I spent two weeks in Finland in late August and early September 2025. I published the majority of photos on my Flickr account, where I have now collected photos from four trips I have made since 2023.
For some of my photos, I choose to create final images in black and white. I like Finland in color and black and white. Finland remains very special to me. Two of my great grandparents emigrated from South Ostrobothnia, Finland to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the early 1900s. On my last trip, I stopped in one of my ancestral villages, Kortesjärvi. It was my second time there. I felt a special feeling in my skin there. It’s hard to describe. It felt like home.
That’s right: October 18, 2025, “No Kings Day,” will go down in American history as a defining day for our troubled, imperiled democracy.
The protests were mobilized around one theme: that in the United States we have no kings. And they took place to challenge the authority of a sitting president and his administration that have falsely called peaceful American cities, like my hometown of Portland, Oregon, “war zones.”
Current estimates peg the number of protesters at 7 million, at least, in more than 2,600 locations, spread throughout every state.
VISIT MY POST ON MY WEBSITE TO SEE MORE PHOTOS AND READ MORE.
Today I learned, to my utter dismay, the historic Grand Canyon Lodge inside Grand Canyon National Park, on its North Rim, was destroyed by a wildfire.
There are few details outside of the initial announcement made the National Park Service the morning of July 13, 2025.
The lodge opened in 1937, and it has been run for years by the rapacious and problem-plagued Aramark concessionaire company, which for decades has poorly managed many national park public assets under government contract at parks like Grand Canyon.
A historic photo at the the the North Rim Lodge, taken in the late 1930s. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service, for Creative Commons use only.)
The lodge had one of the finest viewpoints I’ve ever had at any United States National Park, which serve as cultural and natural institutions that remain national treasures of all the American people. Long before white settlers stepped foot on the North American continent, all the lands in what is now Grand Canyon Park were the domain of indigenous tribes, who continue to call the area home.
As of midday July 13, 2025, two wildfires are burning on the North Rim, having burned more than 45,000 acres. The White Sage fire has burned 40,126 acres (16,200 hectares) near the North Rim, and the Dragon Bravo fire, burning to the south within Grand Canyon national park, has scorched 5,000 acres, according to the InciWeb website.
The moment I read the story about the blaze and destruction of the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, my mind raced back to the one night I spent there in September 2005.
I had flown down to Arizona from my then home in Anchorage, Alaska, to visit my old grad school roommate from our years together at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1991 and after. He and his family had settled in beautiful Flagstaff. The trip allowed us to catch up and do an adventure–running across the Grand Canyon, one of the most famous and world-class trail runs in North America.
My friend and host, Jeff, was very ambitious.
Jeff plotted a run from the South Rim, to the North Rim, and then back (called “Rim to Rim to Rim,” in trail parlance). I would meet him at the Grand Canyon Lodge for the night and do the simpler and shorter “Rim to Rim run” (about 24 miles) from the North Rim to the South Rim only. My run is the classic run. Jeff’s run is for the truly hardcore trail runner, which he was at the time.
We got incredibly lucky, scoring a room in a cabin by the lodge that had a vacancy open up before I arrived. We had been prepared to camp out in the elements on the North Rim, but I am not sure how that would have worked. Even in late summer, it can be freezing at night. But fate was good to us.
Everything worked out perfectly. Jeff ran across solo safely to get our cabin room. I took the shuttle bus to the Grand Canyon Lodge, arriving after a five hour drive, near sunset, after spending the first half the day on the South Rim doing a canyon rim hike. We both got about four to five hours of sleep, awaking around 4 a.m. I ate a terrible pizza at the lodge’s subpar cafeteria to load up on carbohydrates.
We awoke in near freezing weather and darkness under the stars. We grabbed a photo in the dark at the North Rim Trailhead, just where the 6,000 foot descent to the Colorado begins.
I had a nasty spill that day, cutting open my hand on some sharp rocks, but otherwise the day was pure magic. We made excellent time, stopping at Phantom Ranch, by the Colorado River, to refill our Camelback water pouches and buy some food, and we got to the top of the South Rim by mid-afternoon.
I continued to do trail runs for many years after this epic outing, but this adventure, with a good friend, Jeff, remains my most memorable trail run.
I’ll always have that memory of standing on the edge of the canyon, at sunset, gazing at 2-billion-year-old metamorphic rocks turning purple and dark orange hues as the sun slowly slipped over the horizon.
