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Category Archives: Maui

One Second from Drowning and Other Stupid Ideas

13 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by Jay Magidson in drowning, Hawaii, Maui

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cave diving, death, drowning, freshwater cave, Hawaii, Maui, wai'anapanapa

The best things to write about are those which are most difficult, the ones that make your palms sweat remembering them. For me it was 30 years ago when a foolish decision found me holding my breath in a dark underwater cave without a way out.

I was living on Maui in the mid-80s; things were simple, no responsibilities, few bills and good friends. We loved to hike and explore the beautiful tropical island. Maui was different then, still relatively unspoiled by strip malls and traffic. We’d often meet at a place called “Paradise Fruit” on Kihei Road, a funky place with dirt floors and picnic benches, where they sold fresh fruit and smoothies to the locals. You could feel the moist ocean breeze and hear the surf just beyond the small parking lot filled with rusting junkers, surfboards strapped to their roofs.

800px-Waianapanapa_lava_tube_2A group of us decided to go to Wai’anapanapa caves, a state park near Hana. It is and was a very touristy spot, but a place none of us had been to. Hana is a tiny, remote town at the far end of Maui, about a three hour drive along a windy, mostly single lane road. Wai’anapanapa caves are a maze of ancient lava tubes that formed hundreds of thousands of years ago when the volcano was active. They have since filled with fresh water, which eventually empties into the ocean nearby. It is a spectacularly beautiful place, and like all areas that are overrun with tourists, if you explore just a little further than most people, you will find the truly magical part.

And that’s what we did. Most visitors jump into the first cave pool which is exposed to the outside and leave. The water is cold and that pretty much completes it for most people. But the caves don’t end there, not even close, they go on for miles into the bowels of the mountain, hundreds of large and small caves, connecting like Swiss cheese. The problem is the water is cold, and it is pitch black once you go even a short way into the maze.

cave poolOne of my friends brought a waterproof flashlight and another brought a pair of swim-goggles, those little ones that just cover your eyes for swimming laps. But just one of each, and there were four of us, so we had to stay together. Which was probably a good idea, one which I should have heeded.

We followed the first large cave into the dimness until we reached a dead-end. We had been told there was another large cave on the other side only accessible by an underwater tunnel. OK, scary and challenging. Andrew, my crazy friend, took the light and swim-goggles and disappeared under the water. He was back in a few seconds. “It’s easy, down a little, straight ahead and up, there is another cave with a large air pocket.” One by one we went through. It was not deep, only about four or five feet under the water, then up the other side. Now we were in a separate cave about 10 or 15 feet in diameter, with about five feet of airspace overhead.

It was fun to turn off the light and enjoy the intense blackness of the interior cave. But we couldn’t linger here very long. The water was cold and we were treading water, the bottom far below us. The wise thing would have been to go back. The wise thing…

It was Andrew again who dove down and looked for another path. He went down, this time without the light. He came back a few seconds later. “Hey there is an opening or tunnel and it is glowing with light.” We took turns looking, sharing the one pair of swim goggles to see what he was talking about. When it was my turn, I took the goggles, a deep breath and dove down.

underwaterMy hands get clammy and my heart tightens as I remember what came next. This was thirty years ago and it feels like yesterday. I am sure I’m not alone in feeling a terrible fear of drowning, that burning desire to breathe, but not being able to. It still haunts me.

I have never been afraid of the water and am a great swimmer; was on the swim and water polo teams in high school. I swam in the ocean in Maui regularly, was young and in good shape. But confidence can be our enemy, pushing us to take foolish risks with our lives.

I dove under. It was dark at first, away from the glowing flashlight in the cave above, and my eyes grew sensitive to the gloom. I spotted the glow of light that Andrew had seen about 15 feet below. It grew larger as I approached, the pressure of the depth causing my ears to pop. Once upon it, I realized it was indeed an opening, which must be another cave open to the sky.

Andrew had speculated the glow came from a cave with an open roof, a chimney he called it. Now looking at the dull green glow, I thought of that theory and decided to go in a few feet, take a look up as best I could and return to the others with my observation. We could decide if we wanted to do this together, perhaps holding hands, with a single leader as we only had the one pair of goggles.

I eased through the wide opening. The water immediately grew much lighter. Looking up at that depth through 10 or 15 feet of water gave me no clue to what was overhead. It was just blurry and brighter. I turned around to return to my friends, but my night vision was gone. I couldn’t see the opening in the darkness below and ran into the side wall. I had to make a decision quickly, fumble around for the opening, the right opening, or continue up into the light.

If there was light, surely there was air, right? So onward it was, into the unknown. The water was cold and we had been treading water in the cave, so the single gulp of air I had taken was nearly out. I had that awful feeling of needing to take a breath. I headed toward the bright green light, only it wasn’t up, but sideways. It was clearly a tunnel now that I moved forward, the semi-smooth walls of the watery lava tube visible on all sides of me. Gratefully it finally curved up, growing brighter and brighter, but also narrower and narrower, until my shoulders bumped first on one side, then the other and it became too cramped to pull with my arms.

