Guam and the NMI
Beautiful days at camp were more than just beautiful, they were drop dead gorgeous…rays of sunlight; weaving its way through columns of tree trunks in the early morning and late afternoon highlighting patterns in the shape shifting haze of the cooking fire, the midday sun; dappling through dancing leaves in the upper canopy like twinkling stars, the changing color of the landscape throughout the day…images unfortunately captured only in memory…
June 1979, my first summer staff at Camp Honokaia as a professional…the feel of the cool, crispy air; the embracing scent of eucalyptus; the delicate fragrance of ginger blossom; and even the earthy bouquet of wet dirt; flooded my mind with flashbacks of our troop camps in Kaiwiki forest and at Honokaia. Even today, driving through the Pali, the heady scent of eucalyptus, ginger and mud, whisk me back to a memorable time…
Pukahi District (Puna, Ka’u, Hilo) was the district in which I was responsible with Al Sakai (Blought 7, Journeys…). It was a rush getting to know new volunteers and reacquainting with the “Old-Guard” I knew as a young Scout. It was especially gratifying when these “timeless-timers” saw me as an adult and not a kid anymore. Al was a great mentor in making that happen and I learned much from him, not just about planning, organizing and working with volunteers as we made our rounds of meetings and activities; he was also a “shutter bug” and introduced me to the realm of lenses.
I love driving, the biweekly drives out to Ka’u (60+ miles) for meetings, and/or to visit volunteers helped to scratch some of that itch. I always looked forward to passing through Hawaii Volcanoes NP; the late afternoon/early evening/night drive back to Hilo was icing on the cake…my camera was with me of course, and I took advantage of being out there. Dazzling blue skies in the day and brightly lit full moon nights to an unnervingly murky foggy road, the drive through the national park was always a thrill. The park had a lot more “space” back then (less tourists), so shooting landscapes was a matter of waiting for a change of light, as opposed to waiting for the tourists to move. Don’t know what happened to those shots, gotta be around someplace.
Summer of 1980, three weeks of summer camp just wrapped up; the equipment was clean, dry and stored for the next year…it was time for a breather. I can’t recall how the rest of the summer went, but, on October 7, 1980, I was stepping off a Pan Am flight that landed on Guam…I was momentarily stunned by the feeling as I exited the aircraft…it felt like I was walking into a bowl of hot soup.
We were lucky to be able to land since a typhoon passed a few hours earlier, but the residual effects of the storm was my “Welcome to Guam”; it was late evening, it was hot, it was humid, and it felt like trying to breathe in a steam room…“this is what I signed up for?!”
The weather was a little better the next day as we were driving through town on the way to the office, but everything seemed strange, oddly surreal, what I was seeing didn’t quite register in my mind…I was almost sure that I was back in Hawaii in the 50’s early 60’s…then there’s the snakes…
