Eco-Composition Sunday (On Monday): Haleakala National Park

Eco-Composition Sunday, a day late. With the freezing cold temperatures, I thought I might want to think about my lovely warm Thanksgiving Vacation to Hawaii. This is just one small portion of that visit.

Connection in Haleakala

I have had the great fortune to visit a wide variety of National and State Parks across the United States. I’ve always had a great affinity for plots of land set aside for wild places. Working at a local state park for the six months after I graduated college greatly deepened this affinity as well as respect for those who work hard at keeping these wild places a reality.

I first read about Haleakala National Park back in 2003 in Barbara Kingsolver’s collection of essays High Tide In Tucson. At this point in my life, Hawaii was as foreign as the other side of the world, and I never imagined I’d get any closer to Hawaii than California.

Flash forward to November 2006 and I’m stepping off a plane into Honolulu International Airport. We arrived as a disheveled family, tired, wired and more than little disappointed we had arrived in the dark.

My first glimpses of Hawaii were neon signs, construction blocks, and run of the mill busyness. In our evening drive from Honolulu to Waikiki, we could have been in any major U.S city. I had expected Hawaii to be this lush, tropical wonderland. That evening, I was struck by how familiar it all seemed. Where was the Hawaii seen in movies and pictures?

We arrived at our hotel—its lobby had few walls, only a ceiling as protection from the environment. However, the weather was so absolutely perfect, that the whole trip we never gave much thought to it until the trip was over and we were asked how the weather was.
We had all been up since five o’clock central time, so we found our rooms, ordered room service and collapsed into bed once it hit about nine o’clock Hawaii time.

The next morning, the Hawaii I had imagined was firmly in place outside our hotel balcony. To the north, past the high-rise buildings and hotels of Waikiki, Diamond Head loomed beautiful and dark. To the east, the ocean gently lapped against the white sands of Waikiki. Finally, we were in Hawaii.

On our second or third day, we were docked in Maui. The one thing I was hoping to see was the Haleakala National Park that Kingsolver had so beautifully written about. My family was less enthused about the prospect, especially after one already windy upward drive on the Road to Hana. Still, my persistence paid off and we were on our way to Haleakala.

We started at the Visitor’s Center, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a park naturalist in Hawaii. A little different than Missouri I would imagine. After discussing the silversword plant and nene bird that Kingsolver writes about, we were on our way up Haleakala.
My family did not want to go all the way up, so I had to be satisfied with stopping at the Leleiwi Overlook. Our drive up was cloudy, with patches of blue sky and sun. As we got higher, the clouds moved about like quiet ghosts.

Eager to see what I had read about, I bounded ahead of my family on the trail and reached the overlook first. Pictures don’t do it justice due to the clouds, but the beautiful canyon below took my breath away. For whatever reason, this was one of the few places on our visit that I had a connection with. Don’t get me wrong, Hawaii was beautiful, amazing and I would love to go back—but I didn’t feel much of a gut connection that I feel when I am driving through farmland or hiking through woods. Leleiwi Overlook was one of the two or three places I felt that wow. That physical and spiritual response.