Performer: The Who
Songwriter: Pete Townshend
Original Release: Tommy
Year: 1969
Definitive Version: Live at Woodstock, 1969
This is a little out of
order, but please bear with me: That’s just the way that the songs fall. Jin’s
Woodstock bootleg album was one of the cornerstones of my music on our summer
vacation to Hawaii in 1984, and even when I hear it now, I tend to catalog the
songs based on which side of the record it was on—and thus memories.
This song started Side 3,
when the Tommy freight train was building to the See Me, Feel Me climax at (the
last song on that side), so that makes me think of our trip to the Big Island,
which occurred about two-thirds of the way through our three-week vacation.
Dad and Mr. Lee (Laura’s
dad) arranged a side excursion to Hawaii Island from Oahu for me, Jin and
Scott. Laura and Mrs. Lee stayed behind as we boarded the prop puddle-jumper
for the quick hop. I actually was looking forward to this particular portion of
the trip after my purchase of The Hidden Game of Baseball. I’d have almost two
uninterrupted hours to dive into this sweeping statistical analysis as though I
were studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. To each his own theology.
Perhaps it’s changed in the
near 30 years since I’ve been there—I would assume that it has—but in 1984,
Hawaii couldn’t have been more different from Oahu with the exception
of the people, the trees and the flowers. But where everything was built up and
bustling in Oahu, it was sparse and quiet in Hawaii—starting with the Hilo
airport, which if I remember correctly, you couldn’t even reach unless you flew
to Honolulu first. That for sure has changed.
It also seemed much cooler
and rainier on Hawaii. Whereas every day on Oahu never dropped below 75, and
any cloud cover usually was long gone by mid-morning, on Hawaii, it was often
foggy and much cooler—even long pants weather during the day.
We had a rental car, and our
first destination was the Pohakuloa campgrounds in Mauna Kea state park, which
I believe is now closed. This put us at the base of Mauna Kea with Mauna Loa in
the distance past a seemingly endless and other worldly lava field. Mr. Lee was
particularly excited about our cabin at the state park and how great it was
going to be. He talked at length about how the governor, he said—meaning a
reference in a travel brochure—made sure it would be great and that the state had
spared no expense to make it so.
When we arrived we saw that
no expense indeed had been spared. There was no heat—with temperatures that
dropped into the 40s at night (we were well above sea level here). The windows
had no curtains. Mr. Lee tacked up newspaper in the bathroom, specifically so
Jin had a little privacy—not that that would’ve mattered, because we were the
only saps in the campground and therefore miles around.
Then there were the beds,
which were beds in the sense that prison beds are “beds”—nothing more than a
pad over the wire. I took a running dive onto my bed with a hearty “ahhhh” …
only to met by a solid wood frame that had no give and knocked some of the
breath out of me to overexaggerated grunts and groans. My next words became family
lore: “Nice slab.” From then on, Pohakuloa was referred to by Jin or Scott—and
still is, incidentally—as The Home of the Slab.
Mr. Lee was totally
embarrassed by this turn of events and promised to contact the governor when he
got back to Oahu, but funky conditions always make for the best stories and
memories, and so it was true on this trip. For example, we spent more time
later in a much nicer rental cottage in Kalapana near to Kilauea volcano, and I
have absolutely no memory of it other than I know we stayed there and that it
was much nicer. For example, my bed wasn’t a slab of concrete.
The rest of the trip was
spent exploring the south shore of Hawaii, including the fabled black-sand
beach at Kalapana, which, of course, has been wiped from the face of the Earth
by a subsequent eruption of Kilauea.
At the time, Kilauea was
dormant, so dormant in fact that you could hike across the crater, or at least
an older part of it—also now history. That hike remains one of the coolest
things I’ve ever done. I wasn’t afraid that all of a sudden the volcano might
erupt—and, of course, there wasn’t anything I could do about it if it had—but I
was very aware of the awesome power beneath my feet with every step.
Steam billowed here and
there where vents had formed in the ground, and the rock was almost totally
devoid of life. Trees that once had stood (or lay) nearby were stripped of bark
and ghostly white, as if someone had just stuck a knobby pole into the earth.
But the telltale of the volcano’s dormancy was that in a few places at the
craters edges, vegetation began to spring anew, also in the black cracks of
broken lava. Life goes on.
I remember that I was eager
to get back to Oahu and the staples of beach and surf, but Hawaii Island was a
singular experience, and it marked a clear division in the vacation. Afterward,
although it was still great, the memories seem to blend together: Everything
just seemed like more of the same.
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