READING THE LAND
Monthly Essays by
Rob Pacheco

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Kona's Very Own Volcano - "Hawaii is a landscape of volcanoes. If you're a visitor to the Big Island, visiting and learning about volcanoes is at the top of the list."

Looking Toward the Mountain - "Amidst several years of controversy and contention, the summit of Mauna Kea has indeed stood alone in the calm. Now as a community we must stand together and begin the difficult task of developing a harmonious and balanced..."

Search and Destroy - "The 1935 eruption of Mauna Loa is one of my favorite lava flows. If you have driven across the Saddle Road, you have seen it. It is the smooth, shiny black pahoehoe that surrounds Puu Huluhulu at the Mauna Kea Summit Road junction. Pooled in the flats of the Humuulu saddle it is at once ..."

A Natural Image - "Hawaii is one of the best known places on earth. People everywhere dream of a once-in-a-lifetime vacation to our Islands. I suspect most perceptions of Hawaii are similar to what mine was before moving here-white sand beaches, coconut trees swaying in the breeze, and aqua-blue ..."

Chirps and Trills - "Maybe I should write about crickets?" I asked. "Is there enough stuff to write an article on crickets?" Cindy responded. In answer I pulled down Daniel Otte's The Crickets of Hawaii, a 400 page tome on the Orthoptera of our fair islands. Filled with dozens of ..."

A Super Atlas - "I get excited about books. When I find something on the shelf I've wanted or never seen before, my heart gets pumping and I usually buy it without a thought to finance. The other day I plucked down $79.00 for the recently published third edition of the Atlas of Hawaii. First thing about the book that caught my eye was the hardcover ..."

Mauna Nui - "Mauna Loa is massive. Geologists call it the largest volcano on earth. It covers half of the surface area of the Big Island. Besides it size, Mauna Loa is one of the best-studied mountains on earth. It is also one of the most active volcanoes on the planet. While Kilauea continues to pump out the magma and capture the headlines, the giant ..."

The Sex Lives of Flies - "In 1963 a pre-med undergraduate student at UH Manoa got a summer job washing test tubes. The student was Ken Kaneshiro and the job was for the new Hawaii Drosophila Project. Today, Dr. Ken Kaneshiro is an eminent evolutionary biologist. He built his world-renown scientific reputation by studying the sex lives ..."

The Gentleman Farmer - "Don Francisco de Paula Marin was a productive man. He arrived in Hawaii two hundred years ago after deserting a Spanish naval ship in the Northwest. Marin was an important figure in the beginning years of the Hawaiian kingdom, serving as Kamehameha I's business advisor, bookkeeper, sometime physician, and ..."

Extinction at a Snail's Pace - "Most people are not fond of snails. Snails are known as serious garden and agricultural pests. Some like to eat them, but most of us think of them as slimy critters. The native Hawaiian snails however deserve a second look. While one type of native Hawaiian snail is affectionately called "Snot with a Hat" by ..."

Rock and Trees - "I am a book nut. Sometimes I think my fascination with nature is just a highly rationalized excuse to buy books. Anything new that hits the shelves, I get it. Plus, I'm constantly on the search for the out-of-print titles that have anything to do with Hawaiiana. The ones that really drive my wife crazy are the..."

Beach Botanizing - "I visited a splendid place today. My companions were a small group of plant lovers from the Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden and Clyde Imada from Bishop Museum as chief identifier. Our destination was a remote coastal area in Kau. It wasn't an easy journey. The path took us through..."

Sharing Nature - "Kids need to be out in nature. They need to climb trees, crawl through the bushes, play in the dirt and mud, chase each other across the field, and explore the wild. Too often today children never experience the wonderful land around them. Too many of our island keiki rarely get the opportunity to discover..."

Tour of a Plant Museum - "I remember my first visit into a world-class museum. It was the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. I cannot recall what works of art I saw, nor even the artists. Nevertheless, I remember the great sense of anticipation I felt. I remember the immaculate polished floors, the immense scale..."

Natural Encounters - "I love my work. Most days I find myself along a trail in a forest full of birdsong or stepping across cascading streams. Other days are spent in pursuit of hot lava, steam vents, lava tubes, pit craters, and earth cracks in the world-class setting of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. I meet new people..."

