by Jay Reynolds Freeman
I won't say much about the aesthetics of the big island of Hawaii, because this is supposed to be an astronomical report. However, a few impressions forced their way into my one-track mind.
First, the geology is gorgeous, and it is dominated by volcanic processes -- Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanos makes her home in Kilauea crater, and modern geology tells us that she not only lives there but also built the entire island chain, all the way to Midway and the seamounts beyond. My first view of Hawaii, inbound on an Aloha Boeing 737, reminded me that the island volcanos have vast areas and shallow slopes; they are not the steep, conical peaks that one finds elsewhere in the world. On one late afternoon drive up the Saddle Road, I passed out from under the trade wind clouds at about 1.5 Km elevation, to find the sky above completely clear. The dark loom of Mauna Loa lay to the south, like some giant rorqual sculpted in lava, gently lifting its broad back above an ocean of cloud. Ruddy Mauna Kea, to the north, was a little more symmetrically rounded in shape, though flanked by many cinder cones. The road seemed gently cradled between the vast swell of these two mammoth mountains. Both appeared very near, because of the clear air and smooth, treeless plain that sloped up to their sides.
The drive up took me through a wide variety of biomes and climatic zones. Hilo is one of the rainiest cities in the United States, with over three meters of precipitation a year, mostly at night. Where unmodified by humans, the lowlands accordingly tend toward dense forest, not quite jungle, but certainly lush and green. The daytime temperature is hot, and the humidity is high. Further up, the trees thin out, not only because of declining temperature and humidity, but also because the Saddle Road passes over successive lava flows, recent enough in terms of the lifetime of a forest so that there has not been time to break the rock down uniformly into soil and to establish climax vegetation. Nearing the crest of the saddle, the flows are so fresh that there is little vegetation at all, just the rough-surfaced lava that the Hawaiians call a'a, with jagged lumps and protrusions in all sizes from boulders on down. If we ever terraform Mars or the Moon, parts of it will look like this during the process.
Near the start of the side road to the Mauna Kea summit, the young lava flows end, and suddenly it's the wild, wild west, with free-roaming cattle cropping scraggly grass from an open, rolling countryside that reminded me of the Dakotas. Most people don't think of Hawaii when they think of cowboys, but this is a land of vast ranches and large herds of livestock. Cattle guards in the road confine the animals below the steep part of the summit, but I don't know why a cow would want to go there anyway, for the pickings on this increasingly rocky and alpine habitat become rapidly slimmer with height. By the altitude of the Visitor's Center, the vegetation looks like chaparral that is just a little too dry and too cold to be making it. On the higher slopes above, the only living things I could see were astronomers, and you find them so regularly in so many odd habitats that I am not sure they count.
The view back across the saddle from the Visitor Center is an even grander vista than that from lower elevation, for the eye can begin to see down the side of the mountains toward where the ocean would be, if it were not for the sea of cloud. The shadows of the mountains stretch visibly across the haze as the sun sets. The site of the active eruption of Kilauea crater is within line of sight. It is not obvious, but at night, binoculars reveal a flicker of its orangy-white light.
Some of the very small things impressed me as well. The taxiways at Hilo's airport are lined with closely-spaced floral bushes -- I think they were hibiscus -- in a vast variety of colors. What fun it was to see all the familiar ecological niches for birds, filled with birds that were totally unfamiliar! There were birds that acted like robins, and that showed up in habitats where you would expect a robin, but they were not robins, and similarly for rock doves (common "pigeons").
For all the experience I have star-hopping, I surprised myself one day when I went out looking for lunch and couldn't find the Sun. It wasn't very cloudy, and I wanted to orient myself by determining directions in a general sort of way, from the time of day and the position of the Sun. Yet there were no shadows to be seen. The problem was simple: Hawaii is indeed in the tropics, and at the time of year of my visit, the noonday sun was just about straight up.