Nothing ever truly lasts, but this news still fills me with sorrow. The country lost something special today that we will never have back.
(I published most of these photos 11 years earlier, and wanted to share them again with this memory of what is now gone forever: Grand Canyon Lodge.)
Every Friday since early April I have been joining a group of mostly older (like me) Portland residents at peaceful protests on Portland’s Sellwood Bridge during the Friday night, after-work rush hour.
The local organizers live in southeast Portland, like me, not far from Sellwood Bridge. The bridge is found on the south side of Portland, straddling the Willamette River. It’s a busy corridor for traffic heading from mostly Democratic and left-of-center leaning Multnomah County to a more evenly split jurisdiction politically, Clackamas County, which lies the south.
The organizers call their weekly civic event “Friday protests on the Sellwood Bridge.” It is an apt name. Their mission is simple too: “Our goal is to encourage our community to stay engaged and to use our voices and First Amendment rights to protest any erosion of our Constitutional freedoms or functioning government.”
The last event took place on Friday, May 30, 2025. My photos, all intentionally hiding most of the faces of the participants, were taken at the protest under sunny, warm skies.
That night, from about 5:30-7 p.m., over 75 folks assembled on the Sellwood Bridge to defend our country, exercise protected speech, and engage hundreds and hundreds of rush-hour commuters. We come with our own signs—painted, drawn, or marked out with Sharpies. Participants can also use the many more professional signs and repurposed but evergreen cardboard signs brought by the organizers.
On the last Friday of May 2025, the horn energy was righteous under the early summer sun.
Supporters in the passing rush hour cars, and also cyclists, outnumbered the few angry white male bird flippers by about a ratio of 25-1. That was encouraging.
Like previous weeks, I saw the outrage and solidarity in people’s faces. They showed with their expressions they were all in on the resistance themes. I observed how they leaned into their horns, giving protesters a thumbs ups, pumping their fists, and even yelling in support.
For the commuters, they see people engaged. They see protest happening. They see the signs focusing on: cuts to Medicaid, violations of due process, cuts to our federal health system, illegal firings of tens of thousands of federal workers, threats to the environment and education, the gutting of our federal bureaucracy, the illegal disappearance of lawful residents to gulags out of the United States, and more.
The drivers recognize that their frustration and outrage at the ongoing coup to the U.S. Constitution is not a personal assault, but one shared by their neighbors and our country. And man, were they laying in on the horns on May 30, 2025.
The Sellwood Bridge Protest logo
The importance of showing up, week after week
The protests each Friday on the Sellwood Bridge are all organic, with almost no coordination, outside of weekly email reminders.
A few people started the civil actions in February 2025, and they have grown. The entire purpose is to keep showing up, to keep calling out the violations of law by the current president, and to demand a restoration of law and the end of corruption and lawbreaking by the current administration of President Donald Trump, a convicted felon.
What’s important about the events each week is the consistency of civil disobedience and the act of protest.
Renown historian of 20th century tyranny, Professor Timothy Snyder of the University of Toronto, in an interview on May 31, 2025, with MSNBC’s host Ali Velshi, said, “Democracy is a verb.” It’s not a static thing. It’s action. When there is action, others engage, and the acts themselves become part of a system that is vital to human goodness.
I think Snyder described the value of action so perfectly: “But we also have to recognize that it’s not on any one of us to solve the whole thing. Right. So each of us does a little bit, and together that changes the whole landscape.”
I plan to keep going to these events as long as my democracy is under siege, and it looks like it will be a long and painful four years, at least.
Protesters against the administration of President Donald Trump numbered at least 3,000 and shared a diverse range of creative protest signs, defending American democracy.
On the weekend marking the 250th anniversary of the first shots fired in the American Revolution against a tyrannical monarch and the British Empire, at least 3,000 people gathered in downtown Portland, Oregon to protest the administration of President Donald Trump.
The April 19, 2025 events kicked off at Pioneer Square, a gathering place for many public events in the city, and then the march took over the streets for over an hour. Protesters represented all ages and carried a wide array of colorful, creative, and biting signs criticizing Trump, Elon Musk, and the administration for its many actions. I saw about a dozen Portland police officers following on bikes, but mostly there was no visible law enforcement presence based on my observations.
There was no need for any police given the entirely peaceful nature of the civil action by thousands of people exercising their protected speech, as allowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The day was a fitting one too.
