In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly gave. There are two caveats:

• I shamelessly cannibalized this for any rhetoric I thought actually worked, so the actual speech and this one overlap somewhat.
• I abandoned this and never finished editing or, indeed, writing it. So the thing given is unpolished and the quality comparatively low.

Without further hedging, let me give you the Speech that Wasn’t.

Good morning.

I’m going to break one of the cardinal rules of rhetoric and confess to the trepidation I felt in giving this speech. Or not in giving it — because, as anyone can tell you, I certainly like to talk, especially when the listener can’t talk back. But writing it gave me pause. Sometimes the only thing harder than doing a thing is doing it again. As Mr. Evans is wont to tell me, something cannot be considered “annual” until it happens the second time a year later. So in a sense, it is this speech that is intended to inaugurate an annual tradition of speeches by the holder of the Distinguished Faculty Chair.

For a while — longer, perhaps, than I should admit — I toyed with the idea of hedging my bets. The plan was to offer a searching analysis of the phenomenon of the “one-hit wonder” — the savant, found in science, in literature, in every human endeavor, who bursts onto the scene like a shooting star, shakes the foundations of a field, and then curiously vanishes back into obscurity, never to contribute again. I trust the subtext here is clear. Best of all, even if the speech fell flat, I would win: I could always claim that, rather than being a textual failure, it was a meta-textual success.

The solemnity of the occasion, perhaps, calls for something weightier — something at once soaring and deep, an exposition on the human soul and our never-ending quest for meaning. But having explored last year the very future of humankind, I found myself somewhat at a loss. When you’ve begun by debating the survivability of the species, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of places left to go.

Considering the date on which we meet, it might be considered by some to be a propos to discourse on the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The wrenching events of our time demand that we engage with them, wrestle them to the ground, demand meaning from them. On this subject there will be no shortage today of chattering on the airwaves and nattering in the papers. No one needs one more voice thrown into that cacophony. A native son of New York, I still contemplate the skyline with clenched jaw and clenched fist. It has been six years, and there is still a hole in my city — a hole in my country — a hole in my heart. And I find I am not ready to talk about that yet.

Instead, I’m going to talk about Rock, Paper, Scissors. In case you’ve forgotten, Rock, Paper, Scissors is a method of decision between two people, wherein each secretly picks one of the items and they compare. The key bit is that each item ties with itself, loses to one item, and beats the other. The traditional phrasing is, “Rock blunts scissors; scissors cut paper; paper covers rock”. It’s that last one I want to focus on. Paper covers rock? What the heck does that mean? How is that a win?

{Transition needed.}

This past summer I had the opportunity to visit the national Pearl Harbor Memorial in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Commemorating a naval attack, it is fittingly primarily a naval monument. The two great anchors of the monument are the USS Arizona and the USS Missouri. The Arizona was a battleship sunk during the Pearl Harbor attacks. Though most of the Pacific Fleet was refloated and rebuilt in the years following the attack, the Arizona could not be salvaged or moved. It sits at the bottom of what was once Battleship Row. The Navy operates a tender from shore to the stark elegant observation station that has been constructed above the wreck. From it you can look down on the coral-encrusted hulk of the Arizona, watery tomb for the majority of the servicemen killed that day.

The Missouri was BB-63, the last battleship ever constructed by the United States. Now a museum ship docked at Pearl Harbor, the Missouri is still an intimidating sight. Towering over the shoreline, she bears three turrets each with three 16-inch guns capable of throwing an explosive shell a distance of 20 miles and landing within a circle of radius six inches. The Missouri was a great and terrible engine of war, and everything in her design speaks to the awesome destructive powers that could be marshaled by an enraged industrial democracy. But standing on her deck, I found the most stirring and moving part was not her giant main guns, or the anti-aircraft machine guns still deployed on the side, nor even the capped tubes wherein Tomahawk cruise missiles had been installed in the 1980s. It wasn’t the sweeping bow or the grim turrets or the majestic bridge. It was a simple golden circle fixed to an otherwise nondescript spot on the mid-decks.

