Dan's Papers - July 3, 2009 - TSUNAMIS, LEAPING WHALES, LAVA WATERFALLS

Many of us who live and work in the Hamptons get a chance to take long vacations in the wintertime when business slows down. The choice really is to do one of two things - either go somewhere to relax or go somewhere or have an adventure. For relaxing, go to Cancun or the Caribbean or Hawaii. For an adventure, well, it's up to you. Try the badlands of Turkey, the highlands of Guatemala, the deltas of Botswana or the outlawed country of Cuba. I've adventured in all of those.

This year Chris and I took time off from an adventure to go back to Hawaii to visit friends and family we know there. We went there to relax. We came home with adventures. We will never forget these adventures.

One adventure involved a sound. We were at the Mauna Loa Resort on the Kona Side of Hawaii - this is the former Rock Resort - and were waiting at the tennis court for a friend when we heard it. It was a boom. Something like what you would hear when an aircraft goes through the sound barrier. Then it came again. Boom. It was out at sea.

"There they are!" someone on a tennis court said, stopping play and pointing. We looked. Boom. Way off in the ocean, perhaps a quarter mile out, an enormous, glistening whale the size of a truck leaped high out of the water and then fell down on top of it, sending up a great white splash. There was a pause of three seconds. Boom. There it was again. We had seen the splash. Now, three seconds later, we heard it.

All tennis play had stopped. It was two of them - a mother and her calf, perhaps the mother teaching the calf. First the mother would leap up. Then the calf. The calf was about the size of a Previa. The mother the size of a Suburban. Boom. Then boom again, but softer.

This went on for quite some time. Binoculars came out, but they were really not necessary. On this bright clear day, you could see them just fine. And it was not just the two of them. Now there were four or five. A whole herd of them, or pack of them or whatever they are called, joyfully heaving themselves up into the air, then letting themselves happily fall to the surface of the sea with this great boom. Whales at play.

I asked someone how often this happens, and was told, oh, maybe every few days. They find a spot they like and they just start fooling around like a pile of puppies.

We watched for about 15 minutes. They never stopped. A fishing boat motored over toward them to get close, though not too close. They dropped anchor. What a day.

"You ought to see where the lava is going into the sea," some people told us at a bed and breakfast in Hilo, the second largest city in Hawaii. "It's a boiling hot red waterfall. And sometimes, when the rocks explode, fireworks shoot up into the sky."

This we had to see. We were staying at the Shipman House, a historic 19th century businessman's home turned into a place to stay. The owner of it, a Shipman descendant, outfitted us for the trip - rain gear, blanket, flashlight, umbrella and a yellow plastic bag to put it all in.

We left at 5 p.m. There was stuff to see when it was light, and there was stuff to see after sunset. We drove about a half hour along the southern coast of the Big Island until the highway came to an abrupt end at a place where we met the edge of a great lava flow, now black and frozen, that had slithered across the road five years earlier on its way to the ocean.

The highway ended there, but the road did not. It continued, a makeshift one lane blacktop affair the state had built ON TOP of the frozen lava for another mile, just so visitors could rumble along and get to the spot where the action was.

Moving slowly along this mile, we'd pass a car coming the other way and have to move off the road to the right onto some cinders to allow the other car to pass. We could also see, off in the distance, the great white plume of steam, created where the lava waterfall met the sea. We were headed for it. The steam plume rose several miles and then headed south out over the ocean for about 20 miles. It went wherever the prevailing winds took it. And it was visible from space. On the days it was right over the narrow road - they'd call this mist vog - they'd close the road because of it. Nothing to see that day. Try tomorrow.

Along this part of the ride, we were told to notice that people were living on the lava. And there they were, living in trailers or lean-tos, or, on two occasions, even in nice houses that had been built on stilts driven into the lava. Why? Well, it was because they owned that part of the lava. Beneath it was the property where the former wooden house they owned had been inundated and then set fire by the lava when it came through. They still owned the land. Who could prevent them from building there? Some even had electricity. You could hear the generators.

What an extraordinary thing.

Finally, the road ended entirely. It was dark now. Police officials ushered us to spaces along the sides of the road to park. We got out with our gear into the rain. We were under the shadow of the steam plume. We took out our umbrellas. And then we were on our own.

The next part of this story is the really extraordinary part. In the dark, for it was dark now, we had to pick our way, with the help of our flashlights, on foot, over the rocky black lava for three quarters of an hour to a viewing place by the ocean, which was as close as the authorities would let us get to the conflagration of red hot lava hitting the ocean waves.

From the start of this walk, which was three quarters of a mile long, we could see not only the steam plume in front of us, but also the red glow of where the lava fell into the sea. As we walked, it got closer until finally we were by the fence, where about a hundred other people either sat or stood to watch this amazing display of nature. It was a consistent heavy red flow there in the dark, with an occasional burst of fireworks, to which the people watching would oooh and aaaah. And yes, there were people selling t-shirts out there. Finally, satisfied, we picked our way through the lava field - there was no path at all - and went home.

We visited Kauai and attended an oceanfront luau at the Sheraton. We climbed rocks and walked along streams through a rainforest on that island. The residential building at the Maua Kea on the Big Island had been hit by an 8.2 earthquake three years earlier and only a month earlier had reopened. The building we were in had been ripped in two and lost its balconies. But all was fine now.

Where we stayed at a fine hotel on the ocean in Kauai, the Kauai Marriott Resort and Beach Club, the bellhop who took us to our room, after showing us how everything worked, asked if we would mind if he sang us a song. We said we would not. He whipped out a ukulele, and, in a lovely voice, sang a love song called "For You." No bellhop had ever done that for us before.

We played golf in the pouring rain at the Makna Kea. I took two drives at a par 3 from one promontory sticking out into the ocean over the waves to another promontory where the green was, and plunked both in the surf.

But nothing has remained in my mind like the sound of those whales slapping down onto the sea offshore, or the brilliant light of the fireworks and the cheers of the crowd out at the lava waterfall.

Of course, we did decline to take the one-hour mule ride down a cliff to the peninsula on Molokai that had been a leper colony for hundreds of years. That's the only way to get down to it. We could have met several lepers who have remained after the placed closed. They are no longer contagious.