer people were paddling long distances.

Donna decided to paddle from Maui to O’ahu. “Initially, everybody thought I was whacked,” Donna says of her first open ocean canoe crossing. She did it anyway.

The next year, she paddled from Big Island to O’ahu and people came out to support her. Then, she took her message to New York and beyond to Tahiti and Aotearoa (New Zealand).
When I met her, she was completing her tour of Hawaiian Islands with the two oldest and most western—Kaua’i and Ni’ihau. By then, she had paddled close to 1,000 miles in the name of the ocean. She timed her last paddle around World Ocean Day, because it is her hope that Hawai’i becomes the first state to recognize this Earth-Day-of-the-sea event. It makes sense, of course, for an island state to be the first. We depend upon the sea for our everyday livelihood—for food, for recreation and as shipping lanes for the goods we need to survive.

Saving a village in the Sea

Since 2005, Donna’s efforts have taken on another epic challenge. This time, Kai Makana is converging on the 10-acre island called Mokauea, which lies between Honolulu Harbor and the Honolulu International Airport. The island is the site of the last Hawaiian fishing village on O’ahu and only one of two left in the state. The goal is to return a self-sustaining lifestyle to the few families still living on the island. To grow dry land kalo. To grow native limu. To reconstruct working fish ponds. To build an outdoor classroom for science, math and history.

Unfortunately, the island had gone neglected, almost forgotten. Except, perhaps, as a dump site.
“Come, come,” Donna called once again. This time thousands of children and adults have responded. Together, they have removed 40-foot dumpster after 40-foot dumpster of rubbish. Crazy stuff. Stuff that makes you scratch your head. Like refrigerators. Junk boats. TVs. All covered in barnacles.

Together, they have removed invasive kiawe, a type of mesquite that grows as a bush, spreading suckers across the land, releasing seeds by the thousands and creating dense cover that crowds out just about any other plant within the vicinity. And, then, there’s the plant’s thorns—long and strong enough to penetrate the soles of hiking shoes.

“People said it couldn’t be done,” says Donna. It was a sentiment she had heard before, and it didn’t stop her this time, either. “Here it is two years later and most of the rubbish and kiawe have been removed. You just have to start doing it.”

Learning by example

If you respond to Donna’s call, if you come, you get to give back to a greater good. The way Donna explains it, “You give something back to the future.

“The great thing about traditional Hawaiians is they were always conscious of the next generation, to provide food for the next generations, and to some extent, we have lost that,” says Donna.

“It doesn’t take much to bend over and pick up a blowing plastic bag. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t your bag, but it does to the turtle you just saved. If we can see that little things mean big things, then we understand,” says Donna, “and we take action.”

When you are a person who comes from the ocean--like Donna and, really, all of us--it's simple. "We take care of our environment, because it’s our kuleana," says Donna. "It’s our responsibility, because we live here."

Yesterday, I stopped by the post office to pick up my mail. Walking in the door, I spotted a small credit card receipt—all of two-by-three inches—skipping across the parking lot. As it fluttered by, I thought of Donna, and I bent to collect the rubbish. A simple effort. A tiny, slip of paper. Nothing much, really. And yet something. Better than doing nothing at all.

Hawaii's Reefs: Teeming with Life

[Note: This is the second of a five-part series as published in OutriggerHawaii.]

The boat rocked from port to starboard and back again, as regular as a metronome. A diminishing south swell that shut out all dive boat operations for the past week still churned the water—and my stomach. That may have explained my deadpan response to Captain George’s dive jokes, but that wasn’t all. It was early.

I am not a morning person. By the time I usually rise, my husband is up, dressed, drinking his freshly-brewed Columbian Supremo coffee and making a sandwich for his lunchbox. Whenever I rise, I am not the most chipper person, preferring to retreat to my chair on the lanai with a cup of herbal tea and the local newspaper—The Garden Island—to read the daily news and, my favorite, the letters to the editors. While the latter are vocal, providing a pulse on the mood of the island’s people, they are also letters and, therefore, silent. I like that.

George is a morning person. “What does a mermaid eat for lunch?” he asked, as the boat swayed, and I scuttled for a seat. I signed up for this early morning dive charter to research Hawaii’s reefs in celebration of the “International Year of the Reef.”

George didn’t wait for an answer. “Peanut butter and jellyfish,” he said and launched his second joke, “What do you call a mermaid who won’t share her lunch?”

As the owner of Fathom Five Divers, George Thompson has logged thousands of hours on a boat. He has his sea legs. So, he floated from his captain’s chair to the back of the boat to hoist my tank onto my back.

“Shellfish,” he said.

I slipped my fins over my dive booties, wrestled into my buoyancy compensator vest with its bulky tank of air and tested my regulator to make sure the air was flowing. Mask on, I rolled backward into the sea. The last words I heard were, “What do you call a.…” And I descended to eighty feet of peace and quiet.

