Where Tiny Streams Meet Mighty Seas

Hana is on the eastern most tip of East Maui. Driving through it, if one forgoes stopping at the beach in the sheltered cove around which the town is built, as we we did, one passes the town quickly. A few turns on the small grid of streets bring one back to the narrow main road, at a junction where historic wooden church (i.e. from the 19th century) which looks out over the cover.  Hana, unlike other Maui towns, is built on a steep hillside coming right up from the water. The cove keeps in peaceful and gentle, protected from the pounding surf just up the coast.

Once in Hana, we did not turn around and head back. We kept going, heading south oout f town, past well kept Hawaiian ranchettes that were probably worth a fortune.

Here the road was a narrower, the blacktop undulating on the earth, but it was still quite drivable at a moderate speed. We did not know how far we could go along this road. We had conflicting reports regarding the status of the road around the south side of the island (the "other" Road to Hana). We resolved to see how far it would take us.  A road sign soon told us the road would be blocked some dozen or so miles ahead, and we figured we would turn around at that point.

Besides the ranchettes, there is not must civilization here. Yet two hundred years ago, during the time of the Kingdom of Hawai'i, the coast south from Hana was one of the most populated areas on Maui, and in all of the islands. The existence of a long string of settlements along the coast was reported by early European visitors and then later documented as part of the history of the kingdom. Today those people are gone. What happened?

Like so much of Hawaiian history, it is actually more complicated than one might want it to be, but certainly one of the chief reasons was that in the 1830s, the King of Hawai'i forced a disbursement of common lands among the peasantry, in small parcels. It was supposedly for good intentions. Up until then the Hawaiians did not have a concept of private land ownership. The King thought that if the people became small landowners, it would prevent the incursion of foreign land ownership of the islands. The Hawaiian kings were very proactive in attempting to preserve Hawaiian sovereignty or at least independence of some form.

As far as Maui, the division didn't work. The Hawaiians, although perhaps the most advanced of all of the races encountered by Europeans in their conquest of North America and the Pacific, were not quite ready for the concept of private ownership in small hands, at least in Maui. The land became centralized into the hands of folks of various races. 

By the late 19th century, the land here, like much islands, was converted to large-scale farming. The forests were cleared. The people were ejected by some means that was legal but now seems quite unjust. Somewhat the same thing happened in Scotland, in the Highlands, which is why so many of those folk came to America, and some became fanatical about land ownership.

In Maui, along the once-booming Kipahulu Coast, the now people-less and tree-less land was used largely for sugar cane plantations, and later, cattle ranches. In the mid twentieth century, the agriculture usage became unprofitable, and it too succumbed the cycles of history. In the 1960s, the federal government acquired a large chunk of the once-populated coast and turned it into the Kipaluu unit of Haleakala National Park, the main unit of which is at the top of the volcano, 10,000 feet above the road and the nearby coast. The coast here is connected to the summit because this is where the last great lava flows from the summit came down the slope to the ocean, and here is a deeply carved gorge, the 'Ohe'o Gulch, which descends from the summit to the sea. 

The coast here is called Kipahulu and the unit of the national park here goes by the same name. 

Near the parking lot, one can follow the a narrow gravel path into the trees, where one quickly comes upon a small cliff where the view downward is the the mouth of the stream in 'Ohe'o Gorge exactly where comes down from the highway bridge, passes over some rocks, then, at low tide, which is how we saw it, enters a short beach and joins the Pacific, as matter-of-factly as anything in the world. 

There is nothing quite like the view of a tiny river that enters the ocean, in its own way as majestic as the mouths of the mightiest of streams.  Some of the most beautiful are along the Pacfici Coast of the U.S..  Kipahulu is on par with the best of them. 

At the beach, one can hike upstreams on the rocks, past the "sacred waterfalls" (which were never sacred by traditional Hawaiian, but the product of later branding). If one were to follow the foot trails up from there, as we did not, one would pass under the highway bridge, and, if one were particularly ambitious, one could go several miles up the steep gorge in the direction of the summit of Haleakala. 

At some point the trail stops, however, and public access further up the summit is prohibited. The area uphill to the summit serves a preserve for various endangered habitats and species. Some have speculated that the biodiversity of the isolated Hawaiian islands, and in particular this part of Maui, would have furnished Darwin the same insights he found in the Galapagos Islands.

The history of the coast I mention here, both natural and human, is explained on a series of wooded sidewalk plaque exhibits, around the visitor center, and on the nearby trails. This is where I learned it in order to tell it to you, dear friend, dear brudah, dear sistah.