So much of one’s time in Hawaii is spent looking up, or out. Up to the sky, or out to where the sky meets the sea.
And there’s a rainbow almost every day.
In Buffalo, I might get to see a rainbow three or four times a year. In Hawaii, there were rainbows almost every day. I’d get up, make coffee, go to the balcony to greet the morning, look to the right (west) to the rain clouds descending (and breaking up) from the mountains, and…rainbows.
And then there were the sunsets, and the lingering light once the sun was down:
On this trip, the planets got into the act. Here, from top to bottom, are Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus:
One morning I was awake quite early, so I got up at 6:00am…just in time to see Orion setting. Orion is a winter constellation, which I associate with the colder times of year…which of course this is, even in Hawaii, though it doesn’t seem like it.
The most magical skyward sight of all, though, was something I’d never seen before, something I don’t even think I knew was possible until late one night, on a drizzly evening, The Wife and I both saw it at the same time: a moonbow. Though we didn’t see much of the moon on our trip, because we were mostly facing south so its path through the Hawaiian sky was mostly behind us and out of view from our south-facing balcony, there was a full moon while we were there, and on that night its light was bright enough to shine through the water droplets in the air. The result was this:
Hawaii is quite a place for those of us who find magic in the sky….
Longtime readers may remember that I was a big fan of the show Magnum PI back in the day. That is, the original show, the one that ran in the 1980s, and not the new reboot show that is running, well, now. (Nothing against the current incarnation, which I’ve watched a couple of times; it seems like a perfectly acceptable procedural show, but it’s never going to replace the original for me.) Being in Hawaii, where Magnum was set, gave me a chance to see some familiar locations from the show up close.
The biggest draw for an old Magnum fan would almost certainly have been the old estate that on the show doubled as “Robin’s Nest”, the Hawaii estate of the famed novelist Robin Masters, for whom Thomas Magnum and the estate’s major domo, Jonathan Quayle Higgins, worked. This estate was on the eastern shore of Oahu, and we did drive past where it was…but note the past tense there. Sadly, the location–in real life, the Anderson Estate–was demolished a couple of years ago after a long period of neglect. However, we did stop at a beach park a mile or so down the road from where the Anderson Estate once stood, and I took this photo of Manana Island, which is now a bird sanctuary:
You could often see that island in the distance when Magnum was swimming in Mr. Masters’s tidal pool.
Along the same shore, to the south (we drove by this first, actually), we stopped at an overlook with a stunning view. (Overlooks with stunning views are rather a thing in Hawaii!) Here’s a bit of that view, isolated:
That little island with the building on it, connected by bridge to Oahu, is the Makai Research Pier, belonging to Makai Ocean Engineering, a company that works on oceanic tech like sea cables and that sort of thing. That pier doubled, on Magnum PI, as the headquarters for Island Hoppers, the helicopter excursion business run by Magnum’s buddy, Theodore Calvin (TC).
I didn’t realize this at the time, but the lookout where I took that photo, Makapu’u Lookout, is on the same cliffs that become Makapu’u Point, a bit farther to the east. We briefly stopped there but realized that the hiking trail was much longer and more strenuous than we really felt up to that day, so we didn’t go…but it ends at Makapu’u Lighthouse:
Fans of Magnum will remember this lighthouse for one of the series’s most surprising, and unnerving, episode endings. In the episode “Faith and Beggorah”, there’s a subplot where Magnum is supposed to be investigating if a boxer’s wife is cheating on him. In the episode’s final scene, Rick and TC are watching from a distance as the wife and her putative boyfriend-on-the-side are at this lighthouse–but they are arguing constantly. We can’t hear what they’re saying, but Rick is bored because they can’t prove that she’s cheating on the husband if all they ever see her doing is yelling at the boyfriend. Rick is watching through a telescopic camera lens, while TC is lazily dozing off to the side. TC says “Oh, just keep watching, maybe something interesting will happen”…and at that moment, the boyfriend picks the woman up and tosses her off the lighthouse and down the cliffs. Yikes!
Anyway.
Then there’s this place, the War Memorial Natatorium in Waikiki. This was right down the street from our resort, and yet, I never walked down to get a closer look, alas! Next time, I swear! (Unless it gets torn down, which is apparently a possibility as this location has been an ongoing preservation struggle for a while.)
