Taro Terraces

It rained on us all morning. The steady north shore kind that soaks through everything and has you sitting in the car wondering why you drove out. We waited it out, and it broke for a while, and that's the sky in the frame — heavy cloud still filling most of the top with a hard patch of blue burning through the middle of it.

From the overlook the valley reads mostly as green. The ridges close in on both sides, so thick with vegetation you can't find the rock under them until the ridgeline breaks into those jagged spires in the back. Down at the bottom sit the loʻi, stepped terraces built up with stacked stone walls, taro filling most of them and dark water showing in the low corners and along the channels between. There's a thatched hale at the upper edge of them where the road comes in. Everything is dripping. The moss on the big lava boulder in the left foreground is soaked and lit up almost yellow-green, and it was the rain that did that.

The reason I wanted this one wide is that the terraces are small in it. They should be. Hawaiians have farmed kalo in this valley for centuries, in these beds, watered by the same stream, and the whole system fits into one shallow pocket of ground at the base of the cliffs. Somebody laid every one of those stones by hand and it still looks like the valley made it.