Not Even Not Traveling 70: Tiny Guitar of Doom

Tiny Guitar of Doom
(A Heartwarming Tale of Forty-Five Adults Failing to Clap in Unison)

Day G

On Friday, the second day of our voyage, I noticed a free ukulele lesson on the schedule of ship events. So did forty-five other passengers. When I arrived in the crow's nest, the twenty-four class seats were full. I had to steal a stool from the bar next door and improvise a place in the back row.

The instructors, a wife and husband team, had brought a crate of brand-new soprano ukuleles. That seemed like a happy event. I hopped up to get mine before they all disappeared.

"You won't get to keep them," warned the instructor, a middle-aged Hawaiian woman. "We will take them back and my husband will tune them all tonight."

The tiny ukuleles had arrived out of tune, and — because their strings were new — they refused to hold a note for more than a few seconds. Strumming on them was easy enough. Trying to confirm the sound of a chord in a room full of forty-five out-of-tune instruments playing at the same time, though, was an intellectual exercise, not a musical one, so much.

I learned to play a simple song in our first hour. That's what I thought; it sure was hard to verify.

Day C

On Saturday, the instructors raised the stakes. They gave us chord charts for "Mele Kalikimaka" and "Here Comes Santa in a Red Canoe." They told us we would be performing both songs on the World Stage on the night before docking in Hawaii.

I'd never heard the second song before but it had a hook I found appealing. They were both going to be fun, I thought, World Stage or not. But we weren't given melody notes for either piece. We were expected to memorize the singing by ear, which is easy enough, I suppose. Most of the men had to sing an octave down from the instructor, though, and she sang at a low alto. Maybe a fifth of us could make the octave. One silent man behind me chuckled.

"Sing louder," he told me.

"Yeah," agreed the musician to my right, one of those who had brought his own instrument.

We had two days to learn songs for the concert. Fine. Given the ease of the ukulele, I knew it was possible. I wanted a few other men to sing, though. Plus I couldn't see how the group was going to get the timing of the ukuleles right. We weren't strumming in anywhere close to the same rhythm. We seemed to have a cadre of music students who liked to race to the end.

"We keep speeding up," I complained.

"It's not happening in these seats," said the musician.

"Next rehearsal, maybe they'll chill out." That was my hope.

"Maybe they'll get even more excited," he countered. I gave him some side-eye.

"Everyone likes Flight of the Bumblebee," said the woman to my left. Okay, so it was musical humor of a sort. We turned to her. She tossed back her frizzy, blonde hair and and flashed us both a smile.

Day E

After workout and lunch, I went to my ukulele lesson (ratio: still one teacher per forty-five students) and I sat in the middle row of seats. A man who had brought his own instrument took a spot next to me. In the previous lessons, I'd noticed at least three other musicians who had brought their own. We had musical prodigies in the crowd as well, including a boy of twelve or thirteen. The boy, when he picked up his ukulele for the first time, tuned it in a few seconds and then plucked out all the scales on it by ear. Within a minute, he was playing chords and breaking the chords into components, plucked in syncopated rhythms.

This time, the boy even more real musicians sat next to me. The grown man with the most beautiful concert-quality instrument rested it on his knee, leaned over, and said, "It sounds like you've played ukulele before."

I didn't know what to tell him. I had taught myself one song for a poetry event years back. Could an experienced musician pick up a single experience like that? And do it in a room full of other musicians? I felt like he was making a mistake. But in a nice way. I tried to let him down easy while I heard, to my right, the boy pick out part of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

He was really putting "Here Comes Santa in a Red Canoe" in perspective.

After a decent practice, I got nods from a few other folks I knew by sight. One of the gestures came from the military engineer I'd eaten lunch with a couple days earlier. At the time, he'd been severe. He had refused to drink coffee or alcohol. He'd pointedly said that he and his wife came from Utah. Despite his apparent disapproval then, he seemed satisfied with the music. 

His wife had clapped in time when it was demanded. He had not clapped. 

Day A
The Undressed Rehearsal
(It's only a metaphor - we kept our clothes on) 

Our next ukulele lesson panicked me. Our timing, as we strummed, was worse than dancers on a boat in a gale. We were down to forty individuals now but still we had no common sense of time. Half a dozen players kept picking up speed as we played.

The wife and husband instruction team kept arguing. The wife was the leader. She knew her part. She was going to direct the performance. But together, they didn't seem coordinated. They argued for about a third of the class. And they weren't concerned about looking bad on stage. I begged the group to return to the parts we hadn't gotten right. And we did. Still, we didn't nail them. And the instructor was not worried at all.

At dinner, Diane and I hit the Pinnacle Lounge, the most expensive and exclusive restaurant on the ship. Toward the end of dinner, Tim and Wendy sat down at a table nearby. They were our dining mates a few days back and now here they were again.

"I haven't seen you at ukulele lessons," I mentioned.

Tim laughed.

"I've given up on that," he admitted. "We'll do the hula dance. That's our part."

I had to admit, it was a reasonable strategy.

This Chord

Overnight, I practiced for the Hawaiian Cultural Festival. We had been allowed to take the soprano ukuleles to our cabins. Thanks to my wife's generous offer to head to the spa and let me strum, I knew our two songs. I knew I could hit the low notes while singing and keep time with the instrument. As a group, though, well, I remembered our run-through the day before.

Practice, practice. I even practiced the native Hawaiian chant, only one word and a few claps since a Cultural Leader was doing the rest. But I nailed it. 

The next day, I barely noticed my lunch because I was concentrating on the dress rehearsal coming up on the World Stage. 

The Dress Rehearsal

If you opt to learn about Hawaiian culture on a HollandAmerica cruise, you have to be prepared to be part of the show. The Zaandam had four cultural advisors traveling with us. They had taught music, hula dance, and lectured to us about Hawaiian island life. One of them got up on the World Stage and led us in a practice of the opening chant.

A Hawaiian welcoming ceremony had been gently adapted (or so I suspected) for us as passengers. It was simple and friendly. To my surprise, the rehearsal went well. We got our timing right. When we were singing, we took a formation that placed me in the middle. Aside from the men who hadn't sung, there were a few women who felt unsure about their voice roles. In the last rehearsal before this one, I had gently assisted the women’s melody.

"Are you going to sing soprano?" whispered the woman next to me. I knew she meant was I going to softly croon to the female voice line.

"Do you want me to?"

"Yes." She looked at her feet.

I told myself it would be okay as long as I stayed gentle. When the verse came around, I added a quiet line of notes. My ukulele friend and two other women close by nodded in approval. Good, because I needed it.

The Hawaiian Cultural Festival

Well, it helps to perform in front of a friendly audience, which we were definitely doing. We clapped to the traditional chant in the correct rhythm (okay, except for one person). We applauded for the acrobatics and the drumming that took the place of a fire ceremony, which admittedly would be hard to hold aboard a modern ship due to well, fire alarms if nothing else.

We sang Melé Kalikimaka and Here Comes Santa in a Red Canoe. Many of us kept time correctly, even. We moved aside to accommodate the hula dancers. But then we sang along to accompany the hula. Honestly, I think we were the least cultured part of the Cultural Festival.

But the audience, composed of our friends and fellow passengers, stood and clapped. And then most of the people hugged, usually with the family member involved in the performance but not always.
 

Not Even Not Zen 431: Aleksi, Note 4 - Oh Yeah, Art

Oh Yeah, Art

In the summer of 2015, Diane and I brought our family on a driving vacation. Our two youngest kids were still interested in traveling with us, so we aimed to take them to new places. We consulted our extended families and acquaintances. We tried Mapquest. After a lot of thought and tracing out the possible routes, I decided I would rather see friends than anything else.

Okay, so I pretty much always would choose to visit friends if I could. It wasn't a one-sided decision. We knew that college friends of mine, Donna and Aleksi, were living north of Toronto with their son, Ensor, who happened to be around the same age as our kids. They all said yes to a visit. They seemed interested, even.

Diane planned our driving route. It was going to be great. Well, the first leg was going to be long. But Canada is, as everyone points out, a lot like a version of the United States where people don't litter. Folks are polite. Geese are aggressive. We made our way along Route 403 to Toronto and then beyond. No hotel for us, this time. At least, not yet. Donna and Aleksi had generously offered to put us up in their home, which is the kind of thing great friends do and most other citizens pretend they would also do if only things were different, like we all owned multiple houses. 

An hour after we arrived, Al and Donna whisked us off to see the sights of Toronto. Ens gave the trip a tolerant smile. We took a train. It was clean. In fact, the art district downtown was fairly spectacular. The conversation was the best part, though. Sharing opinions and memories is what makes friends worth crossing international borders for, maybe.

When we got back to their place, Aleksi settled us in and turned on the kind of television and sound system I'd never had. He asked if he could play us one of his pieces. Normally, I wince when people offer to show me their work - too many writing workshops with bad writers, I guess - but I remembered Aleksi's sense of art in college as being a strong one. He'd shown passion and determination. He'd had ideas about abstract art. He had since then worked his art into Hollywood movies, too, so I knew I was going to see something polished. 

Aleksi dimmed the lights. Music from Bach filled the room. Streaks of light and patterns began to flash on the screen. 

Seeing his animation, feeling it move me, not always knowing quite why I had the emotional responses, feeling my mind go out in unusual directions - this was different but it was familiar, too. This was art.

"This piece played for a while at a German art museum," he said. "It was in the lobby. People saw it as they came in."

"It was for a celebration of Bach," Donna added. 

Next, he played a second piece, another abstract visualization of a sonata. I noticed my kids fidgeting a little during it but not much, not enough for me to worry. Once more I felt the animation move me. It made me remember how Aleksi strongly envisioned his art. It really was art. It had been a long time since I had seen art for the sake of its inspiration, since I had seen it so pure and naked.

This was not commercialized, did not compromise much with techniques or with the need to communicate. It was driven by an inspired vision. Oh yeah, this was the real stuff. This was art. 
 