Built to honor the veterans and fallen of World War I, the Natatorium is not unlike all the various “War Memorial Stadiums” built across America, except that this one is a salt-water swimming pool. It has been closed for decades and is, as noted, an ongoing subject of debate between preservation and demolition. On Magnum, it featured prominently during the climax of an episode titled “Death and Taxes”, where a serial killer forms a fixation on Magnum, for some reason that the episode leaves unstated (to creepy effect).
Some places I did not get pictures of include the Iolani Palace, used often on the show as the location for various government agencies (such as when Magnum had dealings with the local PD)–
Also Honolulu’s Chinatown, which we passed through twice, once by car and once on the bus. This area served as location for when Magnum PI did stories set in the “seedier” part of town, such as the show’s fictional Vietnamese neighborhood, “Little Saigon”.
There’s something exciting about seeing places you only know through movies and television, isn’t there? This is not a Magnum location, but it is one of the most famous locations in movie history, thanks to a very steamy scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity:
It’s also always interesting to note how much poetic and cinematic license play into how movie and teevee locations work! There’s a Magnum PI episode from late in the show’s run where everyone is after a literal buried treasure, and after some tromping through the wilderness they all end up jumping off a cliff into a pool with a waterfall in order to grab some of the money that has ended up floating there. (I don’t remember the particulars.) I looked this up, figuring it to be located someplace deep in the island’s mountainous interior, but…not so! It turns out that if you stand on that exact spot, in no direction are you more than a couple hundred feet from a parking lot or a four-lane highway.
Anyway, folks, be careful when arranging your vacations, because if the place you’re going is where filming took place for a movie or show a member of your party is a big fan of, you’re going to hear about it. A lot.
Even if the place that person sees has nothing to do with the movie or show being mentioned, like this revolving restaurant in Waikiki. Doesn’t it look a bit like Piz Gloria, the mountaintop lair of Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service???
Our trip to Hawaii was…amazing. Just amazing. In fact, it was quite nearly perfect.
My mother dreamed all her life of going to Hawaii, and at some point after she had safely seen her two children off to lives of their own, she put her foot down, announcing to my father that they were going. This was sometime in the 1990s. Since then, she has gone to Hawaii something like a dozen times. For this last visit, she treated my family and I to going along with her, as part of her celebration for having turned 80 this past August.
If I count this Hawaii trip as a gift, and I do, it might well be the greatest gift I’ve ever received. This would probably blow the mind of my second-grade self (that’s the year I got an electric train), but seriously, this trip was a gift that to be surpassed would probably have to be along the lines of someone giving me their kidney.
For various reasons, I’d never really thought about going to Hawaii myself. It was a place that I knew about, but didn’t really hold out a great deal of hope for visiting personally. Now, all I can think about is going back.
I’m not going to wax poetic at length here about that trip (though I will have a few more posts about it, focusing on a couple of specific things), but if you’re curious, you can see a lot of what we saw via my Flickr albums. I’ve organized just about every picture I took in Hawaii into these albums. I haven’t gone through and captioned every photo, but I’ve done a lot of them.
Hawaii 2021: This album was going to be my “All the Hawaii” photos album, but then I realized that I needed to split them up more, so this one ended up incomplete. (I put all of the selfies and photos of The Wife and I in this album, though!)
Hawaii 2021, Food and Drink: Self-explanatory. I have never eaten so well on a trip as I did on this trip. I have also not imbibed so well as I did on this trip, which is quite a thing given that we live near one of the United States’s great wine regions. (Food will probably be a post of its own, but meantime, here are pics.)
At the Byodo-In Temple: I took a bunch of pictures in this one place, so it gets its own album.
Pearl Harbor: Another location-specific album. We did not get to go to the USS Arizona Memorial, due to damage to the docks (Oahu was hit by a big storm the week before we got there), but Pearl Harbor is still a deeply moving place to visit.
Candids and Streetscapes: Photos of people and places. I love people-watching, and Waikiki is a fantastic place to do so.
Landscapes, Seascapes, and all the rest: This is the biggest album, encapsulating just about all of my “Oh WOW LOOK AT THAT!!!” moments throughout the trip. Even my crappy photos looked good!
Only two days remain in our Hawaiian adventure. This morning we woke up for the first time to cloudy skies. Since gray skies tend to be the norm for Buffalo in winter–a season that I find beautiful in many ways, in ways that incorporate the gray skies, even though I have to admit that the gray gets to be too much at times–this almost feels like Hawaii is trying to prepare us for our return home.
