My Hana Hou! Debut

A new plaque at Kaluakauka

Of course, I've been meaning to write this post for a couple of months, to announce my first appearance as a writer in Hawaiian Airlines' inflight magazine, Hana Hou! But now only one week remains until the February-March issue is removed from seat pockets and the next issue appears!

My article, "The Curious Case of David Douglas," was the result of a trip I took to O'ahu and Hawai'i Island last October with my old friend Lois Leonard. Lois was the producer and director of "Finding David Douglas," a documentary film about the 19th-century Scottish botanist, David Douglas, who died tragically in 1834 while walking towards Hilo.

I wrote the script for that film, which was released in 2012. But, just like Lois, I wasn't able to drop my interest in the subject of the film. As often happens, one thing leads to another and a curious mind goes off on all sorts of tangents.

So when Lois told me of her plans to erect a new plaque on the David Douglas memorial at the site of his death, I was determined to find a way to accompany her and to write about the experience. When Michael Shapiro and Julia Steele, the editors of the magazine, said yes to my proposal, I was ecstatic. For one thing, I had long wished to see my byline in this exceptionally good magazine.

My article gives a history of David Douglas, for whom the Douglas fir is named, telling of how his scientific plant gathering in the Pacific Northwest led to a fascination with Hawaii's flora after his ship made a stop at Honolulu. Exploring further, he traveled to Hawai'i Island and there climbed three volcanoes, Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea and Kilauea, collecting and pressing plants all the way.

On his final trip to the Big Island, he had a fateful encounter with a wild bull hunter. Although murder was never proved, some observers at the time made a connection between Douglas's body being found in an occupied cattle trap and the man who last saw him alive. Something about Douglas's missing money made people suspicious.                                                                                            

Lois Leonard, Gordon Mason, Lucy Douglas

Fast forward 100 years when in 1934 a state forester and Douglas aficionado named L.W. Bryan decided that the great botanist should be memorialized. Next to the cattle pit, which has since been filled in, Bryan built a lava stone cairn and affixed two plaques, one bearing the title "Kaluakauka." Meaning "The Doctor's Pit," it was what local natives called the death scene.

Lois's mission was to affix a third plaque on Bryan's monument, one that commemorated the 180th anniversary of Douglas's death and the 100th anniversary of the publication of his fascinating journal. On October 22, 2015, Lois, Doug Magedanz (her husband, who installed the plaque and is pictured above with Lois), Gordon Mason (a Douglas expert from England who was interviewed extensively in Lois's film), myself and a number of guests, including Lucy Douglas (David Douglas's great-great-great-great niece), conducted a brief but moving ceremony to honor Douglas and to dedicate the plaque.

You can read my article, complete with photos by Jeff DePonte, here.

One Hänau; One Hänai

Last Thursday night I returned to my habitual weekly activity of presenting a Fun Fact about Hawaii to my hula class. I based the latest Fun Fact on a writing project I'm currently involved in, as well as on a lesson from my distance learning Hawaiian language class through Kamehameha Schools.

My writing project is to write the script for a documentary film being made by an old friend, Lois Leonard. Lois and I met at Camp Wind Mountain as Girl Scouts, then we became classmates at Grant High School in Portland. Lois's past jobs at the Oregon Historical Society and at Fort Vancouver have turned her into quite the Oregon history enthusiast. She chose David Douglas as the subject of her latest documentary film. Most Oregonians know Douglas as the man for whom the Douglas fir was named.

There is a Hawaii connection because Douglas, born in Scone, Scotland, in 1799, traveled to Hawaii after several years of botanical field work in the Pacific Northwest. He died on the Big Island July 12, 1834. According to the man who found his body, he fell in a wild cattle trap and was mangled by a trapped bull. But the large amount of money Douglas had with him was gone and, shortly thereafter, so was the guy who "found" the body.

A memorial was erected in 1934 in Douglas's memory by the Burns Club of Hilo to honor a fellow Scot. A grove of Douglas firs was planted there, at a spot now known as Käluakauka (the doctor's pit). It's pictured above. I will be visiting that place next week with Lois and the film crew.

Now here's where my Hawaiian class comes in. A recent lesson was about the expression one hänau, which means the sands of birth. It's the Hawaiian way of saying birthplace. One's adopted home is called one hänai, adopted sands.

Our homework was to write about our own one hänau or one hänai. So I wrote about my love for Douglas firs as a native of Oregon, my one hänau. But I said that when I am in Hawaii standing in the shade of probably the only Douglas fir grove in the islands, I will feel like it's my one hänai.