Sightseeing Below the Surface on Kauai

Under water, I can sometimes hear the crackling sound that shrimp make, but, usually, the only sound I hear is that of my breathing, as I draw air in and out of the regulator in my mouth. It’s a comforting sound.

Before George started reeling off his “dumb diving jokes,” as the rest of us dubbed them, he asked everyone to search for lobsters on our dives.

The lobsters that inhabit the relatively warm waters of Hawaii are not the kind you find at restaurants across the country. Lobsters divide into two groups: Those with enlarged pincers on the first pair of legs—like the American Lobster found in restaurant holding tanks—and those without—like the spiny lobster found in Hawaiian waters. But just because the lobsters crawling around the bottom of the Pacific do not have large pincers does not make them inedible.

Lobsters, known as ula in Hawaiian, are eaten raw and cooked. They are prized. One story I’ve read says lobsters were substituted for pigs during ancient Hawaiian days in sacrifices to the gods.

In Hawaii, Lobsters Are Protected

Two things make lobsters vulnerable to over-fishing today: One, their tasty meat; and, two, their ease of catch.

Lobsters are nocturnal bottom-dwellers. They scramble over the sandy, ocean floor adjacent to the reef, foraging for food during the night when they are easy to catch in traps and tangle nets. So easy that the commercial catch in Hawaii went from 40,000 pounds in 1948 to 4,800 pounds in 1968.

Even though adult female lobsters spawn four times a year and produce up to half-a-million eggs at a time, it takes almost a year for those eggs to hatch and develop into a something recognizable as a lobster.

So, the State of Hawaii prohibits the take of the spiny lobster during May, June, July and August. (Basically, as local fishermen like to say, if it’s an “R” month, it’s a lobster month.) However, undersized and “berried” females are illegal to take, no matter the month.

During the day, lobsters sleep, tucked under ledges and wedged into nooks and crannies on the reef. Unlike nighttime, lobsters are not easy to catch during daylight hours. When I spot a lobster during a day dive, it’s usually because I just happen to spy their antennae poking out of a crevice. Since they’re up all night, my guess is lobsters, like me, are not morning critters; they do not want to be disturbed too early. Yet George’s dive shop participates in a research study that is trying to figure out if the lobster population in the main Hawaiian Islands feeds that in the northwest Hawaiian Islands, now known as the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, or vice versa.

If we find a lobster, George wants us to bring it up to the boat, where he will take measurements and a single leg and, then, release the lobster, even though it’s September—an “R” month and legal to take. “But don’t stick your hand in a hole to go after a lobster,” George said. Because lobsters aren’t the only critters that like to sleep in holes. I’ve heard it said that if you see a lobster with only one visible antenna, it means the other antenna is pointing back into the hole keeping track of an eel.

Eels. Those long, slender, snake-like critters with teeth. They thread their bodies through the reef as tightly as a fan belt wrapped around an engine.

To understand how an eel weaves its body through the reef, it helps to understand how the reef develops.

It Takes the Work of Plants and Animals

In Hawaii, two organisms are responsible for reef building.

The first is a plant. Coralline algae are stony seaweeds that produce calcium carbonate
(limestone). As they grow, they cement sand, shells, rocks and old coral skeleton, producing the reef framework. Much of Hawaii’s reefs are made up of coralline algae, which is a plant but often confused with hard coral, an animal. Light tan to pink in color, coralline algae is hardy enough to withstand the impact Hawaii’s pounding surf, unlike the second organism contributing to the reef’s architecture.

Coral is a community of individual animals called polyps, all connected to each other by a thin layer of tissue. As each coral polyp grows, it secretes calcium carbonate which hardens to create a rigid cuplike skeleton—or calyx—around each polyp. These calyces join to form solid structures of many shapes and sizes, including tables, plates, branching fingers, bushes, lobes and mounds. The telltale characteristic of coral colonies, which helps distinguish it from coralline algae, is the repeating pattern of calyces lined up one after another like rooms in a hotel.

Hawaii’s Unique Reefscape

I’ve been diving and snorkeling around Hawaii for almost 20 years and, until now, I’ve paid scant attention to the reef itself. I guess I figured reefs were rocks and those things growing on them were plants.

Honestly, I thought Hawaii’s reefs were rather bland. Because there weren’t any neon yellows, pinks, purples and oranges catching my eye like that in the Caribbean, I turned my attention to the critters swimming in and amongst the reef. Like the juvenile yellowtail wrasse, bluestripe snapper and Hawaii’s state fish, the well-known Picasso triggerfish, known in Hawaiian as humuhumunukunukuapuaa. Now, they are colorful. Call me shallow, but I guess I was only attracted to outwardly characteristics. Oh, and size too. You can’t miss the graceful green sea turtles. They grow up to 400 pounds, and they like to snooze under ledges around the reef.
In my defense, I’ve always heard it was the volcanic substrate that made diving in Hawaii interesting. That is, the caverns, caves and tunnels created as the successive lava flows that formed these islands erode. And, truly, Hawaii’s underwater landscape is like meandering through an old Victorian home, one room leads to another and another.

