Harvest Approaching

We were staying near Hanalei and drove past this lookout every time we went into town, and after a few passes I stopped and photographed it properly. I went back and did it again on another day. This is the better of the two.

The valley floor is given over to taro — kalo — grown in flooded paddies, which I hadn’t known until that trip. It’s a staple across Polynesia and it matters in Hawaii in a way that goes well beyond food, which I’d rather acknowledge than pretend to explain.

What I was actually after was the geometry. Seen from above, the paddies lay out as a grid of bright water and dark banks running down a jungle valley, and that structure is the whole reason I kept stopping. Black and white pulls it forward and gets the green out of its way, and I’ll admit to a weakness for monochrome whenever the weather is doing something stormy.

Rain came through at some point on every day of that trip, particularly on the north side of the island, and we were told it had been an unusually wet year. That was evident in the size of the vegetation all over the island.