In 1945, at that spot on the decks of the Missouri, in the waters of Tokyo Bay, representatives of the Empire of Japan signed the formal documents indicating their surrender to the forces of the United Nations, ending the Second World War. In a brisk twenty-three minute ceremony, a band of perhaps twenty men — Japanese, American, Canadian, British, and Russian — affixed their names to two copies of the surrender documents to enact the armistice. From that point on the Missouri, you can just see the alabaster arc of the Arizona memorial. Between Arizona and Missouri lie a few hundred yards of open water and a few hundred thousand American casualties. They bookend the American involvement in a war that spanned a decade and a half and claimed upwards of sixty million victims — a number that, even living at the dawn of the most dangerous century, must give us pause.

Standing on the Missouri in mid August, I overhead a museum guide relate a story that struck me immediately. It’s one of those little tales that museum guides love, a tidbit that uses the mundane to illuminate the immense. Signing the Japanese surrender document was, as you might imagine, an event of great import in anyone’s life and, as you might also imagine, it could be the source of great trepidation. The representative of Canada, L. Moore Cosgrave, was apparently overcome by his nervousness and, while signing the Japanese copy, signed on the line for the French Republic. This forced everyone following him to also sign on the wrong lines. Eventually, concern over the implications of this error led General Richard Sutherland to cross out the names of the nations and pencil in the correct ones.

It was a minor, totally banal detail. Yet it was also a striking, astonishing thing. At that moment, General MacArthur stood in supreme command of the largest, most powerful military forces in the history of the world. Having brought the Empire of Japan to its knees, the Allied Powers held uncontested dominion over East Asia and the Pacific. How truly bizarre – between them, these men standing on the deck of the Missouri had fought the most devastating war ever known, had overseen barbarities of a nature hard to contemplate, had rained down obliteration on entire cities and had sent millions of men to their deaths to do it. Yet here they were, worried that somehow, a signature in the wrong place could render the document worthless and the exercise moot — that somehow, a misplaced name could unmake the surrender.

And that’s the hidden key. The Missouri, the last and greatest battleship, the apex of naval construction, serves as a very present icon of physical force — standing at the head of an unbroken lineage stretching all the way back to the first rock lifted by a semi-evolved ape in assault upon its brethren. Our long and bloody history attests to the power of that rock. But on that day in Tokyo Bay, it was not the battleship that mattered, or the airplanes or submarines, or even the atomic bombs looming in the background. To the assembled warriors of the most terrible conflict, what mattered was the document. Paper trumps rock.

And isn’t that the way, when you think about it? We often mistake the things as the drivers of history: wheat and salt, gold and oil. But somehow it’s the pieces of paper that seem to truly matter, to truly steer the course of human life. In 1914, a relatively minor Balkan War was transformed into the First World War by German violations of Belgian neutrality, codified in the Treaty of London of 1839. Informed that the British would go to war to defend Belgium’s neutral status, German Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg expressed his shock that they would expand the war over what he infamously dismissed as a “scrap of paper”. That scrap of paper shook the foundations of Europe and remade the world order. Its spiritual successor, the Treaty of Versailles, would help engender the next world war.

The Declaration of Independence. The Constitution of the United States. The Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter. Words on a page. Scraps of paper. But nothing more feared by tyrants, more despised by despots. It was no accident that the Soviets registered every typewriter and made unauthorized use of a photocopier a felony offense, punishable by jail time or even internal exile. They knew in their bones that they faced a greater existential threat from little scratches in black and white than from all the nuclear missiles in the world.

In a very real sense, the most disruptive weapon ever invented has been the printing press.

Words on a page. Scraps of paper. They give form and life to the ideas they contain. Through them we transcend the oral and enter the eternal.

I am currently in LAX International Airport. I’ve been here since 10:30 AM and it is currently 9:00 PM. If you knew my itinerary, you’d see that this is the time listed for boarding Continental Flight 1803, nonstop LAX to Newark/EWR. You can probably guess that I am not actually getting on that plane at this moment. You see, it’s raining in Houston.

Now, I am not in Houston. I am not going to Houston. As mentioned, my flight is nonstop and so is not stopping in Houston. Nonetheless, rain in Houston has added about half an hour to my departure time each hour since 4 PM.

