More Hilo thoughts

After some discussion with folks, particularly after posting the pictures, I have been thinking about the disconnect between my response to Hilo (not overwhelmingly positive) and the apparent reality (which looks pretty good). For whatever edification it may add, here are my "journal" entries made on the spot, mostly undedited. (I have put them in quote block format so you can skip them if you want. See you below, then.)

It’s a quarter to six on Sunday morning local time. Dawn is breaking, and I just took a couple of pictures of the shy getting lighter over the mountain that I can see from my balcony. Looking at the map, I think it must be Mauna Kea. It looks like the sky is actually blue this morning. The hotel coffee is brewing on the washstand and I thought I would take a few minutes to record some thoughts. If I do find a wi-fi area today, I will post all of these on the blog, otherwise it will have to wait for later.

The flight to Honolulu was long and uneventful. I think I just don’t enjoy flying anymore. I like being new places, and I still like traveling by other means, but the whole flying thing just doesn’t excite me anymore. I used to like airports, even, but now I’m just bored.

I sat next to a nice Chinese guy who didn’t speak much English. He asked me a few questions, was polite whenever I needed to get past him to go to the can, and mostly slept. Perfect seatmate, except that he twitched his leg. I read all of Steven Saylor’s Judgment of Caesar, beginning when I stood on line at Sea-Tac and ending somewhere over the Pacific, and slept much of the rest of the way.

The layover in Honolulu was a little too long to be fun. I did the blog thing and read my email, had a snack and read a newspaper, but it was hard to break out of the airport coma. It was 88 and very humid, and that wasn’t much incentive to go walking around (not that walking around an airport has all that much to recommend it anyway); I spent some time in the garden, but it was just a bit muggy. On the short flight to Hilo, I sat next to a kid and his mom. It tuned out they lived in Hilo, and told me that it did rain a lot, but that the other side of the island was wonderful and that it was a nice drive over there. They also said Hilo was a quiet town, and that one of the reasons that they liked it was that it was cooler than Honolulu. Her husband works at the university “taking care of the dorms” but she didn’t elaborate on what it was like to work there.

Hilo was gray when we landed, and stayed that way. The Hilo airport is rather small, and mostly open air (although covered). I got my bag, but there was no bus or shuttle service, so I had to take a cab to the hotel. The cab driver had a daughter who worked at the UW and son who was attending there, so we chatted a bit. I told him why I was in town, and he said that the high schools were offering $50-60 thousand for people with master’s degrees to teach, because Hawaii County was short 400 teachers. I told him I would think about it.

The hotel room is fine, a little older and shabby in a seventies-chic way. I am reminded of my trip to Reykjavik, oddly enough, because once again it seems I am in the wrong part of town. The hotel is right on the bay, and is a little east of town (open water is to the north), in the same general direction as the airport, so I did not come through town to get here. I am also on a long road that has nothing but hotels on it. I walked for a half-hour in both directions last night and only found too-expensive restaurants and convenience stores. This is a little bitty resort strip, so there were lots of tourists (I heard German and French as well as other languages) and what looked like locals who were partying (hootchie-girls, as Otis would say).


The desk clerk told me that it was a ten-minute drive to the University, but we are adjacent to the Bayfront Drive and old downtown. I want to do this without a car, so today I am going to walk to the old downtown, and the new downtown, and the university, to get the lay of the land. I should be able to get a Sunday paper and look at the local ads and get a sense of things, and hopefully find a wi-fi place to log in.

Another early morning jotting:

It’s Monday morning, again before six. It looks very gray out; it has certainly rained overnight, and looks like it’s raining now. That may put a hitch in my plans for today, but all it will cost is money. Let’s catch up first.

Yesterday I did take my lay of the land walk. I had breakfast (eggs, rice and LOTS of fruit) in the hotel, and then just set out for old town about 8:15. There is a bay front road and a bayfront park; I walked through the park most of the way and then came to a place where I should have gotten out onto Kamehameha Road, but didn’t, so I wound up walking on the shoulder of the bay front Highway for a while. I could still see everything, so it was fine. I was walking alongside a park that was on the landward side of the highway, but I couldn’t get into it because of a fence. Most of the folks in it at 8:30 on a Sunday morning looked like they lived there; some were sharing their 40-ouncers already.

