Rain on the Big Island
Rain on an Elephant Ear plant in the garden outside Dolphin Bay hotel in Hilo, Hawaii
Two days ago a 4.8 earthquake rattled the Big Island, and as we arrived on Thursday aftershocks were expected, along with a deluge of rain that promises flooding in the streams and in the streets. The Big Island is full of drama which is one of the reasons I love it - volcanoes, earthquakes, and almost every climatic region of the earth can be found on this island. Why go anywhere else?
Elizabeth Greenberg and I came a few days early to scout some new locations for our Myths and the Land workshop that begins on Sunday. We’ll do our scouting in the rain, and hope for clearing as our participants arrive for this photography and writing workshop. The wonderful thing about combining both of this storytelling mediums is that we can adapt to the weather on a daily basis - writing as it rains, shooting images when it clears. With luck we’ll have some of both.
Rain is such a part of the culture and landscape. In preparing for the workshop I found this wonderful poem from WS Merwin, a poet who lived his later life on the island of Maui and cultivated a forest of native trees in trying to preserve the trees of the islands from becoming extinct.
Rain Travel by W.S. Merwin
I wake in the dark and remember / It is the morning when I must start / by myself on the journey / I lie listening to the black hour / before dawn and you are / still asleep beside me while / around us the trees are full of night lean / hushed in their dream that bears / us up asleep and awake and then I hear / drops falling one by one into / the sightless leaves and I / do not know when they began but / all at once there is no sound but rain / and the stream below us roaring / away into the rushing darkness
“ all at once there is no sound but rain” My first night on the island the sound of rain enveloped me. Its rhythm on the walkways, on the pavement, the rain dripping from the foliage in the garden, pouring down the rain spout from the roof. Filling the darkness of night with music, lulling me to sleep, Koki frogs singing a syncopated melody to the beat of the rain. Awaking in the dark before dawn. There is no dawn today, only a gradual lightening and increasingly visible rain on the elephant ear leaves in the garden outside.