From The Black Cliffs of Kona

From the Black Cliffs of Kona

    The old man was enjoying his lazy afternoon fishing with his grandson. He had chosen to take the boy to a very special place on the island, South Point. It was the place the old man went to when he wanted solace. Today, he was sharing that solace with someone very dear to him.

    The two of them had driven all the way from their home in Kailua-Kona. They had gone South down the coast, past the famous Kona Coffee plantations, past the quiet town of Captain Cook, and down the lonely ten mile stretch of road that led to South Point.

    The road from the highway to South Point is one of a kind in the Hawaiian Islands. It feels more like a trip across Midwestern farm country, with the exception that the horizon is graced with blue ocean on one side, and Mauna Loa volcano on the other. It's slowly rolling hills, covered in grassy cattle pastures.

    The boy pointed as they drove past one field, "What are those grandpa?" he asked.

    "Windmills. The government put them here a long time ago, when Jimmy Carter was president," the old man answered, not taking his gaze from the road.

    "Who's Jimmy Carter?" the boy quietly thought aloud, his grandfather not hearing him.

    The two drove on, the old man's 1980's Nissan compact pickup creaking and groaning as they made their wave up and over and down the endless rolling hills. Soon they were pulling up to the parking area by the cliffs.  The old man looked at the boy.

    "Stay close to me son. Don't go near the cliff until I have everything ready. If you fall in, it will be very bad," he cautioned his only grandchild.

    "Okay grandpa. I won't," the boy replied.

    "This is stupid," I quietly mumbled to myself as I looked sixty feet down at the cobalt blue waters of the Pacific ocean. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, and heard the groaning of the wooden platform I was standing on. I pondered the age of the platform.

    The creaking and groaning made it seem as if the platform was going to detach itself from the top of the cliff. While cliff jumping was my reason for being here, I certainly didn't want to do a tandem jump with a couple thousand pounds of decades-old lumber. That would certainly be a recipe for disaster.

    I imagined myself falling foreword, with a white knuckle grip on archway on the ocean side of the platform. Falling face down towards my fate, eyes and mouth agape. It's a vision that immediately reminds me of the Nazi going over the cliff in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade , a head and shoulders poking out of the top of a tank as it falls to its fiery end at the bottom of the cliff.

    The image makes me chuckle. "If this thing's been here this long, it'll hold long enough for me," I once again mumble.

    "Huh?" Bracken asks me.   

    He's standing ten feet to my left at the lip of the cliff. His look is one of confidence. He's been here many times, made this jump countless times. Not that he needs experience to look confident. Bracken's a gym-rat. He's the type of guy that gets up in the morning and puts in two hours at the gym before the sun comes up. The visible result of that dedication is something which, deep-down, I'm a little envious of.

    "Nothing," I say. "Just thinking out loud."

    As the two of them set about removing their fishing tackle, the boy surveyed the new surroundings. He could tell that, to one side of him, there was a massive set of cliffs which dropped off into the water. To the other side, there was rolling grasslands, with some dirt trails cutting their way across the landscape. He could see a peak rising in the distance next to the coast in that direction.

    "What's over there grandpa?" the boy asked while pointing at the peak.

    "The Green Sand Beach," the old man said. "It's almost a mile from here."

    "Green Sand? I thought sand was black or white," the boy half asked, half stated to his grandfather.

    The old man pointed way up the coastline to a black sand beach. "You remember how I told you a black sand beach is made?"

    "Yes grandpa. When lava flows into the sea it cools down super-fast. When it does that it hardens and breaks real quick," the junior geologist stated.

    "Very good. I'm so proud of how smart you are," he doted on his grandson. "The Green Sand beach was made the same way, except the lava that made it contained a lot of olivine."

    "Olivine? How do olives get in the lava?"

    "Not olives, olivine. It's a mineral, a rock. But it's typically an olive-green color…"

    "So, it shatters when it hits the water as lava, and becomes green sand?" the boy interjected.

    "You are too smart!" the old man said, reaching down to pat the boy on the head. "Now lets go fishing."

    The two anglers grabbed their long surfcasting rods and the rather large tackle boxes that the old man had kept in his shed for years. They contained the tackle that would only be used for this particular fishing spot. They walked to within ten feet of the ledge, and the old man nodded to the boy. He was to place his gear on the ground there.

    "I'll set this up, you just sit here and watch. Okay?" the old man instructed.

    "Okay grandpa," the boy acknowledged.

    The old man started pulling tackle from the boxes and laying it out on the ground before them. As he was doing this, a white Jeep pulled up and three men in their early twenties got out and walked to the cliff, about fifty yards away from the old man and the boy.

    "Tell me the story about your grandpa again, please," the boy asked his grandfather.   

    "The one about the barracuda?"

    "Yeah."

    "Well, my grandfather used to come out here and fish out of a small boat…"

    "How did he get it down there?" the boy interrupted.

    The old man pointed over to where the three young men stood.

    "Do you see that platform?"

    The boy nodded.

    "You see the pulley on the arch on the ocean side?"

    Again, the boy nodded.

    "He would lower the boat down using that pulley, then climb down the ladder to it."

    The man continued working as he started in on the story. His fingers working delicately to bait hooks onto yard-long leaders.