Not Even Not Zen 430: Aleksi, Note 3 - Remissions and Decisions

Remissions and Decisions 

In the spring of 1989, I got a call from Donna. I'd known about Aleksi's cancer since about a week after I met him, so it had been five years. It had become, in my mind, another part of who he was. He was always dealing with cancer. 

For all those years, he had been treating it through an envisioning practice. Basically, when tumors got bad, he would envision them getting small. He would picture his body, his whole self, as healthy. By force of will, he succeeded with some tumors. At least, that's how it seemed to me. I'd used envisioning techniques myself for a decade with good results — conquering my fear of heights, for one — but my modest successes didn't stop me from worrying about Aleksi. After all, visualizing yourself stepping up to a cliff edge is a different proposition than visualizing yourself beating cancer.

Aleksi didn't want to hear about any of the standard, prescription medicines. As it turned out, he had good reasons for that. What was available for his cancer was known to be crap.

Although a few cancer treatments had started to work in the mid 1970s, after decades of development, no treatment had been devised that was able to beat the type of lymph node carcinoma Aleksi had. Relying on doctors to find a successful treatment in his lifetime was an uncertain hope at best. Except for Donna’s support, he was really on his own. 

In addition, Aleksi knew the available treatments meant getting mustard gassed - not metaphorically, but literally. Chemotherapies in the 1980s were a series of attacks on the body. They descended in spirit (and in science) from World War I, when doctors learned that mustard gas destroyed white blood cells. The ideas developed more during World War II, when doctors found that nitrogen mustard reduced tumors. From those initial observations, and after a lot of trial and error, researchers pioneered the first medically tested chemotherapy. The treatment killed enormous numbers of body cells. The hope was to kill the cancer cells among them, then let the body regenerate. Aleksi didn't relish the idea of subjecting his body to the attack when there had never been a successful treatment. 

But when Donna called me, she told me there was something new. 

“This is for Al's type of cancer,” she said. “Specifically. Someone has lived through the treatment. The patient has gone into remission.”

"Fantastic!" It was a huge surprise. I had never wanted to voice pessimism but I'd also never believed we would all make it to this point. "He’s enrolling in a trial, right?”

“We have already enrolled him. That means we're coming down to your area."

"Can we see you?" My spirits soared at the idea and I could feel my eyebrows go up. "When?"

"We’ll be busy with the cancer treatments a lot of the time," Donna sounded thoughtful. "But, yeah, that's why I'm calling. We want to see you. We want to drop by your place. And we want you to come by the hospital and visit."

I asked if I could talk with Aleksi. Donna admitted he was reluctant to speak with anyone. He was still in shock, apparently, about the existence of a real treatment and its single but important success. He heard us talking, though, and his voice grew closer as he asked for the handset. When he got on the phone, Al said only a few words. But he sounded committed to going to the NIH. He reassured me despite the hesitation I heard in his voice. He seemed to be still catching up to the fact this was happening.

In Maryland, we got a brief visit from Donna and Aleksi. At the end of it, they told us they would be busy for a while but they would keep in touch. It took me a couple of weeks before I broke down and made the call to them so I could find out what was going on. 

After a long conversation, confusing for me, we arranged a trip. It was not for them to visit us, as we had originally planned, but for us to drive down to them in Bethesda

"Your place in Frederick is a little farther from the NIH than I pictured, at home," Donna admitted.

I was a long highway trip but to me, it didn't seem too bad. I had grown up in the area, loosely speaking. To my girlfriend it was a bigger deal but she never complained. We scheduled it, planned for coffee during the drive, and after a few wrong turns at the end, we managed to visit Aleksi and Donna at a Bethesda apartment. 

After our initial visit, we kept making phone calls. Eventually, we arranged another visit, this time to see Aleksi in his hospital room.

"I have to warn you," Donna said. "He seems sort of down. Sometimes he gets cranky."

That's why we're visiting, I thought. He can be cranky at us instead of Donna or his nurses. Or we can just take his mind off the treatments for a while. 

Donna was right. When we got there, Aleksi looked tired. It had been a confusing drive, too. The sign outside the hospital said National Naval Medical Center, not National Institutes of Health. I didn't understand. I had to guess they were the same thing. (In fact, there had been an overflow of beds in the NIH Clinical Center, so Aleksi had been moved to the Naval Medical building. The two institutions cooperated often and, although Donna probably told me about it, the fact didn't sink in. I had no clear concept of what was going on.)

This was how I got to know the NIH for the first time. I sat in a hospital room. We talked about how the treatment was proceeding. Aleksi sounded upbeat, actually, or maybe he simply felt better for having friends visit. In every aspect of his progress, he had good observations to make. He felt well treated. Donna thought he was getting attentive care. Aleski said he stood a good chance of beating his cancer. 

I left feeling better about him. On the way home, my girlfriend and I reinforced our cautious optimism. 

After more time and more phone calls, we met again. This time, we gathered with a couple other friends of Aleksi, although they were strangers to me, and we started by sitting on chairs and chatting around a coffee table. Donna and Al had coordinated an event. After we discussed what we were going to do, we started an organized support session. 

Aleksi had lost his hair. He still looked healthy, otherwise, if a bit worn down. He lay on the floor in a comfortable position while the rest of us lent him energy, touching him or not, and we all envisioned him feeling better and getting healthier. For his part, he did the same. He tried to feel the human connection and love. He tried to feel his body getting better. 

It went on for what seemed like a long time, although it was probably only fifteen minutes. I did a lot of holding Aleski's right hand. I tried to send him all the healing I could. I remember feeling very in tune with my surroundings and my desire for Aleski to heal - to attain a sense of complete well-being. I think I slipped off into a trance state for a while, just maintaining contact and giving, as simply as possible, from my spirit. 

Somehow, I think with signals passing between Donna and Aleski, Donna managed to call an end to the session. Everyone backed off by a step. Aleksi took a spot on a sofa with Donna by his left side. 

"I felt really good energy from someone holding my hand," he said.

Everyone pointed at me. I had no idea if they were right. I knew what I wanted for Aleksi, though. I walked over to him. He took my hand again.

"Thank you," He nodded. 

We socialized for a while. However, Aleski had limits. He was in the toughest cycle of his chemotherapy. It felt like barely a minute later that Donna started escorting people out. My girlfriend handed me my jacket. 

A few years later, I got my Master's of Computer Science degree. I had gone through a lot of girlfriends in the meantime. I'd decided I wanted to have children and a family, a reversal of my previous mindset, and my previous mostly-goth crowd didn't seem to harbor many women who agreed with my new goal. I had to learn to socialize with different sets of people. Then I got a young woman pregnant, got married, and bought a house, It was time to go out on the job market and try to pay bills.

A head-hunting company said they had two offers for me, one working for the Department of Defense, the other working for the National Institutes of Health. At the NIH, I would be making less money, I interviewed there, anyway. I could see the work there was good. In my previous interview for the Defense department, I saw I'd have to evaluate computer configurations for a company delivering and maintaining military systems. At the NIH, I would get to be in the hospital and in the labs. I would fix the machines with patient data and make it possible for the doctors to take medical images of their patients.

And I remembered Al in his hospital bed. I remembered his remission. And I thought about having something to do with that, anything at all. And I said yes to the NIH and trying to do my part.
 

Not Even Not Zen 429: Aleksi, Note 2 - The Only Handball Incident

The Only Handball Incident

We got up early to play. My girlfriend wrung her hands, either panicked or enthusiastic about me going off without her. But of course she came along partway. That was a pattern we were developing without knowing it. We drove together to Donna and Aleksi's house in Northampton. There, I put on tennis-club shorts so I could play handball with Aleksi. I had never played before. 

"I don't have a spare glove," he said. "But I don't think it'll matter."

Aleksi drove us to a gym, where I discovered that a handball court is the same as a racquetball court. At least, it was at his club in Massachusetts. The room he had reserved looked good, three walls of smooth, painted concrete and a fourth of inch-thick glass. It was a gleaming space. Across the polished, wood floor ran a single red line, the serving line.

"Drop once, then serve," he said, moving his arms to show me. He smacked the ball across the room. 

"Wow!" I said, sort of meaning 'ow' when I served a second later.

The lessons continued despite the hot ouch of hitting the ball without a glove. We practiced different shots. Aleksi taught me how to play the corners, which ended up being the important part. The best bounces hit three walls close together, so the ball returns in a weird direction. You had to learn to expect the direction. Even the best players got fooled sometimes; and I was a beginner. 

I'd say I learned the rules and we played a game but I think, in fact, we started a game and worked on the rules together. But I did learn. And we did play. And we kept on. We kept hitting and running and laughing at the crazy angles of the rebounds.

"Good shot!" Aleksi said every now and then. "You're getting it."

In half an hour, the encouragement turned to, "Excellent anticipation!" and "You've got it." 

We played and played, game after game. In theory, we were waiting for a handball friend of Aleksi's. A couple of times, Al wondered aloud about where the fellow was. Eventually, the man arrived, not quite an hour late. He turned out to be a medium-sized, dark-haired young fellow. He wore a charcoal grey shirt, unusual for a club setting, and had longish hair like a college student. He gave a strong handshake and seemed to have a practical, skeptical approach to everything, more like one of the locals than a typical freshman. 

"Where's your glove?" he asked me after the handshake. 

"First time," I said. 

"I figured I'd let him decide if he likes it before buying equipment," Al chipped in. His friend raised an eyebrow, which should have been a clue. 

"The ball is hard," he observed. "Doesn't it hurt to hit it with a bare hand?"

"Yeah," I admitted. 

We all shrugged. After another warm-up session, we started playing competitive games. And we kept on, game after game. Eventually, Aleksi's friend walked to over to his watch, which he had left next to his bag. 

"It's been an hour," he announced. He glanced at me. "How's your hand?"

"Well, it hurt when I started playing. Then it got buzzing, all tingly," I said. "Now I can't feel it."

"Huh."

He put down his watch, took a drink, and returned to play. We kept on going. Aleksi's friend was an experienced player. He won most of the matches. Al got a couple. A few times, my score got close. At the end of one game, my arm felt tired. It must have shown.

