Yin-Yang Revisited

WAILEA, Maui, Jan 5 - The ocean looked dark and angry this morning under gloomy, overcast skies.  So did the northern part of the island...

...where the dormant volcano Puu Kukui dominates the skyline.  But where I stood when I took this picture...

... the sun shone and the sky was mostly blue, as you can see.  The scenery brought back memories of my New Year's Day walk a year ago on a Kihei beach when I realized that "the whole island of Maui is actually bipolar" (see my essay "Between Two Volcanoes," Jan 2006).  This realization, in turn, gave birth to my yin-yang (centered) philosophy and this personal web site, too.  Here's an excerpt...

On the island’s east side, lies the dry and cold “house of the sun.”  That’s what the 11,000-foot Haleakala means in Hawaiian.  On the west side, is the warm and wet Puu Fukui, a 5,800-foot extinct volcano.  The “house of the rain” would be an apt name for it.  The surrounding area gets about 300 inches of rainfall per year.

Neither place is particularly welcoming or appealing.  Yet the valley the middle, where I was walking between the two craters, is brimming with life, beauty and joy.  It is one of the most fertile areas I have ever seen.  This is where the birds chirp, sugar cane is grows, and gentle northerly breezes cool the air off.  The lush green valley that lies between the two volcanoes seems like an offspring of Haleakala, the “father,” and Puu Kukui, the “mother.” 

I wondered if the natives ever contemplated that… “Two mutually interdependent and constantly interacting polar energies sustain all living organisms,” is how the ancient Chinese saw it.  I know Dan Brown did in his “DaVinci Code.”  Except that he talked of the “chalice” and the “blade” as female and male symbols.  Naturally, my mind also wondered off to “When Genders Collide…”-piece that carried a similar message.  I had just finished it a few hours earlier. 

It seemed as if bipolarity was omnipresent here on Maui.  I wondered what sort of a message God was trying to give me.  Maybe it was that it is good to be in the middle; feeling centered, balanced?  That’s where things are calm, as they are in the eye of a storm, or at the fulcrum point of a swing set.  

But this morning (Jan 5, 2007), I was certainly "on the sunny side of the street.

Here's the view of Haleakala (the "house of the sun"), as seen from the Elua Condos entrance gate (with the Wailea golf course between us).  It was the first time in three days that the volcano's top was visible - in stark contrast to its cloudy and stormy looking northern brethren, Puu Kukui.

I used the chance to talk to the head gardener, a native Hawaiian.  "Does the grass on the golf course stay green year-round?" I asked him.

He seemed surprised by the question, like someone who never thinks about why the wind blows or the rain falls.  "Yes, it does," he finally replied.  "It's just a little greener in the summertime."

"I am from Arizona," I said.  "And where I come from, they have to reseed the grass every October so the golf courses would stay green through the winter."

"Really?" he said, sounding amazed.  "The whole golf course?"

"And many private lawns, too," I added.  "This is the first time I've heard of a grass that stays green all year."

We chatted some more about different lifestyles between Arizona and Hawaii.  And then I moved on...

Moonwalk

Having explored on foot the immediate neighborhood around the Elua Condos in the last two days, today I decided to drive as far south on the island as the road reaches.  Which is not far... maybe seven miles or so.  Little did I know, however, what I was in for... a moonwalk! (after yesterday's sunrise-moonset experience).

The "money" trail pretty well ended after that Fairmont Kea Lani resort.  Yes, there were some nice homes in Makena, but nothing like the Wailea Point.  After about three miles, there was nothing but the bush, a tropical jungle on both sides of the road that a roadside sign described as the Makena State Park.

To my great surprise, this is where I also saw what looked like a regular forest of, what we call back home, a cow tongue cacti.  

Some of these specimen were taller than nearby trees, probably over 20 feet in height.  Now, we don't have them that size in Arizona.  Too arid; not enough water in the desert, I suppose.  But I was surprised to find them at all here in the tropics.  It was the only place in Hawaii that I have ever seen them in a natural setting.  And then the penny dropped... this is near the "house of the sun" (Haleakala), the dry volcano on whose foothills these enormous cacti grew.

The road soon became a single lane marked with the "No Sight Distance" road signs.  Must be some native version of English, I thought, as I never figured out what the signs really meant.  "No visibility," maybe?

Occasionally, the road would descend right down to the shoreline, such as at this point, from where I took this picture of the gloomy north, with outlines of the three Hawaiian islands (marked) in the distance.  This is also where one can find many snorkellers exploring the colorful coral shorelines of southern Makena.  No need to rent expensive boats for day excursions to Molokini or Lanai (see "A Whale of a Trip," Dec 2005).

Far off the Wailea "money trail" by now, one can also find here such old architectural gems as this wooden plantation-style Hawaiian estate.  Horses roamed freely in the field around it.  No fences.  No security gates.  Just the ocean below and the volcano above to guard them.  Lovely.

This was another pretty home in the area, though this one was obviously of a more recent vintage.  Still, it was built in a similar style.

teOccasionally, stone walls were covered with hibiscus and other colorful bushes, the way old walls that line the English countryside roads are covered with ivy.

And then, just like that... bam!  The lush scenery came to an abrupt end.  In an instant, I left the Earth and landed on the Moon.  

At least that's what it felt like looking at this extra-terrestrial scenery...

...created by the flow of lava when Haleakala got angry the last time.  And when was that?  The last eruption of Haleakala occurred in the late 1700s, possibly as late as 1790, on the lower southwest rift zone. The vents for these flows are just upslope of La Perouse Bay - which lay behind my back when I took this picture.  So not that long ago, really.  Two centuries is like a split of a second in geological sense.

But two centuries+ is a long time in man's and natural life.  Which is why it was absolutely amazing to see such a clear delineation between the river of lava and the rest of the landscape.  The yellow lines I drew above merely accentuated the clear demarcation lines that nature has created between the "Earth" and the "Moon."  That's how toxic lava must be.  Even after more than 200 years, there are still scant signs of life on it.

Climbing up to the top of one of these enormous "Moon" boulders, I was able to snap this pictures of the ocean (La Perouse Bay) and the Kahulawe island in the distance. 

Speaking of La Perouse, this Frenchman was the first western man to set foot on the Hawaiian islands, a road sign at the end of the "mooscape" informs us.  That was on May 30, 1786, just a few years before the last Haleakala eruption. Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de la Perouse, was born on Aug 23, 1741 near Albi, France.  He was a great admirer of Captain James Cooke, a British explorer who first discovered the Sydney Harbor in 1770, as he charted the coastline of eastern Australia, which he named New South Wales.

On my way back from the "Moon," I took one more shot of the stormy skies to the north from the sunny shores of southern Makena.  The Yin and the Yang of Maui.

END of Day 3 - CLICK HERE to go to Day 4

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