Nationally some have dubbed collective national protests on April 19, 2025, as “No Kings Day, Part II.” The reasons for unrest today have a striking similarity to what happened two and a half centuries ago, as British forces gathered in Massachusetts to confront increasingly rebellious colonial residents.
The issues that led to the first conflict of the American Revolution—the right to self-determination, liberty, democracy, the rule of law, a life free from the power of kings—helped to forge a nation 13 years later, in 1788.
That year, the newly christened United States of America was created through the adoption of a founding charter, the Constitution. While revolutionary, it was also terribly marred and flawed by enshrining slavery, our country’s greatest sin. It would still take over two centuries to guarantee the document’s original promise for all persons.
This framework for a nation, set forth in the Constitution, called for a system of checks and balances by three branches of government: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. On April 19, 2025, in Portland, people gathered with deep and profound concern that this sacred charter had been irrevocably broken by a man who has proclaimed himself to be a king.
At these protests in Portland, the residents who gathered to assemble recalled our original bold vision for a country with their calls for accountability, the rule of law, and the safeguarding of our democratic freedoms. Their demands reminded us all of our daring experiment to forge a more perfect union, stretching from 1775 to 1788, and grounded in our Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Lastly, I observed few persons from a group being targeted for enforcement and deportation action by this administration: Latinos. There was a lot of chatter online by some of the organizers (I can’t confirm who the organizers are based on published posts), who said it would be safe for all people. However, many Latinos are fearful in Oregon, given the cancellations this month of upcoming Latino cultural events statewide. I believe they do not want to be seen, photographed, or filmed at these events. There were very few African Americans too. The lack of diversity at this event is telling and needs to be discussed.
Finland’s Independence Day, itsenäisyyspäivä, is celebrated each year on December 6. It commemorates the day the Finnish Parliament declared independence from Russia in 1917, as Europe was being torn apart by World War I and as Russia was convulsing in its own violent revolution. Finland would soon have its own bloody civil war soon after, in 1918, with the German-backed “whites” defeating the USSR-supported Finnish communist forces, the “reds,” with a decisive and destructive battle in Tampere led by Finnish war hero Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim.
For the Finnish people, it marked the first time ever that the country was finally free of foreign domination after more than 700 years of colonization, Christianization, and conquest and rule by Sweden, from the mid-12th century to 1809. It then endured 108 years of Russian domination and rule. It finally became a nation amid the chaos of World War I.
After the Tsar’s rule was toppled, the Parliament of Finland made its Declaration of Finnish Independence on December 6, 1917. The new Nordic nation sent requests to be recognized as a sovereign country to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The Bosheviks in what became the USSR formally acknowledged Finnish independence on December 31, 1917.
Many Finnish citizens in most communities commemorate their independence with formal and solemn events, often involving war memorials than can be found in every city and every community, no matter how small, throughout the Nordic country, like this event planned for December 6, 2024 in Kuopio, at a memorial, or at churches, like this event the same day in Helsinki.
My Finnish relatives, who I only met for the first time in September 2023, told me the day for most Finns has special significance as a remembrance of the war dead, who died in Finland’s three conflicts during World War II: The Winter War, against the USSR (1939-40); the Continuation War (1941-44), against the USSR; the Lapland War against Nazi Germany (former ally, 1944-45). Some of the pictures I’m seeing posted as day awakens in Finland on December 6, 2024, are of people reading the great Finnish war novel, Väinö Linna’s The Unknown Soldier/Tuntematon Sotilas.
It was a brutal time, when Finland, a much smaller nation, faced an adversary with vastly superior resources and weaponry and withstood an unprovoked attack at great cost. Finland ultimately lost more than 10 percent of its land, but was never brutally occupied by the USSR like Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, or like other Nordic countries, Denmark and Norway, by Nazi Germany. However, the Nazis fought a scorched earth campaign in late 1944 and early 1945 against Finland when Finland turned on them to reclaim their nation and make peace with the USSR. The Germans left a trail of ruin as they were driven from Lapland, where they once were stationed as allies. The harsh peace signed with the USSR ultimately saw Finland retain its territorial integrity and maintain its independence against heavy odds.
During my three trips to Finland since August 2023, I have been documenting the way the country and its people remember the trauma of these wars, taking photographs of its war memorials and markers for the dead. Nothing has shaped modern Finnish identity more than these conflicts that took 95,000 lives of its soldiers between 1939 and 1945. Finland’s remembrance of these traumatic experiences are found in nearly every Finnish community, no matter the size or location.
