Pater: Koas and the Douglas Monument... At right, my dad is drinking from a roadside spring in Humbug Valley, near Mt. Lassen, in June 2007...
Koas and the Douglas Monument...
In the mid-90s, Debbie and I traveled with my parents and a good friend (Jim B.) to Hawai'i. It was a chance for Debbie and me to share something brand new with my parents, who had never been to Hawai'i before – and we were doing it on the cheap, cabin-camping in state parks and in Volcanoes National Park.
We had rented a 4WD vehicle, and on one fair-weather day we made one of our favorite trips with them, a rough dirt track that stretched counter-clockwise around Mauna Kea, starting near the Onizuka Center for International Astronomy all the way around to the town of Waimea. The road traverses several thousand feet of altitude, and wildly different flora, including high-altitude desert, koa forest, rain forest, sugar plantations, and cattle pastures.
The koa (Acacia koa) forests of Hawai'i are some of the most beautiful forests I've ever seen, and I was certain my dad would enjoy them, and he did. We stopped at several points for some of us to get out and walk amongst them, and also to see individual specimens that had struggled mightily in high winds and yet still survived. Some of these, especially isolated trees in a large meadow, have developed grotesque shapes from multiple breaks and knock-downs from wind storms over the years. The photo at right is not mine, but it's representative of the koas we saw on that trip. My dad loved them.
As our path wound around to the north side of Mauna Kea, it passed a little isolated monument, to David Douglas, the famous Scottish botanist (located at the green arrow on the map at left). One of America's iconic trees – the Douglas Fir – is named after him. He is most well known for his three botanical trips to North America in the 1820s, where he “discovered” many previously unknown species and contributed immensely to the body of knowledge about North American flora. Douglas' work was especially notable amongst conifers – my dad's keenest interest – so my dad knew his work and history very well. Or at least, my dad thought he knew Douglas' work well. He had no idea why there would be a monument to him on the side of Mauna Kea!
It turns out that David Douglas visited Hawai'i in 1834, at the age of 35 – and died there, in a pig trap, under mysterious circumstances. The monument is shown in the photo at right (not mine); it's about a quarter mile steeply downhill from the 4WD road, next to a small stand of Douglas Firs planted in his honor. The stone monument is on the exact spot where he died.
My dad was visibly moved by this experience – one of the most famous and accomplished of botanists meeting his end in such an inglorious and undignified manner, at such a young age, and in such a locale. As we stood by the monument, he was thinking up inventive ways to punish the pigs, the pig hunters, and anyone else peripherally involved. That fact that this had occurred 160 years previously didn't affect his desire to wreak revenge at all :)
On all of the subsequent trips I made with my dad, at some point on the trip he'd raise the subject of Douglas' demise. Generally he just wanted to vent again about the injustice of it, but sometimes he also raised it as kind of generalized example of how he didn't want to meet his end. Being impaled on sharp sticks at the bottom of a pig trap wasn't his idea of a good exit. Joking riffs on this thought became a standard piece of the conversations on our trips, generally while we were walking on steep ground in a forest, similar to the area where Douglas was killed.
My dad also remembered the koa forests, and talked about them on our later trips – especially those koa stands that you pass through as you drive up the Mauna Loa road from Namakani Paio to the lookout shelter. This is a winding 14 mile long road that takes you from 3,000' to 10,000' in altitude, passing through a half-dozen or so distinct koa forests on the way up. These koas vary in form, foliage, bark color, and size; each of them quite beautiful in their own unique way. In a couple of the stands near the road there are some fairly old specimens with trunks more than 4' in diameter. These are quite rare now, as most of them were cut for lumber prior to conservation efforts which didn't start in earnest until the 1950s. My dad loved those big old trees; we clambered all over the place to get near enough to see them well. He was particularly fascinated by the dramatic difference between the foliage of juvenile koas and adult koas, readily on display in those forests – it was common for an individual plant to have some of each kind of foliage.
I miss you, dad...
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