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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Long-mountain love
>> 5,000 feet
Cruz MacKenzie started looking for signs of Mauna Loa shortly after Hawaiian Airlines' flight 142 to Kona ascended from the interisland terminal and dashed past Diamond Head. On a clear day, you could see Mauna Loa rising like a shadow out of the blue sea from Diamond Head, 180 miles away. But this sunny Sunday did not dawn clear. The usual trade winds had died during the night and the sky was filled with vog from Mauna Loa's cousin Kilauea.
With no hope of seeing Mauna Loa for several minutes, Cruz pulled two clips from the Star-Bulletin, his paper for the past 15 years, from the pocket of his silk aloha shirt and re-read them, again. They weren't much, but they were all he had.
The first clip was a 3-inch Associated Press story in a box at the top of Page One about Daren Guy of Kona winning $2 million in the state's first Lotto game. It told just the barest details because the news came across the wire after deadline for the morning edition, but they'd done a quick remake of the front page, stopped the press and gotten it in. Cruz liked working with pros who cared about the product.
The second clip, from yesterday's late edition, was about Daren Guy's disappearance and presumed death while swimming in the bay in the wee hours after winning the lottery. Authorities were not ruling out the possibility of a shark attack, especially not after what had happened to that Maui woman recently. The 16-inch story, also on Page One, carried the byline of Dewey Clarksville, the paper's Big Island correspondent, who immediately after filing it caught the last plane to Oregon to marry the new chiefess of the Tillamooks.
His story mentioned the highlights of Guy's life: Age 33, a fishing-scuba-whalewatch boat skipper, single, no known surviving kin. But it didn't tell who he was, what he was like, or what he liked. That would be Cruz's job.
He was new to the story, but he knew the Big Island. That's why the city editor asked his columnist to take the story. Cruz hoped that some old contacts from scuba and fishing trips would be able to shed some light on the life of Daren Guy.
And on each of those Big Island trips after the first one, as soon as the plane was in the air, Cruz started looking for Mauna Loa like a long-lost love. It would not be overstating it to say that his first glimpse of the "long mountain" changed his life. Cruz was in love with the world's biggest mountain -- and the goddess who made it.
But he didn't walk around talking about it every day either.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com