(Aside: I’ve received no fewer than six email alerts warning me that the flight will be delayed — although I was also warned that I had to show up at the airport at the printed time, since the airline reserved the right to leave then after all. I’m not exactly what the point of the alerts are, to tell you the truth. I mean, if I can’t leave for the airport any later, than why do I need to know that the plane is going to be held? It’s some sort of weird Calvinist thing: I’m delayed if I do and delayed if I don’t. I can know my fate but I cannot do anything about it. [And if that's not a true metaphor for a citizen in the hands of corporations, I don't know what is.] )

Back to my delayed flight. Despite the frenzied pace of email alerts, actually very little information has been shared about why. Apparently, even though — as I said — my flight neither originates in, terminates in, or passes through Houston, I have been bolluxed by the remnants of the tropical storm Erin, which has delayed the plane I’ll be taking, which is for reasons unknown to anyone but God, flying out of Houston.

Now… The people of Houston have known, of course, that there’d be rain in Houston. The people at CNN and Weather Channel and every podunk news outlet in all the land knew that there’d be rain in Houston. Heck, I’ve just spent the past fifteen days at sea and even I knew that there would be rain in Houston. But somehow the airliines, with state of the art equipment and a literally million-dollar information infrastructure, somehow did not know that it would be raining in Houston.

More below the fold.

Of course, they did know that it would be raining in Houston. They knew probably a day or two earlier than today. The issue of course is that they did not care. Their business model depends on cramming every last person into every last seat. They don’t allocate any resources for “unexpected” contingencies — like, say, rain. There should be enough give in the system that when something like this develops, equipment can be routed from other places to cover. But in fact, all the eggs are allowed to drop. Somehow, this does not constitute breach of service.

It’s almost amusing, because I am writing this standing at the counter (which is just about the only horizontal surface available for my laptop). So I get to hear everyone come and kvetch at the harried counter attendant. I’m continually amazed that each and every person is shocked that this has happened — even though studies show that one out of every four flights suffer noticeable delays. Instead everyone asks to be scheduled to the now-earlier flight to Newark. (I’ll leave aside my burning rage that a later-scheduled flight will depart an hour or more before my flight — I am so glad I paid premium price for a first-class seat.)

It’s almost heartening, the unending stream of slightly-forlorn travelers ever-hopeful that the attendant will magically conjure a new flight for them. At the moment, the stand-by list is at 18 people, but newcomers keep adding themselves to the list. God bless American optimism, I suppose. (I cannot imagine the scale of the disaster now necessary to get some of these people on the plane. I mean, eighteen independent reasons for eighteen separate people to miss a flight? What are the odds?)

On the other hand, I am undergoing a slow burn every time I hear the attendant explain that the plane is not here because “sometimes there’s a thunderstorm in Houston”. Again, as if the tropical storm that’s been tracked across CNN for over a week could not have been foreseen. It’s that fundamental disingenuousness that ticks me off the most — the unwillingness of the airlines to come clean and admit that such delays are not unpredictable, unforeseeable acts-of-God. Their business model is predicated on frustrating and misleading thousands of people each day. They hide the true cost of the ticket from the piurchaser and so can claim “low fares” — as if my time had no value.

But there are two things that really piss me off. First, the attendant just got on the mic and told us that the plane “looks good for the 12:10 departure”. I know it’s all weasel-words and I know she’s under pressure. But the fact of the matter is, that’s an hour and a half after the printed departure time. It is now no longer possible for this to “look good”. The best they can hope for is, “This has stopped looking like crap.”

Second, the sign to my right now shows the updated information: “Flight 1803. Departs 12:10 New York / Newark. Ticketed passengers must be onboard 20 mins before departure“. Take a moment to grasp that. The airline can arbitrarily delay my flight by 90 minutes and all I can do is suck it up. But if I should be 21 minutes late, oh my God, no force on Earth is going to get them to hold that plane for me.

It is that fundamental asymmetry — that inability of the airlines to even pretend to play fair — that sours me on air travel, to the extent that I just might not ever do it again.

Last note: As I send this, it is 9:45 — exactly the originally-scheduled departure time for Continental Flight 1803.

Every night, the crew of the Regal Princess find some live entertainment to put on in the grandiosely-named International Show Lounge. Sometimes it’s in-house, like a crew sing-along. Usually, it’s more like a Vegas revue: Sometimes piano, sometimes comedy, sometimes live performance, sometimes old Broadway standards. For the most part, I’ve avoided this like a leper colony. It’s wildly not my usual type of entertainment and is in fact quite explicitly pitched for passengers who have the advantage over me of multiple decades of life experience. Before reaching Hawai’i, I did venture in once to see a so-called comedian, and had my impression utterly confirmed: It was cheap and lazy comedy, based on ancient stereotypes that went well past the border of offensive. It was un-funny.