"I think it's time for you to stop," said Aleksi's friend. "Probably we all should stop."

"Why?" Aleksi asked. 

"I don't like him playing without a glove," the fellow replied. "I don't trust it."

When we got back, Donna and my girlfriend treated us to an early dinner. Donna mentioned how I was eating left handed. The fingers on my right hand were shaking too much. Once I made the switch, though, I didn't much notice. Afterward, we played cards for a while. I felt fine.

The next morning, I woke up to find my right hand replaced by a grapefruit. It was a lump of purple flesh that throbbed. Ugh. Fortunately, I had busted my right hand a lot like this in high school. I knew how to handle it. My left hand would do most of the work for the day, no problem. The most difficult part was the involuntary horror on people's faces when they noticed my purple grapefruit.

By the evening, I realized this might go on for a while. Sure enough, on Monday morning I could drive but I had to report to work one-handed. I was installing computer systems in a bookstore. The staff, all older women, responded with an outpouring of motherly sympathy. They made me hot chocolate. They did the typing. (I did a little left-handed work.) All in all, it promised to be an entertaining week. My hand, beaten like a cheap steak as it was, returned to normal over the course of a few days. The next time I saw Donna and Aleksi, I had full movement in my fingers.

My girlfriend couldn't resist describing the lump that had been the purple grapefruit, though. Aleksi frowned, apologized, and never invited me to handball again.
 

Not Even Not Zen 428: Aleksi, Note 1 - Cosmic Encounters

Cosmic Encounters

It was a Saturday afternoon in early spring, warm enough (for Massachusetts) to enjoy being outside, but free of pollen (because it was Massachusetts). My girlfriend had some of her friends over, which meant by social logic, I invited my friends, too, even though I was not one of my girlfriend's nine roommates. So for my part, I'd invited Aleksi and Donna. 

This is pretty much the way it works in your twenties. You inherit social groups the way you inherit old furniture. Sure, you didn't choose it exactly but here it is and it's pretty comfortable. At this point, I'd graduated and moved back to Massachusetts because, in its way, it was comfortable. I only sometimes slept in my girlfriend's mod. (Note: she called her group home a 'mod' because the term at our college was short for 'modular houses.' She lived in one of a row of apartments designed with the sort of bold minimalism that says, 'We had a budget of eighty dollars and a dream.')

However, there's only so much socializing you can do over a meal before your pants file a formal complaint. I've always preferred games. They give you something to do with your hands while you talk. We played spades, hearts, and rummy around the mod dining room table for about an hour. Then Aleksi got out something he'd brought by pre-arrangement, a board game called Cosmic Encounters. He said he had played it once before and it was great. He said it wouldn't take long to learn. This is, of course, what people always tell you about new games, although the learning curve for a game is sand in the gears of fun. As it turned out, though, Al was right. He had prepared. By the time we had set up the hex-grid board, he was done ensuring we knew the rules.

I was all for it. This was yet another social thing. And even though I'd never played, I assumed I'd do well. I usually pick up social games pretty quickly because I grew up with them. They were as good as bowling or, nowadays, as axe throwing.

"Is that whiskey?" Al asked when I sat back down with a glass. Because my girlfriend encouraged me to drink, I had fallen off the wagon. Anyway, it was a college environment in the 1980s. A little smoking and drinking could be taken for granted although, in the mod, hardly anyone did actually smoke except for a little weed behind closed doors or an occasional tobacco cigarette outside.

"Do you want some?" I offered.

He shook his head. "Not today."

Two of my girlfriend's roommates sat down to play with us, while others did what people do on a relaxed college Saturday. They drifted in and out of the room, raided the fridge, and maybe leaned against the kitchen counter to watch for a while. Sitting at the board, I concentrated for a few minutes. In Space Empires, each player gets two alien races, and each race comes with its own special powers. That's the game's way of giving everyone a fighting chance while also, it turns out, giving me a completely unfair advantage because about two minutes in, I saw how my two races were a good match. It was like they'd been waiting for each other their whole fictional, alien lives. After a couple of turns figuring out how movement worked, I started to methodically wipe the map with everybody.

Toward the end, the social pressure started to mount. My girlfriend was making sad eyes at me. Her roommates were sighing with quiet dignity. I felt I'd gotten caught up in my winning strategy so much I'd forgotten to be nice to everyone.

I had six captured systems and needed seven to win, so I did the usual, good-winner thing I often did: I eased off to let everyone catch up. I declined to take the seventh system - although I figured I would take it in another turn or two.

I had not, however, been paying any attention to Aleksi. He had been lurking in the middle of the pack. I got up to make myself another drink, returned to stand over the board with my glass in hand, and discovered Al building up a huge space force. Then it was his turn to wipe the map with everyone. I sat down and tried to stop him. But he used his special alien powers. Really.

He won. He crushed everyone and knocked me back from a winning move at the same time. On his next turn, he expanded to nine systems. There was no way to bust him back to six. I hadn't encountered anything like this in years.

"Why did you ease up?" he asked me at the end. He placed his final piece on a hex.

"To be nice?"

"Well, it's not so nice." He hunched his shoulders a little.

I knew Al enjoyed the social aspect of games. I had never realized how much he liked to compete.

"I had to teach you not to do that," he said. "I mean, if I could. I had to get lucky, too."

He hadn't been lucky, though. And that was something for me to remember.  

Not Even Not Traveling 70: Hawaii - Oahu, Pearl Harbor

Visiting Pearl Harbor

We were headed to a place where ride-share drivers can't get in and cell service goes to die. When ten thousand people are trying to use a cell tower simultaneously, neither ET nor you can phone home. (I believe this is also how the Hawaiian tourism board keeps people from checking their email.)
 
Our bus driver checked our identification and handed us our tickets — not for the bus ride, but for our Navy transport to the U.S.S. Arizona. Those were the reason Diane had booked us with a cheesy little tourist company with a red, double-decker bus.

We stepped aboard as the first bus passengers. Unlike many others from the Zaandam, we hadn't waited until the day of the tour to try to get into the memorial. From the dock, we rode in pre-arranged bliss - not splendor but still, it wasn't bad - diagonally across a third of Oahu, picking up other visitors along the way. 

The Arizona

We arrived at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial with time to spare, confirmed our reservations, and toured the park and museums before getting in line. Finally, the Navy called us up. We sat in a theatre and watched a newsreel about the U.S.S. Arizona. The basic theme was: this is a gravesite. Be respectful.

When we boarded the Navy transport to the sunken grave, that was the theme, too.

"You are not expected to be silent," said the Lieutenant to the crowded seats in the main cabin. "However, you will be escorted from the memorial if your behavior is loud or irreverent. Remember, there are passengers coming to visit their relatives who died here. There are over nine hundred men buried in the ship due to the battle. We have the remains of forty-eight men who have died since. They have chosen to be buried with their comrades, serving in the eternal duty, as is their right."

"You will also not be permitted to take pictures on the way to the memorial or to stand up in this craft while it is moving." He gestured to the pilot. The lieutenant had earlier given cast-off orders to a seaman recruit and a petty officer. Now, his ship accelerated.
 
Our transport was a small, partly open vehicle. Even from my seat, I could see how shockingly shallow the harbor was. We coasted less than forty feet above the silt-covered bottom. How had cruisers and aircraft carriers ever navigated through here? There must be deeper channels somewhere, though the whole place seems to have the nautical depth of a wading pool. No wonder the attack used only mini-subs — a full-sized sub would have gotten stuck like a bathtub toy in the sink. No wonder so many American ships got grounded here, too. Even the U.S.S. Nevada, which escaped during the attack, deliberately ran aground near Hospital Point. The crew had no choice; they had to beach their damaged battleship or risk blocking the harbor channel.

The memorial itself was a small building, spare and scrubbed, set in calm position above the sunken ship. Walking up the ramp, the crowd fell quiet. Inside, even the children stayed subdued — which, if you have taken children anywhere solemn, you know is miraculous. Yes, everyone had been warned. But warnings and children have a complicated relationship. This time, at least, they listened.

We filed into the place with a long pause to look down at the rusty remains of the U.S.S. Arizona. Then we nudged ourselves forward and went to pay our respects. We stood in the sanctum with the list of names carved in marble. We read them all, slowly. Then we looked for family names. We noticed a Naylor, a Hess, and several Roberts who died that day. There were six of the Roberts clan, in fact, and the lieutenant had mentioned to us, in an offhand way, how some sailors had been entertaining approved visitors when the surprise attack began. It looked like the Roberts family had been in attendance and the guests had died here along with the sailors.

Later, in the hallway over the water, we leaned over the rail and studied a rusted hatch of the Arizona. We thought about the men buried here by the attack and their friends who had asked to be buried with them.

The Pearl Harbor Museum

Back on land, we spent a lot of time reading about the attack. We watched footage, too. Hundreds of people told their stories, including children who survived, a few of the Japanese-American soldiers, the husband and wife teams in the military, the Japanese-Americans who were classified as 4-C and weren’t allowed to serve, the firemen who tried to stop the blazes and got shot by both Japanese and American forces, a pilot who had managed to get his plane off the ground, and another pilot who flew in from an aircraft carrier and was shot by his own side.

As it turned out, Diane had not known the timeline of the attack. It helped her to find the museum being so clear about the order of things. I might not have noticed, myself, but she commented on it twice.

We both liked the interview footage. In one of the museum buildings, interviews played on a loop. Each film captured the stories of soldiers (American and Japanese), civilians, children, and Hawaiians of all backgrounds as they were affected by the opening attack of a war. These were firsthand accounts. True, they were mostly captured forty or fifty years after the incident but at least someone thought to record the stories.

Personally, I was peeved that the codebreaker display in the museum was broken. There was a decoding device available, a flimsy cardboard-and-plastic thing about a yard long filled with dialed numbers. It was possibly a replica of the Purple Machine. But no one could get it to work. A gear inside had stripped and no operator could dial up the decoding sequences.