My lungs screamed for air, and my mind raced in panic. The tunnel surely went to the surface to the light and air, but what if it was too narrow for me to swim through? Should I go back now, while I could still manage to turn my body around, force myself to swim into the darkness, all the while running out of air, feeling for an opening I hoped I could find; or risk going on only to be wedged into the narrow tunnel, quickly drowning when my body got stuck. With no time to waste on decisions, I went on.

The tunnel scraped my shoulders on both sides now, my arms ahead of me were now forced to stay this way as the tunnel was too narrow for me to bring them down to my sides. I was only able to swim on from the short strokes of my barely kicking legs.
I was out of air. I can’t know what it’s like for other people when they face the possibility of death. For me in that moment it was peaceful, an inevitability that removed fear. I was going to die and there was nothing I could do about it. The single breath of cold damp air from the dark cavern far behind me was long used up and I was going to drown because of one stupid decision. I thought of my friends waiting behind, not knowing what happened to me, hoping they wouldn’t follow. I thought of my family and my brief life, was it really supposed to be this short. Oh well, better luck next time.

Warm air and blinding sunshine slapped my face; blessed sweet air that I gulped in great spasms. I had blasted through to the outside of the entire cave system, to the park and trails that surround it. A young couple who had been walking by, stared at me in surprise and wonder, a swamp monster who had suddenly burst out of a tiny pool of rotting leaves barely two feet across. What the hell.

escher puddleI stood there shivering and panting, realizing how close I had come to the end. Air and warmth soon refilled my lungs and damaged psyche. I was alive – am alive. I thought briefly of going back into the tunnel to warn my friends not to follow. But the thought of diving blindly through the rotting leaves into the cold darkness below overwhelmed me and I couldn’t do it.

Time is a strange thing, expanding and contracting at the same time. The whole experience was surely less than a single minute. I have no idea. It was an infinity in my mind, stretching and stretching into hours. I would never willing repeat the experience, but I’m glad it happened. I’m a little less afraid of death and a lot more in love with life because of it.

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Through the Volcano – a Journey of Discovery

18 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Jay Magidson in discovery, Haleakala, Hawaii, Maui

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discovery, haleakala, Hawaii, Maui, moonbow, volcano

maui from oceanIt was the late 1980s. I found myself on the island of Maui, HI after a failed marriage, a ton of world travel, and a series of dead-end jobs. It is a beautiful place to live, warm and friendly, but life tends to leak out through the coconut shavings if you don’t pay attention. Serving grilled Mahi Mahi and Mai Tais to pink-skinned tourists was not exactly how I envisioned making my great mark on the planet.

Millions of years ago, the island of Maui emerged from the ocean as two volcanoes, one now extinct and the other dormant, with a wide valley spreading between them. The two mountains couldn’t be more different; the smaller, older peak, Pu’u Kukui is choked with a blanket of thick, impenetrable foliage, where it rains virtually every day. To the east, Haleakala towers over its older brother, nearly twice as high at 10,000 feet, a massive barren desert wasteland at its peak.

I worked at the Maui Intercontinental Hotel as a waiter, bored and mildly depressed most of the time. One evening after watching a spectacular sunset over the ocean, I swore I’d do something spontaneous (and stupid), to shake up my life. I turned my back to the silver-blue of the ocean and looked up to the towering volcano of Haleakala looming high above. “Hell, I’ll hike through the crater tonight.” I told myself.

haleakalaI was an avid hiker, and had done the hike before – during the day of course, like all sane people. But it was a full moon that night, what could be better. I grabbed a single bottle of water, my beat-up tennis shoes, a windbreaker and threw them into my car and took off. Now this wasn’t just any car, but a Maui beater, as the locals called it. The previous owner had “sawed” the roof off of an old two door Ford Mustang to make it into a convertible. I thought it was the coolest thing ever when I bought it for $800. It rains a lot in Hawaii and metal rusts when it gets wet, salt air speeds up that process – a lot. The floorboards had mostly rotted out and you could see the road speeding by under your feet in places, so you had to be careful how you stepped into the car.  You didn’t want to fall through the floor, or run with the car like the Flintstones. To stay dry in the car when it rained, I simply drove faster.

It’s also warm in Hawaii, all year round, day and night. Like most of the people living there, I only wore my shoes to hike or work, otherwise it was flip flops, shorts and a tee shirt. A cold day was when you had to shut the windows, and that was only a few times a year. Haleakala is high enough to have a completely different climate, however. I hadn’t thought about that when I left the warm tropical night by the ocean.

Halfway up the mountain I felt the temperature dropping, not too bad at first, just colder. I flipped on the heater in my car (which I’d never used before) and I was fine. About three quarters of the way up it started to rain lightly; I sped up a little so it went over the windshield. Another few miles up, the rain turned to sleet, then to hail, and finally to honest-to-god snow. Really, snow, in Hawaii.

