Spirit of Aloha | Features | November/December 2007

Destinations
By Lisa-Natalie Anjozian


Flipping and Flopping in Kealakekua Bay

The first place they feel good is in your mouth. All those repeating vowels and consonants and syllable stops. Napo­‘opo‘o Road; Kealakekua Bay. When you say them, you soften your breath, purse your lips, tap your tongue against your teeth, relax your cheeks. Once you’ve repeated the words a few times, a Hawaiian rhythm born of spoken sound enters you. It’s there, inside, where you take your breath and change it into vibrations that become words.

We practice the sounds as our car winds down Napo‘opo‘o Road, curving through country covered in coffee bushes, clinging to edges, embracing the space, dipping down Kona’s coast. Napo‘opo‘o—to sink, to go down. Ha­wai­ian words are an infectious poetry. Down the car goes, winding down and around as Napo‘opo‘o Road loops back on itself in tight curves and hairpin turns, spelling its own word for paradise in the cursive alphabet of its track.

And then—surprise—what we find does not jell with the description we were given at the store many miles ago and back up the cliffs. With rented snorkel equipment in our car, we face our destination: Capt. James Cook’s monument in Kea­la­kekua Bay, one of the best places to snorkel in all of Hawai‘i. But the white obelisk is a mile away, across the waves and wind, across ocean and current, accessible only by boat or by foot. Some­where we missed the unmarked trail we should have hiked that starts 2,000 feet above and drops to this height, three feet above sea level, in less than four miles.

My brother ponders a moment. Then he parks the car in an asphalt lot next to a dock. Napo‘opo‘o Wharf is the concrete remainder of vintage commerce. Today, it is a staging area for recreation. Pairs of paddlers (who have come prepared with boats) place their kayaks in the water.

While we consider our options, the repetition of our earlier incantation produces magic. Though no equipment concessions can be found in this area, a Hawaiian man beside a battered car parked on the wharf has several boats to rent.

The sky is cerulean; the water is warm; the boats are ready. The only element that produces a chill is what the water is doing. It is mid-December in Hawai‘i, and that means big surf. In furious sets, waves rush past the left side of the concrete wharf where paddlers were moments before. Each wave smacks the land, exploding more than three times taller than I am. A green sea turtle floating near the break is being tossed like a cork. My brother urges us to join him in a paddle.

I will go, I say.

The plastic boat, an open-ocean kayak, is missing a cap that closes an aperture on the bow. Sticking out of the hole is a piece of colored foam. The blue personal flotation device I am given to wear has a yin-yang symbol on the back. At this moment, I don’t have my usual interest in running through the interpretation of symbols as they appear in my life because I am watching the next team of kayakers struggling to put in and paddle away from the wharf.

The Hawaiian man has big brown arms, and I like that. They reassure me as he lowers a kayak to the water. Our red boat sits on the green water three feet below where we stand on the wharf. He tries to steady the boat with the toeline in one hand and a paddle used as a staff in the other. Even with his strength, he is struggling to keep the boat cozied up parallel to the dock.

It is my turn.

I sit on the concrete edge and stretch my legs until I can feel the boat with the ball of my foot. I lower myself onto it, keeping my torso centered over my legs to prevent tipping it. We begin digging into the water to drive ourselves into the open ocean and against the current until we clear the wharf, then bear right and cut across Kealakekua Bay, paddling through water that keeps pushing to­ward shore. Later, on the return trip, a pod of spinner dolphins makes travel look effortless.

Kealakekua means “pathway of the god.” If you were a Hawaiian god, you could hear two siblings—older sister, little brother—argue about coordinating strokes. You would see neither ceding and the boat shimmying like a fish through one mile of water, under multiple miles of perfect sky.

Kealakekua is the largest sheltered natural bay on the Big Island and a marine sanctuary. Around the remote cove, bodies float face down in the water, bottoms bobbing, flippered feet flapping, plastic breathing tubes performing. We maneuver the kayak and head for shore to the left of the monument. We drag the boat onto the rocks, slip on our flippers and don our snor­kels. As soon as we step away, a mongoose investigates. To the right of the monument, a sheer cliff rises, the burial ground of kings and the site of human sacrifices. To the left are the open wa­ters of the Pacific. Above, the quiet sky. Noise is absent from this place.

I keep looking up at the sky, up at the cliffs, out across the water, absorbing the beauty—and procrastinating. This is my first snorkel experience, but I am finally ready to go below the surface. I sink my face into the water. A flash of bright yellow darts past a couple of feet below me, a school of tangs so large in number, I can see their shimmer even from above the surface of the water when I come up for air. (I can’t vacate my fears of breath­ing through the snorkel tube.) What forces of evolution selected such brightly colored inhabitants? Yellow tang, kole tang, damselfish, angelfish, butterflyfish, goatfish, Moorish idol. They’re thick through­out the vast coral reef. There’s one! Another!

“Over here, quick!” my brother says, and I swim over to what he wants to share. A short distance from shore, the coral reef plunges downward, down, down, where the water is deep. “Check this out,” he says, and I hear the thrill in his voice that people experience as they mentor and guide.

On this singular day we have gone down, and then down below; we have traveled the pathway of the god. Road and cove and cliff and sky—Napo‘opo‘o and Kealakekua illuminate this: A pattern in the track of ordinary days seems to loop back on itself, veiling a splendid mystery in its depths that glistens like the water and flashes by like the skein of yellow tangs.

LISA-NATALIE ANJOZIAN is a frequent contributor to public outreach ef­forts of organizations such as the U.S. Forest Serv­ice, the U.S. Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey.

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