On Sunday, the conference was over, and I met with my friend Flynn to go hiking. I had met Flynn on Guam a few months previous to my trip, as he works for the federal government in the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, and travels throughout the big blue Pacific on business. He and his wife and two sons lived for six years on American Samoa, and now live in Pearl City just north of Pearl Harbor. Flynn knows O‘ahu and its hiking trails well. There are a lot of them on this very green and lush island.
We drove to a trailhead north of Pearl City and through Pacific Palisades, a suburb that looked exactly like the one in the old show The Brady Bunch, except that the suburbanites had mango trees in their front yards. (The name of the city should clue you in that it’s very suburban, as would, for example, Pineapple Vista Heights or Coconut Grove Estates.) I don’t know why I didn’t expect Honolulu to have suburban-looking suburbs—I assumed that everybody lived in a little plantation-style bungalow climbing the hills surrounding the city, apparently—but this was obviously not the case. Prices were maybe lower than those in central Honolulu but not by much; Flynn mentioned what his home in Pearl City was appraised for, pointing out that it’s doubled in value in only two years, and my eyeteeth nearly dropped out.
That said, the trailhead was at the end of the suburb, and we had been climbing steadily throughout the suburb. By the time we got the top of the city, as it were, all of Pearl Harbor was spread out to our south, and more suburbs spreading out to the mountains in the north. It didn’t look a lot like paradise. Actually, it looked like Phoenix.
I was struck at how much the trail initially reminded me of a trail in Michigan. The trees were of course very different, but they arched over the trail like a hardwood forest would back in the Midwest and the climate was mild as a May morning. The ironwood trees in particular look like pine trees, though of course they’re tropical; they have kind of needlish-looking leaves, and their wood is extremely hard and durable, which is how they got their name. They are all over Guam.
There were a few other hikers on the trail. First was a nice Korean couple. Koreans are the world champions of hiking, and even if a Korean were to go up a small hill on the outskirts of Lubbock, Texas, he would set out with the gear that one would normally take to ascend the Matterhorn. Certainly they are the most stylish of hikers; there are hiking equipment stores in Seoul in the way that there are Starbucks in Seattle. Then there was a Filipino couple, I think, with a great gaggle of kids who were surprisingly well behaved and polite. “Did you make it to the bottom?” Flynn asked, and they had.
We were hiking to the bottom of the river valley several hundred feet down in a forest of really lush greenness. It started out pretty easy and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. The slope down was a serious slope. I mean serious. I’m guessing a 75 degree incline, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is when you’re hiking it. It made going down very difficult at times, as there was nothing to keep you from slipping unless you grabbed onto a tree branch and hope that it didn’t break and send you slipping down down down until a tree broke your fall, or so you’d hope. Fortunately, many of the tree branches ran sort of perpendicular to the actual trunk—that is to say, they grew naturally across the steep slope rather than up and down it to hold the soil and formed “steps” so that you could carefully descend the staircase of gnarled tree roots. It wasn’t easy, nor was the little muddy stretch that you had to go through and get your shoes sopped and really dirty, nor the stretch that was so precariously steep that previous hikers have thoughtfully provided a rope tied to a sturdy tree with which you can work your way down like a mountain climber. I did pretty it clumsily but well, feeling totally Vin Deisel as I did so, and it was fun. I’m amazed at what a wuss I’ve become, living such an urban life.
For the most part the trail just kept going down down down, and then it stopped. And then you see the little stream that you’ve been hearing in the distance, and all of a sudden you’re on it: you’re standing in a little tiny tropical valley with two waterfalls and wading pools, all plashing about and hung over with ferny things and deep shadows from the late afternoon sun. It was just glorious. By this time the sun had set and it was chilly so we opted not to go wading in the little pool, but just seeing this little slice of hidden paradise was enough for me.
Going back up was even more strenuous but oddly easier. Because you were climbing a hill, you had better far traction than going down it, something I hadn’t really thought about the next day when my very sore ankles made me think about it. It took a longer time to go back up, and I was surprised to discover that the hike down was maybe a mile or so. So our two-mile hike took about two hours—not an impressive pace.
Following our hike, Flynn and I drank beer on the shores of Pearl Harbor in a small public park, the only public land on the harbor. All of Pearl Harbor is owned by the military, and you get the sense that if you are to so much as dip a toe into it, a Navy gunboat will rush up to collect you and deposit you in the nearest jail. Following that, we rewarded ourselves with a Vietnamese dinner. A fine, fine day in metro Honolulu.
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