The Leaping Place - Brief Article

Sierra, Sept, 2000 by N. J. Johnston

Can't head any farther south? You've found Ka Lae

There is no flat land in Hawaii. Even in the southern grasslands of Ka'u on the Big Island, where Angus cattle stand up to their bellies in rich pasture, the landscape tilts more or less steadily from volcano top to the sea. The twin volcanoes, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, each rise well over 13,600 feet on an island 80 miles wide. It is not surprising then, that the road to Ka Lae, the southernmost point in the United States, is one long descent.

Turning down South Point Road feels like the beginning of a long journey. Twelve miles of single-lane asphalt wind down past macadamia nut farms and fenced pastures with gates and long grassy driveways. The landscape is dotted with monkeypod trees and I glimpse water catchment tanks, small outbuildings, and weathered ranch houses.

I've been told there are only three kinds of places in Hawaii: where the tourists go, where transplants from the mainland go, and where only the island-born Hawaiians go. Not even haoles who have lived here for a generation know about the latter. Most people who visit the Big Island go to the Kona, or leeward, side where destination resorts are strung like pearls along the best beaches. Multinational hotels import luxury architecture and soil to grow lawns, bushes of hibiscus and bougainvillea, and groves of royal palms. With lavish watering systems, they create oases of tropical lushness in a naturally lunar landscape. The real Hawaii is elsewhere.

As a pale-faced friend of locals, I've been to secret places that require local knowledge and hours of bone-jarring, bring-your-own-water, backcountry adventuring. The reward is windsurfing across open bays with deserted beaches, and hiking beside the flowering heads of wild ginger, a species introduced by Polynesians that stands as tall as the spears carried by the old Hawaiians.

Approaching South Point, the road drops sharply and crumbles at the edges. There is no parking lot or barrier. Nothing to stop a plunge into the deep blue Pacific. I turn in a lazy circle, and stop on hard-packed red dirt. Ka Lae is no secret, but not many tourists come to this ancient and exposed end of the earth.

Waves with a fetch of thousands of miles come to land here, in a crashing fury some days, or gently, as today. The silver surface of the ocean sparkles and undulates, rolling wave after wave in over the huge stairsteps of black lava at my feet, each one churning to white foam and the palest of blues before falling back on itself. Blinking in the glare, I climb down to the waterline

and search for manmade holes ground through the lava as attachment points for mooring lines. They are few and small, only two inches in diameter, but there is no mistaking them. Many people believe the first Hawaiians landed here. The image of double-hulled, hundred-foot canoes moored beyond the surf on long lines of plaited fiber suggests a race of giants.

Climbing back up, I see an open bay to the west, an arc of cliffs fringed by the grasslands of Ka'u. In the distance, barren ribs of lava alternate with jungle green on the long slope of Mauna Loa. My map shows dates for each time the volcano spewed lava over arable land, as well as the location of ancient temples, now on private property.

An abundance of native plants grows at Ka Lae, which is amazing considering the degradation that began with the first colonizers 1,600 years ago. They cut trees for canoes and dug garden plots for the plants they had carefully transported from Polynesia--taro, banana, yam, coconut. They also brought pigs, dogs, and the inevitable rats that escaped to the highlands to be joined hundreds of years later by cattle and goats brought by Europeans. Today native dryland forest is rare, surviving primarily in pit craters, out of reach of feral animals.

Before the arrival of Captain Cook in 1779, before colonizers made landfall in the year 400, endemic flora stretched clear to the tip of the island. Pili grass grew where there was topsoil, and the higher elevations supported forests--all of which buffered the wind and precipitated more rain, mistfall, and dew than today. The first Hawaiians recognized that the deep water and force of current around South Point attracted the big pelagic fish they favored: tuna, swordfish, dorado, and mackerel. But there was no reef, no beaches, only a few tiny coves, and a harsh landscape that trembled and exploded unexpectedly. They colonized anyway and called the land Ka'u, "the breast."

All that visitors take away from Ka Lae are bragging rights for having once been 500 miles farther south than Key West, Florida. But the local people come for more substantial reasons. It is they who built the two wooden hoists to lift fish from boats below, and they who dare to climb the iron ladders that swing free from the cliff face.

When the first Hawaiians landed, it was probably to the east or west, not directly on South Point. The mooring holes were for fishing, and were prized possessions. This new land required new techniques, and some fishing prodigy devised the mooring holes that allowed canoes to ride in the current where the fish were, without the need to paddle. There are shrines throughout the Hawaiian chain of islands to this god of fishermen. Systems were developed for chumming the fish in the open ocean and pinpointing schools of fish with the help of land-based watchers and signal flags. Two-piece bone hooks appear here in archaeological digs, as well as the only example of a trolling hook with a double-holed pearl-shell point. Ka Lae is also the Big Island's "leaping" place--every island has one--where the ancients believed souls of the departed leapt off into the afterlife.