My father said "You should take the back way to Hana." Enticed by a new adventure Courtney and I set off with Pierson in his baby car seat the next day. The first thirty minutes were delightful. The islands Southwest side was dry and added new sights that I had never seen on Maui. The ocean reflected the pacific deep blue, contrasted with the wheat colors of dry grasses and mixed with dark black lava rock outcroppings. White billowy clouds migrated across the whole horizon creating the expanse of being in the middle of the largest ocean. We were alone. No tourist.
The United States government always gives the best land away as reservation land. The "good lands" of Wyoming, special places in Nevada, and the Southwest side of Maui.
Thirty-one minutes later the road on the backside of the Hana road lost government funding and must have fallen under the jurisdiction of the Hawaiian tribal council of road development and upkeep. We made the mistake of believing that the break in pavement was just a fluke.
Two hours and thirty-one minutes later the fun adventure spirit had worn off replaced with the desire to place blame on each other. Courtney felt my father was trying to kill us, and since she was driving I felt she should have been the one to turn the steering wheel and point us 180 degrees the other way.
Hour four of driving a Chevy Malibu on a road only a Hummer would be qualified to get through, we had both developed the thousand yard stare. Glazed and beaten, tired of our vacation, and sick of being shaken by the road we came around bend number 1258 and like the desert survivor who find the oasis on his last dried out breath, there lay a beach of black.
The beach was black sand that turned to black smooth rocks as it neared the water. The waves struck the shore and ran its foamy fingers up the incline of rock before closing around the banks and grabbing on its return to the ocean a fist full of rocks. The rolling of rocks in the palm of the waves hand created a sound that compounded on each other until every thought and feeling was a high pitch staccato rumble that cleared the mind and soul. Imagine you are bird flying on the winds, the rhythm is flap and glide and fall, flap glide and fall. Somewhere in between falling and flapping is that feeling of exhilaration the sound that those rocks made.
This ring
represents the union of the rocks to the ocean and the sounds they make
together.