Every city and village I visited had memorials. All of them. So I would stop my rental car, get out, and document what I found. Flowers were always fresh. Always. Every memorial I saw everywhere had fresh flowers. Everyone I went to had visitors. The past was always remembered. If you look for Finnish news of itsenäisyyspäivä, inevitably there will a photo at a memorial.
I’m getting to be an old fart. As such, I actually want to do another Baltic Sea crossing between Sweden and Finland on these cruise ships. They are fun. On my trip from Turku to Stockholm on the Viking line, I met a fabulous German couple who even guided me nicely to downloading the right local transport app and picking the right bus and subways to the central station from the ferry terminal in beautiful Stockholm. How about that! Also, you get to behold old farts like me disco dancing in the discos, the mad rush to buy duty-free booze by huge crowds of Nordic travelers stocking up for months, and the wonderful upper deck views of this lovely part of the world.
(Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
Portland does get its summer concerts in the parks right, even if so many other things are not going well.
We have a lot of issues now in our city, from a wave of gun violence to massive open air drug use of deadly fentanyl, and the failure of our community to meet these and other challenges. These problems have also led to an exodus of nearly 3 percent of Multnomah County’s population since 2020.
In fact, this week, the local weekly newspaper, Willamette Week, published a litany of woes that national and international journalists have shared about the falling star that Portland has become from its quirky, almost rock star status less than a decade ago.
“Portland is on a short list of destination cities for national media,” wrote the Willamette Week. “Rather than a model, however, we have become a cautionary tale. It wasn’t long ago that the nation’s leading newspapers and magazines regularly wrote the same glowing profile of the Rose City—a lovably weird outpost wedged between the Cascades and the Pacific where colorful (but mostly white) residents pedaled tall bikes while playing the bagpipes, eating Voodoo doughnuts, and slurping elderflower-flavored kombucha.”
The Voodoo doughnuts and bagpipes were always absurdities and click-bait style gimmicks disconnected from lived reality of nearly everyone who lives here, but that’s what feeds the media and social media appetites.
Portland, and its countless brand messengers, ran with it, until the city hit the brick wall of harsh reality. This collision of fantasy and reality has made us a model of what can go wrong with civic life and the brute truth of complex issues like gun violence, deadly opioid-fueled drug use, mental health disorders, gentrification, racial disparities, political experiments gone amok, and more.
Despite our many issues, the city can still put on some good public events that bring together diverse residents. That was on display on July 15, 2023, at the great public park near my home, Sellwood Park.
The Portland-based Latin Music group Conjunto Alegre dished up the standards of salsa, merengue, cumbia, bachata, cha-cha, and more. This is a wonderful and eclectic ensemble from the diaspora of musicians from Latin countries who call Portland home.
Even dance-challenged–and yes, mostly white–Portlanders were on their feet dancing. The band had fun. The crowd had fun. Kids had fun. The breeze cooled all of us down at the end of a hot day. And for a couple of hours, the magic of Portland had returned. I loved it!
As the nation navigates from extreme winter weather that cancelled thousands of flights, lead to fatal crashes by dangerous truck drivers, and imperiled many living on the margins, Christmas Day finally arrives.
Snow and ice hit the Pacific Northwest, blanketing Seattle in perilous ice and closing portions of Interstate 84 outside of Portland. Fortunately, Portland had mostly light snow just before Christmas eve that today, Dec. 25, is turning to wet, soppy mush.
To everyone who is braving the elements or trying to connect with families and friends, please travel safely. Enjoy the season and, if you can, be kind and think of others who may be less fortunate.
I normally try to avoid popular tourist dens when I travel.
I prefer to learn about new places and not expose myself to the corporate, global tourism culture that makes holidays to Bali, Cancun, and Paris all blur into bland rituals to relax those wealthy enough to fly around the world for temporary pleasure.
In late October 2022, when I took a long overdue short holiday, I had little time to plan for a true learning adventure. I found myself suddenly between two jobs and a small window to organize. That meant I needed to find a place that aligned with my interests and could be reached quickly.
My plot emerged overnight—to surf in warm, tropical waters. I had nursed this scheme for years. This also meant breaking my self-imposed travel rules.
After six years of surfing in the cold Pacific waters off Oregon’s shores, I craved warmth. By the time I booked this trip the last week of October 2022, I had been irregularly surfing the cold, feisty waters of the Oregon Coast since 2016. That also made me an almost entirely cold-water surfer. (I don’t count my few past efforts in Hawaii in 2009 or Australia in 2007 as real surfing outings.)