However, I enjoyed the statistical displays, including the military demographic ones. At the time of the attack, the Japanese had a much greater military force than the United States. Seeing the forces graphed side by side helped make the disparity clear. You could understand why Japan's leadership felt it was reasonable to try to knock the United States out of the action. They could dispense with America as a second-place opposing power in one shot. That may have been wishful thinking, of course. Some Japanese leaders thought so at the time. But the military advantages Japan possessed apparently convinced the rest.

And Japan did succeed. At the end of the day on December 7, the United States Navy had only three aircraft carriers left. Those were out on a routine patrol, so they missed the action. Add to those the four cruisers, a couple submarines, and a few smaller ships always on patrol, and the U.S. had a tiny fleet, too small to offer a serious fight. The Pearl Harbor attack led to as good an outcome as the Japanese military could have hoped. Yet it wasn't enough.

Japanese conquered most of China, swaths of the Soviet Union, Taiwan, Korea, South Sakhalin, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Burma, East Timor, Guam, the South Seas Mandate, Wake Island, Kiribati, and many Pacific islands too small to list. Some of those countries don't exist anymore, of course, but the point is that Japan succeeded in occupying them all. They had plans to subjugate more, including Australia, New Zealand, and Siberia. They accomplished it all largely without allies, except for Germany on the other side of the world, and Thailand, which was not a major force. If they hadn't kept expanding - if they had paused to solidify their positions - they might have kept an empire.

The Submarine Museum

We only saw the outside of the U.S.S. Bowfin, a beautiful submarine, because we'd miscalculated our time. After the Pearl Harbor museum, we walked over to find we had half an hour before our tour bus left.

"We could run through," I suggested.

"Pretty sure they won't let us," said Diane.

We had time to walk around the submarine memorial outside and read the plaques. While I did, I tried to learn what we were missing. Life aboard submarines had always seemed claustrophobic to me, and after reading about it — yep, it was absolutely awful. Submariners lived in a sealed metal tube with no sunlight, no privacy, and no way out, like an open-plan office building but with torpedoes.

What I did enjoy learning about was the evolution of submarine technology. The improvements were remarkable; running an early submarine required either extraordinary bravery or a complete failure to read the brochure.

The Navy built the U.S.S. Bowfin as an upgrade to the fleet. It launched exactly one year after the Pearl Harbor attack and went on to become one of the most decorated submarines of the Pacific Theater. It earned credit for sinking thirty enemy craft and damaging seven more. Like the U.S.S. Missouri, the Bowfin is now open to the public. And the museum attached to it has four thousand or so submarine-related mementos. It's got a dissected Poseidon missile. It includes an audio tour so you can get a good idea of what the relics mean and how they were used. But we mostly toured the Waterfront Memorial.

The Waterfront Memorial

The Navy can't recover the remains of those lost when a submarine gets destroyed. Instead, they have a memorial outside the submarine museum for those people. The site arranges fifty-two plaques in a semi-circle. It offers specifics on each of the lost submarines, including the names of the crew members.

Close by on the park grounds, the Navy displays more war relics. You can look through a periscope from the USS Parche. You can see parts of a Japanese Kaiten, which was a manned torpedo. As one might imagine, the pilots of the Kaiten had to be pretty dedicated. Due to a manufacturing problem, water leaked into the operator and engine compartments. Solving the problem was never a priority. Instead, Japan issued the pilots a self-destruct mechanism in case, for some reason - like taking in too much water - they missed their target.

More Oahu

Well, Honolulu is unlike anything else in Hawaii because it's a true city, not a town, and it's anchored by a world-class international harbor, Kulolia. Pearl Harbor, too, is set apart from the rest, although in spirit it felt to me a little like Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau, the City of Refuge on the big island. They are both places shaped by the hardships endured there and the sacrifices made. Maybe that's the only connection they have but, to me personally, one reminded me of the other.

The attack on Pearl Harbor changed Hawaii's place in America. Before December 7, 1941, Hawaiians had reason to doubt whether the mainland would stand by them in a crisis. After that day, they knew. America had felt struck when Hawaii was struck. Mainlanders had come to the aid of the islands.

Before the war, there hadn't been much sentiment one way or another about making Hawaii a state. After, the question of statehood seemed redundant. Most citizens knew their answer. Hawaiians were Americans. 

 

Not Even Not Traveling 69: Hawaii - Actually Mexico

Ensenada, Mexico

I'm not sure why we pulled into a port in Mexico. We were coming from Hawaii. Our destination was San Diego. But we docked in the blue waters of a wide, arcing bay south of the U.S. border. The countryside around us started from low, white sand beaches and rose up the slopes to meet houses, hotels, a business district, and tall apartment buildings. A mile or two in the distance, beyond the city, the land rose higher into a range of coastal mountains spotted with green, semi-desert shrubs. I stared at the mountains and the bay for a long time.

Ensenada looked better than Oahu. I mean, the sight of the place made me wonder why I hadn't heard of it before. I had to remind myself how I thought the same about Missouri, where the land is beautiful but the locals either disagree or they take the beauty for granted. I don't hear many people rave about Missouri.

At dawn, the temperature rose into the 60s and stayed there, a cool, slightly-breezy January day. I knew Diane had opted for us to take a package tour because she had given me a choice of tour options. Although I had been tempted by the tequila tasting, I felt I'd done that plenty in college. So I picked the mountain ziplining. It was a way to see the countryside on our only day in Mexico.

Our bus ride to the mountains started with a drive by the gangster mansion in downtown Ensenada. Our guide gave us a quick description of the mansion's history. It hosted crime and shootings. Then it became a sort of museum. The bus and the talk from the guide continued out of town, up into the hills, and eventually took us through wine country. Finally, after most of an hour of riding and talking, the bus driver cranked the wheels to the left, pulled through a gate into a wineyard, and bounced along a gravel driveway to a house responsible for manufacturing wine and tequila. Plus they had an equipment shed for ziplining gear, which made it my destination.

Later, I found out one of the passengers bailed out when we pulled up. She made her decision as the rest of us dressed. She switched to the tequila tour.

Mountain Ziplines

Meanwhile, Diane and I clambered into the gear along with a dozen others, leg straps, shoulders, helmet, and harness. We passed inspection and hopped into another bus, this one headed up a mountain peak. In a minute, our second bus turned off the road and grinded up a volcanic trail of broken basalt, rocks, and clay. The trail disappeared. It looked like it had been washed out and filled in, by hand, with rocks and gravel. Eventually, maybe two hundred feet from the top, the bus could get no further. The trail ended in desert scrub. We had to get out and hike the rest of the way. Fortunately, we could see the huge zipline cables and the launch platform above. We had something to aim at.

We lost another person on the first climb. The guide said one of our tour members returned to the bus and asked to be taken back to the tequila house.

The rest of us didn't know. But one or two of our remaining troupe eyed the launch point nervously. The mountains around Ensenada top out at around 4,300 feet. There was a higher range to the northeast but we didn't have to worry about those. Anyway, we were elevated enough to see the ocean fifteen miles away. We saw the bay clearly, too. It was a bright day in the desert hills.

Even though it was December and we were high up in the air currents, Ensenada by the Pacific coast was warm like an early spring day in Maryland. I was fine in my t-shirt and zipline gear. Diane had to billow her jacket to let in more cool mountain breezes. Eventually, she took it off and tied it around her waist.

The zipline looked easy. Still, we could see it ran from mountaintop to mountaintop. The nervous folks knew what was coming. The hike up to the launch site let our bodies know how it was going to be. We all understood, if we were struggling to climb the last five hundred feet, our reality. We knew what lay ahead, more. Our legs understood. Our lungs did, too. Our eyes saw the depths of the valleys. Our skin felt cool, hair-whipping gusts.

The sun glinted off the ocean to the distant west and far, far below. We hadn't seen the ocean for hours on the rides to get here. We stared at it now, from on high.

"Go ahead of me," said the older man in front, tall and thin. I had been climbing slowly and patiently but nevertheless I had caught him. When he noticed, he stopped on the trail. He wiped his brow.

I hiked past him, worried we might lose another zipline partner. We hadn't even begun.

At the launch point, four college-aged tourists waited with me for the rest of our group. When I started to stroll forward to the launch platform, two of them hopped to the front. Okay, so I wouldn't go first down the mountain. That was a good thing, probably. The guide called me forward when it was my turn. He strapped me in.

My first impression when I took my running leap from the launch deck was not about the height. So I've beaten that old phobia, I guess. It wasn't the wind, either. It was the sense of being on a desert peak half-covered by scrubby trees. It was a 'Gosh, I'm on a mountain' moment.

The world went quiet. I traveled at the same speed as the wind. My hands vibrated. A whining sound rose from the pulley on the steel cable. The pitch got higher as I gained speed. Close to the end, a cross-breeze swept in and threatened to twist me backwards but I pointed my feet, aimed, and I landed fine. In front of me, the same gust had blown a woman sideways. Our guide decided to give us advice.

"If the wind pushes you around," he drawled, "let go of the straps. Spread your arms."

He had waited for a pair of older women to arrive before he repeated himself. One of them gave us a brave smile, showing us her teeth. The idea of letting go sounded crazy to her, I could tell. And to me. Extending my arms meant trusting the equipment more than my grip. But rationally, I knew I was already dependent on the harness. This wasn't different, just another step in a trusting direction.

The guide locked me into the harness for the next ride and told me to, "Wait." We watched the other instructor at the front. The guide reached out to me and repeated, "Wait, wait."

"Okay." And I thought, an impulse is not just a decision but a real pulse, a kick off.

I kicked off. The air felt warm but fresh to my skin. I had the sense of floating above the trees. I could smell them. I could feel their moisture in the dusty, mountain-desert air.

A blast of wind swept me side to side for a moment. My body turned. I spread my arms. But it wasn't working. Then I pulled in my right and stuck my left out. The roaring air spun me back to facing forward. I lowered my hands, pointed my feet, and narrowed myself like a bicycle racer down a mountain. The wind rushed faster.