Today, my attention was turned to the reef, the place some 5,000 animal species call home in Hawaii. That’s where one of my dive buddies, Terry, spotted the whitemouth moray eel. It was so tightly wound around the branches of cauliflower coral that it looked like the coral had grown around the eel. But coral grows heartbreakingly slow, maybe one-quarter inch per year, so that was impossible.

A Lack of Coral Diversity

Cauliflower coral is one of Hawaii’s six common corals. All six are relatively ordinary in color, which explains the limited color range on the reef. Cauliflower coral forms branching cream or tan colonies. Lobe coral grows in large yellow-green mounds. A relative of lobe coral, finger coral produces shades of gray and develops, as the name suggests, in finger-like protrusions. Rice and sandpaper rice coral shapes in sheets and plates in tans and browns.

What’s more interesting than Hawaii’s lack of color on the reef is its lack of diversity. Hawaii boasts only six common corals and sixty-six species of hard corals total. That compares to over 500 hard corals elsewhere in the Pacific. Scientists explain this lack of variety to isolation. Hawaii is one of the most isolated bodies of land in the world. As everyone who visits Hawaii knows, it’s not easy to get here. Same goes for corals.

The other thing that limits the number of coral species around Hawaii is the species’ fragility. Reef corals are notoriously fussy. They live within a narrow tropical band around the equator, preferring an average water temperature between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. They like clear, well-lit water and salinity close to 35 parts per thousand. While corals want their watery home to move, they do not want it to rage, just as we like cooling trade winds but not a hurricane. So, the winter waves for which Hawaii is famous allow for only the hardiest of corals to survive here. There are few frilly, lacy soft corals in Hawaii. Those that do grow here are considered rare and found in deep water.

A Reef is a Reef is a Reef. Not.

On my two dives with Captain George, I learned something else about Hawaii’s reefscape: No two reef ecosystems are the same. They change as quickly as the terrestrial topography around Hawaii. Whereas the north shore of Kauai receives more rain and is redolent with lush, tropical plants, the dry, west side of Kauai resembles more a desert, complete with cacti.

As we moved from Turtle Bluffs dive site to Sheraton Caverns, a mere few miles apart on Kauai’s south shore, I noticed a change in reef ecology. Whereas Turtle Bluffs was primarily characterized by coralline algae and a few wire corals, I spotted many more mounds of lobe coral and heads of cauliflower coral at Sheraton Caverns. According to George, that’s because a slight change in salinity, water temperature and nutrient and chemical runoff influences what lives in the area, just as different land-based plant species prefer different soil types.

Hawaii Is Home to Some Unique Characters

While Hawaii’s isolation may limit its species diversity, that same characteristic has spawned an endemism epidemic. Twenty percent of marine invertebrates and 25% of fish life are endemic to Hawaii; that is, found here and no where else.

Take the lobsters for which George had us searching. I never did find one, but another dive buddy, Mark, spotted a spiny lobster embedded in a crevice. Of the three spiny lobsters in Hawaii, one—the banded spiny lobster—somehow evolved into its own unique species, making it endemic to the area. I’m not sure whether Mark’s was the endemic variety or not. All I know is that Mark came up empty-handed—and with all five fingers in tact. Maybe Mark had heard the diver’s old saw about the one visible antenna.

Our Precious Reefs

[Note: This is the first of a five-part series on Hawaii's reefs as published in OutriggerHawaii.]

Joel Paschal and Marcus Eriksen departed Long Beach Aquarium in California for Honolulu, Hawai’i on June 1, 2008. They arrived 87 days later. En route, they survived a sinking ship, dodged four hurricanes, and ran out of food.

It wasn’t so much that they declined the standard six-hour, airplane flight and chose a boat for their 2,600 mile journey. Every summer, dozens of sailors ply the Pacific Ocean for Hawaii. What really surprised those onlookers who had gathered at the Ala Wai Boat Harbor in late August to greet them was the duo’s choice of vessel. It wasn’t your traditional mono-hull sailboat or even a double-hull catamaran. It was a raft named JUNK and, appropriately, crafted from 15,000 plastic bottles, 20 sailboat masts, 5,000 plastic bags woven into rope and the remains of the fuselage of a Cessna 310.

One week before Joel and Marcus set sail, 40-year-old Roz Savage pushed away from the dock at the Presidio Yacht Club in San Francisco, destination Hawaii. Her transportation mode of choice: A rowboat.

It took Roz over 1 million oar strokes and 99 days, 8 hours and 55 minutes to cover the 2,324 miles in her 24-foot boat made of carbon fiber. She faced stiff winds at times and upwards of 25-foot waves. She survived the failure of two water makers while munching on dried fruit, veggies and energy bars and listening to 62 audio books.

