Hawaiian Saltmaking
By Jan TenBruggencate On hot summer days, on rocky shorelines throughout the Islands, you can find pockets of white crystals in depressions in the stones. They are places where waves deposited salty...
View ArticleThe Garden Isle’s Fossil-Rich Landscape
By Jan TenBruggencate A lot of folks think of fossils in terms of dinosaurs — things a couple of hundred million years old. A place like Kaua‘i, which emerged from the ocean just five million years...
View ArticleBringing the Past to Life
By Jan TenBruggencate The stone remnants of early Hawaiian structures are just the bones of what they actually represent. A house foundation today may only be a rectangle of stones, with an opening in...
View ArticleA Canoe Is an Island, an Island is a Canoe
By Jan TenBruggencate Let’s face it. I’m a canoe nut. I’ve built them and rigged them, surfed them, sailed them, raced them across interisland channels, voyaged on them, fished off them. At various...
View ArticleRoyal Treatment from a King
By Jan TenBruggencate Kaumuali‘i, the last king of Kaua‘i, belied the meme of royals as petulant needy folks. He was a superb host. He had, as one would have said generations ago, the breeding. His...
View ArticleAs Large Farms Decline, Small Farmers Hold Strong
By Jan TenBruggencate Kaua‘i is known as the Garden Island, but how our garden is changing. In 1982, according to the Hawai‘i Data Book, there were 410 farms on the island. The average farm size was...
View ArticleMai‘a-Ki Trails
By Jan TenBruggencate All across Hawai‘i there is evidence of mai‘a-ki trails. This is a term for ancient pathways whose routes are often marked by banana and of ti plants. In many cases they are long...
View ArticleThe Hawaiian Makahiki Season
By Jan TenBruggencate One thing that sets us as humans apart from other species is the times in our lives when we do something different, when we ritually vary our routine. In the Judeo-Christian...
View ArticleThe Sands of Hanalei
By Jan TenBruggencate We think of gorgeous Hanalei as a stable, vast half-moon bay, a two-mile crescent white sand beach and a wide plain of fishponds, river, town and taro. But Hanalei Bay has had a...
View ArticleA Whale of a Comeback Tale
By Jan TenBruggencate A couple of years ago, a whale popped up in front of me as I was paddling a one-man canoe alone under the cliffs between Maha‘ulepu and Nawiliwili. There wasn’t another human in...
View ArticleThe Hawaiian Horse
By Jan TenBruggencate Hawai‘i’s proud equestrian traditions started in 1803, more than two centuries ago. The story goes that the first horses in the islands were purchased in California by Richard...
View ArticleCane Juice, Hops, Yeast — the 1st Hawaiian Beer
By Jan TenBruggencate Early European voyagers got their brew where they could find it. Certainly, ships left their home ports well supplied, generally, with casks of rum, and perhaps bottles of wine,...
View ArticleThe Nearly Lost Art of Weaving Makaloa
By Jan TenBruggencate The loss of wetlands in the Islands to agriculture and development may have resulted in the decline of one of the iconic plants, the tallest of makaloa. This noble sedge, which...
View ArticleHow High or Low Can the Oceans Go?
By Jan TenBruggencate We think of sea level changes in inches over periods of decades, but over longer time spans, the evidence is for far more dramatic rises and falls. How dramatic? Hundreds of feet...
View ArticleKoloa Plantation
By Jan TenBruggencate The Hawaiian sugar industry didn’t start in Koloa, and Koloa wasn’t really the site of the first sugar plantation, but these rural myths aside, this South Kaua‘i community has...
View ArticleCoconuts in a Nutshell
By Jan TenBruggencate If you love the look of a coconut, you shouldn’t prune your coconut trees, but if you don’t prune them, you shouldn’t stand under them, either. A swaying palm never looks as good...
View ArticleHolokū and muʻu
By Jan TenBruggencate Words have meaning, but meanings can change over time — even when they’re the names of common items — like pieces of clothing. A couple of Hawaiian words that can cause some...
View ArticleHawaiian Party Food
By Jan TenBruggencate Pono Market in Kapa‘a has probably the largest selection of poke types on the island on any given day. They also have a popular take-out lunch menu that changes daily. I was...
View ArticleWhen We Were Young
By Jan TenBruggencate Old coffee containers in display at Kaua‘i Coffee in Kalaheo. Things were different when I was a kid. It’s hard to even image how different. It was just after World War II. The...
View ArticleThe Beautiful Hibiscus
By Jan TenBruggencate A Hibiscus waimea subsp. Hannarae, or koki‘o ke‘oke‘o in Hawaiian, seen here in Hanakāpī‘ai Valley, Nāpali Coast. Photo by Seana Walsh/NTBG On a slope next to a trail, just above...
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