Westways > April, 1998

Legends of the Falls
Islands of folklore and myth hide many secrets from the unsuspecting tourist.
by Eric Hiss

SAY "HAWAII" and most Southern Californians nod knowingly, the lilting name evoking memories of suntans, surfboards, and umbrella-laden cocktails. While frivolous diversion is serious business on the islands, the Hawaiian chain sustains a parallel universe of travel experi- ences rooted in deep history and culture. Marked by ancient place names and astonishing physical features assigned mythic beginnings by the first Hawaiians, the six main islands remain fresh destinations if viewed through eyes open to the cultural and historical essences of the landscape.

Following is a tropical trilogy, excerpts if you will, from my experiences on the three islands where I searched for the Hawaii of legends. I learned many lessons on Oahu, Kauai, and the Big Island, but above all I learned to be careful approaching the local gods - in Hawaii, myths might be closer to the truth than we mainlanders realize.

OAHU'S HISTORIC VALLEY
About 40 miles, one hour, and several blood pressure points from Honolulu lies the island's bucolic North Shore. At the opposite end of the island from Waikiki, it's a retreat to old-time Hawaii. Aging wooden storefronts, such as M. Matsumoto's Shaved Ice in Haleiwa town, provide shade for slow-moving surfers and kamaainas (locals). During the winter, these same surfers become animated aquanauts, challenging the world's largest ridable waves as they come thundering ashore at nearby Waimea Bay.

Behind the bay, in the deep, cool valley on the opposite side of the Kamehameha Highway, lies Waimea Valley and Adventure Park. The 1,800-square-acre historical nature garden is a privately owned botanical park and tourist attraction where the nonprofit Waimea Arboretum and Botanical Foundation researches rare and native plants and where visitors can attend demonstrations of cliff-diving, Hawaiian games, and cultural events. Here I learned about the Hawaiian festival of Makahiki, a three-day harvest festival that in ancient times lasted four months. I also strolled the impressive hibiscus gardens, where 400 species are on view.

Pu'u o Mahuka altar

But my first introduction to Waimea Park wasn't actually the park at all, but Pu'u o Mahuka, a sprawling heiau, or ancient Hawaiian temple complex, on an adjoining promontory, preserved and maintained as a state monument. I spent a postcard-perfect morning - all azure skies and radiant sunlight - poking around the stacked lava rocks marking the perimeter of what had been the island's largest of such sites. I silenced my mind and tried imagining the spectacle of the ceremonies that took place here before European contact: sunlight glinting off the brightly colored feather capes of the nobles, the priests chanting from oracle towers, and sometimes the sacrifice of enemies and lawbreakers.

Kayaks beside the Waimea River on Oahu

Brochures are available detailing the colorful history and religious significance of Pu'u o Mahuka, but I was fortunate enough to run into Butch Helemano, a well-known native Hawaiian musician and wood-carver, who gave me a personal overview of the area. That day he had traded in his more artful instruments for a weed-eater and was busy clearing growth from the heiau grounds as a member of a group of volunteer caretakers. During our chat alongside the low lava-rock walls of the structure, Helemano detailed the span of history in the area, recounting the visitors Waimea and the heiau had entertained throughout the centuries. The colorful cast who washed up on these shores included everyone from the first Europeans to visit the island (the crew of Captain James Cook's ships, the Resolution and Discovery, arrived in Waimea Bay in 1779 shortly after losing their captain to a bloody skirmish on the Big Island) to modern day Hare Krishna believers who visit the heiau for its legendary spiritual energy.

"My view is that the gods are still here," Helemano offered, gesturing at the expansive grounds of the Pu'u o Mahuka shrine. "As a practitioner of the Hawaiian religion, I come here and pray every morning, like Catholics would go to Mass."

But some visitors respond to the spiritual facet by succumbing to a "wishing-well syndrome" - coins, candles, and rocks wrapped in ti leaves or rock lau laus are left as offerings. Tourist literature and locals alike urge guests to refrain from depositing the well-intentioned detritus, but somehow everything from Buddhas to bicycles end up as offerings at Pu'u o Mahuka and other Hawaiian sacred sites.

Apart from the thought-provoking heiau, the vista from the two-acre site proved the perfect place to put my new Nikon through its paces. To the north, I studied Kaena Point, where ancient Hawaiians believed souls leaped to enter the afterworld. Below, Waimea Bay shimmered, its midsummer tranquillity belying a ferocious winter temperament.

KAUAI'S MYTHIC BEAUTY
On an island known for its staggering beauty, the Haena area still stands out as exceptional. Its beaches are gems of tropical idyll leading west toward the Na Pali coast, an isolated area where eons of erosion and giant landslides have carved one of nature's great masterworks.

Pele's Flower

Beaches such as Ke'e - the last one accessible by car on the North Shore's Kuhio Highway - possess an attraction few mortals can resist (or goddesses, for that matter). It was here at Ke'e, legend holds, that the powerful and incendiary goddess of volcanoes, Pele, turned up in search of a chief whose hula drumming aroused her from her dreams. Assuming human form as a woman, Pele strode up to the chief, captivated his heart, and initiated a careening saga that maintains a high place in native Hawaiian mythology. This legend holds particular relevance and sacredness for practitioners of hula kahiko, the traditional hula. Ke'e is also a really great place to snorkle.