I came to the intersection at the west end of old town, and just walked up and down the streets for a while. There was a bit of a preserved feel too it, but not so much. A lot of the buildings were from around 1910, but it wasn’t like they had really dressed the place up. It didn’t have the self-conscious feel of Poulsbo or Leavenworth; some stuff seemed a little touristy, but most of it just seemed old. Not much was open on a Sunday morning; there was one coffee shop doing land-office business and a supermarket where I recorded some prices to check when I got home. Mostly, it looked like downtown Vancouver or Edmonds. Walking to town and around took maybe an hour.

I headed out of town on a slight southeasterly angle to go to the college and University. I just walked down some larger parallel streets, checking out the neighborhoods. Mostly, the feel was a lot like Greenwood: a little shabby, with some nicely maintained small homes sprinkled through. I didn’t see any large or expensive-looking homes anywhere on my whole walk. Some of the sections had no sidewalks, but there were some, and certainly at the bigger intersections, most of which had controlled pedestrian walk signals.

I deliberately angled my path to go by the Hilo Shopping Center. It wasn’t a mall in any real sense; it was a two-level, outside access center with some interior bits. No anchor, no chains – it all looked like local stuff. It was also closed on Sundays, except for one coffee shop and the video game place.

I got up to the college neighborhood at about 10:30. I had some trouble finding the community college lower campus, and wound up walking to the University first. It is not overwhelming on first look – a lot of portables, a lot of red railings, the usual grass and landscaping, and mixed architecture. Some buildings were wood, some monolithic concrete, some brick; there didn’t appear to be a plan.

I went to the library to cool down a bit – it was so hot that I was drenched with sweat after walking for two hours. It was a smallish library, maybe the size of the Clark College library, and didn’t have any public Internet access. The rest of the college was shut down, since the students aren’t back yet. I walked around a bit, but didn’t spend much time there, since there wasn’t much to see.

I went past the community college lower campus as I headed back to the hotel; it was singularly unimpressive, mostly a collection of portables. I headed back toward the water, passing some commercial stuff, and more of the same kind of residential blocks, and the county park, which appeared to be more like a county fairgrounds, with event buildings and such. There weren’t a whole lot of places to eat, at least not on the route I took, and when I checked with the hotel desk later for dinner options, they confirmed that the closest food was farther out than I had ventured.

I got back to the hotel sweaty and sore and blistered. I had a salad bar lunch and then logged on to the pay-internet terminal. My cycle sold, Otis’s ring has not; I checked some email and felt connected. Then I went back to the room and read a Sunday paper. Local politics seemed to be mostly about native-Hawaiian issues; the rest looked pretty typical for a town this size.

I took a little walk after that and tried to figure out what to do next. I figure I need a car after all; this is not a walking town, and lots that I need or want to see is a ways out. So I made some calls and arranged for a car at the airport this morning. The I was going to walk to the airport for fun, but since it looks so rainy, I think I will just get all ready for the day, catch a cab to the airport, get my car, and tour until the interview this afternoon at 2:00.

So let’s get to it.

As you know, I did get the car and toured the town. I found where all the chains and malls were; just a little outside the radius of my walk was a strip like any other strip in America: Borders, Office Depot, Sears, Jack-in-the-Box, and so on. Traffic wasn't so bad anywhere, but was more congested around the strip area, of course. I didn't see neighborhoods any different from the ones I had already seen. So, other than being cooler, it was pretty much the same trip.

In addition to the comments I have made about the HawCC interview process, I guess the big thing was that it seemed that their pedagogy was about 40 years old: a real lockstep, conformist, skills-based approach to Basic Writing. I don't know if there's a match there.

I think the whole Hilo trip experience can be summed up by this anecdote: I wanted to buy a ukulele in Hawaii (I think it would be easier to learn to play than my recently-sold melodeon). In all my wandering through the town, I never came across a music store or even a Hawai'ian store that sold ukes. Finally, when I was up at the volcano, I saw some teen boys, one of whom had a uke and was strumming it. I asked him if he had gotten it in Hilo, and he said they had been on the Kona side. I told them I hadn't been able to find a uke store in Hilo. He told me they had bought it at the Costco in Kona, and that it was a real good deal, since it came with a case and everything.