Meet the Tubers

Funny -- cosmic kine funny -- that tube is one of those words that means exactly the same thing in both English and Hawaiian.

Whoa, the purists are shouting, there's no T in Hawaiian, no B, no R.

Ha! Although the pre-contact Hawaiians' connection with nature is reflected in their language, somehow the early Christian missionaries missed several sounds when they transliterated the previously unwritten Hawaiian into English. Kamehameha the Great -- whose bones and their secret hiding place are central to this story -- knew himself as Tamehameha.

Ye olde missionaries also missed S and SH -- such as heard when surf sweeps across a sandy shore, such as heard still on Niihau.

Then there's the whole W vs. V thing.

And they missed the B and R sounds. Or maybe they just weren't hanging around a thatched hut with the natives on cold nights when folks would shiver and say "Brrrrr."

While the damage in words lost has been done up here, the Tubers, denizens of the vast lattice of lava tubes beneath the Hawaiian islands and running all through the archipelago, still speak the old Hawaiian.

Quick geology lesson: When molten lava wells up from the volcanic "hot spot" that created the islands and continues to create new acreage on the Big Island, it travels in lava tubes, underground rivers really, created when lava at the edges cools and hardens. When for some reason the lava stops or is diverted, it tends to drain away, leaving the empty tube, almost always with a flat floor. The Thurston Lava Tube at Volcanoes National Park is a good example, big enough to drive a truck through. Others discovered from the top where the lava rock is thin and some poor schmutz, usually a hiker or hunter, falls through the roof and drops 10, 20, 30 feet.

Which causes a problem for the Tubers. Interaction with us topsiders -- don't say us humans, for the Tubers are equally human, and quite civilized -- is always a ticklish deal. Secrecy is their greatest defense, but there are times when interaction is necessary.

And this was going to be one of those times.

The word was going out from the rotunda of the king of the Tubers, King Kavawai. He and Queen Tuberosa -- actually of higher chiefly lineage than the king -- were announcing that it was time for the lovely Princess Tuberosa La'a to find a suitable young man to marry.

The news traveled by royal runners, some branching out through lava tubes beneath the Big Island, even more heading to Maui through the winding 'Alenuihaha Tube and then spreading out to all of the other Tubers.