June 2018

I started this post 3 times, first focusing on the weeds, then focusing on the natives plants of Hawaii, the former pretty easy to see, actually hard to avoid, and the latter requiring a certain amount of effort to find. But with recent developments on the Big Island and the volcanic activity in the eastern rift zone of Kilauea Volcano I shifted gears.
This past April we went back to Kapoho in that zone, and it’s lovely tide pools to celebrate my 60th birthday. Little did we know that a few months later the whole place would be erased by lava.
This was my third trip to the southeastern corner of the Island of Hawaii and I have developed a certain attachment to the place. We liked staying at Kapoho for its rural setting and the proximity to the hiking opportunities of Volcanoes National Park and the lush Ola’a Forest Preserve, as well as the lovely tide pools.

The little ocean front community of Kapoho became our home, of sorts; we formed a quick attachment and fostered dreams of maybe moving there one day. The dreams died this past week as Kapoho was taken by the volcano. It seems almost silly to talk of grieving for a place only visited twice. And the grief I am feeling is unspecific.

While I was there I read “Ghosts of the Tsunami” By Richard Lloyd Parry, about the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan. One day I wrote down this quote from the book in my note book: “ It is easy to imagine grief as ennobling, purifying emotion—uncluttering the mind of what is petty and transient, and illuminating the essential. In reality, of course, grief doesn’t resolve anything anymore than a blow to the head or a devastating illness. It compounds stress, and complication. It multiplies anxiety and tension. It opens fissures into cracks, cracks into gapping chasms.
Each day with tsunamis haunting my mind I looked out to the ocean wondering when it would come and wash this all away. I should have been looking over my shoulder; the wave that was coming was pure hot lava.

I had read Frances K. Kakugawa’s “KAPOHO: Memoir of a Modern Pompeii”, the story of her growing up a Japanese-American in the sugar plantation town of Kapoho back in the 40s and 50s, before it was destroyed by lava in 1960. It was hard to imagine such devastation happening again. The “new” Kapoho was a quiet rural community of residents and vacationers. It was surrounded by small orchid and papaya farms; we would stop at roadside stands to buy fresh cheap papayas and avocados.
Each evening I would walk around the community enjoying the gardens and swatting mosquitoes. I even met a few of the locals and talked to them about their experience of living there. I can’t imagine what they are going through now, absolutely helpless against the slow advance of the lava, and absolutely homeless now that the lava has passed through. My grief is partly for them, partly from the dream I had of finding home there too. And partly for the beauty that was that place on the most eastern tip of the Hawaiian Islands.
As a way of working off some grief I have decided to change the focus of this post to the vanished gardens and plants of Kapoho.
The original village of Kapoho was destroyed by a lava flow in 1960. The new developments were built directly on those lava flows. The gardens of the community, grown lush over the years, disguised this lands provenance. But just beyond this gardened oasis there were scrublands and still raw lava fields. I wandered these areas, too, looking for native plants.
I have been trying to under stand the flora of Hawaii for a few decades now. It would probably be going a lot faster if I went more often. My trips there are widely spaced, but I do spend a good deal of time in between visits reading and webbing, trying to get a deeper sense of what I see.
The flora of Hawaii is a mess. According to the 1990 “Manual of Flowering Plants of Hawaii” there are 1817 species of plants on the Hawaiian Islands. 956 or 53% are native, which means 47%, or nearly half the flora, is weeds. On my first visit all I saw was Hawaiian plants, but in my subsequent visits I became more interested in the native plants of the islands.
The archipelago has seen numerous colonizing events since it emerged from ocean floor so long ago. Winds, birds and waves brought the first plants to the island. Polynesians, arriving between 300-500 A.D., brought the next wave: bananas, sugar cane and taro, along with pigs, rats and chickens. In 1778 the first Europeans arrived, over time these colonizers brought plants from the tropical Americas and Africa, creating the current chaotic flora of the islands. Some plants that have arrived since this last colonization have had devastating impacts on the native flora, as well as the European goats and sheep.
I will not try to tweeze apart this flora in this post, though I spent a good deal of time seeking out native plants, and trying to understand the provenance of the others. I want to create just a little picture memoir of a place that is gone

The following series of pictures taken in April are of plants and places which are now buried under meters of lava.

