Da Solar Eclipse in Hanapepe                8/21/17

It started with thunder the night before the expected eclipse. The whole island heard it. I know this not from the local radio broadcast, but from my co-workers at da mega Big Box store where I work twice a week. We are a small brigade of food service workers dressed in hairnets and aprons.  Before work began ,the morning’s conversation was not the usual chatter about the products we were about to offer the general public, but the power of Mama Kauai in our humble, daily lives.

My co-worker Ester, showed me a video her nephew sent from his smartphone. It was Mama Kauai’s siblings, brothers thunder and lightning, then sisters rain and flooding disturbing and shaking us from our comfortable ignorance. Late at night, hearing the thunder from the warmth and safety of my bed, it only shook my skull for a moment. A passing dream of sound alone. It was like the percussion section of all the world’s orchestras hitting their drums and cymbals all at once. It was shocking, yet rhythmical and recognizably lovely. A celestial sheet of music had been played then precisely silenced, just in time for me to fall back to sleep. I missed the lightning accompanying it, but I got to catch it on my friend’s video, via phone. Even the customers passing by commented about the startling weather from the night before da eclipse. At midnite, it was as if the Pope himself had spontaneously appeared in our communal dreams offering a blessing from the Vatican balcony , or Queen Elizabeth decided on a whim to also enter our dreams in her carriage of plumed white horses waving her royal palm of greeting for the masses. Overnight, the weather and the everyday orbit of the earth and moon had taken on a grand scale.

For island residents, talk of the weather is an oddly enjoyed topic of daily conversation. For me, when I first arrived back on Kauai, 8 yrs ago, still rather fresh from my life in northern California, I could not understand why anybody cared about the weather. To me it was always hot and rained a lot. “So what else, is new?” I thought to myself each time anyone mentioned the weather. For quite a while it was an often annoying, puzzling topic of brief conversation I refused to participate in. After a few years, I found myself participating in these brief conversations. Unknowingly, it slowly started to occur to me that it often rained on one side of the road and not the other. Briefly of course, but definitely wet for a short while. Then of course, after a few more years, it dawned on me that it would rain in one town and not the neighboring town. More years later, I learned it was hot and dry for weeks on one side of the island, and drenching rain on the other. What did it matter to me personally? Not much really, but communally, as a relatively small population, on a little island, it did. Thousands of years ago, for the original, indigenous Hawaiians on their voyaging canoes from Tahiti, each days observance of ocean currents, the flight of seabirds, schools of fish, winds, rains, and stars decided their ultimate destiny. We are not so blessed by the courage ,knowledge and wisdom of the ancients, yet we are what is left of the stewards of our Aina and eachother. All combined, all ethnicities, all originating from everywhere, we Kauaians know to watch da weather and watch out for eachother, for good and for bad. A passing rainstorm makes for good surfing with your buddies after work. Rain on one side of da road and not da otherside is a common, harmless occurrence. Flash flooding across your only road home can ruin your shopping day, damage your car and possibly kill you. When it thunders, we listen, and when it rains we all get wet.

 

The evenings brief storm was a strange prelude to the morning’s global experience of the solar eclipse. Most of the eclipse would be visible from the northern hemisphere, mainly in the Northwestern United States, specifically Oregon. In the mid-pacific, near the equator, on Kauai, our teeny, tiny bit of isolated earth and humanity lay asleep waiting for 7am, M standard Pacific time, Monday, Aug. 21,2017.

On Monday morning, after watching Ester’s thunder and lightening video, I found myself enjoying talking story with another co-worker, Tara. She had awoken early to watch the eclipse with a dark welder’s glass. Tara is one of my favorite storytellers who also happens to live in Hanapepe. She started first by describing the cool piece of welder’s glass she wore like a one eyed pirate’s patch. It had fallen into her possession years ago. So long ago, she did not remember how she got it, but only the delight she had in using it. Throughout a lifetime of adventures, traveling, moving, packing and unpacking, the piece of welder’s glass had always found its place protecting her vision during a rare solar eclipse. Hawaii’s location, she explained, did not allow the dramatic change from daylight to the apparent darkness of night when the moon appeared to cover the sun. Such an event occurred in Oregon where the celestial alignment of earth, moon and sun would change day to night and back again in just a few minutes. For her, in Hanapepe, with her welder glass protecting her one eye, it was a glimpse of shadow, like a passing cloud, not normal, but not extremely different. She further described, without being able to see it like the viewers in Oregon, the phenomenon called the eclipse star. When all is momentarily dark and the moon just barely moves to allow a bit of sunlight again, there appears only a sliver of light in the shape of a small star. This smallest of beginnings illuminates the part of the planet just minutes earlier in complete darkness, like an instantaneous dawn. In its entirety, I felt, da story was told with the mystifying vigor and innocence of someone who had been blessed by the sweet kiss of Mama Kauai herself. Somehow, I too, felt a reassuring communal hug from Mama because of the shared stories of friends, and curious comments from customers passing by. Like the weather itself, life and work is an unpredictable mystery.