Tag Archives: Kohala

Better Days: Abandoned car

Better Days-Abandoned car on coast

Better Days-Abandoned carOne of the Big Island’s scenic attractions is its sprinkling of abandoned vehicles. One doesn’t have to drive too far to spot a car being swallowed by weeds or a wreck languishing just off the highway. Usually the person dumping the vehicle has stripped it of all the identifying information or never registered it and so can’t be traced.

I did a double take when I saw this car on one of my regular walks. Was this something new or something I’d simply failed to register for days/weeks/months? The latter is entirely possible, but I think this was a recent arrival that someone was not content to just abandon, but also felt it necessary to push it into the ocean. Perhaps it was stolen, perhaps used in a crime. Either way, it didn’t make it to its planned watery grave, at least not yet. Next winter’s storms might yet snatch it away. I doubt it will be retrieved before then.

King Kamehameha statues

King Kamehameha statue KapaauKing Kamehameha statue Honolulu

These two photos are of statues of King Kamehameha I, the king who first united the Hawaiian Islands under one leader. On top, draped in leis from last Monday’s Kamehameha Day celebrations, is the statue at Kapaau, here on the Big Island. Below is the statue in Honolulu. It sits in front of the Aliʻiōlani Hale, which housed the government of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and the Republic of Hawaiʻi, and is currently home to the Hawaiʻi State Supreme Court.

Back in 1878, a statue of the King was commissioned for display in Honolulu. The commission was given to American artist Thomas Ridgeway Gould, and in 1880 his plaster model was sent to Paris to be cast, before being shipped to Hawaii. Alas, it never made it. The ship transporting the statue caught fire and sank off of the Falkland Islands.

Fortunately, the statue was insured, so a replacement was ordered. While this process was underway, the original statue turned up! Salvaged by fishermen, it was sold to a British ship captain who recognized it. He, in turn, sold it to the Hawaiian government, which now found itself in possession of identical twin statues. But the statues weren’t identical. The replacement statue was pristine and resplendent with gold detailing. The original was missing a hand and had a broken spear, and had suffered a good deal of fire damage.

The government decided to erect the replacement statue in Honolulu and the original was restored and sent to Kapaau, near Kamehameha’s birthplace. However, the original was corroded from its time in the sea so, in the early 1900s, local residents began to paint the statue, both to prevent further corrosion and to make it more lifelike.

By the end of the century, the statue was in bad shape and in 1996 conservator Glenn Wharton was hired to assess its condition. In his book, The Painted King: Art, Activism, and Authenticity in Hawaii, he recalls being startled by what he found, ‘A larger-than-life brass figure painted over in brown, black, and yellow with “white toenails and fingernails and penetrating black eyes with small white brush strokes for highlights. . . . It looked more like a piece of folk art than a nineteenth-century heroic monument.”’

For the next few years Wharton led a community discussion about how to save the statue, including the tricky question of whether it should be restored to its original bronze and gold finish or continue the painted alternative the community had grown up with. In the end the community voted to keep the painted finish and in 2001 the statue was restored in this way and rededicated.

A third statue of King Kamehameha I was commissioned after statehood in 1959, for installation in the U.S. Statuary Hall in Washington DC. However, this statue wasn’t cast from the original molds, but from molds taken of the Honolulu statue.

Posted in response to this week’s Sunday Stills challenge on the theme of ‘Twin.’ See more responses here.

Storm cloud over Kohala Mountains

Storm cloud over Kohala Mountains

Driving down old Saddle Road, one late afternoon, I saw this dramatic storm cloud sliding down the side of Kohala Mountain. Later, when I headed over the mountain road, I saw the cloud had settled over Kawaihae, dumping rain over the normally desert dry area.

Posted in response to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge ‘Liquid.’

Keawaiki beach

Keawaiki Beach

I’m not a person who goes and spends a day at the beach, but I have been drawn to water and the ocean all my life. Possibly that’s why I’ve ended up in Hawaii, where the place is surrounded by it. And who wouldn’t be drawn to the water here?

This is Keawaiki Beach on the South Kohala coast. It’s a steep, black beach where sometimes the surf can roll in. But on a day like this one, it would be a fine place to swim. And on this particular day, not a soul was there, just me and my camera.

Posted in response to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge ‘Place in the world.’

 

Gnat cloud

Gnat cloud and wind turbine

Gnat cloudDriving past Hawi Wind Farm, I unexpectedly ran into several clouds of gnats. I quickly rolled up the windows on my truck, not needing a cab full of gnats to influence my driving. Sometimes the clouds blended and made one big gathering, and I was reminded of murmurations of starlings, though perhaps not as dramatic.

It’s the first time I’ve seen anything like this since I’ve lived here. The clouds are made up of male gnats hoping to snag a mate. The large numbers give them visibility so that the females can spot them. Of course, that doesn’t explain how the males can spot the individual females when they show up. Hmmm.

Posted in response to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge ‘Unlikely.’

 

Signs: Drive very carefully

Signs-Speed limitRecently, these two new speed limit signs appeared, alongside the main road, not far from where I live. Nothing too remarkable about that, you may say, but it is odd. The first sign gives the speed limit as 45 miles per hour, but the second sign mandates a minimum speed of 40 miles per hour. Seems like a prime area for tickets to be handed out. I can’t imagine anyone getting very far without breaching one of those two limits.

As it happens, about a quarter mile before this pair of signs, there’s another pair that have been there a long time. Those signs, which mark the departure from a more residential area to a largely uninhabited stretch of road, mandate a speed limit of 55 miles per hour, with the same minimum speed of 40 miles per hour.

So why would the county want people to speed up to 55 only to put the brakes on a few hundred yards down the road? They don’t. They just put up the wrong sign. It was gone a few days later.

This isn’t the first time the Hawaii County Department of Public Works has had a sign problem. In late 2016, a major new road project, the Mamalahoa Highway Bypass, south of Kailua-Kona, was completed. Where this new road joined the existing Mamalahoa Highway, a dangerous Y-shaped junction became a fully-signaled, four-road intersection.

Most people were thrilled with the new, safer setup, but not all. People unfamiliar with the area were perplexed. They didn’t know where to go because the major new highway intersection didn’t come with any signs. If that sounds like it must be an exaggeration, it is a bit. There was one sign, on the old road, that had not been removed during the project. Unfortunately, because of the intersection’s redesign, the directions it gave were wrong. It indicated the main highway went straight ahead, but that now sent traffic plunging down a steep, winding road into a populous residential area.

As with our local sign, after a few days the old highway sign disappeared and a week or so later proper signage was erected for the new intersection.