But tonight I was a little bored after walking around Maui all day and I was having trouble getting the wireless to work smoothly. So I decided to take a chance on tonight’s act, a guy named Greg Kennedy who is, of all things, a juggler. I was not in a receptive mood. I’d more or less written off the hour it was going to occupy. Truth be told, I was ready to be significantly unimpressed. A juggler? In today’s world?

This guy blew me away. I mean, it was one of those scales-from-the-eyes moments. This was not some set of cheap hacks performed by a bored carny at the end of the fairgrounds. Kennedy had artistry, real artistry. It came to me that very little separates his level of juggling from what would be universally recognized as high dance. His fluidity and his choreography were both astounding. From time to time he chided the audience for being slow to applaud, for being unresponsive. I think he really didn’t get it. We weren’t clapping because we were dumbstruck. You don’t clap halfway through the aria, or the soliloquy, or the amazing guitar solo. You soak up the artistry and you let the artist finish. This guy was that good.

Then it got me thinking about juggling, in ways I hadn’t before. First of course, I had to analyze it from a physics teacher’s point of view. Can I use this in my classroom? Clearly there’s a lot going on in terms of Newtonian physics: inertia, torque, even gravitational potential. How could I tap that?

That made me look more closely at what actually goes on. And then I understood something I hadn’t before. Most of physics, most of engineering, is about stability and control. We like to live in equilibrium spaces, and we spend an awful lot of time trying to get there or trying to stay there. But juggling is engineering turned on its head. It’s all about disequilibrium – mastering the innate tendencies of objects, that you think should tend to tear the system apart, and tapping those tendencies to stabilize it instead. It’s not about clamping down and exerting control. Juggling relies on letting go of simplistic ideas of being “in charge”. It demands that the juggler work with the intrinsic behaviors of the objects as they are. It requires getting results without dictating pathways.

And then I realized that, at last, I had the nucleating idea for my second Convocation speech, the dust of sand around which I might construct another piece. Juggling is a great metaphor for life in the 21st century. Getting out alive is going to require us to work with subtle touches that tap the intrinsic potentialities of the world we find – we must surrender obsolete dreams of deterministic control. It’s not about dictating paths; it’s about steering outcomes.

For the first time I think I have something I can hang a speech on. And that feeling is a joy in itself.

Today was the final port of call in Hawai’i, at the port of Lahaina. It was another transfer-by-tender affair. The seas proved a bit rougher this time compared to Kona; I got bumped around a bit. Nothing serious but a little unnerving.

Lahaina is a cute little tourist trap. I went on the Atlantis 4 submarine tour. We had to take another launch out to the sub. Despite fears of being cramped in a sardine can for hours at a time, the sub itself was very roomy and comfortable. We dove to 80 feet and then 140 feet, hovering off the coral systems that grow just offshore in Hawai’i. Although the scenes were ethereally beautiful, I was a little disappointed how washed out everything was. Of course I knew that Rayleight scattering meant that most of the long-wavelength stuff would be overwhelmed by the background blue “hiss” (a phenomenon the guide got 90% correct, to my surprise) I hadn’t appreciated how strong the attenuation would be, though. I guess Jacques Cousteau faked it a bit in all those documentaries. He probably brought his own light source.

I also took a ride on the Lahaina, Kaanapli, and Puukolii Railroad. I had naively assumed there wouldn’t be much railroading in Hawai’i. Coastal trade is easy for islands, of course, and yet it would be prohibitive to bridge the gaps. I had made the mistake of assuming that railroads are built for passenger traffic. Of course, the first and dominant justification for a railroad is to haul freight – to move commodities from their origins to ports. For the LK&P, it was sugar cane. Moving the cane from its fields to the coast by ox – the traditional method – limited the amount that could be harvested. So eventually some robber baron decided to build a narrow-gauge road to speed things up. Production went from 8 carloads to 120 once the road was up and running.

But now sugar cane isn’t a driving force in Maui’s economy and the road fell on hard times. Someone realized that, if tourism is Hawai’i’s future, then a restored railroad makes sense. It snakes across the island at an average speed of about 15 mph, shakes a lot, and makes a lot of noise. In other words, a perfect reproduction. On one level, it’s sort of pointless – it just goes out to Puukolii and back, and doesn’t really even stop at the far station. But it was quaint and engaging.