As I approached the landing platform, I extended my toes. I could see where the instructor had landed. I remembered when I was eighteen, parachuting, and I didn't stick the landing because no one had told me it was possible. Well, now I knew it was possible. I wanted to nail the right spot.

"Whoa," said the instructor as I dodged him and set my feet down hard, next to his. "Oh, okay."

And so it went down the ziplines, from mountain to mountain.

We started at the highest peak and lost elevation each time. We had to hike back up to the next launch point, climb after climb, jump after jump. Mountain after mountain. Okay, it was eight mountains. At the last landing, we climbed down only forty feet to the level ground.

On the bus ride back, we had to stop for a farmer taking his cows across the dirt road. Everyone waited patiently. Someone wondered aloud about the tequila tour. 

 

Not Even Not Zen 427: Biomythography - Note 139: Old Pranks

Wikimedia,, Yann Segalen

 Laugh Like You've Got a Hotfoot

"That gal is driving like she's got a hotfoot," I said as we rolled up to a stoplight. Two cars over, a driver in a silver jeep was revving her engine.

"A what?" said my son.

"What was that?" My daughter shook her head. My wife spared me a puzzled glance. She raised her eyebrows as if doubtful of getting a reasonable expectation. Or maybe she suspected this was a sign of me going senile. 

It's an old phrase, for sure. But I was surprised to learn my wife and grown-up kids didn't know what a hotfoot was. Nobody pranks other people to that degree anymore, to the level where it's a low-grade assault. American humor has changed. Admittedly, for the better.

How To Do It

Find someone napping. Grab their shoe without waking them up or removing it from their foot. Stick matches in it. Light the matches. Walk away. Watch from a distance as the heat of the flame wakes them up.

Maybe they try to run from the blistering heat. The matches are firmly embedded in the shoe, remember. They can't get away. Hilarity ensues. They leap about like a court jester. Then they come to their senses, sit back down, and pull off the offending shoe.

By the time I was seven, I had heard kids talk about it. I had seen the prank carried out successfully once, on television in the visitors' dugout of a baseball game. One player had fallen asleep. Another player had given him a hotfoot. The camera caught the highjinx, the players and manager laughing at the victim of the joke. In the television booth, the commentators chuckled and slapped each other on the shoulder.

It looked like fun. Grown-up fun. Of course, I had to try it. You should try it, too.

But it's hard, when you're seven. You're not allowed to have matches. You have to steal them from the kitchen junk drawer, next to the gas stove. Then you have to find a friend, hold the matches in a fist behind your back, and tell him to go to sleep.

"Now?" he says. He's sitting on his front steps. He leans like he's considering resting his head.

"Yeah, of course."

"Why?"

When he won't sleep, you have to admit you wanted to try to hotfoot him. Then you both get involved in finding an appropriate pair of old shoes. You try the matches. They don't stick into the shoe right, not between the sole and the top of the shoe like you saw on television.

You break all the matchsticks trying to jam them in. Your friend gets a screwdriver to help the shoe have an appropriate hole. Back at your house, you steal more matches. You rush out to your friend. He has stolen a lighter from his father's cigarette tray. Together, you go to work on the shoe some more.

This time, the matches catch. And they do basically nothing. You try to burn the shoe, which your best friend took from his older brother's grass-mowing Keds. His brother had left them to dry in the basement. Even with the lighter held against a shoe, though, the moist canvas and the worn-down rubber won't burn. The best result you can get is melted rubber. And it's not much, either. You're making the soles of the Keds slightly warm and smooth.

"It doesn't work," Joe says. He's still your best friend. He's always willing to try.

"I saw it on television," you swear to him.

"Well, it's not doing anything." He continues to hold the lighter to the shoe. He's right. It's not burning.

How Different We Are

Not everybody carries matches, lighters, and tobacco, nowadays. No one tells ethnic jokes. We don't accept property destruction as a prank. Pushing someone downstairs is no longer funny. Chevy Chase falling downstairs is no longer funny. Actually, it never was. 

Gerald Ford falling down is still a little funny. But he was President.

 

Not Even Not Traveling 68: Hawaii - Oahu

In the morning, we arrived at our fourth stop, our third Hawaiian island, Oahu. Although Oahu is not the largest island in the chain, it's home to the most people, The state capital, Honolulu, sits on its southern coast.

On other islands, we landed in towns like Hilo, Kahului, Waila, and Kona. They seemed reasonably-sized - but not Honolulu. Because Honolulu was enormous.

A Comparison

When I vacationed with my wife in Chicago for a few days, many years ago, we wisely decided not to drive in the city. No one ever says, "Hey, what I want to do with my precious free time is fight the traffic in downtown Chicago." But that's the mistake we made with Honolulu. It's because I hadn't realized downtown Honolulu is basically Chicago, but moved to a nicer beach.

We went to pick up our rental car. Even getting to the site by taxi and on foot was a struggle through the crowds. Driving back out into the perpetual traffic jam of the downtown was almost impossible.

Another Comparison 

I have driven in New York City. It takes a special type of driver to do it in rush hour - basically, not me. You have to be assertive at a different level. My impression of Chicago traffic was similar, although as a tourist I could see it was a step below the intensity of New York. Honolulu, to my shock, competes at the Chicago level, albeit with more of a smile. The drivers have an aggressive downtown culture and, if you're going to drive with them, you need to watch and follow their unwritten rules about how close you can be, whose turn it is, and how much room to give pedestrians.

To make it extra stressful, I decided at the rental agency to make this the first time I drove a Toyota Prius. Now, they gave me five options. I picked the Prius deliberately. Immediately, I realized I was going to have regrets. The car had standard features and advanced configurations at the same time. It didn't have many built-in services but all of them it did have were engineered in a confusing way. I spent half an hour fighting for traffic position while struggling with the car's weird gear shift. Diane had to puzzle with the bluetooth at the same time. Plus, the car started with a 'Maintenance Needed' notice on the dashboard that never turned off.

Finally, A Sandy Beach

Eventually, we made it out of the city. The process was no fun but we broke free. We knew where we wanted to go: a park where we could rent equipment and go snorkeling. Diane had one picked out on her GPS. After twenty minutes more driving, we got there. Except we didn't, really. We couldn't park. They had the equipment shack. They had room in the ocean, sure. But the parking lot was closed.

We drove to our alternate destination, the Diamond Trail. A sign on the mountain there said the parking lot was full. Tourists had parked their cars along one side of the road, too, creating imaginary spots. There were no imaginary spots left.

So we kept driving. In time, we reached the southeast shore. There we found a docks area with an outdoor mall. We decided to have lunch at an Italian restaurant and look at our maps. I stared for a moment at the prices, though. The cheapest appetizer was twenty-five dollars. Of course, we ate anyway. We wanted to sit and figure out our next targets. Getting a table was also the only way to go to the bathroom. All the bathrooms in Honolulu and Waikiki were closed to non-customers.

During our lunch, Diane found another place to go snorkeling, then another. The businesses occupied spaces on the east bay. That meant we needed to keep driving. By this point, I was starting to resign myself to the time on the road but I was going stir crazy in the car. Lying prone in a bay gazing down at fish sounded wonderful.

The problem was, the next place was was closed due to lack of parking. And the next. We kept driving the loop of the main highway around the island and came down off the mountains to a place called Sandy Beach. There was no sign saying it was closed. I had to try it. Then, in the imaginary parking lot (there was a real, paved part but our part was a sand pit), I saw where I could make an extra imaginary space for our car. Diane pointed to a police car.

"They're not bothering anyone here so far," I countered. To be safe, when I saw someone pulling out, I snuck into their spot. Now we were just doing what the rest of the beach crowd was doing. In the Prius, we flopped around for a few minutes to get dressed for the surf. It wasn’t too hard because we had been ready to snorkel.

The beach was so nice that Diane felt the ocean touch her feet and said it was enough for her. She was done.

"I have to get in," I told her.

"I know you do," she replied. 

As I waded into the surf, teenagers kept telling me how “the waves were crazy” due to the storm on the other side of the island. Okay, fair. The waves were a lot taller than me. I'd never been here before, though. Maybe that was normal. 

It did not occur to me at the time that I am no longer fifteen years old. Body surfing was no problem for the first ten minutes. I rode a few waves successfully. But as I grew tired battling the waves and the undertows, it took more and more effort simply to survive failing to catch the waves (as the real surfers zoomed by) and eventually it took even more effort for me to recover from the pounding surf and sand and staying (mostly) upright.

Oh, the undertows. There were two, one moving north, another southeast. They met where the waves were the best, so of course that's where I wanted to be (along with everyone else). Thankfully, the crowd wasn't big and the surfers dodged through the swimmers with skill. The surfing area was bounded on the south side by sharp, volcanic rocks. So we were limited in how far we could spread out.

After the thirty-fourth surfer sped by me through the crowd, a magic timer went off in my mind/body saying, “that’s enough.” I had been thrashed in the surf for most of an hour. Diane deserved however much time it took for me to accompany her on a trip through the tidepools. 

To the south, we thought tidepools were nice enough. Getting dry and figuring out where to go next was okay, too. Half a day later, though, it occured to me that only teenagers had surfed in those waves. And me. I think the oldest person aside from me in the water at Sandy Beach was about twenty-five. Most of the others were in high school. I had been older than the boogie boarders, surfers, and body surfers by about forty years. They probably weren't telling me the surf was crazy because of the storm. They were, as politely as they could, telling me I was crazy.

Anyway, the tide pools really were nice. As we clambered back into the car, we glanced to the southwest and saw storm clouds. We gazed north and saw only sunshine in Waikīkī. 

Friendship Garden

Diane searched her phone for attractions. At this point, she was looking for almost anything: museums, parks, beaches, hiking trails, luaus, whatever looked open to the public. And we tried. We meandered along main and side roads to each spot. Some looked beautiful. At each and every one, though, the parking lot was full. When there was imaginary parking, that was taken, too.

Hawaiians on Oahu are comfortable with making their own spaces. However, I think they balk at rolling over the curb and into the park. None had done it, anyway, or I would have tried.