So, what gives? Why in the world would anyone sail across the Pacific in a boat made of trash? Why would someone row alone from San Francisco to Honolulu? These days, it seems “because it’s there” is no longer enough. Joel, Marcus and Roz are not mere adrenaline junkies, although, admittedly, there must be some of that in their DNA. All three ocean-goers say they crossed the Pacific in so unlikely of ways for the same reason: To save our oceans.

Conservation down under.

Based on headline news around the country, one would think our world’s biggest concern is what’s going on above the water with things like greenhouse gases, rising air temperatures, and melting polar ice caps. But like all of nature, the air and the water are interconnected. What happens in one, affects the other as surely as night follows day.

The “save our seas” message isn’t one of just a few renegade individuals like Joel, Marcus and
Roz.

According to The Nature Conservancy, “The increase in global carbon dioxide emissions is not just damaging the Earth’s climate, but is also threatening the very fabric of our oceans.”
Messages like this are making their way into headline news, especially in Hawaii where we are surrounded by water, and around the nation, as well, in states whose borders do not reach the sea.

The reason for the increased attention to what’s happening to our water is because we are all affected by the health of our oceans, whether we live in a coastal community or not.

It's all connected.

Pioneering undersea explorer and one-time chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Dr. Sylvia Earle spoke at the recent Hawaii Conservation Conference. She emphasized that every breath we take comes from the sea. In her book Sea Change, Earle writes, “Clouds of freshwater are lofted from the sea to the atmosphere as vapor and return there, via the land, as fog, rain, sleet, and snow.”

The ocean is important, because without it, we would not exist. There would be no life. As Earle says, “There’s plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water.” And at 97% of the Earth’s water, the ocean is the life-support system for all creatures on our planet.

That’s a pretty clear reason why we should care about and for our seas.

Out of balance.

So, right now, we should care about something called “ocean acidification.” As carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, approximately one-third is absorbed by the ocean. The mixture of CO2 with saltwater forms carbonic acid, which lowers the pH of the oceans. More greenhouse gases, more acidity. More acidity, big trouble.
In July 2008, scientists at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Florida declared acidification to be the largest and most significant threat facing oceans today. Unchecked, it can lead to the destruction of coral reefs.

Reefs serve many roles in our everyday lives.

We in Hawaii like our coral reefs. They form natural breakwaters, buffering our land from the big waves for which Hawaii is famous. They provide underwater marine parks for snorkeling and diving. They generate waves for surfing. They create the ingredients for our miles of sandy beaches. And, they offer food to eat.

Now, let’s take a look below the surface.

Earlier this summer, NOAA released a report that said almost half of the coral reef ecosystems in the United States territory are in poor or fair condition.
Although they cover only two-tenths of one percent of the ocean floor, many scientists refer to coral reefs as the “rainforests of the sea” because of their abundant biodiversity. It is reported that 25% of marine species need coral reefs to live and grow and that 40% of fish caught commercially use reefs to breed. And did you know that people consume more seafood than either beef or pork?

Global warming: It does more than melt glaciers.

Remember what we said earlier about what happens above the water affects what happens in the water? Well, as air temperature rises, so, too, is the temperature of our oceans. As a result, some corals are rapidly declining to such an extent that for the first time ever, two corals have been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Earlier this year, coral reef experts and managers from the United States, Mexico, France, and Bonaire designated 2008 as the International Year of the Reef with the specific purpose of drawing the world’s attention to and celebrating coral reefs. Since then, NOAA has joined the effort, as well as The World Bank, SeaQuest Marine, the Coral Reef Symposium, the US Department of State, the Ministry of the Environment in Japan and the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation.

You might find all this interesting, but, if you’re like us, you might still be asking, What exactly is coral? And what is a coral reef? Where is it? Can I see it? How are the reefs faring in Hawaii?

What can I do to help?

OutriggerHawaii is suiting up—fins, goggles, and snorkel—to find out. We’ll journey around Hawaii exploring coral reefs, talking to the experts, learning about some fascinating plants and animals and, where we can, pitching in to protect our precious marine environment. At this point, there are no plans to cross the Pacific in a raft or rowboat, but you never know. Check back here regularly to see what new information and stories we’re posting. And spread the word: Save our seas.

Patricia Wrasse, er, Wood

As published in OutriggerHawaii.

It was dusk when I pulled into Nawiliwili Harbor on Kauai’s east shore and found Patricia Wood standing under a streetlamp in the middle of the marina parking lot. The light above her had not yet flickered on, probably because it was not quite dark enough. Then, again, maybe it was Patricia Wood’s beaming energy that prevented the sensor from triggering.

I first saw her from a distance. She was talking on her BlackBerry. Her short, wispy blonde hair was streaked with time spent in the sun. She was wearing all white—white, cotton top and white, cotton pants. I thought, She looks much too fresh for a woman who rose before dawn—the darkest part of the night—hopped aboard a catamaran and sailed 15 hours across a notoriously rough channel, from Oahu to Kauai. But that’s just what she’d done. She was as tireless as the bird wrasse, known for its endurance swimming.