Finally, I had to wrap up my souvenir shopping, as Maui is the last island we’ll be stopping at. I don’t know if we can debark in Esnenada, and I don’t really want to shop there anywhere. I took another stab at finding a Hawaiian print shirt that I like and that fits me – no luck, really. But I finally crossed everyone off the list, so I guess I’m set. I’m glad I took time in Honolulu to mail back the bulk of my purchases, because I’d never fit everything in my suitcases.

Now, it’s back to sea for five days and then a gruesome 14 hours in LAX and the red-eye home. I’m actually looking forward to being back at sea, because I think I’ll get some writing accomplished. We’ll see if that actually pans out.

I was going to write today about my visit to the USS Arizona and USS Missouri memorials and how moving it was. I suppose I’ll get to that, though maybe not today. Right now I’m going to blog about one of the deepening madnesses of the 21st century, the traveler security checkpoint.

Let me say at the outset that I understand why we have these checkpoints and, in their basic incarnation, I agree they’re a good thing. Although I don’t believe for an instant they necessarily stop anyone, they at least make the terrorists have to work harder and be smarter, and that at least reduces the number of incidents, not to mention mindless me-tooistic attacks. Although one wonders if it’s a net positive to breed a harder-working, smarter terrorist.

But since 9/11, this process has spiraled wildly out of control with little check on it. The list of banned items grows daily, follows no discernible pattern, and irritates travelers without adding an iota of actual safety. As with the super-tight security in the months following the WTC attacks, it’s more about appearing to do something to improve security rather than actually doing anything.

Today’s example that set me off: I’m in Honolulu, near the end of my Hawaiian adventure, and I’m trying to wrap up my souvenir gift list. I come across a nice set of hand-crafted wooden candle holders – three concentric rings that each hold a little tea candle. This strikes me as appropriate for one of the names on my list, so I buy the handle, check the name off the list, and take my purchase over to the port security checkpoint, a mere 100 yards away.

You might guess what happens next.

I dutifully empty all of my pockets into the little plastic boxes. I also drop in my hat and, having learnt at Newark/EWR that this saves time, I also unbuckle my suspenders and throw them in the box. Happily today I am not made to shed my shoes or otherwise further disrobe. I step through the metal detector, which remains mercifully quiescent, and start reassembling the bits of my life I’ve passed before the ever-watchful eyes of the Transportation Security Authority. I’ve just able rebuckled my suspenders when a ripple moves through the contracted security workers.

“Sir,” I am asked in a hushed tone, almost of disbelief, “does this bag contain … a candle?”

Actually, no, three candles, tiny little tea candles. I point out as much.

“You’ll have to step over here. Can I see your ID? Where did you get the candle? Is it in this bag?” While rattling off this list, the security person is rooting through my plastic shopping bag and comes across … da da da dum! … the candle holders. They’ve been intricately wrapped, ready to be put into a gift box, but that’s no barrier. The bag is untied, the paper peeled back, and the offending illuminary devices revealed for all to see. Another TSA guy has wandered over. “Did he bring a candle onboard?” he asks, incredulous.

When I ask why exactly this is a high crime, I’m told “security”. Nothing more is forthcoming. I’m also told that the TSA worker is going to have to confiscate the candles, but I can have a receipt. In theory, at least, Princess Cruises will pick up my candles – in addition to whatever other diabolical contraband that other nefarious passengers have tried to smuggle on board – and then return it to me at the gangway in Los Angeles. I take the receipt and watch the candles disappear. I have my doubts as to whether they’ll ever see the light of day. I suspect they’ll end up brightening up some cell in Gitmo.

Once I have passed the second layer of security and gotten on board, I walk over to the purser’s desk. I show him the receipt and ask how I get my candles returned in LA. He looks at me blankly. “You purchased candles in Los Angeles?” he aasks. No, I purchased them about one football field’s length away, in a tiny dockside novelty store. “I don’t think we have anything from LA. Let me ask.” Ah, good. Happily the one-level-higher purser does know what’s going on and explains to the desk gofer that the insidious candle will be returned at the gangplank. “So I should keep this?” says the desk gofer, holding the receipt I’d offered to him as physical proof of my story. No, no, the passenger needs that.