I thought seriously about turning back then; challenging oneself is a great thing and all, but not in shorts and a windbreaker. I was feeling sorry for myself though, and decided I needed a little more misery, so I plowed on. It was about 10 at night when I finally arrived at the top of Haleakala. A thick slushy layer of snow greeted me when I stepped out of my car in the empty parking lot. The wind was howling and cold, just above freezing.Haleakala craterHaleakala is a huge mountain, nearly 100 miles in circumference at its base. The top is a blown out volcano crater, proud on one side and dropping away to the sea on the right. The rim rises again on the left to about 8,000 feet. The trail I was going take crosses the mouth of the crater, down the sloping rim dropping 3,500 feet to the valley floor, then follows that about eight or nine miles, then up, climbing steeply for about 2,000 feet and out of the crater. The total hike is about 12 miles. The tourist guides like to give you comparisons about the size of the crater, telling you it is large enough to swallow the entire island of Manhattan including the skyscrapers with room to spare. From the rim you can see what look like tiny volcanoes, cinder cones, dotting the crater floor. Those tiny volcanoes are actually quite large up close, some rising well over 200 feet high. And everything in there is colored charcoal or burnt-red like Beelzebub’s garden in Hell.

cinder coneMy tennis shoes squeaked as I sloshed though the melting snow and sleet to the mouth of the crater and to the trail-head. I leaned over the rim of the crater, the raging wind holding me up as I stared down into that frozen maw. “This is nuts!” I shouted, but my life was nuts. Overhead, angry clouds whipped by, threatening to pummel me with more snow and rain. In the daytime, on a nice sunny day, this was a 7-hour hike. I had worked all day and was already cold and getting numb (remember the shorts and tee-shirt). But something had driven me to this moment; so I closed my I eyes and asked, begged really, “What do I do?”

The answer came immediately, a single word, so clear I didn’t dare question it. “Trust.” I walked face first into that gale, the tiny bits of snow stinging my suntanned face. But as soon as I dropped a few feet into the crater, the wind stopped completely. It must be the wall of the crater blocking the wind, I thought. Then, as miraculously, the clouds overhead split and dissipated as if I were watching a time-lapse film. The full moon burst out and bathed the world in a thousand shades of silver. All my fear and doubt evaporated as I fell to my knees in gratitude. “Thank you.” I offered simply. “Thank you for my life.”

I began walking now, following the well-worn trail, buoyed and energized by the gift of this single word and this amazing night. The volcanic soil crunched reassuringly under my feet with every step. Sometimes I would stand very still, holding my breath and listen. Nothing. It was so quiet my ears would ring, and my own heartbeat sounded like a drum in the unearthly silence.

The descent to the crater floor took about two hours. Little grows in this barren moonscape with the exception of a rare succulent called the silversword plant, which grows nowhere else in the world. My timing was excellent and I was able to see some of them flowering, blossoms glowing silver in the moonlight, jutting skyward on a single thick stock as wide and tall as a man. I passed dozens of these magnificent plants along the trail, each more beautiful than the last.

silversword

A couple of miles along the crater floor, about 1 or 2 in the morning, heavy clouds moved in and it grew quite dark. At this point in the trail, there was a very important junction that I mustn’t miss. One way led up and out of the crater, my destination. The other led down and out the far side of the island through a dense rain forest ending at the ocean more than 20 miles away, to the rural, lightly inhabited far side of the island 60 miles away from where I lived. I didn’t have any food and just this one, nearly empty bottle of water. The wrong route would have made for two very long and miserable days.

kaupo gap

Kaupo Gap, Haleakala

The ground was hard, dense volcanic rock, which didn’t show my tracks or the trail. I was lost. I spiraled out from where I stood trying to regain the trail. Nothing. The voice came to me again.  “Rest,” it said. So I did. I lay on the hard ground and slept for about half an hour. I felt better when I got up and looked around for the trail again. There! Not the trail, but a single set of footprints, seemingly out of nowhere in a patch of soft volcanic dust. I followed them back to the main trail.   Why hadn’t I seen them before? Never mind. Think what you like, but I choose to believe in angels that night.

Everything was glorious after that. A light mist began falling which created a moon-bow high overhead. I had never seen or even heard of such a thing, a monochrome rainbow that circled the full moon, shining a dozen shades of silver. All of this beauty for one lone man in the middle of the night, in this gigantic, empty landscape, a dot of land in the vast Pacific Ocean. It was overwhelming.

SONY DSCHours later, I arrived at the final leg of the trail, a series of steep switchbacks up the far crater rim and out along a thin saddle-back. This is the most spectacular part of the hike, a naked ridge. One side drops down and away into the crater from where I came; the other side sweeps far down to the ocean 8,000 feet below.  It is like straddling a knife’s edge in the sky. The moon was just setting into the ocean horizon to my left as the sun rose out of the sea to my right. It was and is the most magnificent thing I have ever seen.

sunrise over the ocean

I lingered on that ridge for a time, exhausted and elated at the new day, and the end of my long and magical night. I said good-bye to Haleakala and my melancholy that day, realizing that life had been showering me with beauty and magic all along; I had only to open my eyes to it.

I moved away from Maui a few months later, my mind made up to face the world and all the mysteries I could embrace. I gave my “convertible” away when I left the island, careful to warn the new owner, “Don’t drive too fast over bumps, it might break in half.”

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