Ruins, 1999

Time travel. “Here today, gone tomorrow.” Or, here today, gone to maui, as the bumper sticker read.

Māui, actually, trickster demigod who fished up various Polynesian islands. Who was en route to conquering Death by heading up Her vagina until She crossed Her legs: the end of the end of Death.

In the 1970s, hanging out in a friend’s shack on Māui’s north coast, I’d go to the sleepy sugar mill town of Pā‘ia for groceries and coffee. Pā‘ia had by then been discovered by hippies, for them an incarnation of, say, a vegan colonic therapy epicenter.

When I returned in the late 1990s, Pā‘ia was a soon-to-be former mill town, locus of several time warps and anachronisms. Mill as before just up Baldwin Avenue, plume of vapor like cotton candy. Diffuser / crusher / escalator / scrubber / mud bath / catwalk / shredder / centrifuge / clarifier. Trucks with payloads of fifty tons. But also Pā‘ia’s weathered wooden storefronts; flocks of helmeted tourists on bikes; old Horiuchi market empty; windsurfers from France / Germany / Brazil.

Also, as well, dazzlingly ahistorical seekers still abounding in the ozone of nearby Ha‘ikū or Makawao town, barefoot with sun-bleached hair, eyes open very wide, swimming in the sea of the soul. Shopping at Mana Health Foods. Bulletin boards offering Sufi music, Taoist yoga, Reiki training, rebirthing, channeling, holistic facials, avatars...

To return to Pā‘ia in 1999, I joined the flow of interisland travel, starting toward Honolulu International Airport in rush hour. Gridlock on Interstate h-1, despite the then ever-more-depressed economy, “visitor” count way down in a two-industry state (US military the other big spender). It was dawn, full moon setting, surf on O‘ahu’s north shore wrapping around to the east and west.

At the airline terminal, there were cetaceans on the walls. Alas poor Ahab: everyone Saved by Whales.

Waiting for the flight, women from “the mainland” were sporting white pants / white sneakers, their consorts wearing large stomachs without apology, as if tolerating another inevitable of the spousal-paternal role. Talk about carry-ons! Their teenage boys, baseball-cap brim reversed, were generic, as recognizable to each other as long-lost twins. And, for the whole family, fanny packs / cameras / tethered sunglasses. naked co-ed golf read one man’s T-shirt. Tourism a stage play requiring an agreed-on diminution of the Unknown. Analogue of, say, the roller coaster.

There were also racks of tourist literature. Free post-modern smorgasbords of opportunities. Coming soon to Hawai‘i: The Rolling Stones, Yale Wiffenpoofs, Dave Brubeck, Koko the signing gorilla. Jeep safaris, available anytime. Snorkel Bob in a woman’s bathing suit. Atlantis Adventures’ submarine visiting a “brave new world.” (“’Tis new to thee,” Prospero responds when daughter Miranda utters these words in The Tempest.)

But why my flight? Like Pā‘ia’s New Agers, I was a seeker. My quest? To respond in written words to Geoffrey Fricker’s photographs of a ruin just outside of town. I already knew his other photographic concerns: wild and “tamed” rivers and watersheds of California; dinosaur fossil assemblages—“death beds.” Had spent time with him on the upper Sacramento River.

So: off to a ruin. Where a métier can lead you.

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I’d done some homework. Industrial capital came to Hawai‘i in the form of sugar. With, that is, descendants of the nineteenth-century missionaries who, by 1893, sixty-something years after the missionaries’ landfall, had overthrown the Hawaiian kingdom.

Annexation, private property, and sugar in Pā‘ia meant the end of traditional Hawaiian farming of taro, breadfruit, banana, arrowroot, yams, kava, and sweet potato. Meant the building of miles of siphons, tunnels, and flumes to transport water from the windward slopes of Haleakelā, this area too low to draw rain out of the northeast trade winds. Meant the arrival of thousands of immigrants to work the plantations. Meant stoop labor. Meant a local industrial hero, the legendary Henry Perrine Baldwin, adjusting a mill’s cane-crusher and getting fingers caught in the turning rolls, right hand and arm mangled.

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Nineteen ninety-nine. From...