I’m assuming a copy of the receipt will attend the candle and help explain to Princess Cruise with whom the candle should be reunited. At least, it’s a paper trail in case I’m forced to go all habeuas corpus for the sake of my candles. Before leaving the desk, I ask again, “Why can’t I bring candles onboard?”

“Security.” The magic password. But I’m not taking that at face value any more.

“They’re tea candles. How are they a threat to security?”

“Well, you could light them in your candle. An open flame could set the whole room on fire.”

OK, first off, that means they were confiscated for safety reasons, not security ones. It’s irksome to be lied to. Second, that’s flipping insane! I can bring matches or a lighter on board. I know because I seem to have a spidersense that lets me discover every single nook wherein smokers are allowed to congregate and puff away. The ship crew delivers to my cabin every day a highly flammable newsletter – not to mention, say, the toilet paper provided gratis. Hell, for that matter, they let you bring back rocks – I could strike sparks like a flint. The point is, if I wanted to start a fire, nothing is done to stop me by preventing me from having the candles.

And even if I did want to start a fire, what good would it do me? The rooms are individually wired with smoke detectors and sprinklers. There are several warnings to that effect both in the cabin and during the mandatory safety drill at cruise inception.

What’s my point? It’s twofold. First, we must never get so used to the need for security that we allow it to substitute for thought or honesty. If Princess Cruises is really concerned about the fire potential of the candles, then Princess Cruises should say that. No one should be hiding in the folds of the TSA’s ever present cloak. Second, we have to start getting rational. Anyone with a basic knowledge of chemistry can do a lot more damage with the common items that are allowed. We need to face up to a disturbing fact: Living in an advanced, industrial, and open society will entail some level of risk. The net cannot be drawn finely enough to eliminate that risk.

Is my candle saga a milestone in the struggle for human dignity and freedom? No. But in its own small way it does plug into that. If we’re not careful, step by step, well-intentioned policy by well-meaning intervention, we’re going to give up everything, and all for the illusion of security.

We made our third landfall today, on the island of Kauai. For various reasons I had not signed up for any of the escorted excursions, so the day was pretty much my own. I stayed on ship until a little after noon. For the first time this trip I was unimpressed with the Princess Cruise customer service. I stayed onboard in part to take care of lunch before rooting around Kauai, because I didn’t know what I’d find to eat. But for reasons unexplained, the dining schedule was off at almost all of the eateries on the ship. The main dining room had a “closed” sign, the buffet was unstaffed, and even the old reliable burger bar was not open. Sigh. Luckily, there are multiple backups for eating on a cruise, and Plan D worked.

I went online to find things to do in Kauai for a day. Unfortunately – but, in retrospect, predictably – most of them were the same sort of thing as the tours I’d already passed on. So instead I walked around the beach for a bit and then spent some time just riding the various shuttles that ran from the pier to sundry locations on the island. It was not an earth-shattering day. On the other hand, both of my “tour days” have wiped me out so it was actually nice to have a little bit of a breather. Tomorrow, it’s the Arizona memorial and the Mighty Mo.

Today we stopped at Kona, which is also on the Big Island. Although I got just as little impression of this town as I did of Hilo, I think I prefer it. It seemed smaller and more relaxed. Although, the hilly terrain would probably spell the death of me.

The Kona Highlights tour lived up to its name, in that we were shuffled from site to site with very little time (about 15 minutes) at each. Actually, I liked it that way. I am not a tourist, as could be attested to by anyone who’s traveled with me. I don’t like to dawdle and I don’t sightsee all that gracefully. So hitting the high points briefly is probably the best way for me to do it. In principle, were I to return to Kona, I now know I’d be happier spending time at, say, the City of Refuge instead of the Royal Coffee plantation. I wouldn’t have been sure without sampling both.

I’ll admit, my positive impressions of this tour compared to yesterday probably owes a bit to the much more comfortable motorcoach as opposed to squirrelly converted van. Although, on the other side of the scale, this bus had more than its fair share of annoying children. I know I’m turning into a grinch on the matter but I really wish more of these activities had been explicitly labeled “kid friendly” or, more to the point, “kid-unfriendly”.

More below the fold.