The gardens of Kapoho, poised between the rough coast and the scrublands and farms on the old lava fields, were lush and beautiful, a testament to hard-working gardeners who moved on to these barren soils years ago, and brought life to them.

I had admired this white hibiscus on my first trip there, and the wild garden that it grew in. This time I got to meet the gardener. Mars had been gardening in Kapoho since the late 70s. She had designed and planted many of the gardens in the community.

She had planted several of the Bismarck palms (Bismarckia nobilis) in the area. From the aerial news reports of the lava flows we could see them easily, there silver canopies stood out among the green. I remember how proud she was, I wonder now how she feels now…
Just recently I was talking to a friend about what might happen to the trees I planted. I will never see them get old; they may well succumb to the chainsaw of the next owner of my property before they get old. It made me a bit sad. I wonder how Mars might feel now knowing all she had planted was gone a in a few days. We had planned to meet again so I could see her whole garden, a jungle of curiosities I only saw from the road. We never connected, or shared contact information.
(if you see this post Mars please let me know you are okay)

Another local I talked to had turned the rocky lava soils of his lot into a food oasis.
Under his bananas (Musa x paradisiaca)was a ground cover of sweet potatoes and kabocha squash.

Another resident grew papayas, my favorite fruit.

And pineapples, my other favorite fruit, out of practically pure rock.

Coconuts are weeds, sprouting up everywhere. Nearly every tropical place I have visited boasts of coconuts as theirs. There origin, thought to be somewhere in the Old World tropics, is long lost behind this plants peregrinations both with humans and on the open waves

Coconuts were brought to the islands by the Polynesians over a millennia ago, though they were less important than kukui, or candlenut, (Aleurties moluccana)which they also brought to the island
This one grew in pure lava outside our beach house, flowering and fruiting all at once.

Guava (Psidium guajava) and

Noni (Morinda citrifolia)

and the insidiously invasive strawberry guava (Psidium littorale var. cattleianum), all brought to the islands for fruit production, made up a large portion of the scrublands surrounding Kapoho.

Still I found many natives, like Ākia (Wikstoemia phillyreifolia) an endemic to the Island of Hawaii, growing there, too.

And the lovely endemic ōhi’a lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha), one of the first colonizers of lava flows and the most widespread tree of the archipelago, can be seen on all of the main Hawaiian Islands from sea level to about 8,200 feet.

There were also some charming weeds among the scrublands, like the Philippine ground orchid (Spathiglottis plicata), brought to Hawaii in the 1920s as a garden ornamental and now widespread, but hardly invasive.

And field paint-brush (Castilleja arvensis) native from southern California into Central America.

What I was reminded of as I looked through my pictures was that Kapoho and its surroundings were all just bare lava flows with a tenuous thin mantle of green. And that plants are tough. This unidentified grass not only grew out of lava rock but also was inundated with salt water twice a day. And it made little pockets of soil for other plants to get started.

Like naupaka kahakai (Scaevola taccada) growing on lava outcrops in the Kapoho tide pools.

Naupaka’s lovely half-flower.

A screwpine (Pandanus tectorius) seed will lodge into holes in the cooled lava one day, like they had time and time again on these, and many other pacific islands.

A new colonization will begin, help rebuild the soils and flora, yet again.

Ohi’a lehua due to its red flowers like spewing lava is sacred to Pele, goddess for fire and volcanoes. It is not surprising that ōhi’a are one of the first plants after mosses and ferns to colonize open, cooled lava fields. This image was taken on the flanks of Mauna Loa,I imagine this plant is still there.
Ohi’a flowers were and are still used to relieve the pain of childbirth. In a way the lava flows we’ve been watching each night on TV are a birth, new land is being born. Just like the shelf of lava that our vacation rental stood on was new land some 60 years ago.
It seems strange to greet birth with grief, even this unspecified strange grief for a place not home yet not foreign. It seems glib to offer hope to those who have lost both home and income. And those who wait to hear daily where the lava will hit next. I can’t imagine their losses as I sit in my comfortable home and listen to birds sing through the open window. I hope though for those who have lost, that space for hope will come to them.
I know one day the plants will return to the burned and buried landscape of Kapoho, Leilani Estates and all the other areas of the eastern riff zone of Kilauea, as if nothing had happened. And this little hope born of my grief imagines me walking on these new lava flows, cooled and verdant once again, enjoying the messy Hawaiian flora.