Early one fall morning on a perfect day, we followed a trail through the brush, turned left at the homeless guy's encampment, and walked along the coast until we reached a sandy cove. We were pleased to find that we had arrived before anyone else. Even the homeless fellow was still fast asleep.
Our shadows stretched across a welcoming patch of damp sand where the only other tracks were those of shore birds. The ocean was unusually calm. We were at that time of year when the summer swells had faded away, and the wild northern storms that send huge surf crashing into the north and west shores had not yet begun.
Our goal was to swim to Ko Olina resort and spend the morning roaming its four picturesque lagoons. From the air, they resemble a mile-long bracelet of stunning jade beads linked by strands of dazzlingly white sand. Unfortunately, it was the time of the Great Lockdown of 2020, and Ko Olina was not welcoming visitors, and they made this clear by closing their parking lots. We had been politely turned away a few days earlier, but we felt this was wrong because when Ko Olina was still in its planning stage, its management agreed to provide beach access to Hawaii residents. So . . . we would exercise that right - and our bodies - by swimming to the lagoons, which were situated only a half-mile away. On a day such as this, it would be a relaxing swim.
The water was like a pane of glass, and as we waded out to where it was waist-deep, it was with an air of expectation and thankfulness. We knew many others were huddled in their homes, hiding from the strange new horror in the world, but we had this . . . an empty beach, a beautiful day, and a peaceful ocean. Breathing a silent word of thanks, we eased into the water and began to swim.
There is something beautiful about swimming in an empty ocean with the one you love, matching strokes, slipping through the water side-by-side, catching glimpses of your partner as you turn your head to breathe and seeing her arm slide without a splash into the water, feeling the water rush alongside your body, feeling your body respond, enjoying its strength and suppleness, and then feeling a hand touch your body, and you stop to see what little shell or painted fish has caught her eye. The two of you gaze on it for a while, and then continue down the coast, arms cutting through the water, bodies moving purposefully and in perfect synch, and the water so incredibly blue. “Cerulean,” you think. You love that word, that word that means blue, but to you it is a stunning blue, an awesome, heart-stopping blue like no blue ever seen before, and that is how the ocean looks to you on this day of great peace and beauty.
We knew a small lagoon preceded the four large lagoons at Ko Olina, and we decided that we would stop there and explore it for a few minutes and then continue our swim. The problem was finding it. The entire swim along the coast presents the same view, an unbroken landscape of barrier rocks with palms thrusting overhead. Here and there, clefts in the rocks enabled us to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond them, and, after about 15 minutes, we spied a welcome sliver of beach, and we immediately headed for it.
The tide was low, and the surf, although small, surged restlessly in the gap, exposing rocks that would have been safely underwater at high tide. The current exiting the lagoon was surprisingly swift, and it was doing its best to prevent our entry, but we were finally able to latch onto a rock in the middle of the gap, and when the surge momentarily eased, we propelled ourselves forward with a churn of arms and legs and slipped laughing into a small welcoming lagoon of peaceful blue water.
She emerged from the surf with a surge of exuberance, laughing and gasping and full of life. Water streamed down her face, and she was laughing as she caught her breath, and her eyes were alive, and her expression was filled with vitality, and I gazed upon her and remembered why I had loved her for more than 40 years.
We had the lagoon to ourselves. Away from the gap, the lagoon was like glass. Palms rustled overhead, and their reflections were a painted mural on the water. We could see no one on the shore. Brilliant fish clustered and schools of goat fish moved as one, darting over the sand.
I always tow a rescue/safety buoy behind us, and since we did not need it in the little lagoon, my wife left the water to deposit it on the rocks, away from the grasp of the surf. When she did not return in due time, I turned and searched for her and found her hunched over a shallow tide pool on a rock shelf, and I could tell by her mannerism that she had found something that interested her.
My shadow fell over her, and she said without looking up, “Look at these. This is amazing.”
She was gazing upon a thumb-sized depression in the lava rock, and in that depression were two tiny lime-green creatures that appeared to be shells but were unlike any shells we had ever seen. Light patches of blue were spaced haphazardly on top of a lime-green body, and covering everything was a field of orange freckles. The eyes were two dark pin points that provided them with an endearing, cheerful personality. Six inches away we were surprised to find another cluster of the same species, and as we cast our eyes across the rocks, we saw that the entire area was a splendid lime-green carpet of the tiny creatures, some by themselves while others were clustered in gossipy knitting circles. There were many hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, and we had to pick our steps carefully to avoid crushing them underfoot.
In all our years on or in the ocean, we had never run across anything remotely resembling these tiny Easter eggs. None was like its neighbor. Each was clothed in a stunning pattern of color given to only that one individual and never repeated. Barely a half-inch in length, these miniature works of art proclaimed the same wonder and majesty of the ocean as the resounding crash of a breaching humpback on an early Maui morning.
That night, we pulled out our book on Hawaii's marine invertebrates, and we learned these were “cymbal bubble shells” (haminoea cymbalum). During some years, they occasionally appear in the thousands during the fall season, concentrated in a handful of shallow tide pools across the state, and, just as abruptly, they disappear by the turn of the year.
As the sun rose higher in the sky, we continued to be enraptured by our discovery and by our exploration of the small lagoon, which we had begun to fantasize as our personal lagoon. Much later in the day, another couple appeared on the beach, and we exchanged greetings. They were the first people we had spoken to all day.
We did not want to leave. How often do you get a beautiful, peaceful lagoon to yourselves? We never did make it to the four large Ko Olina lagoons on that day . . . but it was no longer important. We had found enough mystery and wonder in this small, quiet lagoon beneath the palms.
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