When Patricia saw me, she ended her phone conversation and hopped inside my Jeep.

“Hi, I’m Patricia,” she said, stuffing her backpack at her feet and offering me her hand.

And, then, she plunged into her tale. I say “tale,” because it is more than a mere story. Patricia Wood’s story is more along the lines of a fairy tale.

We arrived at a stop sign. I hesitated. Patricia read my thoughts. “Take me anywhere,” she said. “I don’t care where we eat.”

“Aren’t you exhausted?” I asked.

“No, but I am famished,” she said.

Because I was driving and because my digital voice recorder was stashed in my purse in the backseat, I didn’t take notes, so I don’t have the tale verbatim and I can’t quote her, but Patricia’s dream-come-true, once-in-a-lifetime, every-writer’s-fantasy goes something like this.

In 2005, Patricia attended the Maui Writers Retreat where she workshopped her first manuscript with best-selling author Jacquelyn Mitchard. Soon after, Patricia wrote her second novel and started a third. In January 2006, after sharing her idea for a fourth book with a horseback riding student of hers—who happened to be the celebrated author Paul Theroux—she spent the next four months writing Lottery. When Paul read it, he told her to get an agent. Over the long weekend of Memorial Day, Patricia started querying agents. On July 20th at 5:15 a.m. HST, Dorian Karchmar of the William Morris Agency called to offer Patricia literary representation. That Labor Day weekend, Patricia again attended Maui Writers Retreat and Conference. That fall, Lottery went to auction and was sold to Putnam in December for a six-figure advance. Patricia’s first published book Lottery appeared in hardback in August 2007. The same month, she again attended Maui Writers Retreat and Conference, this time as a student and as a published author. In October, Lottery made the Book Sense Notable list. The Washington Post Book World included it in their Best Fiction 2007 roundup. This past spring, Lottery was short-listed for the UK’s 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. In June 2008, Lottery was released in paperback. Then, the film rights were optioned by Sarah Michelle Gellar. Through it all, Patricia has received thousands of emails from readers. She’s participated with dozens of book clubs around the world by conference call. She’s spoken with local Hawaii schoolchildren who have read Lottery in their classrooms. As of this date, Lottery has been translated into 18 languages.

But the tale didn’t come out in that order. Patricia jumped around in her story like a ping-pong ball, and I sometimes had a hard time keeping up. I figure she is not the kind of writer I imagine journalists to be. Linear. Chronological. Methodical. I think Patricia must approach writing more like a bird wrasse (gomphosus varius). Darting here, there and everywhere. I imagine her office—which is the salon of her sailboat Orion at Ko Olina on Oahu—looks like a hurricane blew through.

At my favorite Lihue restaurant, Kauai Pasta, Patricia scanned the menu.

“I’ve lost a lot of calories today,” she said. “What do you recommend?”

“I like their salads,” I said. “Especially the Portobello mushroom and roasted red pepper salad.”

“I need more than just a salad,” Patricia said, eying the filet mignon. “I need protein. Maybe the shrimp.”

By the time I finished eating, Patricia’s plate was still more than half full. I watched as she forced an inordinate amount of greens onto her fork, opened wide, and shoveled the bounty into her mouth. She paused for the briefest of moments as she parked the bite in one cheek and resumed her story, without once spitting food across the table at me. Then, she took a bite of shrimp.

After dessert—more calories—we headed to the airport. Patricia was slated for a 9:45 departure on Hawaiian Airlines. She would return to her home on Oahu in the dark, just like she left it.

I was a little disoriented when I dropped Patricia off, because my mind was swimming with the unreality of her story. Sometime during dinner, the phrase, “You can’t make this stuff up” flitted through my mind. As did, “This is the kind of story nobody would believe.”

But it’s true. I swear.

As I drove to my home, Patricia’s words reverberated in my head. I kept hearing her say, “When I turned 50, I decided if I was going to call myself a writer, I should write something, so, I set a goal of writing 2,000 words a day.”

Two thousand words. Let me do the math for you: At an average of 250 words per double-spaced page of Times New Roman, 12-point type with one inch margins all around, that’s eight pages of writing a day. Eight pages a day.

That’s when I started to understand this woman and why she published her novel last August and why today we were talking about how her book was short-listed for a $60,000 award. I get it. When you live on a sailboat, you have to put more stock in experiences than things.

That explains why she’s sailed the Pacific, from Honolulu to San Francisco. That explains why she’s participated in shark research off the remote island of Midway. Why she’s won the Hawaii State Jumper Championship with her horse Airborne. Why she’s enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Hawaii. Why she’s worked as a medical technologist and taught high-risk students at a pubic high school in Honolulu. And, now, why she’s a published author.