Nice try, Paradise, but I’m not ready. Nine full days here will turn out to be many things, almost all of them wonderful, but they will not be ‘enough’.
To justify the Jimmy Buffet reference, here’s the cheeseburger I had the other night.
Thanks, Maui Brewing Company! To paraphrase Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, “Mmmm! This WAS a tasty burger!”
And here I am, writing.
It turns out that Hawaii is not a cure for RBF, sadly….
Both of these things happened in Paradise.
Some writers are insistent about doing their work in their preferred environments–their home offices or libraries–but I’ve always been able to write just about anywhere I can plunk down with my computer for a while. I actually like having a bit of hubbub around me, and when I write at home I don’t like it to be too quiet: I’ll almost always have music going, and nowadays there is the wonderful world of soundscape videos on YouTube where you can actually pick some ambient sound to play in the background while you do stuff.
Of course, for ambient writing noise you can’t really beat the cries of sea birds, the lapping of the waves, and the voices of happy people on Hawaiian holiday.
I didn’t bring my laptop on this vacation because I just didn’t want to be that encumbered, which means a forced two-week break from drafting Forgotten Stars V: Spacecapades (not the actual title). I draft the new novels in Scrivener, and the laptop is the only device I have that can run Scrivener (until they come up with an Android version, that is), so for now, that book is out. I suppose I could write new material for that book in Google Docs and import it after the fact, but the formatting would be all screwed up and I don’t have the book in Google Docs to begin with. Plus, it’s my experience that at the lengths of book I tend to write, Google Docs tends to bog down.
So, what am I working on? I’m making a pass through an older manuscript that I haven’t looked at in a while: the supernatural thriller about a haunted kayaking expedition, that I had once dubbed Deliverance, eh? (Deliverance being an obvious reference to a canoe trip gone bad, and the eh? because the story takes place in Canada.) As part of my “Release a book every year” plan for as long as I can manage to pull that level of production off, this one’s set to be my 2022 release.
This book is definitely on the short side, for me: it tips the scales at roughly 85,000 words. Even so I can tell that this length makes Google Docs a bit sluggish. But the good part is that I don’t need my laptop for this! Using Google Docs for shorter work is a big reason why, last time I was in the market for a new tablet, I bought one with a Bluetooth keyboard:
Obligatory “pie in the face” wallpaper!It is a challenge scaling one’s position to a smaller keyboard, and at times I miss the keypad, and I have to remind myself that mouse functionality isn’t there. As always, overalls are the best uniform for writing.
(Those are older pics, by the way.)
I’m enjoying using this tablet a great deal! It’s a Samsung Galaxy Tab A, which I bought about a year and a half ago. Samsung devices do have their quirks, but I like the ecosystem and the easy connectivity of devices, and I love the cameras on their phones, so a Samsung fan I remain. (In fact, my next laptop will likely be a Samsung too! This after what will likely have been fifteen years as a Dell user.) Typing with the Blluetooth keyboard is a breeze, and blogging-on-the-go is very easy. I do have the WordPress app installed, but I prefer to use the actual site in my browser; a while back WordPress updated to a new content-management system that uses something called “blocks”, and I find it generally confusing to use so I’ve got a plug-in installed on the main WordPress site that lets me use the old interface. I can use the app, and I do on occasion, but I prefer this way of doing things.
Oddly, when I was still on Byzantium’s Shores, I had to use the Blogger site in the browser too, as opposed to the Blogger app, for a completely different reason: for whatever rationale the engineers chose, the Blogger app will only render in portrait mode, which makes blogging on the app while using the keyboard (and therefore landscape orientation) nearly impossible. This is likely under the assumption that the Blogger app would be used more on phones than tablets, but even so! Bluetooth keyboards are not that uncommon a tool, and and design choice that makes use more difficult is a bad choice indeed. I believe there are workarounds–maybe third-party apps that force reorientation–but I don’t want or need more stuff cluttering up my gizmos just so I can do the work I want to do. Of course, it’s not even an issue anymore since I’ve left Blogger behind, but still!
I know that the tech gods really want to get to a point where full-sized laptops are a thing of the past, but I wonder if they’re not slowly giving up on that dream and are instead blurring the line more and more between old-school laptop and tablet, with touchscreens that fold all the way around and the like. I’ll probably get to experience that myself with my next laptop (which will likely come sometime next year), but for now I don’t mind having multiple devices for different tasks. This tablet suits me nicely for smaller needs, and also for travel. And who knows? Now that I’m being bitten by the travel bug….