The Highlights tour hit the Painted Church, the Royal Coffee Plantation, and the City of Refuge. The last is a beautiful oceanfront site with an amazing sea wall and even a bay full of turtles. I was put off a little bit learning about all the rules the great Kamehameha instituted for royalty, once he had conquered just about all of Hawai’i. For example, the following merited death sentences: Touching a royal; looking a royal in the eye; letting yourself be touched by the shadow of a royal. I guess I’m a dyed-in-the-wool republican but I can’t stand things designed to set one class of people off as intrinsically superior to another. And I totally get the argument that this was the culture of the Hawaiians and I’m not to judge them. But hey – egalitarianism is my culture, and why should it be any less worthy of respect just because it happens to be mine? (Ah, the central puzzle of multiculturalism.)

After the highlights tour, the next activity was shopping. The driver of the bus let a bunch of us off at Hilo Hattie’s, which is nominally “world-famous” for its Hawaiian goods. I did some souvenir shopping, mostly Hawaiian prints, and had it shipped home – an expensive but very convenient option.

I spent the last bit of the afternoon on a glass-bottomed boat tour of the coral reef near the island. It was not as visually stunning as I’d hoped. The reef is very pretty and we saw lots of fish. But it’s about twenty feet down on average, and by the time sunlight has pierced down to the coral and back up to us, it’s been leached of almost all color. It was pretty amazing to see the difference that even a few feet in depth made in terms of how much color came through. I also felt the design of the boat was non-optimal. The “glass bottom” was actually six windows set into the hull (which is fine), but each was at the bottom of a sort of well. You peered over the side and hoped you didn’t drop your camera in. I’m not sure how I’d improve it, but I know it’s not the design I’d choose.

Also – and this isn’t the fault of the operators, really – the boat rocked back and forth a lot. After a long day in the Kona sun, I wasn’t really at the top of my game, so I had to look away and catch my balance quite a lot. I probably spent about half the tour looking at the horizon rather than the depths.

As happened yesterday at Hilo, by the time I made it back to the ship, I was pretty much wiped out – doubly so today, because we had to alight by tender. (Ooh, don’t I sound nautical!) I had feared the tender would be one of those little dinghies you see in bad 1970s sitcoms (as if there were any other type of 1970s sitcoms), but in fact these were serious little powerhouses. To take a Trek analogy, they were much more like runabouts than shuttles. Nonetheless, they tossed a lot in the bay and the crossing, while uneventful, was a bit draining.

Today I stood on the roof of Hawai’i. Tonight I watched an island burn.

The first was my scheduled tour of Mauna Kea and the observatories perched at 13,500 feet above sea level and, more importantly, above the cloud layer. According to our guide, a “Pacific inversion” ensures that clouds all form below 11,000 feet in Hawai’i, and this seemed borne out by what I saw today. Of course it’s risky to extrapolate from one data point, but it was undeniably cool to be standing above the cloud deck.

Six or seven observatories dot the top of Mauna Kea. Much gas stations crowding busy intersections, the observatories are all drawn to Mauna Kea by that combination of height and clarity: You’re already above a lot of the atmosphere by 13,000 feet, and what is there, is not often occluded by clouds or rain. Also, of course, it’s attractive to be based in Hawai’i. Maybe the high-energy physicists get all the cool conferences (Aspen, St. Croix, etc.) but at least the astronomers get to work in Hawai’i.

The observatories all looked remarkably alike, coming in two flavors: Radio-disk farms and domes. I wondered aloud what some future archeologists would think, should our civilization vanish and these domes be discovered forlornly occupying the desolate lava-sculpted mountaintops. Veronika, the about-to-graduate psych major sharing my row in the touring van, answered immediately, “Temples”. She’s probably right – “religious purposes” is anthropologist shorthand for “We have no idea”. And yet it’s probably not as far off as it seems at first blush. The ancient Hawaiians climbed Mauna Kea to bury their elite, to commune with their goddess, and to figure out where they were in the Universe. The tech is different but we still do the third.

More on that burning island below the fold.

The burning island was in fact the Big Island of Hawai’i. We passed close to the shore between Cape Kumukai and Kaena Point, which the navigator assured us was along the southeast side of Hawaii. There, an active volcanic lava flow lit the sky with an otherworldly red glow. The blaze was maybe as wide as the full Moon – with no reference, I can’t say how far away and hence, how wide in linear distance – and was a little unnerving. It must have been on the other side of a hill, though, because the lower edge was razor-shape, a score against the blackness of darkened land.

I almost missed it. I forgot about it and was heading back to the cabin to turn in. Luckily it was a matter of discussion in the elevator on the way down, so I decided to take a look.