    "My grandpa would then paddle out just a little ways and tap his oar on the bottom of the boat three times. Sometimes he would have to do this a few times, but eventually a six-foot barracuda would show up.

    "Grandpa would throw a little bit of steak or chicken into the water, and the barracuda would eat it. Then the barracuda would kill fish for Grandpa. They would float to the surface, and he would put them in his boat.

    "When he had enough, he'd throw another bite to the barracuda, tap the bottom of the boat three times, and head back to the ladder and pull his boat out."

    The little boy was wide eyed imagining the tale his grandfather was telling him. He thought it would be amazing to have a barracuda for a friend.

    The boy's daydream was cut short when he heard a loud scream coming from down the cliff.

    "Ahhhhhhhhh!!!!" From behind me, I hear what can best be described as the noise Private Joker makes when Sargent Hartman asks him to "show me your war-face!" upon arriving at boot camp in Full Metal Jacket . It's Kevin. He's running at a full sprint across the basalt plateau, running straight for the edge. It's almost a comical picture he paints. Short, awkward, a bit nerdy; his image is nothing like the near-Adonis Bracken. He runs right past Bracken, and I watch as he glides out into the void.

    "Gerrrrrrronimo!"

    I watch as he flails his arms and legs on the way down and at the last minute tucks his arms around his chest, brings his feet together, and looks up with closed eyes as he enters the water below.

    Bracken and I wait a moment, and sure enough, Kevin's head emerges from the calm waters below.

    "Wahoo! That was awesome!" Kevin screams back up. Soon he is swimming towards the old rusty iron ladder hanging off the side of the cliff. It is the only means of escape from the water below.

    I take a few steps back, off the platform and onto the ground. Bracken turns and faces me, his back to the ocean.

    "See you down there," he says, jumping backwards. His head snaps back, he grabs his knees to his chest and does a complete back-flip, suspended in mid-air. It's almost like a cartoon, as soon as he is right-side-up and vertical again, he plummets to the water below. I cautiously rush to the ledge and am relieved to see his smiling face looking up at me.

    "Your turn," he says up to me, and makes a quick swim to the ladder.

"Ahhhhhhhhh!" the shortest of the young men was screaming  and running for the ledge.

    The boy cupped his hands over his cheeks and looked in shock as the young man soared over the ledge and down towards the water below.

    "Gerrrrrrronimo!" the young man cried, right before he hit the water.

    "Oh my gosh! What if the barracuda is down there? Will he hurt him?" the boy asked his grandfather as he turned to him frantically.

   I have one of those paralyzing moments. I want to go, but my feet don't want to move. It's a fight in my head: my conscious mind wants to do this, but my subconscious is holding me back. The human inclination towards self preservation is putting up a fight against an action which seems downright suicidal.

    I look to my left and see Kevin cresting the lip of the cliff on the ladder.

    "Dude, you gotta do the run and jump the first time. It's the only way you can keep from pulling back," he encourages.

    I walk back from the ledge about thirty feet. My heart is racing, my palms sweating. I am about to jump off a sixty foot cliff into forty feet of deep blue Pacific Ocean. Aside from the rickety old ladder, the next nearest place to safely get out of the water is the beach a mile up the coast. I'd never make it if something went wrong with the ladder, and this weighs on my mind.

    "Come on Matt, you can do it!" Kevin forcefully encourages.

    I put one foot in front of the other, then another, and another. I'm  at full speed when I step off the ledge into the air.

    His grandfather didn't even look up from his job fixing his tackle.

    "I wouldn't worry about a barracuda. That was just a fishing tale my grandfather liked to tell when I was a boy. It's not true. I don't know anyone who's ever seen a barracuda around here, " the old man said to the boy, trying to calm him.

    "But don't we have barracuda in the water outside Kailua? Why wouldn't they be here? It's not far."

    "Because, if a barracuda came down here, it would get eaten pretty fast," the old man chuckled.

    The fall is amazing. In an instant, I have tunnel vision. My focus is on the ocean below, and the spot where I will break into the blue. As I fall, my stomach finds a new home somewhere around my Adam's Apple, in the middle of my throat .

    Surprisingly, the fall was not one of those adrenaline-fueled moments that seems to last forever. It was quick. So quick that I almost don't have the presence of mind to prepare myself for the force which will overcome me when I break the surface tension of the water. At the last possible fraction of a second, I bring my arms in close to my body, bring my feet together, close my eyes and tilt my head back.

    I feel my body enter the water violently. The resistance of the water, coupled with the position I entered the water in makes me shudder back and forth somewhat violently. When I finally come to rest, fifteen or so feet deep in the water, I'm almost flat on my back and looking up. I start swimming for the surface, exhaling air as I pull myself up. Soon I am rewarded with the sensation of broaching the surface, and take a gigantic breath of air.

    Turning my gaze back up from whence I came, I see Kevin's smiling face peering over the lip at me. I see him raise his hand and give me a thumbs-up.  A salute for my successful jump.

    To my right, I see Bracken, climbing the ladder to safety. He looks down over his shoulder at me.

    "Was that fun?"

    "You know it!" I exclaim. "Get your ass up that ladder, I'm right behind you and I want to go again!"

The boy's eyes widen once again.

    "Eaten? What could eat a barracuda?" the boy asked, completely bewildered.

    "Well, Grandson, the waters off South Point are the biggest shark breeding ground in the entire State of Hawaii."