Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Under the Hula Moon | January/February 2006

Under the Hula Moon
By: JOCELYN FUJII

Winter Without Overcoats

Photo: Brett Uprichard

The most dejected traveler I’ve ever seen was a businessman preparing to leave the Big Island for Chicago in the dead of winter. On a 75-degree day, waiting for his flight at Kona International Airport at Keāhole, he wore a dress shirt and tie and toted a dark wool overcoat that looked out of place in the throng of aloha shirts and shorts. The open-air terminal and lava fields were saturated with the intense gold light of sunset, and the complex layers of cirrus clouds were lit like a Jules Tavernier painting. In an odd quiet moment between takeoffs and landings, I heard the chirp of the ‘ulili, the wandering tattler, carried over the lava fields by a soft and perfect breeze.

“I’m heading home to a blizzard,” Mr. Chicago Businessman lamented to the person standing next to him. His face, wearing the sun blush of a few days on a Kohala Coast beach, drooped. “Wanna trade places with me?”

I felt deep sympathy for the man. That scene has played over and over in my mind because of its dramatic juxtaposition of the seasonal and the seasonless. While many nonresidents think of Hawai‘i as a long stretch of summer, each season has its own identity and markers. The wandering tattler—like so many other shorebirds and the visitor from Chicago—is a winter migrant. The sunset was a seasonal signature, prolonged, fiery and flamboyant as only high-altitude winter clouds can be. And the overcoat poised against the lava field was just as powerful a contrast as snow melting on a volcano.

Winter in Hawai‘i is a time to welcome humpback whales and high surf at Waimea Bay. From golden plovers to shorebirds, it’s also the consummate time for bird-watching. Albatrosses are nesting in places like Kahuku and Ka‘ena Point on O‘ahu and Kīlauea Lighthouse on Kaua‘i before the adults leave in late spring, followed by their chicks in early summer. At the most secluded of our wetlands, the bristle-thighed curlew, the kioea, a large and rare transient, arrives from the Alaskan tundra for winter in Hawai‘i. One year, in a rare sighting in West Hawai‘i, I saw a curlew lunge for a crab on the reef, capture it with its long, curved beak and dash it against the rocks for the kill. It then feasted, oceanfront, on its well-earned lunch of fresh crab.

Trees, flowers and fruit are the most visible of our seasonal identifiers. You can park under a monkeypod tree in the winter without having your car plastered with sticky flowers. Shower trees, the luminaries of the summer landscape, have long lost their brilliantly hued blossoms and are regenerating, their winter energies focused on fertile, dangling seed pods promising next summer’s blooms. Shrubs of pīkake, the delicate jasmine that perfumes the lei world for three-quarters of the year, are blossomless now, their flowers missed and eagerly anticipated as one of the rites of spring. Pakalana, the Chinese violet, and gardenia—my favorite spring thing—are on hiatus, too, coveted in their absence. Take a walk past the Chinatown lei stands and revel in the scents of ginger, tuberose, maile and puakenikeni, because they’re the only fragrance-providers of the season.

Although local mangoes are a summer crop, mango-watching is a year-round ritual for seasoned lovers of this queenly fruit. We pray to the mango gods all year round: for dry weather and mild winds in late winter, so that the mango blossoms survive and the trees erupt in a torrent of fecundity—a bumper crop of fruit—when the season arrives in early summer.

Occasionally, we even have snow. Mauna Kea wears a white cap when it’s very cold, and in January 2002 it snowed so much atop Maui’s Haleakalā that someone built a snowman in the crater. It was a small touch in what wasn’t exactly a blizzard, but it’s safe to say it would have surprised the Chicago businessman and made him feel at home.                                                                                                    

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