It’s a rare day when the phone call comes. The phone call. The one that marks a before and after. When the phone rang that day for me, I remember glancing at my phone and seeing a number I didn’t recognize and “Alaska” as the caller’s location. Immediately, names started cycling through my head. Who did I know in…
Category: In Search of Mark Twain in Hawaii
My Year of Tracking Twain
For four months now, I’ve been tracking Mark Twain’s movements around Hawai‘i. Tomorrow marks the 150th anniversary of his departure from these Islands. During Twain’s time in Hawai‘i, I made visits to the same islands as he during the same weeks he visited. Just 150 years later. I went to O`ahu, Maui, and Hawai`i Island….
Tracking Twain into Hawaiian Language Newspaper Archives
One hundred and fifty years ago today, Mark Twain was back on O‘ahu, after five weeks on Maui and three weeks on Hawai‘i Island. When I was on O‘ahu a while back, I met James E. Caron outside Morning Glass Coffee in Manoa Valley. He’s tall—taller than I am—with grey in his beard and bushy…
Tracking Twain into a Volcano
It’s lunchtime at Volcano House inside Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park. Sitting in a rocking chair, I gaze out a wall of plate glass windows at Halema`uma`u. Two miles across the rocky landscape, lava erupts from a hole in the ground 4,000-feet above sea level. I have to remind myself of that. That below me an…
Tracking Twain: Finally, I Met Mark Twain
Celebrity. What makes it? I’ve thought this often since a friend’s boyfriend left college a credit or class or paper—there are many stories out there—short of graduating and went to Hollywood to become Brad Pitt. Actually, he was already Brad Pitt, but in Hollywood, he became the famous—and wealthy—actor Brad Pitt. Our society likes celebrities…
Tracking Twain: Hawaii? Paradise? Hell? Or Just Another Place?
One hundred and fifty years ago in March, Mark Twain laid eyes on Hawai‘i for the first time. I’ve written before of his first words on sighting the Islands: “O‘ahu loomed high, rugged, useless, barren, black and dreary, out of the sea….”
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