Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

 It may not have been the most majestic sight I saw in Hawaii or the most picturesque, but the perseverance and unflinching courage of the green sea turtles flapping their flippers on the shore of Ho’okipa Beach to lay their eggs is surely among the greatest testaments to the resiliency of life in Maui. The turtles don’t even make it look easy. They lay on the sand protecting their soon to be hatchlings, patiently awaiting the day the new generation of green sea turtles will accompany them back into the ocean. Before that day comes the parents put on a truly inspiring show of making their way back. Revolving their flippers they wade the rocky sand, slowly inching their way to the water. When they are close enough the waves sweep them back in and they are lost to the hundreds of spectators as they swim gracefully in the shielding blue waters of Ho’okipa.  Resilience was needed on the day I arrived at Ho’okipa Beach. A heavy rainfall began almost immediately after I parked my re...

 During my brief stay in west Maui, I spotted at least three mongooses. Those aren’t good statistics for an invasive species in an island ecosystem. Like the cane toad was imported from the Americas to control insects in Australia, so the mongoose was brought over from India to the cane fields of Hawaii to exterminate rats. Both species failed in their intended mission and instead created a biological nightmare in their host countries; the mongooses devastating indigenous bird species far more than it made a dent in rat populations.  The impact was made more significant that all the sightings were during my drive to Oneloa Beach, an inviting paradox of a place, curiously calming as it is thrilling, secluded as it is popular, small as it is expansive. A place that can only exist in a closed environment like Mākena State Park. This is the ecosystem at stake. In less than a week, I visited the beach three times, that is how much it encapsulated for me everything I went to Hawaii ...

 June 30, 1764, had started out as a typical day for fourteen-year-old Jeanne Boulet. While France, her homeland, was mourning the recent loss of its Canadian colony and recovering from the bloodbath of the Seven Years War, Boulet went on with her quiet life in her family’s sheep pastures near Les Hubacs. Her mind was on the flock of sheep she cared for especially as there had been rumors of predation nearby. Boulet never returned home. Instead, she would be the first victim of the mysterious creature which would come to be known as the Beast of Gévaudan that would terrorize France for the next three years with over one hundred gruesome attacks.  Two-hundred and fifty years later there is no settled answer as to the identity of the creature that haunted the Mercoire Forest. The most common explanation is an unusually large wolf and, indeed, some accounts of its behavior reconcile with known wolf behavior. The European subspecies of Canis lupus , after all, has a far more volat...