24-hour Day One

Spent 24 hours awake, 16 hours traveling, and the remaining time exploring my very new surroundings. After flying over flat blue Pacific Ocean for hours upon hours we began to descend, with no sign of land from my window. Touching ground just on the coast made for a dramatic landing that seemed as though it would be atop water. The first sight I had of Hawaii was this dark black and brown volcanic rubble that extended right into the sea where the water crashed explosive on the jagged shore. I met up with four other students from Cornell and our TA Katie helped squish our luggage up against the back windows of a van, distributed orchid leis: heavy, fragrant, dark purple and white, and drove us from sea level to 1500 feet at our house in the saddle between Kohala mountain to the north and Mauna Kea to the south. Kohala is the oldest of Hawaii Island's volcanoes and its grassy hills are usually dotted with black cattle or reddish brown horses. This is what the area behind our house is like. A sunset walk - a group of us headed up the thick grass to a slope facing out to the sun setting over the coast. As a cloud made its way across the sky we all saw Mauna Kea for the first time - an immense long volcano with snow and a few (controversial) observatories at the peak. Stunned, we made it down the hill under the rising, almost full, and blindingly bright moon. (From January 19, 2008)