I booked a three-night, four-day trip to one of the most famous of tourist destinations in the Pacific, on the Island of Oahu. Traveling to Waikiki meant I was embracing its long-documented excesses symbolizing global tourism, especially for Americans and Japanese travelers.
The least I could do on the trip was learn more about the place.
I soon discovered after booking my trip that Waikiki was once a sacred site, rich in aquaculture and sea harvesting for native Hawaiians. The last century saw it paved, developed, and transformed into a tourist haven, attracting millions of annual visitors the world over.
That transformation damaged the local environment and displaced its original inhabitants, all through the historic systems of colonialism and global capitalism. My self-described adventure would reward this victorious new reality. My consolation would be honoring the sport Hawaii generously gave to the modern world—surfing.
I found a surprisingly affordable hotel, the Pearl Waikiki. It catered to budget travellers like me, by Hawaiian tourist standards. It also put me a short walking distance from Queens, a gentle surf spot, where I surfed for three days. I needed a place that allowed me to rent a board and put in the ocean without driving. I literally could pick up my board from the surf shop, walk two blocks to the famous Waikiki Beach, and paddle out.
Offshore adventures
As surfing goes, I am not that great. I rented mediocre boards, not a performance board. That was a mistake. The shop owners seemed reluctant to let me rent a nicer board, or maybe we had a simple misunderstanding. It may not have mattered, really.
Waikiki’s surfer sculpture was created by sculptor Robert Pashby and erected in June 2003.
Still I was able to catch my requisite number of rides, most on my final day. I will never forget my final ride and the sounds of the board slapping on the wave face as I rode a beautiful break to the shoreline.
The waves were at most four feet high, and the swells came in irregularly. Most of the time I spent in the water with other surfers consisted of gazing at the sea, bobbing in the small swells, and waiting.
In short, I did what surfers mostly do.
The water sparkled a rich, aqua-marine blue. Best of all, the water measured a very warm 79-81 degrees Fahrenheit. For an Oregon surfer, who has always worn a 5-4 wetsuit for cold water, this represented a radical change. I could wear board shorts and a rash guard surfing shirt and not once shiver.
For some of my hours floating in the water, rainy clouds painted rainbows above the nearby Diamond Head crater and the skyline filled with bland, tall Waikiki hotels. The surf reports I followed predicted larger swells. They never rolled in.
Out in the water, I found some nice moments of surf fellowship with some older local men. They rode old, beat-up long boards. They were as hungry for nice waves as I was. Like me, they came out in the early morning, just after 6 a.m., enjoying surf time, but taking it seriously too. Surfing is serious business, even if its spirit lies in finding moments of peace.
Finding a wave also requires a mixture of patience and positioning. One waits, while constantly reading the ocean for signals where to paddle one’s board for just the right ride. When they come, everyone moves into position.
Over the three days I surfed, I saw about a dozen male surfers who could be called hot shots. Some were haoles, or white guys, who to me looked like corporate lawyers in surfing gear. They didn’t smile much as they confidently popped up and cut their lines effortlessly in front of beginners to remind them who the alphas were, even at a mostly tourist surf break. Most of the surfers at Queens were visitors, like me.
I also could not believe how fit and beautiful some of the local women surfers looked. They resembled advertisements for women’s sport fashion brands, with perfectly sculpted bodies that came straight from a Patagonia women’s swimwear photo shoot. I had not seen such fit and good-looking people like this in a long time, at least in the water. They reminded me how much this sport attracts the beautiful, the confident, and the strong.
There were other locals who did not look like statuesque surf pros I see on YouTube channels dedicated to global surfing. But one could tell they lived here. They had the moves, knew the waves at this break, and mastered the take offs at always the right second. I loved their style.
Mostly, I appreciated the laid-back vibe. Even when the irregular good wave came, with a dozen riders paddling at once to catch it, no one barked at newcomers for violating the unwritten but clearly known surf etiquette. Those globally recognized norms, which create order when there could be chaos and real conflict, were egregiously violated by nearly everyone.
Even then, no one yelled or gave the “stink eye” glare of surfing displeasure. After one wave, I quickly apologized to a surfer my age, who I thought I had cut off, and he waved it off saying, “No worries, man. This is Waikiki.”
