Marmalade Daydreams

It was a wonderful couple of weeks of winter, and I felt blessed with snowfalls over Christmas and New Year's, but I'm glad to be back on Oahu where "chilly weather" means that you might goosebumps if you're in a T-shirt & shorts. Yesterday I went up to the North Shore with some friends to see one of the epic winter swells firsthand, and we were each moved to silence by the enormity of it all. We sat speechless in Waimea Bay watching this rare break create sets with thirty-foot faces dwarfing surfers until they appeared as insects, disappearing behind the set's second wave before dropping into these steep marine valleys of deepest blue, chased by the collapsing curl. We ate our lunch by Sharks Cove as crystal foam-capped mountains of surf impacted with the rock wall and shot skyward in a wall of geysers spraying fifty feet high before, seized by gravity, it fell crashing into its source like the cyclic construction and demolition of entire city blocks. Finally, we gawked at the Pipeline, arguably the world's most famous break and one of its deadliest, where a few hardy souls surfed within its enormous tubes, disappearing for a few dramatic sections before shooting out the barrel to the cheers of the sizable crowd. We ate freshly-cut pineapple on the scenic way home back, past the mysterious mountains valleys that serve as the settings for King Kong and "Lost", up above beautiful Kaneohe Bay, and through the tunnel blasted through the heart of the Ko'olau Range back to "town" -- the place I am lucky enough to call home for the next eighteen months.

Stories of my North American trip abound (just read a letter to the editor yesterday asking them to stop using the term "mainland" as it, by opposition, denigrates Hawai'i as "peripheral") and hopefully before the new semester begins on Monday I'll have an opportunity to write up a few of the more amusing and picturesque tales. Until then...