Ua at Kalākaua’s Hydro
Not long ago, I took my 9-year-old granddaughter Ua to Honolulu for six days of “holo holo” (cruising) – the waterpark, zoo, art museum, movies and Ice Palace for three ice skating sessions. For a kid who, in five minutes, can pedal her bike to the beach and spends all year chasing waves, gliding across a big frozen rink in a puffy jacket is an exciting adventure.
Ua’s got her own crew in town, and so our week went by with me playing chauffeur to the chatty mini-memsahibs in the backseat. But I was more than just their driver. They picked and I paid – though Ua did occasionally offer to treat with the cash stash she’s accumulated from being my worker, and she bought “omiyage” for her mama (a jar of face cream from Macy’s).
One morning, after picking up Ua from a sleepover in Kailua, we had just crossed the mountains through the tunnel and were heading down the steep highway toward Ice Palace. I caught her eye in the rear-view mirror.
“Hey, Ua, wanna check out a hydro?”
“Do we have time?” she asked. We organized our schedule around Town’s rush-hour traffic. It was 8:45, Ice Palace opened at 10:00, and Ua didn’t like being late.
“Plenty of time. It’s a short hike to the hydro.”
“Is it one you built, Gaga?” She’s called me Gaga since she learned to talk.
“No. This is the first hydro in Hawai‘i, built by King Kalākaua in 1888. You know who King Kalākaua is?”
“Sure. The Merry Monarch. He started the hula festival. Let’s go!”
Ua has been taking hula lessons for two years. A devoted student, she chants and dances hula as she moves through the house.
“I think you would have liked King Kalākaua,” I told her. “He was Princess Ka‘iulani’s uncle, a scientist, a songwriter, a musician, and a big supporter of hula. Did you know that Kalākaua installed electric lights in ‘Iolani Palace four years before the White House had electricity? People back then were terrified by electricity. They thought it was just lightning strikes, fire and death. So, to show the people that electricity was safe, he had Princess Ka‘iulani pull the switch that lit up all of Honolulu’s street lights. She was only 13.”
“Wow! Amazing. I didn’t know that,” said Ua. I could see her in the rearview mirror, eyes getting wide, sitting up in her car seat, and looking around as I pulled off the highway.
“And in those days, Hawai‘i was one of the most literate nations on earth. A larger percentage of people in Hawai‘i could read and write than in the United States.”
“Hey,” protested Ua, “we can’t park here!” I’d pulled off the highway in front of a transformer station fenced with high chain-link topped with barbed wire, and Ua was reading the warning signs posted on the fence.
“It says No Parking and No Trespassing,” read the good Japanese girl who likes to follow all the rules and wants everyone else to follow them too. She takes after her mama and nana, not her “Gaga.” I prefer asking for forgiveness rather than permission.
“Don’t worry,” I said as I drove to the side of the fence and pulled into a narrow clearing under an African Tulip tree. “I did an article for Hana Hou! Magazine (see below for full article) on this hydro, and parked here many times. No problem.”
We ducked into the forest behind the transformer station, descending down a steep, leafy slope, with Ua leading the way.
“It’s just up ahead,” I called as she skipped down the trail. Ua had seen several of the hydros I’d built on Kauai, and on a recent trip to Bhutan, I took her to a powerhouse that I’d worked on just south of Thimphu. She enjoys tagging along with me on hydro jobs because they take us to beautiful, often hidden places. I try to landscape the powerhouses with permaculture gardens, and Ua loves gardens.
We climbed over a big black pipe half-buried in vines and underbrush. The trail led to a roofless two-story ruin rising into the canopy like a long-abandoned cathedral, its walls covered with graffiti.
Ua’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “What are all these paintings?” She seemed spellbound, awestruck by the colorful murals of mythical beings. She slowly turned in circles, looking at the walls lit with dappled sunlight filtering down through the trees.
“I think those are scenes from the Bhagavad Gita, one of the Hindu holy books,” I explained. “There’s a Krishna temple nearby, and I’d guess that artists from there made these paintings.”
She pressed closer, studying one of the murals. “What’s a Hindu?” she asked quietly. Ua loves making art and was fascinated.
“A Hindu is someone who practices Hinduism – the main religion of India. Buddha was a Hindu, and we saw several Hindu temples in Bhutan. Remember? About a quarter of the Bhutanese are Hindus, and the rest are Buddhist.”
Ua quietly wandered off, going outside to check out the paintings on the exterior walls. Soon, I heard her voice coming up through the cave-like tailrace under the powerhouse floor that used to direct the water to a reservoir after it left the turbine.
“Hey Gaga, it looks like someone's been camping down here, but he must have left a long time ago. It’s a mess.”
“Stay out of there, Ua.”
“Don’t worry, Gaga – there’s spiders!” she called back.
I sat on a windowsill, waiting for Ua to finish exploring. Gazing at the Hindu imagery, listening to the birds in the trees overhead, and thinking, “These images seem so out of place.”
Nevertheless, I felt a sense of peace and harmony, and remembered seeing images painted in a similar style on a recent trip to Calcutta, India. Though I usually associate Hindu iconography with the crushing crowds, revolting smells, and neurotic, deafening noise of the subcontinent, somehow here it was different. King Kalākaua, the world’s first monarch to circumnavigate the globe, arrived in Calcutta from Rangoon in May 1881. India was a very different place back then. The King made a favorable impression and was lionized in the English language press, described as “... an English scholar … a poet… master of a variety of instruments, a patron of the arts and dance.” I thought of the idyllic paintings of Lord Krishna playing his flute while dancing with his beautiful gopis and thought, “Kalākaua would understand this. He played music and danced hula with the Hawaiian girls.”
My mind drifted and I began to daydream. “What if Kalākaua hadn’t died so young?” (He died at 54.) “Hawai‘i might be a very different place. He was a brilliant visionary, well-read and insatiably curious. Ninety percent of the Hawaiian people had died of introduced diseases by the time he was crowned, and the king was desperately concerned for his people. The motivation for Kalākaua’s world tour was to find advanced technologies, vigorous immigrants, and medical breakthroughs to rebuild the kingdom’s population. He wanted to bring Hawai‘i into the modern age and establish the nation’s progressive reputation internationally. (Hawai‘i outlawed slavery a decade before the United States.)
“It’s no wonder Kalākaua was the one to introduce electricity to Hawai‘i.” I thought. He stopped in Paris at the International Exposition of Electricity and joined a group of world-renowned electrical engineers for the inaugural ride of the first electric streetcar. Then, during his visit to New York, he spent a day with Thomas Edison discussing the technical aspects of electrical lighting and generation, as well as the practical applications of geothermal energy and the feasibility of undersea cables.
A visionary and perhaps a genius, Kalākaua was also very human. He drank too much and gambled. He had extravagant tastes and, as a result, was a poor relative. The Kamehamehas had all the land and all the money, while Kalākaua was plagued by debt. Yet Kalākaua’s people expected their “mō‘ī” to be royal, aristocratic and generous. Largesse was a cultural tradition among the Hawaiians, and the king would not disappoint. As a result, he faced several financial crises, an Opium scandal, when Kalākaua sold the kingdom’s exclusive opium license to two competing Chinese businessmen…
“Gaga! Gaga! We gotta go!” cried Ua, suddenly ending my Kalākaua reverie as she ran toward me, her hushed, reverent tones long gone. We had an urgent appointment at Ice Palace and couldn’t be late. Kalākaua’s hydro was now a familiar playground.
As Ua ran by my side, I noticed cobwebs in her hair.