Onshore adventures
When I wasn’t surfing, I explored the area just east of the Waikiki strip that includes the state monument site called Diamond Head. The caldera can be seen nearly every post card ever taken at Waikiki and looking east on the shore. Geologist suggest the crater was formed about 300,000 years ago, during a single and explosive eruption.
Today most of the site is protected, but accessible to hikers for a small entrance fee to hike to the crater’s rim, with its surrounding slopes off-limits to all. The state estimates more than 1 million visitors a year visit the crater, trudging up to the crater overlook that points to Waikiki’s hotel skyline.
From my hotel door out and back, going around this extinct volcano, I estimated the distance at six miles, with change. It was a perfect runner’s outing too. The air temperatures both mornings were a bit warm, at 85 degrees Fahrenheit. I came back a sweaty mess, the way a good run should leave one. My foot-only adventures turned into my unexpected trip surprises, taking me to a famous local spot, but one rich in beauty and natural wonder.
My running route, and also one used by perhaps tens of thousands of runners before me, passed on a bike path and multi-use trail surrounding the crater. Even as a natural monument, it also is fully surrounded by developments and high-end homes on its southern face looking onto the Pacific Ocean.
My run hugged Kapiʻolani Regional Park, past the Waikiki Shell performance stage and Honolulu Zoo, up Monsarrat Avenue, and the around the crater’s outer walls. In addition to the expensive homes with ocean views on the south side of the crater, I passed Kapiʻolani Community College and the State of Hawaii Department of Defense headquarters.
I took this selfie of me and and Diamond Head at Kapiʻolani Regional Park, which was once a sacred area to native Hawaiian people.
Best of all, my route gave me a perfect overlook of two amazing surf spots called Cliffs and Lighthouse. From this overlook I could see the local “heavies” riding beautiful waves in the mid-morning when I did my runs.
At the overlook, I talked to a local man in his late 50s, who likely had Chinese ancestry, or maybe mixed heritage, as do so many in the state. He was smiling and still dripping wet. He had just wrapped up his morning set with a short board. He let me know both spots would welcome newcomers.
He said he didn’t have a good outing, but his face was beaming that glow a surfer wears when they come out of the water. I felt a bond with him as only surfers can feel discussing the waves and surf locations. Unfortunately, my trip did not involve renting a car or getting to know the local surf spots.
A short trip into Hawaii’s past
My second unexpected highlight happened during my day-trip to historic sites in downtown Honolulu. I reached them using the island’s reliable and renown local public transit system called “TheBus.”
Downtown Honolulu seemed like a ghost town when I went there my second day on the island. The downtown historic, government, and cultural area surrounds the modernist State Capitol building and colonial style state judiciary and pre-statehood administrative buildings. The area is walkable and well worth a half-day visit.
These were residences of white missionaries from the newly formed United States. One of the earliest missionaries, famed Vermont-born Congregationalist minister and colonialist Hiram Bingham, arrived to the islands in 1820 with other devout Protestants.
Like many of his stern Protestant peers, Bingham was uncomfortable with the culture and indiginous residents he observed. His goal was to replace local culture in the name of Western progress.
In his accounts written 27 years after his “first encounter” with the still unknown culture, Bingham wrote: “As we proceeded to the shore, the multitudinous, shouting and almost naked natives, of every age, sex, and rank, swimming, floating on surfboards, sailing in canoes, sitting, lounging, standing running like sheep, dancing…attracted our earnest attention, and exhibited the appalling darkness of the land, which we had come to enlighten.”
Today, the sights of Hawaiians expressing their indigenous culture that so worried Bingham is the same media-conjured image and Hawaii brand drawing visitors the world over to the state.
A tribute by Bingham’s relatives to the New England preacher is still inscribed in stone on the front wall of the historic Kawaiahaʻo Church that Bingham founded, found next to the mission homes. The engraved homage celebrates his and his New England peers’ colonizing efforts and reads like a painful artifact of white, American expansionism.
The missionaries’ played an important role in creating a dominant, white colonialist culture—amid the arrival of many other immigrants from Asia and Portugal—that influenced the island’s development in the 1800s. One researcher on the impact of the first missionaries, Anatole Brown, noted the missionaries’ impact expanded far beyond the missionary period that formally ended a few decades after their arrival: “By the time the U.S. Navy took interest in the Islands by mid-nineteenth century, the American colonial process was in full swing, as Bibles moved onto guns.”
