Tag Archives: Hawaii

USS Arizona 1979

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It won’t be too many years before the living memory of the attack on Pearl Harbor is as gone as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand or the shelling of Fort Sumter or the Shot Heard Round the World. Does it matter whether such events make it into a collective awareness beyond actual memory? I think it does.

PearlHarbor79According to the Park Service, about 2 million people visit each year, so it’s unlikely that the awareness will fade too soon. This image dates to July 1979, which I took on the approach to the memorial. That was almost closer in time to the attack than to the present (not quite: 38 years vs. 36 years), which itself is a sobering thought.

Inside are a list of the Arizona’s dead. The inscription also says: To the Memory of the Gallant Men Here Entombed and their shipmates who gave their lives in action on 7 December 1941, on the U.S.S. Arizona.

Honolulu 1979

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Something I spotted at one of the large strip centers near us: a new barber shop, Mad Men Barbershop. I’m not quite sure what they’re suggesting. Come here to look like Don Draper? He was the only male character whose hairstyle didn’t change much during the internal chronology of the show from 1960 to 1970. If short and oily for men is coming back, I want no part of oily. I’m glad that died off in the 1960s and has stayed dead. Grease is not the word.

Slides are an inconvenient medium in our time. I wonder how many billions of slide images are languishing in boxes, never to be seen. Ah, well. I’m doing my little part to bring a few of those to a wider audience here (four or five readers, at least).

Thirty-six years ago this month I visited five of the Hawaiian islands. I had a 35mm camera with me, one that belonged to my brother Jay. I took good care of it and came home with four boxes of images. Many are of lovely, picturesque Hawaii. Green hills, waterfalls, flowers, ocean vistas, volcanoes, lava tubes, black sand beaches, that kind of thing.

But not the following pics. They are urban Hawaii. Views of Honolulu in 1979, that is.
The first one is arguably picturesque. It’s Diamond Head, after all. But hotels and other development seem to be creeping up on it. Not that I object to development of that kind per se. I took this shot from a hotel room balcony. One of the higher floors of the Sheraton Waikiki.
HonoluluDiamondHeadFun fact about that hotel, developed in the early ’70s, I think: it had no 13th floor. Or none with that number. If they’d known how inundated the islands would soon be with Japanese tourists — and there must have been a fair number even 40 years ago — they probably would have not used the number 4 in their floors.

Speaking of hotels, this one only looks a little like the Ilikai, famed in one of the best TV intros ever. I’m not sure what property it is, and while there’s probably an app to find out, never mind. The image comes complete with ugly breakwater in the foreground.
Honolulu79.2Another balcony view, this time of Waikiki Beach. Two young lovers strolling the sands of Waikiki couldn’t be lost in each other’s charms for long without stepping on another beachgoer.
Honolulu79Finally, Honolulu at night.
HonoluluatnightA little fuzzy, but representative of the way the lights — which is to say, development — attached itself to the foothills near Honolulu, looking for every square foot. Even then, Honolulu was the most expensive real estate market in the country.

Ah, Haleakalā

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In his TEDx Talk (see yesterday), Ed also mentioned a transformative experience – maybe transcendent experience — he had at Haleakalā, the enormous volcano on Maui. Brave fellow that Ed, walking into a volcano against medical advice.

Even against the advice of the National Park Service, which says re Haleakalā National Park: “The Summit and Kīpahulu Districts are remote. An ambulance can take up to 45 minutes to arrive at either district from the nearest town. People with respiratory or other medical conditions should also be aware that the summit of Haleakalā is at 10,000 ft.”

Can’t say that my experience at Haleakalā was transformative, except that incremental transformation one gets living day to day, with a handful of those days including things marvelous to behold. The vista down into the cone was certainly that, like no place I’d seen before.

Haleakala79-1Mars. I thought of Mars, with its rocks and rusty terrain. When I gazed down into Haleakalā in 1979, and took a few of my own pictures, the pictures taken by Viking were still pretty fresh. But I knew it was Earth; a rare part of Earth, accessible to the likes of me only because of the twists and turns of history and personal circumstance.

That day I made the acquaintance of the silversword, Argyroxiphium sandwicense macrocephalum, which grows nowhere else, though another subspecies grows on Mouna Kea.

Haleakala79-2Say that to yourself: The Silverswords of Haleakalā. Fun just to say. Sounds like one of Edgar Rice Burroughs lesser-known works.

Silversword79Plenty of fully grown men and women who didn’t exist when I took in the vista of Haleakalā and its silverswords are now loose in the world, so long ago was it. But I get some satisfaction from the almost certain knowledge that the vista hasn’t changed at all since then.

Ed in Maui

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This is the video of a TEDx talk in Maui late last year, featuring my old friend Ed, whom I’ve known since the early ’90s. We both happened to be in the same part of Japan at the same time working for the same company.

On the whole, he’s right. The bucket list is an inane concept. Though we probably differ a bit in that I sometimes visit famed sights in large part because of their fame. What, I wonder, is all the fuss about?

More often than not, the place turns out to be famed for good reasons, and even if it’s something everyone everywhere knows about, you can still take something novel away from the experience. Take the Eiffel Tower, for instance. Can’t very well go to Paris for the first time and not visit that. As we sat directly underneath it, I thought, wow, this is a hell of a metal sculpture.

And there are places I’d visit in preference to others. That seems only reasonable. Iceland, say, rather than Bayonne, NJ. But if I never make it to Iceland? So it goes. Life is short, the world is large. Can’t go everywhere.

Rainbow Over Diamond Head

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A headline that Google News pulled up for me this morning: “Comic-Con Fans Get World of Warcraft Teaser Trailer. You Don’t.” The implication is that that’s some kind of bad thing, but I don’t see it.

Heat much of last week, then rain in the form of more than one short nighttime thunderstorms rolling through to cool things off. By the next day, most everything had dried off. The pattern: rinse, dry, repeat.

This photo has been captioned many times, but one recent caption is, “Only one human being alive on July 21, 1969 is not in this picture.” Never thought of it that way. Makes me want to read Michael Collins’ memoir, Carrying the Fire.

I have to be content with taking earthbound photographs, and mostly I am. I’ve always liked this one, taken on Oahu in July 1979. The transition from photographic negative to slide to print to digital scan to web page doesn’t really do it justice, but the image retains a bit of the original flavor. I’ve got three boxes of slides made in Hawaii that year and two more made in East Asia in the early ’90s, which are a little hard to appreciate in that format. One of these days, I might convert them directly to digital, but buying the equipment and taking the time are a fairly low priority among all the other demands on my money and time.

For some reason, I didn’t visit Diamond Head State Monument and climb to the rim in 1979. I can’t remember what went into that decision. I hear the view is worth the climb.