Next week, Harmony, I get to come see you. Last time I saw you, you were just starting to talk in a language I could understand. Since I am not around you all the time, I had to listen closely. This time, your language will be more fluent. I will get it better. And we will have adventures.
Today I had an adventure. After the post office, I drove a little bit further down the coast. Yesterday it rained a lot, and today the air is all washed clean and really nice to be in. I took the very first left turn I could, down towards the ocean.
This part of Hawaii is steep, with gulches and the roads curve a lot. There are no beaches near by where you can go swim, and no resorts, so not so many people. I stopped here and wandered about.
There was a house and then below it all this grass and where the edge of grass and land is, that is the edge of the world. It drops off in a sheer cliff so when you walk really close to the edge and look over, it can make you dizzy, it is so far down. So I looked down, and walked back away from the edge, and then over to another spot, and kept doing that because I could hear the sounds of a waterfall.
There are ironwood trees that grow like spindly weeds up the sides of the cliffs. Cliffs are called pali in Hawaii. There was tall grass, like you can see on the edges of this picture. That grass grew along the edge of the pali, so you could not tell where it was safe to put your feet. The grass holds on in places a person would slip down and down.
I found the waterfall, and discovered you could only see it if you stood all the way close to the very edge, or walked down a narrow path with slippery leaves on it. Since the leaves were still wet from rain, I stayed on the top edge. It was a pretty and wide waterfall, but you would not be able to see it from any house you could build there, only hear it.
This tiki stands on a wall of what was once a structure of some kind that has gone back into the ground. Once there was a great tsunami here. Perhaps the wave climbed all the way up the pali and took the house when it went back into the ocean. There are many broken walls there. It is so far up from the ocean it is hard to imagine a wave so high, but they do come. Something happened here. It makes me wonder if the tikis were placed here to watch over the land make sure it stays safe from now on.
It's pretty, isn't it.