After five more failures, Diane found a place called Friendship Garden where the parking was described as “limited.” Given how things were going for us at sites with a hundred places to park (but all full), I figured we had no chance at Friendship Garden. It was a hiking destination, though. That’s something we have loved to do in these past few years. We were close, just ten minutes away. We had to try. 

The GPS took us off the main highway onto a side road north of Waikiki, in Keana. Next, it told us to turn into a housing development. It guided us up switchbacks in the development. Then we took a small road, one car wide, up a lonely mountain into exclusive, gated estates. Soon the path grew more tilted than anything in San Francisco. And it remained obviously private.

“Is this park accessible through someone’s house?” I joked. But my sarcasm turned out not to be entirely wrong.

Diane responded with a description of the nature trail. She read from an attractive paragraph supplied by her map. We could walk about a mile on a little mountain, under the shade. 

“You have reached your destination,” the GPS intoned. Diane waved it around.

“Stop! Stop!” She rose out of her seat.

“Do you see anything?” We paused on the road with estate walls to our left and a spacious, cast iron gate to our right. 

“No.” She slumped down again.

Down the slope to the right, which was the north side, we could see a mansion with its own vineyard. It didn’t look anything like a hiking spot. Next to the estate walls, two cars had occupied the only imaginary spaces available. I pressed the pedal down. The Prius rolled on.

In a quarter mile, the mountain trail ended in a loop. So the one lane road we were driving must have been able to accommodate two cars in opposite directions at least some of the time. We looped and headed back down, defeated. 

“You have reached your destination,” the GPS intoned. Diane sat up. And in front of us, a young man and a woman crossed the road from the mansion to one of the two cars in the imaginary spaces. Now I could see the spaces lay on a semi-paved shoulder. The shoulder looked designed to provide sewer access. I could see a round sewer plate on one side, in the shadows underneath a big truck. The young couple hopped in their brown sports car behind the truck and pulled out. We watched them roll down the hill in front of us.

“Pull in, pull in!” She held up her phone with the GPS blinking green at the bottom. “Let’s get out and look around.” 

I was cramped from driving. Stretching my legs sounded great. So I swung into the muddy gravel of the topmost spot. As I did, the truck in front, which apparently had a driver sitting in it who I hadn't noticed, started to pull away. The movement revealed the round sewer plate entirely. There was asphalt around the sewer plate. It looked like better parking so I rolled forward. I cut the engine and pulled the emergency brake.

“We’re here,” Diane announced as she got out.

“Well, we’re somewhere.” I stood up straight and closed my door behind me.

“No, I mean come around to this side of the car.”

When I walked around, I saw to my surprise that Diane was pointing to a placard. It read, in small but unmistakable letters, 'Friendship Garden.' In half a minute, we discovered another sign, one chiseled in stone. It had lay hidden by vegetation and, formerly, it had been blocked by the truck. I scratched my head as I thought. 

Two spots. That was the extent of the public parking. And we had just gotten one.

Well, Friendship Garden was worth the trouble. We wandered up the path and found a gazebo with pamphlets inside, describing the hike routes. The place turned out to be a large, private reserve although it was technically open to the public. (It had those two spaces.) Obviously, the locals of the neighborhood had to be the main users of these footpaths. The best source of access was a stroll up the road; otherwise, visitors had to depend on their luck with the uncertain parking.

To our shock, as we marched up a slope, we met a young woman coming down. She did not look happy to see us. She scowled as if we had invaded her private space. 

Friendship Garden is a ten-acre park, more or less. It occupies a mountain peak high enough to give a view of Kaneohe Bay, provided visitors climb half a mile to it. On its paths, hikers pass long stretches of trees, flowers, and birds. Some of the trees are Cook Pines. And that's weird. I found it odd and unsettling to see pine trees invading a tropical forest. New settlers to the islands must have planted the trees about a hundred and fifty years ago, from the look of them. The name 'Cook' pines is probably a clue. 

The Kokokahi Tract, the residential development outside the boundaries of the park, was developed in 1927 as a multi-ethnic community. Kokokahi was based on a Christian belief in the brotherhood of mankind. Its name translates to “one blood,” and amounts to a statement of its multi-ethnic purpose, which ran contrary to the prevailing segregation on the island at the time.

Not long after we started out, a bevy of college-aged kids started climbing up. We heard them park down below, a faint slam of car doors and excited, young voices. To our surprise, though, at about the halfway point on the trail, we got passed by someone different. A man who seemed to be walking his dog caught up to us. We stood aside to let him pass. Before we reached the summit, the college group passed us, too, where we stopped beside a pagoda to look at the Asian-style masonry.

At the top, we found ourselves surprised by the view of Kaneohe Bay. It really was beautiful in a way we hadn't expected, or at least I hadn't. The college kids were making a lot of noise, shouting to one another and fooling around by the side of a tree-lined cliff. One of the youngest ran up to us and beamed a white-toothed smile.

"Want us to take your picture?" he said. 

And so, at the top, we got a picture of us with a bit of the Kaneohe Bay in the background.
 

Not Even Not Traveling 67: Hawaii - Hilo

Wednesday, December 24

It was our arrival day in Hawaii. Specifically, we were docking in Hilo, a big city on the big island (the one actually called Hawai'i). It was also Diane's birthday.

This can be a tough day, sometimes. I usually feel like I'm not doing enough to make the day special. Fortunately, when we got a network connection, Diane's friends started chipping in with birthday wishes and I could tell she was relieved not to be forgotten.

We are lucky, nowadays, to receive so much affection over such distances. 

Diane and I ate breakfast in our suite. I was feeling ill and feverish, so I skipped my workout, confident that walking around the island on our excursions would make up for it. Diane planned for us to skip the HollandAmerica tours of Hilo anyway. We had rented a car with the idea that we'd make our own excursion itinerary. We could tour the island of Hawai'i, yes, but at our own pace.

"What are you most interested in seeing?" she asked me.

"The volcano park."

"Anything else?"

"Nature stuff. One of the botanical gardens." No one wants to see yet another city on vacation. Well, that might be just me. When it's a city with entertaining differences and great bookstores, like Portland, I can see some appeal to it. Mostly, though, I want to understand the land I'm visiting. There's nothing better than seeing the land itself or what's left of it, untouched or at least, unpaved. 

Diane wanted to see Rainbow Falls. Fine my me. For my part, I had memories of hiking to weird plants I wouldn't normally see. Visits to places like the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix were great, so I was the lookout for more like it. We found a promising attraction on the route between the Rainbow Falls and the National Volcano Park - the Pana'ewa Rainforest Botanical Garden and Zoo. It's apparently the only U.S. park located in an actual rainforest. Weird plants, I thought; so that's probably interesting. 

As usual, the spontaneously planned part of our day proved to be the best part. Rainbow Falls was nice enough, although Great Falls on the Potomac is nicer. Our final destination, the National Volcano Park was good because I found the steam vents fascinating. But the zoo we dropped by between those sites was the best. And it didn't even have weird plants.

Hawaii Has Coffee Girls

After the Rainbow Falls, we turned into a strip mall. I was looking for coffee. Diane found a place on her GPS called Coffee Girls. It was pink. The coffee was great. This is recommended, actually.

Hawaii Has Goats

As we turned onto the main drive into Pana'ewa Rainforest, three animals burst across the road. They dashed from trees on my left into the grass on my right, then trotted downslope into a tree-covered stream. We saw them for a few seconds, a small, white goat, a larger, brown goat, and another animal, maybe a donkey. (You would think I could recognize the difference between a donkey and a goat or a sheep but it was fast. And it was grey. And it had four legs.) 

At the time, I thought the three animals had escaped from the zoo. After seeing goats during every excursion in Hawaii, though, I realized that Hawaii simply has a lot of wild goats.

Pana'ewa Rainforest

We arrived fifteen minutes early. We bought our tickets. We waited. Eventually, the gate guard told us, "Go ahead." He waved us through the park entrance, which made us detour through the gift shop. As we walked out of the shop onto the zoo paths, we paused. The grounds were eerily quiet. We were the first and only tourists. After a minute or two, we heard someone say, "Hello."

I glanced around. There were no people in view.

"Hello." Thirty feet away, a macaw stood on a perch in a cage. It was staring at me.

"Hello," it said. 

"Hey, they've got a 'Hello Bird!'" I had no idea what a macaw was. It looked like a big, colorful parrot, mostly red with a bit of green and blue on its head. Also, it had a job. No professional greeter at a retail store did this better. 

"Hello." It spoke again as I approached. I read the plaque beneath its perch, which told me about the type of bird.

"You've got a big beak," I said.

"Hello."

"Well, that's enough of that."

"Hello."

So it wasn't much of a conversationalist. Still, it was pretty cool. I felt like we had already gotten a benefit from arriving early on December 24. We had only ourselves and the animals in this rainforest. We could give ourselves a private tour.

Well, the rainforest wasn't much. I dutifully read the display boards telling me what was what. There wasn't a lot to see. The paved zoo path and the cages had knocked back the jungle. Only in a handful places did we encounter swaths of green lushness. At one of those, a sign told us it wasn't part of the native rainforest but, instead, a grove of foreign transplants.

The animals, in contrast, each had distinct personalities. We saw a dark swan at its meal, surrounding by golden carp roiling the surface of the pond. Each fish attempted to help itself to the crumbs spilled by the swan. As we walked through a section of rainforest, we heard a hidden, native bird that sounded like a rave club electronics track. It sang just the highest end of a human hearing range, but it hit notes on a descending scale.

We found a white tiger roaming through an acre of grass. She flopped down in the sun for a moment. We walked to our left around her, watching. She rolled on her back and exposed her belly. In a pen behind her, we noticed an orange tiger, pacing. Someone had placed the orange one in a prison, essentially. It paced exactly like a prisoner, too, one who had spent too much time in solitary confinement.

"Maybe that one misbehaved?” Diane suggested as she studied how it was confined. Her idea seemed right. If one tiger had attacked or harassed the other, the zookeepers might have needed to cage the aggressor. There would have been no other good reason, in fact, so we hoped it was something like that.

