Marmalade Daydreams

Well, I haven't moved in yet (depends when they're finished with a few last minute painting and cleaning details), but I just signed a lease on 1691A Kamamalu Ave, and to celebrate, I opened my first bottle of Paradise Pale Ale, the standard recipe packaged with the equipment kit, and it's fairly tasty. In retrospect, I should have picked up some more hops to dry-hop in the fermenter...

Anyway, I still haven't finished writing up all of my Kaua'i adventures, and a lot of other stuff has been going on with getting ready for school and all. I'll catch y'all up later on what's going down. For now, I'm psyched to be able to pick up some furniture and have a roof to throw it under, and though I love sleeping on Jesse & Kim's porch, it's nice to know that Monday morning, my first day as a full-time student since 2000, I'll wake up in my own house!

It's a grand thing to spend a week without knowing the time aside from the position of the sun, to live so that the phase of the moon has more reality than the day of the week. The last thing I did on the clock was to catch a plane at 8 AM on the morning of July 31. While waiting to board, I noticed some commotion by the gate, fellow turistas excitedly snapping photos through the glass. A full rainbow had manifested over the runway, one foot in the Waianae Mountains, the other in the harbor. I could only take this as an omen for a good trip.

I had barely closed my eyes on the puddle-jump of a flight before we began our descent -- literally, I don't think the fasten seatbelt sign had ever been turned off. As we pulled around the coastal mountains in which is nestled little Lihue, the county seat, I wondered what I was going to do when I got off the plane. I had been trying to find a campsite up in or around Waimea Canyon, Kauai's geologic centerpiece, the ever-growing product of millions of years of weathering and erosion's diligent partnership, weathering and erosion being an inimitable team of Erisian forces that shape our world in a time-frame that so dwarfs our teeny life cycles, we live under the illusion that the planet is static.

But back to the human time-frame of day-to-day, the lady in the seat next to me told me that it was an easy walk into town from the airport, so I strapped up my pack, walked out of baggage claim, and up the road to the State building, an architectural monstrosity of Euclidean geometry at the foot of lovely undulating mountainous ridges in jungle green. Leave it to civil government to construct the most hideous buildings imaginable. Inside, the lady at the Parks Department desk was unable to help me, as the campgrounds in the State Parks had all been reserved months in advance, and she referred me to the Fish & Wildlife Department, which maintained campgrounds used by hunters in the Canyon. This lady sold me a fantastic topographic map of the whole island and gave me a permit to camp in the lower Canyon, but told me that she had no idea why anyone would want to camp down there, as there's "nothing there".

This statement mystified me, and I walked out of the building a bit muddled, until I got two messages on my voicemail -- the one from a buddy telling me that he'd become a father the day before (congratulations Lucas!), the other from a lady at the YWCA telling me that they had vacancies at their campgrounds at the State Park. So it all works out... I loaded up on dry goods at the supermarket in town, and a few thumbed rides later, I was cruising up Waimea Canyon Road with a middle-aged ex-hippie couple from Colorado, we were stopping at all of the vista points, and what vistas they were! The misty canyon's red rocks and waterfalls certainly stood up to Mark Twain's moniker, "The Grand Canyon of the Pacific", though this canyon is full of feral chickens and pigs, wild guavas and blackberry brambles, all non-indigenous species threatening the highly endemic flora of the area. I set up my tent at the idyllic YWCA campground, Camp Sloggett in Koke'e State Park (what a pair of names!), and wandered up the road, hitting a few small trails in the afternoon heat, until I came to the end of the road, and could look down into one of the only valleys in the state that are only accessible by foot (or helicopter):



Okay, I've been sitting in front of the computer all day. I need to get out and take a walk. I'll write more later. XOXOXOXO, me.