The colonial process launched by the white settlers ultimately paved the way for the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in January 1893 by the American government and business interests, in what can be consider an act of war. That cultural and political assimilation almost crushed local Hawaiian culture and cultural traditions in the process, like surfing and hula, which are now the living symbols of Hawaii in the minds of the world.
I next stopped to pay my homage to the statue of the legendary Hawaiian King Kamehameha, the monarch from the Big Island of Hawaii, who invaded at Waikiki in 1795, defeating the island’s local ruler, Chief Kalanikupule. He then unified all of the islands in 1810, when King Kaumualii of Kaui island surrendered peacefully. His statue stands proudly in front the Al’iolani Hale Justice Building. Within a century of Kamehameha’s triumph, the islands would succumb to outside conquerors and far more deadly diseases.
Across from the statue’s outstretched arms is the last home of Hawaii’s monarchs, called the Iolanai Palace. The palace was built by Hawaii’s final king, Kalakaua, in 1882. It remained the house of Hawaii’s royalty until Queen Lili’uokalani, the king’s sister and successor, was overthrown in the January 1893 coup, engineered by a business cabal called the Committee of Safety and led by the U.S. military.
I did not go in, but walked around the expansive palace grounds. Just north of that one finds the State Capitol, completed in 1969. The modernist, square-shaped building has an open-air courtyard, where the midday sun shone down. The building was designed to be unlike most state capitols that mimic classical Roman architectural style. It’s considered one of the most accessible state capitols, where legislative and executive offices are open to the public.
Hanging on its front entrance, by the bronze statue of the overthrown monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, hangs the 15-foot wide, massive bronze state seal. The emblem shows the state’s royal coat of arms, the seal of the former Hawaiian Kingdom and the 50th state since 1959.
I next walked west across the street from the Iolani Palace, to visit the Hawaii State Art Museum. The museum is free and found on the second floor of the Capitol District Building, a Spanish Mission revival style building built in 1928.
During my visit, the Turnaround Gallery of the facility was hosting a collection of black and white photos taken by photographer Ed Greevy. The collection of remarkable black and white photos document his decades-long collaboration with Hawaiian activist Haunani-Kay Trask. They show different chapters of the state’s environmental and social justice movements. The photos are found in the book “Kūʻē: Thirty Years of Land Struggles in Hawaiʻi.”
The images show resistance protests for Hawaiian sovereignty, starting in the 1970s, and scenes of civil protests against forced evictions, loss of affordable housing for local residents, and the building of the interstate highway across the backbone of Oahu’s mountain range separating the north and south shores.
The gallery exhibit also revealed the clashes on the Islands that began far before the protest period. They continue to this day. Throughout the decades of conflict and change, Hawaiian culture thrived. That can be seen most clearly through the sport of surfing and the first global ambassador of the sport, who grew up in nearby Waikiki.
Waikiki’s legend
If it wasn’t for the legendary exploits of famed Oahu and Waikiki native Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, the forced cultural assimilation by outsiders might have succeeded. His life both reflects and embodies how his Waikiki childhood home turned into its meta-mythical destination for visitors like me.
Kahanamoku was born into Hawaiian royalty in 1890. By that year, Hawaii’s native population had dramatically dropped due to imported diseases brought by missionaries, explorers, and whalers. The imported epidemics of infections, including measles, smallpox, and whooping cough, wiped out Hawaii’s population. It fell precipitously from approximately 300,000 at the time of Captain Cook’s first arrival in 1778 to 135,000 in 1820, and 53,900 in 1876. Kahanamoku grew up in the aftermath of this radical change that nearly destroyed his people.
During his 73 years, until his passing in 1968, Kahanamoku achieved global fame in multiple fields and became a living embodiment of his people. Kahanamoku was the first person to be inducted in the Surfing and Swimming halls of fame, a testament to his life in and around water on Oahu.
Kahanamoku rose to stardom first as an Olympics swimmer and Hawaii tourism promoter.
The island’s business elite paid for his participation in events like the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, in San Francisco in 1915, to promote the Islands’ emerging nascent tourism industry. There he performed the hula, played the ukulele, and posed for photographs in traditional Hawaiian clothes. He also competed for the U.S. team in three Olympics: 1912 in Stockholm, 1920 in Antwerp, and 1924 in Paris, last competing at the age of 34. All told he won three gold and two silver medals for a country to which Hawaii was still relegated to territorial status, and only recently occupied militarily.