The parking lot was full of rental cars whose intrepid drivers sprawled in their glory on the hot white sand of the gently curving beach. The crescent of blue Pacific that softly pulsed against the shore seemed designed to hold as many snorkelers and bathers as were willing to bob tranquilly inside the sheltering reef. On this beach I rendezvoused with Kehaulani Kekua, a Hawaiian cultural advisor, who had agreed to be my guide on Kauai.

A student of hula since the age of two, Kekua comes from a family of traditional Hawaiian cultural talents: Her grandmother was a kumu hula - a hula master - and her grandfather came from a prominent line of Hawaiian musicians.

Leaving the beach, we picked up a short path on the west end of Ke'e, moving languidly through a lush tunnel of ti plants and ginger that leads to an area near the start of the famed Kalalau hiking trail. We were headed for Ka Ulu a Pa'oa, one of the most sacred hula sites in all of Hawaii. To my untrained eye, this area just yards from the edge of the beach had seemed a place of abundant natural beauty, but nothing beyond that. The soaring cliffs leading up to Mount Makana are considered sacred by native Hawaiians, Kekua told me, and I began to see offerings carefully placed in niches in the gray and black basaltic lava -- garlands and specially prepared bundles of ferns and flowers, each selected as proper reverences to Laka, the goddess who presides over the art of hula.

What at first had seemed to be agricultural terraces of stone and lava were in actuality dance and training platforms, I realized, where centuries of hula artists had trained to become masters of this revered art. This was where the most famed halau hulas, or hula schools, practiced their ancient arts: dancing, playing instruments, and chanting in honor of the major deities of hula.

"This area would have been considered the most sacred in the old days," Kekua explained. "This was where the ceremonies took place." The papa hula, or hula performance area, faces soaring black and gray basaltic cliffs bursting with plants and ferns. "Ke'e means 'critique' in Hawaiian, and here hula students were trained and judged," continued Kekua. "The curriculum was very difficult. There were all sorts of restrictions, trials, and tests, including chanting on the beach so you were clearly heard against the booming winter surf and swimming the channel, which was said to be patrolled by a very large guardian shark."

My interest piqued, I asked her what sorts of restrictions were enforced, and just what role the shark played. "There were restrictions on diet -- no foods such as he'e, octopus, which has the double meaning of 'slip away,' as in knowledge, because in the Hawaiian language, double meanings of words are very significant. Also, no sexual relations, no cutting of hair."

"And if a rule was broken?" I asked.

"That's where the shark came in," smiled Kekua. If a student disobeyed, the shark would impose strict discipline -- more than most wanna-be hula dancers could survive. Staring down at the sunbathers on the beautiful beach, I wondered how many knew the legend of the shark god.

Crater Rim Drive in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

HAWAII'S SACRED CRATERS
Geologically the youngest of the island chain, the Big Island is still enduring growing pains, which are evidenced at Kilauea, one of the world's most active volcanoes. Located in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Kilauea's magma rises from a hot spot deep below the earth's crust -- successively forming Hawaii's sister islands as they move on the great tectonic Pacific Plate ir a northwesterly direction at a rate of a few inches a year. It's impossible to visit the Big Island of Hawaii and not come into contact on some level with the legendary goddess of volcanoes, Pele. Every local will offer you insight into her myth and powers: The gas station attendant will tell you about the curse of the rocks (take one home, and bad luck follows) the bus driver will wax on about drivers seeing a woman in a white dress hitchhiking, afterward thinking she must have been Pele; the park ranger will point out the crater where Pele is said to reside today.

Haunting coasts of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

However one interprets tales of Pele, it certainly can't be denied that this relatively minor ancestral deity within the Hawaiian pantheon has managed to make quite a name for herself, embodying the fitful tremors, flashing magma, and vast lava fields associated with the southeastern end of the Big Island.

Here science and myth meet, as Hawaiian legend tells of Pele's gradual journey down the island chain searching for a home, planting her fire stick in vain until she came to the island where the home fires still burn.

Lava flows can be as capricious and elusive as myth, with no predictable patterns, so I decided to first get acquainted with Pele's neighborhood from an aerial perspective by taking a helicopter tour from the Hilo airport to the Pu'u O'o vent on Kilauea's southeast slope. I soon learned that it's one thing to watch the Discover Channel, but quite another to actually fly over a coursing river of magma churning up from the core of our planet. This 50-minute flight was the best hundred bucks I ever spent.

Coming back down to earth, I went off to explore Volcanoes Park by foot and Jeep, a project that conceivably could take a lifetime due to the vastness of the 377-square-mile national park, so I remained on the 11-mile Crater Rim Drive. Along the way I stopped at the Kilauea Visitor Center to view its well-known eruption movie and then toured the Thomas A. Jaggar Museum, which offers sometimes-working seismographs and an unobstructed view of the Kilauea Caldera Crater.

After nudging around an international assortment of tourists for an hour or so as they craned over displays in the visitors' centers, I went outside and walked down into the legendary home of Pele herself, the Halema'uma'u Crater -- a "pit crater" lying within Kilauea. Once a lake of molten lava, Halema'uma'u drained in the 1920s; today, the crater floor is a forbidding expanse of hardened lava approximately one kilometer in diameter. Mounds of yellow sulfur provide the only color, trails of superheated steam the only movement. If this was Pele's realm, I wasn't going to take any chances with a deity who could master such a hostile environment. Unzipping my parka, I pulled out a branch that I'd picked from the roadside for just such an emergency. I tossed the ohelo berry branch into the crater as homage to the goddess. Consider it a Hawaiian insurance policy, I told myself.

by Eric Hiss
photography: Laura Martinez

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