How is it that some volcano in the middle of the Pacific ocean exploded in this exact spot? How did the birds survive, how did the soil get ground down from the spiky lava? How did the plants grow? This is paradise on Earth. This is the Hawaiian Dream.
Hot damn, talk about freak volcanic eruptions and even freakier ornithological survival rates.
Sitting on a jet plane to Waikiki, you read about Cook’s first impressions of Hawai’i, discovered tracking the course of Venus, goddess of love while working as a surveyor for the Royal Navy: “On the first day of December [1778] ... he recognized that he was raising the greatest of all the islands he had discovered: what the natives appeared to call, and Cook wrote, “Owhyhee.”1
By the next morning they were close in to the spectacular shore of massive cliffs, spines of land piercing into headlands, white streaks of great waterfalls tumbling into the white surf, more rivers emerging from deep valleys. Once inland, they saw ravines with thundering torrents, a landscape of mixed barrenness and fruitfulness, a pocked landscape rising slowly and then higher and higher to the summits that were