Sure there have been some strokes of good fortune and good luck in this woman’s story. Indeed, her father won $6 million in the lottery. But Patricia was already 40 years old, long past the time a daddy’s generosity could shape her character. Beyond serendipity, there’s another ingredient in Patricia’s success, and that’s hard work.
It’s sitting down at your computer and resisting the urge to shop on the Internet, set sail, do a load of laundry, create a new computer filing system and go snorkeling. It’s writing 2,000 words a day. And it’s not easy. The key, according to Patricia, is to gather advice from places like the Maui Writers Conference and, then, to do the work.

The bird wrasse is a small reef fish that grows to six inches. It uses its beak-like nose to gather small crustaceans like shrimp and crab out of the nooks and crannies of rocks and corals. It is a determined swimmer and has even been known to take flight. Just like Patricia.

When I returned home from dinner, I was inspired anew to write the book about which I have talked for a couple years now. And I resolved to rise early the next day and start on my first 2,000 words. Wish me luck.

Surfing Safari

Islands Magazine

The numerous rivers around Kauai get their start at the island’s rainy center, Mt. Waialeale, and flow down to the ocean like spokes in a wheel. One of them, the Hanalei River runs through a stunning wildlife refuge where endangered Hawaiian waterbirds play. This day, I’m in the middle of the river, but I’m not looking up at the birds; I’m looking down at my feet—surfing.

Well, sort of. Seemingly just like everybody else in Hawaii, I’m learning how to “stand-up paddle surf.” I’ve lived here for more than eight years, and I’ve always wanted to spend more time surfing than wiping out. And yet the one time I actually managed to stand up on a traditional surfboard, my mastery lasted for a nanosecond before I went under. The rest of that day, salt water dripped from my nose at the most inopportune times.

But I never thought the key to waves would be surfing a river. While paddle surfing has been around for decades, it has only become socially acceptable lately, with everyone from pro surfers to celebrities trying it. Basically, to do it you stand on an oversized surfboard and use an elongated canoe-type paddle to catch and surf waves. Of course, the ideas that sound the simplest are never the easiest to execute.

I’m lucky my instructor is Titus Kinimaka, a legend of big-wave surfing. When I first meet him in front of the surf shop in Hanalei that bears his name, he is standing at the top of a flight of stairs with his arms crossed. Unruly black hair striated with silver and sun-drenched with gold draped his shoulders. His dark face is deeply carved, like the vista of Namolokama Mountain behind us, the result of years spent in wind and water. He looks larger than life.

“Hi, I’m Kim,” I say.

He offers me his hand. “Titus.” Even his name makes me feel small, and I am close to six-feet tall. This is someone who has conquered one of the hardest sports on Earth, riding some of the biggest waves on Earth. I feel like I’m just a school kid daring to ask Michael Jordan for dribbling tips.

We drive from his surf shop to Hanalei Bay. There we check the surf, grab out gear and walk over to the adjacent Hanalei River. On the shore, Titus shows me where to stand on the board and how to paddle. I just have to figure out how to go from having my two feet firmly planted on the ground to having two feet shoulder-width apart on a floating board.

“Watch me,” Titus says as he places one foot on the center of his board like’s about to climb a couple stairs. He steps up with his other foot and, easy as that, he is standing on water.

I’m stalling, and Titus knows it.

“So, I just step up?” I ask.

“Try it,” he says.

I do, and I stand on water, too. The difference: I feel like a newborn colt, all legs and angles.

Titus is a fit 55; he learned to surf when he was 2. I am 45, and I’ve tried to surf traditional-style maybe three times in my entire life. Three days before this, Titus was on his stand-up surfboard carving the faces of 20-foot waves down the beach in one of the biggest swells of the season. He has paddled into waves that others merely admire from shore. He has paddled in to waves others merely admire from shore. He broke new ground with tow-in surfing, a style that uses a personal watercraft to pull him into fast-moving, behemoth waves. The biggest wave Titus ever rode breaks a mile north of Hanalei, called King’s Reef. He estimates the waves there can be up to 100 feet or so. That’s the height of a 10-story building. I use elevators for buildings that tall.

But Titus was also a lifeguard at one time, and while he’s willing to risk his own life, blessedly, I discover he is not willing to risk mine.

“We’ll stay on the river,” he says. The Hanalei River, which feeds into the bay, is perfect for learning this sport, because its water is so flat.

A form of standup paddling may have been used in old Hawaii for fishing, but its roots as a sport began in the 1950s when Waikiki surf instructors grabbed canoe paddles, so they could head out to the surf standing up. That way, the cameras strapped around their necks stayed dry, and they could take close-up pictures of their students. Standup paddling never took off, though, until the past few years, thanks in part to how easy it is to learn compared to regular surfing…supposedly.

Standing on my board as it floats on the placid river, I take a couple tentative strokes. Titus tells me to plant my paddle’s entire blade in the water, so I reached forward, bending at the waist—big mistake—and immerse my paddle. Immediately, the board slipped out from under me, and I’m treading water in a cold river. Hovering over me like a king atop his surfboard, Titus smiles, “I was trying to keep you dry.”

