The view from the highway overlooking our part of the farm co-op, on a day when the wind is blowing at a sprinter's pace and the sun is out, the clouds are spread like loose hunks of cotton batting pulled thin, and the overgrown grass that frames the road below us whips and thrashes in a riot of snapping leaves, while cows feed among ironwoods and macadamia trees in grazed pastures bordering fields of more writhing, untended guinea grass, together forming a wide ribbon of green ending where the treeline marks the edge of the land, falling away as cliffs into a titanic blue Pacific that runs on toward a horizon made indistinct by imperceptible distance—this is one of the best things I've seen.
It is a simple and unadorned view, with very little about it that would mark it as distinctly Hawaiian except for the monstrous expanse of the ocean, a vast blue plain stretching off into a hazy mist of virtual infinity, meeting with the sky to create a wall closing off an entire quadrant of the Earth. Barges and cruise ships are dwarfed like caterpillars crawling across the floor of an empty ballroom, waves rippling along its surface appear as small as the wrinkles in a shirt. There is something unsettling in the realization that this immensity surrounds you on all sides, that the land mass on which you stand is two-thousand miles from the nearest continent. It would make Hannah and I feel profoundly isolated if the island of Hawai'i weren't so large.
For me, to look at the ocean often leads to thoughts of what lives out there, the hidden menagerie that thrives beneath the waves just off shore. I've always had a fascination with, and fear of, aquatic creatures, particularly the very big ones. I know there are sharks out there, a few different kinds if I'm not mistaken, hunting fish among the reefs and further out where the water opens into an inky abyss. There might even be great whites—there's no real reason for there not to be—ghostly and huge in the deep water, their powerful bodies pushing along perhaps not even that far away, just a mile or so, if even that, and visible if not for the screen of the ocean's surface, as close to them as I've ever been in my life, even as I stand there thinking and wondering about them. Manta rays are out there as well, from what I understand, big as hang gliders, flying in the Pacific brine like liquid condors. And there are whales...
Every night they make noise, and they've been doing it for over a month now at least, slapping their tails on the water so steadily and rhythmically you'd think a person was smacking a two-by-four against a tree stump, leaping and impacting with a sound like a distant shotgun blast, chuffing so loudly through their blowholes I swear sometimes they crawl up on dry land like sea lions and pass by twenty feet from the shack. I heard one just now, as I'm writing this.
We've seen them, at last, after weeks of being teased by the sound of them, and not in the way portrayed in National Geographic: out on the water in a motor-driven raft, with a guide drawing on years of study and an intimate knowledge of the life-rhythms of great cetaceans, coming so close you could reach out and pat one on its barnacled head. No, we were putting a roof on our outhouse and saw first one, then two misty spouts firing out of the waves a couple of miles from shore. If the wind had been blowing we might not have seen them at all—the whitecaps would have camouflaged any sign. With the tradewinds still, their movements stood out in sharp relief against the water. One jumped, I think, its body barely visible at that distance, just a vague black shape and the foamy white aftershock of its splash, and I'm sure I saw a tail wave as it arched down into the blue. More spouts came as the pod moved along the general line of the shore, the black humps of their backs bobbing up and then down, going off to the left of where we stood watching, in the direction of Honoka'a. We didn't start work again until they were gone.
They're humpback whales, the kind I've only seen on TV, and I've now been able to see them with my own eyes, albeit from a couple of miles away. All it took was a moment outside to work on the bathroom. We'll go on seeing them from time to time. The other day, as we were coming down the hill with jugs of water, a massive black tail rose out of the ocean and slid back in again, close enough that we could make out the cleft of the fins. Our attention is always drawn back to the ocean; it's as unavoidable as the sky, and from our perspective on the island, nearly as big.
I've heard people talk about natural vistas that can make a person feel microscopic, insignificant, that bring on humbling notions of the spiritual or the cosmic because of their grandeur. Some have to hike along the spine of a sprawling mountain range or reach the top of Mt. Everest for that feeling to occur. It seems almost unfair that merely by standing on the shoulder of a highway, gazing out over cow pastures and an unmarked road, we see something that has almost the same impact on the senses.
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