By
Madeleine Kando
Of the many places I've traveled to in my long life, Kauai remains my favorite. I've had a decades-long love affair with this beautiful island. The moment the plane lands on this tiny speck of land in the vast Pacific Ocean, I feel at home.
A group of nenes waddle across the lawn. Behind them, the blue ocean shimmers in the morning sun. In the hazy distance, Mount Makana, also known as Bali Hai, stands guard over her dominion, making sure everything is as it should be.
The sun is baking my legs. Suddenly, raindrops come down - a sign that a rainbow is about to appear. A Shama thrush has landed on our lanai, and together we look out on the vast ocean. It has a slender build, and the breeze lifts its delicate feathers. He sits there for long periods, at the edge of the lanai, making sure that he can fly away at an instant.
I've lost count of how many times we've visited Kauai over the past twenty years, my husband and I. The island has not changed, except for the increased number of tourists.
What has changed is my body. The three-day long hikes on the Napali Trail are now filed away into a box in my head marked: ‘no longer active’. The five-hour-long jungle hike to the blue hole and the steep climb down to ‘Hide-Away Beach’ are also filed away as ‘closed for you until further notice’. Like Mount Waialeale, the now-dormant volcano that created Kauai, those activities are not only dormant, but also dead. And like dead volcanoes, they won’t erupt again.
I am no longer in charge. It is my body that calls the shots now, especially after I tore my meniscus. Until now, I took my knees for granted. They were there for my bidding.
There are strong laws against physical abuse, child abuse, domestic abuse, and sexual abuse, but there are no laws against self-abuse, because we consider our bodies as private property.
The reason we take so many liberties with our bodies is that we have a delusional conviction that we are immortal. And immortals don’t have to worry about their bodies conking out on them.
When our bodies finally no longer cooperate, we don’t have an ounce of pity and run to a physician and say: ‘Doctor, look at my knees, they don’t work anymore. Can you believe it? What’s wrong with them! I am sure you can fix them.’
But it gets harder to pretend. I'd better accept that I won’t do much hiking this time. My daughter and grandson came back from hiking the Napali Trail. They show me pictures that not too many years ago, I took from that hike.
A majestic frigate bird gets a free ride on the wind high above. As he folds its powerful wings, it dives into the ocean, like a down-pointing arrow.
Kauai was born from fire millions of years ago. Like all Hawaiian islands, Kauai is a shield volcano that spent half its life submerged, until enough lava accumulated to make it emerge from the ocean.
Then Kauai slowly moved away from the ‘hotspot’ that gave it life, to make room for the birth of another Hawaiian island. During its long journey northward, Kauai had time to transform itself from a boiling inferno into the green paradise that it is now – the most beautiful of the Hawaiian islands.
For 80 million years, the Hawaiian hotspot gave life to a chain of volcanoes: the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain, which reaches all the way to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. Like a conveyor belt moving over a torch, the Pacific tectonic plate moves over the hot spot, which pokes holes in the belt, causing volcanoes to form. It is already creating an unborn, submerged volcano called Loihi. Scientists predict that it will rise above sea level sometime between 10,000 and 100,000 years from now, so don’t hurry to buy real estate there.
From the small to the large, this island has been our paradise for the past 20 years. Maybe this will be our last Kauai trip, and instead of rummaging through the box marked ‘no longer active’, I am grateful that my body has served me so well for so many decades.
leave comment here
