Kauai Sketch Journal

These are finished drawings rather than field notes, Copic marker, ink and watercolor on white paper, of the things that make Kauai feel like itself: a juice stand, a surfer walking through Hanalei, a pair of kimchi jars from a small grocery, a rusted wagon with boards on the roof. Most come from the North Shore, where a single road winds past Hanalei Bay over narrow one-lane bridges, and from Waimea on the dry west side.

My Kauai Moleskine Journal, kept in nut-brown ink, is the naturalist’s side of the island, its native birds, reef fishes and Polynesian history. My essay Roundup and Runoff in the Hanalei Valley follows the Hanalei River from the taro ponds down to the coral reefs of the North Shore.

Hanalei and the North Shore

Hanalei sits at the mouth of a wide green valley, a half-moon bay in front of it and taro ponds behind. It has long been a surf town, and it looks like one: boards on every roof rack, open-air stands selling smoothies and cold coconuts, and old trucks slowly rusting in the salt air.

I enjoyed all the open-air fruit stands of the Kauai North Shore. This small juice stand in Hanalei captures this part of Hawaii.

Hanalei is a refuge for surfers, hippies and hippie-surfers. I liked this guy, walking through the streets with a lighter in one hand, and a fattie in the other.

Surf transportation in Hanalei. Since there is only one road through the North Shore, a car needs only do so much, which makes for some great, rusty old vehicles.

Islands Apart

The Hawaiian Islands are among the most isolated archipelagos on Earth, more than two thousand miles from the nearest continent, and nearly everything that lives on them arrived by wind, wave or wing, or in a Polynesian canoe. Some visitors never stay. The wandering tattler comes down from the far north each year to spend the winter on Pacific shores. The whole chain, down to its smallest atolls, is on my Hawaiian Islands Map.

The coral reef fishes of certain regions, say, the Caribbean and the West Atlantic, are fairly uniform wherever you are. If you know the fish of the Bahamas, for example, you won't be all that surprised by the fish of, say, the Lesser Antilles, or Belize, or Panama: the species are fairly evenly distributed throughout their range. Hawaii is different because the chain is so isolated. Many of its species are unique to the island chain. The markings and coloration of the Hawaiian fishes is remarkable, especially when considering the state of the reefs themselves.

It's not always easy sorting your shorebirds from each other. When I first spotted this Wandering Tattler, I thought it might have been any number of other similarly sized sandpipers. But learning the differences is important: the Wandering Tattler, for example, summers in Alaska and the very northwestern shores of Canada. Knowing that this bird is migrating from the Arctic to the islands of the South Pacific makes the site that much richer.

Plantation Towns and Island Groceries

Kauai’s kitchens carry the history of its sugar plantations, which brought workers from China, Japan, Portugal, Korea and the Philippines. Their foods became island staples, which is why a small grocery here stocks kimchi and pickled radish beside the poi. Waimea, at the mouth of the Waimea River below the canyon, still keeps its old wooden storefronts and upstairs verandas.

Hawaiian groceries are wonderful for their fusion of global ingredients. Although Kimchee is a staple in my own refrigerator back home, the diversity of brands and types represented even in the smallest groceries in Hawaii is a sight.

Great island architecture in the town of Waimea, where Captain Cook first made contact with the Hawaiians.