And as always, one doesn’t even need a nifty electronic device to get some work done! I may not be directly drafting Forgotten Stars V while on this trip, but I am getting some plotting done the old-fashioned way:
Pen and paper will never die!
Oh, and the actual title of Deliverance, eh? is–tentatively–The Jaws of Cerberus. The more you know!
And now, I wrap this up because as I write this I have to catch a bus to make a boat ride. It’s a tough life, I tell you!
I’m not saying this is my ideal writing set-up, but it is, as the kids say, “In the conversation”.
“It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.” –Haruki Murakami
I wrote the other day about the somewhat overwhelming nature of the sea here in Hawaii. Over the days since, I have come to realize that the sky is every bit as overwhelming here.
And like the sea, the sky is astonishing here no matter what time of day. This city gleams with brilliant light, but as you stand on the street in front of our hotel at night, you see the brilliant light on one side…and the ink-black dome of the sky on the other. Occasionally in the dark will be broken by the flashing lights of an airplane or helicopter. The moon’s path does not bring it into view from our balcony–a shame that, as there is a full moon very soon–and I haven’t been able to make out many stars.
But the other morning I was up at 5am–sleep comes easier, but my body still thought it was mid-morning–and I went out on the balcony to read and to write and to think and listen to the waves and the birds in the banyan tree and the occasional cars. I looked eastward–southeast, actually–and spotted a couple of stars, and then a few more. And then I knew.
The Hunter.
Orion the Hunter was setting, and the bright star off to the left was Sirius, brightest star in our sky, at home in its own constellation, Canus Major.
Orion has always been my favorite constellation, for many reasons. It’s a big part of why I love the winter sky more than the summer one, and to see it for the first time this winter, while here on this journey, was an unexpected gift.
Orion the Hunter, over Honolulu and the South Pacific.
You’re looking good, Orion! Soon I’ll see you in your normal setting soon…but not too soon. I’m not quite done here.
As for the sky at other times, well…oh, this place.
“I want you to live forever, underneath a sky so blue….” (“Live Forever”, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors)Words fail me….
For a bigger resolution of that last one, go here. I’m slowly getting a lot of my photos from here organized on Flickr, but bear with me as content management isn’t exactly high on my priority list on this vacation!
I didn’t want to blog about this until we were at the very least on the plane (I felt like I was jinxing it by even pre-scheduling a Daily Dose of Christmas post obliquely referring to it!) but…we are in Hawaii.
Specifically, Oahu. More specifically, Waikiki.
Strange thing about Hawaii…it’s never been a place I’ve really even dreamed about visiting, because for many years it just didn’t even feel like a possibility. And even this trip owes everything to someone else’s good graces (Thanks, Mom!). But…well, it’s just a place, isn’t it? It’s a place where people live and work and do stuff. They just do it in the shadows of lushly green mountains and by the side of a wide blue sea.
Just a place.
But what a place!
I mean…come on now.
Waikiki by night
And then there’s the sea.
Have you ever wondered why the word sea is so much more packed with poetry and romance than the word ocean? Maybe it’s because the sea is a much more primal concept, a more basic one. I know that mariners think of the Great Lakes as seas in their own right. Oceans are specific things. But on this particular morning, I find myself remembering one of my favorite quotes (which I should probably track down at some point in its actual context):
The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea. (Isak Dinesen)
Well, like many others, I’ve had sweat and tears in damned good measure. Let’s give the sea a try, shall we?
For someone who loves water, who can’t fathom the idea of living in a place where water is a scarcity (Phoenix? Vegas? Never!), there’s still something about the sea that overwhelms my brain on a primal level. My whole life has been spent near water, but I think of streams in a wood, waterfalls, bubbling small pools, swimming holes, rivers, lakes, ponds, whitewater rapids. The sea, though, is something else. You come to the sea and you realize that eventually, on this world of ours, eventually all the water comes back to the sea.
The deep blue sea
Anyway, those are my somewhat jet-lagged and under-caffeinated thoughts on this, the first morning I’ve awoken to pink clouds over a darkened sea where people are already surfing. Now, we’re gonna try to find some coffee and get our rental car and see what a Hawaiian grocery store is like. As one does.
Further dispatches as events warrant!
(And the Daily Dose of Christmas is prescheduled for every day until the 25th, so we have that going for us, at least!)