Farther south on the trail we met more caged birds. The sign said we were looking at an alala. However, the alala remained quiet and tried to hide. Apparently, it's a type of Hawaiian crow that went extinct in the wild. So we were seeing one of the handful remaining. Fortunately, local Hawaiians had started a project to reintroduce the alala in the wild. The program was just then starting to show signs of success. Our bird looked like he remained doubtful.

A little further on, a grey crowned crane stared at us like we had forgotten to bring the coffee. (True enough.) It barely blinked. Crowned cranes all look like mad scientists after a long night because they have spiky heads, a bit like English punks but also like Doc Brown in Back to the Future. They've got wild, bewildered eyes, too.

At one of the fences with a big “animal bites” warning sign, an emu trotted over to meet Diane as she approached. The giant birds got an acre of grass to roam in, like the tigers. I waited for Diane to try to pet the emu but she wisely did not. I think the bird was waiting for that, too.

At the lemur cage, we met animals like the ones in the Madagascar movie. They didn't dance but they had pretty (and recognizable) physiques and fur markings. They turned their butts to us, totally unbothered by their first customers of the day at the zoo.

Farther on, we met two binturong. I hadn't seen any before. The smaller and stronger binturong lazed on a branch in the middle of the cage. Another name for this type of animal is 'bearcat' and I could see why. It was about the size of a lynx but with fur like a bear. Although it seemed strong and tough, it relaxed like an opportunity hunter - basically, like a cat. This particular binturong had a surly expression as it ignored us, half-sleeping. I felt as if we were watching a furry Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. This time, he was playing a character who refuses to get up from the couch, lazy but dangerous.

Along the southwestern zoo path, we found monkeys of many types. Each one disdained us in their own unique way. Some showed us their butts. Some got up front and relaxed in exaggerated poses, slumping as if to make it clear they didn't worry about us at all. A few remained preoccupied with the bars of their cage. Others played with their favorite toys.

At some point, I turned a corner and discovered albino peacocks. Diane had mentioned them, I thought, when we had each gone separate directions briefly and then reunited. Here they were, in their big cage. Although there were two of them, they looked rare and expensive, like designer editions of this year's top-end model. As I studied the pair, I became aware of motion to my right. I turned to see what it was and spotted a regular peacock, actually a peahen, strutting free. It wasn't in a cage. Rather, it was roaming the paved zoo paths like a tourist. When my gaze fell on it, the bird held motionless for a moment. It gave me a sidelong glare, as if I had interrupted its visit to its albino relatives and I was the one who didn't belong.

Maybe the peahen came to check out the albino peacocks every day. She treaded around me, behind and to my left, where she could get a better view of her caged relatives.

"There are more," said Diane. She saw me and stepped close. "I've seen at least two others."

In fact, there were half a dozen free-roaming peahens. We saw them at a distance, sitting in groups of two or three, or we found them in the underbrush along the paths as we visited the smaller animals like the swimming turtles, poisonous frogs, snakes, fish, salamanders, and axolotl. 

This was the first axolotl I've seen in real life.

Volcano Park

Back at the Pana'ewa Zoo, the day had been warm, for December. The sky had been intermittently cloudy and bright. When we drove up to the top of Mount Kīlauea, though, we met a different sort of weather. At this elevation, the day was a cold and rainy. And it was still December, of course.

Normally, people can stand on the edge of the volcano caldera and see across it. On this day, no one could. Sure, we could stand in the wind and rain. But we couldn't see through the swirling mists. The air turned grey and opaque in the distance. 

We could still see a quarter of a mile, maybe. It simply wasn't far enough to do more than make out faint, silver shapes halfway across the caldera. On the national parks app, we saw we had just missed an eruption warning. We'd been lucky in that respect. People had been allowed back in. Also, the steam vents in the caldera were billowing at their fullest and probably their hottest, too. But the wind on the rim gusted at high speeds. It was loud. It blew the rain into people's faces from unexpected directions. It billowed the tourist raincoats, knocked down umbrellas, spat moisture into every sleeve, every cuff, and down the backs of anyone who left part of their neck exposed.

Now, I was unaccountably happy about this. I enjoyed the weather. Yes, it was December. So what? It was Hawai'i. I could have hiked around the mountain for hours. However, I could see everyone else's faces around me. They all were miserable. Adults with children were already cranky, of course. So were their children. So were teenagers. Instagram posters gave the world a bitter glare. College students, usually the hardest to faze, gave their friends surly glances. People looked exhausted by the wind and rain. 

After an hour of hiking from place to place around the rim, Diane remarked to me, "I'm not enjoying this as much as I thought I would."

As I've mentioned, I have a great emotional immune system, immune to all sorts of hints. But even I caught this one.

"Let's get to someplace with trees," I suggested. I grabbed the brim of my hat as another gust tried to carry it away.

"Out of the fucking wind."

"Um, yes." Although I liked the wind and enjoyed the sight of tourists in plastic raincoats getting caught in the gale, I knew it wasn't enough to entertain Diane. Even when she cackled as she watched a fashionista in a yellow, see-through raincoat turn the wrong way and explode, suddenly, into a crystal sphere of surprise, it wasn't enough. 

"There have to be better hiking locations somewhere around," she muttered. 

Off we marched, back to the tourist center and back into our car. 

Timing: don't go to Volcano Park at two in the afternoon like we did if you want to see the Lava Tube Caves. We decided the tubes should be our next stop but, alas, we did not make it in. We were not even close to getting a slot. The parking lot had filled to overflowing, probably hours before. Park police were shooing drivers away from trying to find a spot in there. We dutifully moved on. But the site after it was full, too. And the next. Tourists who couldn't get into the lava tubes were settling for the sites close by. We had to keep driving. We couldn't get into the petroglyph sites, either. We looped around for miles. Eventually, between our park map and our sense of where we would find a good hike, we navigated to one of the more remote locations, the Hillina Pali Overlook. Sure enough, we found parking and, not far away, a hiking trail through groves of trees sheltered from the wind and rain.

We couldn't stay protected for all the miles, of course. Sometimes we climbed barren slopes of volcanic ash, pumice, and basalt, When we did, though, I still liked being out in the weather. 

"How are we doing for time?" Diane asked at a distant point in the trail. 

"It's pretty late. We'll have to head back soon." We needed to drive back to the city of Hilo. After we returned the rental car, we'd have to hike downhill to the docks and re-board the Zaandam for dinner.

"I think I want to call 'pumpkin.'" This is her short-hand term for, 'the magic of this is wearing off and my enchanted coach is turning back into a pumpkin.' Sometimes, when we're at a party, she'll turn to me, whisper 'pumpkin,' and I'll know it's getting late and she's tired. It works on hikes, too. 
 

Not Even Not Traveling 66: Hawaii - Arriving in San Diego

Flying There and Being There

We planned and packed. We rose before dawn. We slept as we flew. Suddenly we were in San Diego and I was talking about computers with our Turkish-American immigrant Uber driver.

It turned out he had written a program to places calls for the Uber / San Diego Airport waiting list. After months of troubleshooting, he got his hardware and software right. He started getting the best possible spot in the Uber ride list. Other drivers noticed. They wanted in. Now he offers his software as a paid service. The other drivers pony up to get the best spots in the Uber ride list for the airport. So we talked about his software for a while but also the hardware. I asked questions about his design and I agreed he had implemented the failover correctly. I couldn't validate the load balancing just by his description but I had to say his app performance sounded like he'd done things right. (Also, I made sure he said he had offline backups and he'd tested them.)

Now our Uber driver was getting his main income from his app. His driving had become his side gig. It was very cool. His scheduler could probably expand more. Due to the way scheduling is different in different airports, he would need a server pair per area but still, that would be fun.

He's got an active mirror, a backup, and he's keeping up with the increased load of his customer base. He's doing it all with homegrown equipment. Also, he was a fun driver.

Segway Tour of San Diego

At our hotel, we checked in early. The staff was nice. We wanted to drop our bags and bolt; and they let us do it. We didn't have much time in San Diego. Diane wanted to see as much as she could. She had scheduled a full afternoon of tours. First came our segway ride.

Our tour guide was Amy. She turned out to be a Navy vet who spent most of her military tour in San Diego. She mustered out in the city. Now she proved able to tell us about the history of San Diego, how the harbor was discovered and named twice by different explorers; how the downtown was a scrub-brush desert; and how none of the plants we saw were local. The last part shocked me a little. San Diego looks lush. But every tree and flower was deliberately imported.

Opinion: Balboa Park was the best part of the tour. We entered over the Cabrillo Bridge, a narrow two-lane road that's more friendly to pedestrians than cars. Inside, we got to see how the park hosts museums, theatres, gardens, biking trails, and of course the San Diego Zoo, the most popular zoo in the country. One of the museums on the grounds of Balboa Park is the Comic-Con Museum. (We did not drive into that one on our segways.) Balboa also hosts the San Diego Air & Space Museum, Automotive Museum, History Center, a Model Railroad Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the San Diego Natural History Museum. You could spend a week just visiting the park.

A woman named Kate Sessions started the park, at least according to Amy. Sessions gave her plant nursery to the city, then she donated trees and exotic flowers every year. She's responsible for a lot of the plant life in San Diego. In 1915 and in 1935, the park hosted International Expos; some of the park architecture comes out of the preparation efforts. Then in World War II, the U.S. Navy took over the park and made it into a training ground and barracks. (Yes, they gave it back.) This is an intensely varied and worthwhile place.

Kayaking Tour of La Jolla

We discovered a few hidden factors involved in a kayaking trip in La Jolla in December.

• It's chilly (see: December)
• The previous kayakers complained to our faces about not having wetsuits
• The tour guides all had wet suits
• And we could rent wet suits

So we rented them. More properly dressed than I'd planned, I pushed-launched our two-person kayak into the waves. I had help from Tumas, our guide. Tumas hailed from Toronto, he said, not San Diego. He had gone to school in the U.S. and decided to get his green card so he could settle in the United States.