I slither back on the board, slide my knees under me and stand back up. Once I have the first fall out of the way, I settle in. Soon, I even felt comfortable paddling. Two strokes one side; two strokes the other.

It was time to learn to turn. “You’ve got to be able to turn quickly, so you can catch the next wave,” Titus said.

Now, it’s time to learn to turn. “You’ve got to be able to turn quickly, so you can catch the next wave,” Titus says. He demonstrates, digging the back ofh is board into the water and swiveling it around like a screw. He instructs me to slide my strong leg back when I want to turn. That will make the board’s nose pop up, a maneuver that will be useful when I’m ready to whip around and ride a wave.

My turn, though, isn’t as commanding. In fact, it takes nearly a dozen tries and as many cold plunges in the river before I make a complete turn. Then, I trie turning the other way, and I whip my board around on my first attempt. Titus’ eyes open wide.

“You’ve got some skills now,” Titus said. “You keep practicing in the river and in a couple weeks, you’ll be on the ocean. In a year, you’ll really be riding some waves.” Maybe then I’ll go from feeling like a newborn colt to a ballerina.

As Titus and I walk with our boards in the crooks of our arms, I notice Titus was no taller than I am. He tells me he was surfing last night past sunset, and he was out again this morning before dawn. “I love surfing,” he says. “I live and breathe surfing.”

That’s when I realize Titus isn’t just teaching me to surf. He’s teaching me something else. Something about practice. Patience. Persistence. I may not have actually surfed waves today, but if I kept trying, I will eventually. “Thank you,” I say, leaning in to give Titus a hug goodbye.

“Come down any time,” he says, pursing his lips and brushing my cheek with a kiss. “Take a board out. Practice.” And I want to. I want to come back, try again. Some day, I know I’ll even surf waves, but definitely not the size Titus surfs—no thank you.

Until then, I can paddle up and down the river, looking for those endangered seabirds. I can paddle along the coast with the wind at my back, catching little bumps of waves. With a surfboard and paddle, I can explore places on my island home that I’ve never seen before.

Book Review

People of the Book
by Geraldine Brooks
The Garden Island
April 11, 2008

Australia. Bosnia. Italy. Spain. Austria. United States. The tale of Pulitzer Prize-winning Geraldine Brooks’ newest novel travels the world piecing together clues—an insect wing, a wine stain, saltwater crystals, and a white hair—of the life and multiple near deaths of…a book. It’s no ordinary book. It’s the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a six-hundred-year-old Hebrew codex. What’s more, it’s loaded with lavish illustrations that were created “at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments.” Ah, the mystery, the intrigue. The “People of the Book” (Viking. $25.95) is a combination suspense thriller, mystery, and love story made to order for the bibliophile as well as those who simply like to read them.

When the novel opens, Australian Dr. Hanna Heath sits in “the boardroom of a bank in the middle of a city where they just stopped shooting each other five minutes ago.” The year is 1996. The place is Bosnia. A conservator of medieval manuscripts, Hanna awaits the arrival of the Jewish text, recently safeguarded from the shelling of the Bosnia Museum by its Muslim librarian. Hanna’s task: To analyze the shape of the book and, according to her personal philosophy of book conservation, only where absolutely necessary, repair it. Brooks protagonist doesn’t believe in “chemical cleanups” and “heavy restorations.” “I think you have to accept a book as you receive it from past generations, and to a certain extent damage and war reflect that history.”

That history is what Brooks’ contemporary book delivers. Each of the strange items that Hanna finds in the spine of the codex during her examination serves as clues to the life and times of the people of the book: A Muslim librarian in Sarajevo who saved it from the Nazis during World War II, the Venetian censor who saved it from burning during the Inquisition, the scribe who wrote the text in 15th century Tarragona, and the surprising illustrator who against tradition illuminated the text in Seville.

The author’s narrative works best in these historical moments, as the book’s structure zigzags back and forth in time. This presents two problems. One, the historical characters are rendered with such intrigue and are set during dramatic world events that it feels like the author is inviting them to a mystery-solving reunion in the book’s end. Of course, that could never happen with a storyline that crosses centuries, stretching from 1480 to 1996. While the reader returns to Hanna’s story time and again, the syphilitic bookbinder, the Bosnian teenage guerilla fighter and the alcoholic Catholic priest—once introduced into the story—unfortunately never reappear. Their stories end much too abruptly.

Two, Hanna is a likeable enough character, but she doesn’t have much depth. There’s the strained relationship with her neurosurgeon, feminist mother, and Hanna’s perpetual inability to commit to a romantic relationship. Hanna feels like a one-dimensional stereotype.