Koppen's Climates - "Hawaii is a place of extreme climates. But that's not what a mid-western couple planning their once-in-a-lifetime, mid-winter, Hawaiian dream vacation wants to hear. Nor is it a fact that the marketers of Hawaii Visitors and Conventions Bureau spread through glossy literature. But a fact it is. Hawaii Island contains perhaps the world's greatest concentration of climate types in its 4038..."

Don't Call Me A Spelunker - "Speleology, stalactites, stalagmites, troglodytes, chemoautotropic ­ the glossary of the underworld is intimidating. So is a descent thirty feet down on a six-inch-wide cable ladder into a dark, unknown hole in the forest. This is the world of cavers and caving (few of us moles use "spelunkers" and "spelunking"). To the caver, there is no greater joy than a..."

The View from Poliahu - "The summit of Mauna Kea is sacred place. Sacred in its stark surreal beauty of cinders, rock, colors, and technology that captures the light of sun and stars. Sacred in its geologic manifestations of fire and ice that portray an ancient conflict. Sacred in its biological life that inhabits such a hostile terrain. Sacred in the human history that ventured into thin air centuries ago..."

Stolen Moments - "Yesterday in the kitchen I snatched a kiss from my wife. At that moment I felt like kissing her. Not wanting to lose the moment, I came up behind her, put my arms around her waist, leaned over and as she turned I kissed her gently. It was a beautiful spontaneous moment between the rice and the salad. The other day, I watched a Yellow-Fronted Canary take a brief bath in my daughter's little ..."

The Essence of Honeycreeperness - "Once Hawaii was for the birds. Before the arrival of humans, it was birds, not mammals, which dominated the environment. Today Hawaii's native forest birds are disappearing. Nearly half of the 140 bird species that were known from historic times are extinct and ..."

A Hot Spot of Aloha - "Hawaii's volcanoes are different from most volcanoes around the world. In other places when a volcano erupts people flee for their lives. In Hawaii we get in our cars and drive down to the lava flow to check it out. In many ways they are gentle volcanoes; they are volcanoes with aloha. Unlike 90% of the earth's volcanoes..."

Inventory of a Koa - "It is a big tree. It rises above the canopy of the kipuka with sculptured grace. Its trunk is as thick as a bus. The branches are larger than most other trees' trunks. It is a Koa. I visit the tree often, with hundreds of visits over the years. Only after a dozen visits did I see how expansive its crown truly spread. Nearly every visit..."

Over the Hump - "Let's take a quick ride over the Saddle Road. It is a stunning and scenic fifty miles that crosses over the island between the great volcanic mountains Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Though it passes through a large expanse of Parker Ranch, Saddle Road is not named for our paniolo heritage. At its elevational height of over..."

Micro, Meso, and Macro Cavernous Critters - "Let your imagination run wild. Visualize a subterranean world, literally underfoot. Tiny cracks in rock a millimeter wide, empty pockets once filled with volcanic gases, wider crack passages which may fit your thumb and even a hand, and also picture large caves that run for miles. Now imagine..."

A Walk a Weekend - "Four years ago nearly five hundred hikers hit the trail and walked the entire length of the Ala Kahakai in one day. This "trail by the sea" runs two hundred miles from Upolu Point in Kohala to the Hilo side of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The event that brought these hikers together was National Trails Day, an annual nation-wide celebration of public trailways. Through the..."

A Bird's Bone View of Hawaii - "Last month a bunch of bird people were in Hilo. They attended the 67th Annual Meeting of the Coopers Society. The Coopers Society publishes The Condor, one of the prestigious journals for ornithological research. Professional researchers..."

You Pest - "I am the baby of six siblings. Growing up I was often referred to as a pest by my older brothers and sisters. "Mom, he's such a pest. Do I have to take him along?!" "Quit being such a pest, Robbie." Never lacking affection, attention or..."

The Volcano I Sleep On - "Hualalai is my favorite volcano. Kohala is so eroded and covered in green it lacks that volcanic bite. Mauna Kea is too cluttered with cows and cinder cones. Mauna Loa is ..."

Lumpers & Splitters - "I like to know the names of things. Whether it's the weed that leaves flat sticky seeds on my socks or the little worms that eat holes through my books, it drives me crazy if I don't know their names. And though I..."

Creative Isolation - "This summer the Pope and I came to an understanding. If you account for a Supreme Being, he said, the Vatican doesn't have a problem with evolutionary theory. He went further to suggest that..."

A Founder Effect - "My first lesson in Hawaii was about dirt. Soil development to be more precise. Like many who experience Hawaii for the first time, from an airplane approach onto the..."

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