Diane and I paddled out into the deeps. Tumas promptly steered his kayak to stay in position between us and the shore. Apparently, most of the problems on the tour have come from kayakers straying too near the rocks.

Tumas pointed out leopard sharks beneath us but, to be honest, I only saw a few ripples and flitting, darkish shapes. Instead, I noticed the bright orange fish around us. Those were garibaldi. They didn't dart around. They hung out and nibbled on rocks like stoners nibbling on crumbs from the couch, unwilling to move.

We were the only ones moving (except for another ripple that Tumas said was a seal). The main site we wanted to see in at La Jolla was a series of caves below the cliffs along the shore. The sun was already low. We wanted to get into the caves before it got dark. We weren't allowed to bring cameras in the kayak but trust me when I say the caves were, well, okay. Not breath-taking. Not astounding. They're nice if you like weird light and seaweed. And history. During prohibition, gangsters used the caves for smuggling barrels of alcohol, which they brought in on rowboats.

Back outside the caves, we saw a cloud of diving birds. They had formed a hunting flock, which our guide called a 'kettle.' The kettle consisted of cormorants, pelicans, and a few seagulls teaming up to pick off individual fish from a school in the shallows. The cormorants and pelicans seemed to be having success.

Then at my request, we kayaked southward toward a roost of sea lions. We could see thirty of them. Close on the north side, we saw a couple males threatening each other. Males weigh maybe 1200 to 1400 pounds. They are loud and territorial. They establish their positions on the rocks; a few females join; and that's their social order. Trouble starts when a male encroaches on another's territory.

Two of the males were mad. Our guide moved his kayak between them. The biggest sea lion howled. He swam toward Tumas's kayak. He picked up speed for a charge. Then he dove under the water. A minute later, he popped up somewhere else.

"They're pretty cool, aren't they?" said Tumas. 

"Yes." That's why I wanted to get close. I wouldn't have gotten between them, though. I guessed Tumas had plenty of experience.

"Notice they don't eat the garibaldi?" he said.

"Yeah. Why not?"

"Garibaldi don't poop like other fish. They excrete waste through their skin."

I thought about it for a second and said, "They must taste terrible."

"Yeah!" He smiled at the thought.

Not Even Not Traveling 65: Hawaii - Diving in Molokini

Our Snorkeling Excursion

It was Christmas Day. The tour owner himself was driving the boat. He let a lot of his staff take the holiday off and now he was captain. He seemed to be having fun with it. He punched the throttle. His big, ninety-capacity boat hit the waves like a jet ski. Diane leaned close and told me it reminded her of a kids-only roller coaster she rode as a child in Hershey park.

We noticed whale tail fins to the port (left) side, far away.

Then the boat turned. We gave each other looks of surprise. The vessel spun completely around. This wasn’t supposed to happen. One of the crew approached us.

“We forgot the food,” she whispered. It turned out the captain hadn't waited at the dock for the catered food to arrive. And it was a tour requirement. So he seemed out of practice at being the captain. 

When we got back on the correct course, the owner kicked the engine up another notch. Diane and I stood at the front, bouncing, and watched the ocean and the shorelines. Our ship was turning towards a small island. After a while, a single flying animal popped out of the sea to our left. It glided for a while, not really flapping. Then folded its wings and popped back into the sea.

“Was that a flying fish all alone?” I asked. The alone part was what surprised me most.

“Yes,” said Diane.

We looked for another but never saw one.

In time, our ship slowed and approached a cove on the northwest shore of the island. Another tour group had set anchor in the cove, too. 

Coral Hygiene

"This is a protected marine habitat," the captain warned over the loudspeaker. He started describing the fines we would pay for touching the fish, going ashore on the beach, and a list of other impermissible activities, each of which would result in the sort of fines that would wreck a small country's defense budget. I listened with a smile because I knew, for each rule, someone had decided, "I'll bet I can ride a sea turtle with a horse harness" or something and now that’s why we have the rule. People are amazing.

Now, since I have facial hair, I had to use vaseline to get a good mask seal as we suited up. It gave me the dignified appearance of a man who just head-butted a petroleum jelly monster but hey, it did the job. I mean, for the first time in my life, my diving mask didn't leak. In the water, I dove down to test it. Still no leak. We paddled toward what looked like the prime spot. Everything was perfect. I could see fish forty feet down to the bottom. Then thirty, then twenty. We stopped and paddled in circles. 

Now, these first ten minutes were what Diane later described as "bad." She was hyperventilating. Between the cold of the water and the weirdness of breathing through a tube, her body was trying too hard. She was convinced she would never want to go snorkeling again and she was probably composing a one-star review for it, mentally. I experienced something similar. I kept tasting salt water no matter how hard I clamped down on the mouthpiece of my snorkel. As I relaxed and paid attention to the fish beneath me, though, the seal of my lips around the mouthpiece improved. Everything started to feel natural. Breathing was never difficult again, the entire day.

So my first-time snorkeling advice is: give yourself a couple minutes to adjust. We both got comfortable.

After our adjustment period, the snorkeling experience was great. We were looking down on a coral reef and a range of fish I've only have seen in aquariums before. They included a few slender, bottle-nosed specimens I'd never seen anywhere. One of them was long and thin and silvery blue. It blended with the seafloor so well, it was difficult to make out. When I pointed it out, Diane had a hard time understanding there was a fish. 

But soon enough, we were pointing out weird fish to each other more or less constantly.

Half an hour later, the captain rang a bell to call us back to the boat. He was ready to take us to our next snorkeling site, informally called "turtle town." 

Swimming with Yertle

When we got in at the turtle site, though, we saw forty feet down to blank, blue nothingness. We maneuvered. We tried to find interesting fish and underwater alcoves. In theory, we were swimming with turtles. But we weren't. We didn't see any. 

Eventually, I noticed a rock moving far away. I realized the rock had flippers. After I watched it move for a while, I went and got Diane. I pointed it out to her in the same manner she and I had pointed out fish before. It took a while for her to see it. After she started tracking the animal, we swam together above it for twenty minutes.

By the end of our dive time, we had gathered a group of five, all tracking the turtle. As I started looking around the ocean bottom a little farther, trying to find more to track, I got separated from the group. Basically, I got lost. I figured that if I found the turtle again, I'd find my group. So I paddled in a big circle until I found a turtle moving pretty far beneath me in the near-dark of the sea. When I looked around, I found no other swimmers nearby. That was weird. I tracked the turtle for a while, convinced the other snorkelers would show up. I kept looking but I never found any people. So I swam away from the turtle, back toward the distant boat. In a minute, I found my group. They were tracking the original turtle, which I had lost. So I must have found a different, smaller turtle. 

I paddled around with the larger group for a while. The captain blew the "all back" horn. We clambered aboard, divested ourselves of the diving equipment, and took our seats. The boat bounced. Around me, people ate from the food supplies from the tour buffet.

Hawaii Whale-0

Next, the captain took us to where he had noticed a whale surfacing in the distance. I’m good at spotting whales even in whitecapped seas, or so I assumed after the one time I did it, so I got up when I heard the news. I marched to the prow of the boat to look. At first, I noticed nothing important. I know the spout plumes move differently, at least to my sense of motion, than the regular, white, ocean spray. After about a minute, I saw one, a plume twice as tall as the waves. 

I pointed. Everyone around me turned their heads too late. There was nothing for them to see. In a minute, I noticed another plume. I pointed. 

"He probably is seeing them," my wife said in support of my phantom ability. Our fellow passengers weren't sure. They shook their heads. An Australian lady sidled up next to me.

"Are you really seeing them?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I love whale watching," she told me. She described the one other time she had gone to see them on a cruise off the coast near Perth. After six hours, she finally glimpsed one. She'd been thrilled. Now, I thought, we were seeing three sets of plumes, so I mentioned it.

"Seems unbelievable," she said with a smile. When we got close enough, I pointed again and, at last, she saw what I saw. She exclaimed, "Oh, it's lovely!"

After they heard her remark, a few other ladies came to join us. Soon the other passengers started to see the plumes, too. They swarmed to the decks of the boat, every corner and cranny. We listened to the captain, clearly a veteran of this sort of event, as he described what we should look for. He said we were pulling up beside a mother and her calf.

I wondered where the third whale had gone. From the timing of the plumes, I was pretty sure I'd seen one, but it had disappeared before the boat drew close. Meanwhile, from the bridge, the captain kept up his narration. He kept saying this was a mother and calf but, if so, the calf was mostly grown. These were both large humpbacks. We kept watching them for ages. They kept surfacing. The Australian lady was clasped her hands and sometimes, clapped. 

Finally, I remembered my camera. Since it was really my phone, I hadn't been able to take it snorkeling for pictures of fish or turtles. I could use it now, though. I headed down below decks. Despite the wall of glass windows there with great views of the whales, the space was deserted. Amused, I dug through my bag. 

“A breach!” The captain shouted in surprise.

Whoops. I ran to one of the windows, phone in hand. Sure enough, I saw a whale come down in a terrific splash. It had not done a belly flop so much as a back flop. The creature had turned while in the air. A moment later, the second whale rose up.

"Another breach!" yelled the captain. "Two! Very rare!"

We stared as the pair of whales seemed to play. For a minute, they swam near the surface. The ocean roiled.

"Another!" he shouted. Sure enough, the slightly-smaller whale leaped out of the water again. It twisted and fell with a mighty, booming splash. 

For a few minutes, the whales settled down to a routine of skimming under the waves and surfacing from time to time, usually together. They were a synchronized swimming team. After I took a few photos and videos, I meandered back up to the fore deck.

"Did you see the breaches?" Diane asked. She shielded her eyes from the sun as she turned to me. 

"Oh yeah." I nodded. We pointed at the whales and talked about them for a few minutes. At last, one of them kicked up a tail fin. 

"Uh oh," I mumbled. A moment later, the other whale did the same. 

They were gone. We had spent more than twenty minutes with them, though. And we had been up close. The Australian woman pattered across the deck toward us. Her gestures were wide, her eyes crinkling. She couldn't stop smiling.