But Brooks’ medieval bookmaking details save Hanna from a complete ho-hum existence. Hanna identifies the parchment of the haggadah as coming from “the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep.” At her mentor’s urging, Hanna recreates the ancient ways. “I had to make gold leaf myself,” Hanna says, “beat it and fold it and beat it again, on something it won’t stick to, like the soft ground of scoured calf intestine.” She makes white pigment in her mother’s orchid greenhouse. “You cover lead bars with the dregs of old wine and seal them up in a shed full of animal dung.” It’s these kinds of details that imbue Brook’s first published book since winning a Pulitzer Prize for “March” with authenticity. That kind of attention just might come from Brooks’ journalistic tendencies.

Brooks first learned about the Sarajevo Haggadah while covering the Bosnian War as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. “While some of the facts are true to the haggadah’s known history,” writes Brooks in the afterward, “most of the plot and all of the characters are imaginary.” The fact that the “People of the Book” was inspired by a true story no doubt adds further appeal to the book. “Of course, a book is more than the sum of its materials,” writes the author. “It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.” Brooks understands what so many of us wonder when we come near an ancient historic relic, usually at a museum. Whose hands have touched this? What kind of life did its maker live? If this thing could talk, what stories would it tell? In “People of the Book,” Brooks gives us some interesting answers.

Book Review

‘A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose’
by Eckhart Tolle
The Garden Island
Mar 28, 2008

Question: How do you respond when another driver blasts his horn and screams obscenities at you?

According to Eckhart Tolle in “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” (Plume. Paperback. $14), if you yell, “idiot,” or shake a first, or, for that matter, respond in any manner whatsoever, a phenomenon called “unconscious ego-repair mechanism” has kicked in — and it’s one-way road to enduring unhappiness in life.


“Unhappiness or negativity is a disease on our planet,” writes Tolle. “People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness, that is to say, dependent on form. They don’t realize what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly.”

The subject of — and advice in — Tolle’s new book isn’t groundbreaking. There are countless self-help books on how to find happiness and purpose in life. In fact, Tolle himself has already authored many. “The Power of Now,” first published in 1999, covers much of the same ground, suggesting the key is living in the now. By that, he means, don’t get hung up on the past or wish away the present for the future. His message was well received. Close to 800 reviewers rate it 4.5 out of five stars on amazon.com.

Before Tolle, going back through the millennia, there have been other spiritual teachers. Tolle doesn’t promote any one religion or spiritual tradition, yet he acknowledges many in his book, including Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

Consider “The Power of Now” as something of a freshman primer and “A New Earth” an upper-class course with a lab intensive, courtesy of Oprah.com. On March 4, Oprah Winfrey debuted a 10-week online class featuring Tolle’s newest book. So far, the site claims over 2,000,000 people have “experienced” the class, which offers a companion workbook, exercises and chat rooms.

In “A New Earth,” Tolle says the “book’s main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to your mind or to try to convince you of anything, but to bring about a shift in consciousness, that is to say, to awaken.”

The roadblock to awakening, according to Tolle, is the ego.

“Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the common insight — that our ‘normal’ state of mind is marred by a fundamental defect. However, out of this insight into the nature of the human condition — we may call it the bad news — arises a second insight: The good news of the possibility of a radical transformation of human consciousness.”

It’s the “fundamental defect,” or ego, that blurts, “jerk” when another driver yells at us. “When someone blames or criticizes, that to the ego is a diminishment of self, and it [the ego] will immediately attempt to repair its diminished sense of self through self-justification, defense, or blaming. Whether the other person is right or wrong is irrelevant to the ego. It is much more interested in self-preservation than truth.”

Unfortunately, the ego’s survival mechanism comes at the expense of happiness. Tolle explains the ego as identification with form — be it thought forms, emotional forms or physical forms.

“The joy of being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event — through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you — ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are.”

Identification with form disconnects people from their inner essence, which some call “God,” others call “spirit,” and Tolle calls “being.”

Tolle writes, “Being is prior to existence. Existence is form, content, ‘what happens.’ Existence is the foreground of life; being is the background, as it were.”

Lasting happiness comes with what Tolle calls, “awakened doing.” That is, “the alignment of your outer purpose — what you do — with your inner purpose — awakening and staying awake.

To those who have read many of these types of books, this one may feel redundant. For others new to this track, it’s the repetition that makes Tolle’s concepts understandable. Tolle approaches his writing like any thorough photographer. He captures his subject over and over again from many different angles. If Tolle’s ideas are esoteric to some, his writing is straightforward, making his road map to happiness easy to read. Tolle rarely interjects his personal story, and yet he comes across as a sympathetic narrator. He doesn’t present himself as a guru or as the keeper of all knowledge but as a fellow pilgrim on the path.

Pearls of wisdom and practical exercises sprinkled throughout the book make “A Good Earth” a worthwhile read — whether read as a refresher or as an introduction to spiritual self-help.

Of course, saying anything otherwise would be an expression of the ego — the ego that wants to strengthen itself by showing off its knowledge or by appearing better than others. That’s what Jesus meant, according to Tolle, when he said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Similarly, the “Tao Te Ching” teaches it is better to be the valley of the universe than the mountain.