In the 1920s, he lived in southern California during the early years of Hollywood. He found bit parts as a minor screen actor in more than 25 films. Unfortunately, he was cast in “ethnic” roles because of deep racial biases in the studios and wider culture. But his legend as a surf promoter took root.
Kahanamoku also had achieved renown as a surfer and surf ambassador. In 1915, he traveled to Australia, to Sydney’s Freshwater Beach, introducing the Hawaiian sporting tradition to the continent that is now synonymous with surfing.
According to one account of this trip, “Duke and Australian surfers sealed an eternal alliance.” His most legendary ride took place in 1917, when he reportedly rode the largest wave ever, towering some 30 feet, at Waikiki on his 16-foot wooden long board. Kahanamoku reportedly caught the monster at a surf spot called Castle’s, off Waikiki, and took it all the way to another surf break called Publics, by Kapiolani Park, then into Cunha’s.
In California, during his Hollywood years, he popularized the nascent sport, taking out his long wooden board and visiting now-famous surfing spots, such as San Diego, Newport Beach, Santa Monica and Malibu.
In the 1930s, Hawaii’s so-called “waterman” returned to his native home. Kahanamoku was elected sheriff of the City and County of Honolulu in 1935, and then held that role for 13 terms, including the entirety of World War II. For his final life act, he was appointed and served as the official “Ambassador of Aloha” after statehood was granted in 1959—a position that embodied how he lived his life, according to many from Hawaii.
“The Duke,” as he is forever and famously known to surfers and the wider public, died in 1968, just at the global sport of surfing was taking off with surf movies, global tourism, and surf-themed rock and popular music. His ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean at Waikiki.
Even before his death, his legacy was questioned because of his Christian faith (his mother was a devout Christian) and his perceived deference in the early 20th century to Hawaii’s self-named Committee of Safety—the powerful business group that two decades earlier had ousted Hawaii’s last ruling royal monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani. The group had employed him and bought him a home in his beloved Waikiki.
Despite Kahanamoku’s controversial ties from his early life, in an era of rampant prejudice, his fame has grown, just like the global sport and lifestyle he helped to pioneer. In fact, his name and legend continue to grow in value.
In recent years, Kahanamoku’s surviving kin and the super-rich elite of Hawaii have locked legal horns over ownership of his lucrative global name and brand. “More significant, though, is the anger that the war has aroused among native Hawaiians, who perceive it as an appalling exploitation of a revered cultural icon,” noted a Nov. 16, 2003, Los Angeles Times story on the legal dispute over his name and legacy. “The conflict brings into focus a growing tension in Hawaii, unseen by most tourists, but a bitter, daily reality to island natives—a stinging reminder of a culture lost to commercialism.”
Final aloha
Like many visiting Waikiki, my trip would not have been complete without watching a traditional Hawaiian music and dance show on Waikiki beach. It seemed to embody the clash of Hawaii’s surviving culture and the tourist-driven capitalism visible in the international hotels that overlooked this famous stretch of sand and water.
They paved paradise and put in a tourist spot.
Several times a week the shows take place at sunset at the Kuhio Beach stage, near the water’s edge, for visiting tourists. The Hawaiian performers, with dancers, singers, and instrumentalists, share traditional Hawaiian performances and songs after the sun sets and the last surfers pull out their boards from the water. I could effortlessly watch and listen to Hawaiian music and dance every day, and the performance I saw genuinely shared the aloha spirit.
Close to this spot, next to Waikiki beach, stands the popular bronze statue of “The Duke,” with has both arms outstretched and a his signature long, wooden Hawaiian wooden surfboard planted in the ground and towering above him.
During my short stay in Waikiki, the statue was constantly mobbed with visitors, who posed in front of it. Many smiled while mimicking Kahanamoku’s pose. Each time I passed by, I saw a line of visitors from Japan who must have known of his legend, judging by their eagerness to pose next to the bronze replica, adorned daily with fresh flower necklaces called leis.
Like them, and countless tens of thousands of tourists before me, I also snapped my obligatory selfie with my cell phone. As a passable surfer, I smiled in appreciation of the gift “the Duke” and the Hawaiian people freely gave to the world. It felt like a respectable thing to do, even when the world now claimed Duke’s ancestral home and the lands of the first Hawaiian people as a manufactured “paradise” for an escape from our realities back home, wherever home might be.
What Beautiful Light 