Like Nebraska with an Ocean

This is the old wooden church beside the road where hills reach down to the sea. St. Joseph in Kaupo. Maybe the most beautiful place on earth. As I reflect on it, the coast there recalls to me the the golden grassy flanks of the Columbia Gorge near the mouth of the John Day River, and  and the wide sparkling river below.

Proceeding westward along 360, the forest trickles away completely leaving only the rolling golden flanks of the base of Haleakala. Upwards one see the misty green ridges amidst the clouds at the top of the volcano. But around the road, it looks like western Nebraska but with a giant blue ocean next to it. The golden rolling ridges reach down to the water far below the road, where black beaches spill out like debris into the water, and tongues of recently built like, less than a thousand years old, reach out towards small conelets peaking from the surf.

The golden hills against the blue sky and deeper blue ocean are the most serene thing I have seen in a long time. For about twenty miles there is nothing but what I just described. The last landmark one passes is the historical wooden church that appears like a faded barn in an old painting, alongside the road with an ocean behind it. We stopped and got out of the car to inspect the church, which is small historic site. A group was having a picnic on the grass round the church, so I lingered at the turnstile absorbing the serenity of feeling like a million miles from anywhere. The sound gets swallowed up in the air and surf far away, as if proving spiritual and mental shelter from everything else in the world.

Several times one descends into sudden steep-walled gulches that scar the otherwise gentle rolling golden hills. Approaching one we thought the road was going to end at last---a barrier was visible down into the gulch, and indeed, coming over the crest of the road and dipping down one saw that the bridge was washed out, but that just nearby, a dirt and rock levee had replaced it, upon which one could drive around the washed out bridge. It would have been a disgrace to have to turn at that point, and go all the way back.

It seemed the road could go on that way forever and I would have been happy, but I knew eventually it would lead back into civilization. I did not want to see it come back so quickly into view.

I told Jessica to stop, just along the road, just so I could get out and stand in the air there and feel the vista of the golden hills and sea, and the wind. I knew this was one of those places that I used to encounter, on the plains or the Great Basin, where driving alone, I would have gotten out to do the same thing, and it would become to me an experience of the deepest beauty, and peace within my soul, that was part of a collection of such experiences in my life.

Later Jessica, who also got out of the car, thanked me for making us stop there.

A few miles later we at last came to a commercial business, a small octagonal wooden shed, of very recent construction, that seemed like an Orthodox chapel but which was actually a roadside stand selling honey products. We entered the open gate and parked. Jessica went inside the tiny inside. I followed for a moment, inspecting the products on the shelves that lined the inside of the shed. The shed itself looked to be part of a burgeoning compound on the land there, with similar structures nearby, of purpose undetermined. While Jessica made her purchases from the woman who staffed it, and apparently lived on site, I went outside and leaned against a wooden countertop on a nearby wooden deck to look out over the sea sparkling in the late afternoon sun of early December.

The honey hut proved to be the fringes of civilization. Within a few miles we had entered the trees again, a dry little forest like on the Greek isles, and we came upon the Ulupakalua Ranch Store, where we had dined just few days before, while exploring south from Makawao.  It felt as if one were getting further and further away from civilization, but in reality space was folding back on itself, around the rim of the island, and one was coming to civilization just as one thought one was leaving it.

We stopped for a soda at the ranch store and proceeded onward, past the green ranch hills where the talk show host lives, and back into Makawao town, where we dined at a recently opened pub and grill. 

A perfect day, really, except for missing Lindbergh's grave. If I never get back to the south coast of Maui it will be one of those singular experiences in my memory for the rest of my life. It was life all of time, in my whole life, was collapsed together and I could experience any joy I had ever lived again, but it felt so good.