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Haiku Stairs give
lawyers a leg up

If you are going to write about something called the "Haiku Stairs," I think you should fit an actual haiku in somewhere. So here it is:

Stairway to Heaven?
What Haiku Stairs really needs:
An escalator

For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, a bit of background: On the Windward side of Oahu, the U.S. Navy built a long metal stairway up the side of the Koolau Mountains for the purpose of, well, nobody knows for sure. There must have been something up there that they figured needed to be gotten to by a staircase -- maybe a light bulb had to be replaced every few years, or they just got a big grant from the U.S. Department of Stairways and the money had to be spent on something.

Anyway, as stairways go, this is a biggie: nearly 4,000 metal steps now in the city's control. Even though the stairs go nowhere but up, people like to climb them. Not normal people, but people who consider stairs "fun," instead of normal people who consider stairs "a bother."

The Haiku Stairs also are called the Stairway to Heaven because from the top you get a pretty good view of the Windward side. It's exactly the same view you get from your car on the H-3 freeway, but they don't call it the "H-3 Freeway to Heaven," for some reason. Given a choice to see heaven from a car or at the end of a 4,000-stair climb, I'll take the vehicle every time.

In order to climb the stairs, you have to trespass on people's private property, which people who own private property generally don't like. So after the city spent nearly a million dollars to repair the stairs, it had to post guards to keep anyone from climbing them. This is one of those "only in Hawaii" deals that we seem to have a lot of.

Now the city wants to transfer ownership of the stairs to the state because, frankly, being in charge of a 4,000-step stairway is like being in charge of a milk spill on Aisle 8 in a supermarket: Eventually someone's going to get hurt, and that somebody's lawyer is going to sue you.

The state is considering taking responsibility for the Stairway to Litigation for reasons I don't understand. My lawyer wouldn't allow me to take control of a 4,000-foot-long stretch of Nerf material laid over a bed of cotton and bordered by Styrofoam. He knows eventually someone would suffer Styrofoam burns or stick themselves in the eye with a handful of cotton, and then I'd lose my house.

I think that if people are deranged enough to climb 4,000 stairs, they'd be deranged enough to pay for the privilege. So why not give the Haiku Stairs to a private company willing to accept all of the legal leg traps in return for making a few bucks from vertically inclined hikers?

Leave it to private enterprise to develop the Haiku Stairs into a world-class tourist amusement, complete with a gift shop at the top selling T-shirts with sayings like, "Help! I've Walked Up 4,000 Stairs and I Can't Get Down!" and "I Slipped on the Stairway to Heaven and Now I'm Suing the Hell Out of Somebody."

The best thing a private developer could do for the Haiku Stairs, as pointed out in the earlier haiku, is to turn them into the "Haiku Escalator."