That day, moving along the bases of the cloud-shadowed precipices, we planned happily how we should some day come here, restore one of the abandoned cottages and its garden, and live for a while without thought of time. What a place for quietude and work! For once Jack seemed to welcome the idea of such seclusion and repose. Little as he ever inclined toward folding his pinions for long, Hawaii stayed them more than any other land. “You can’t beat the Ranch in California—it’s a sweet land,” he would stanchly defend, “but I’d like to spend a great deal of my time down here.”
We bemoaned the weather that prevented us from climbing the zig-zag stark above our heads into Waimanu.
An accession of the storm began tearing out the road to Honokaa, and even a section of the plantation railway along the seaward bluffs. That repaired, we heeded the warning of the manager, aware of our schedule, that we might not be able to leave for weeks if we did not avail ourselves of this route. In a heavy downpour and wind that turned our futile umbrellas inside-out, we made the several miles in an open roadster on the track, and the spanning of rain-washed gulches recalled the flume-coasting of 1907.
After an automobile passage over the roads of our journey of years earlier, we arrived once more at Waimea, on the Parker Ranch. Here, turning off into North Kohala, the machine emerged into better weather and dryer roads along the flanks of the Kohala Mountains, which are over 5000 feet in elevation. Carelessly enough, we had somehow pictured the North Kohala District as in the main a wilderness of impassable gulches. And to be sure this feature is not lacking, for the district embraces some splendid country that is a continuation of the gulch and valley scenery of which Waipio and Waimanu form part.
Imagine our surprise to find ourselves, at the Frank Woods’ home, Kahua, on a gigantic green-terraced sweep from mountain top to sea rim, in the midst of a ranch or conglomeration of ranches covering many thousands of acres, whose volcanic rack had been rounded by the ages and clothed with pasture. The laying out of the grounds had been guided by the natural lines of the incline. From the house, where the living-room extended full width overlooking the vast panorama, it was hard to discern, except by the finer grass of the lawns, where garden and wild ended and began. Never have I seen Jack so pleased over any gardening as with the undulating spaces of Kahua. And in this house of valuable antiques we slept in a high koa bedstead, crested with the royal arms, that had belonged to Queen Emma.
Motoring across to the northwest coast, our surprise grew. A perfect road traversed an ordered landscape that was unescapably English in its general trimness as well as in the architecture of its buildings. Of course, there was everywhere a waving expanse of the fair green cane, and near the oceanside were ranged the sugar mills of Kohala. At the town of Kohala, where Kamehameha began his conquesting career, one happens suddenly upon the original Kamehameha statue, spear in hand, helmet and cape gilded to simulate yellow feathers. This figure, by T. R. Gould of Boston, cast in Italy, was lost coming around Cape Horn. The exact duplicate, which stands before Honolulu’s Court House, was made and set up previous to the salving of the original from the wreck, which was sold to the Hawaiian Government.
The rich plantations formerly depended upon rainfall for irrigation; but in 1905 and 1906 they became independent of this more or less sporadic source by constructing the Kohala Ditch on the order of those of Maui and Kauai. The indefatigable M. M. O’Shaughnessy was chief engineer of this nine miles of tunnel-building and fourteen of open waterway, that supplies five plantations. He was assisted by Jorgen Jorgensen, whose own remarkable Waiahole Tunnel and ditch on Oahu, aggregating nearly 19,000 feet, we had seen; and P. W. P. Bluett, whom we visited at Puuhue following our stay at Kahua.
Mr. Bluett took us horseback up the mountain to show us this Kohala Ditch, and also the second great engineering feat, of his own designing and supervision, the Kehena Ditch, consisting of fourteen miles of tunnel and ditch line, some of it through rank jungly swampland. This ditch supplements the Kohala viaduct by conserving storm-waters which had heretofore been wasted. Along the Kehena we rode at an elevation of thousands of feet, through some of the most gorgeous country of the whole Territory of Hawaii, culminating in that of the valley Honokane Nui, into which we peered while our host described the perilous building of a trail we could see scratched oh the almost perpendicular wooded side of the great gulch, this being the line of communication for the O’Shaughnessy system.
Jack, with his unquestionable love of natural beauty, was ever impressed with man’s lordly harnessing of the outlaw, Nature, leading her by the mouth to perform his work upon earth.
“Do you get the splendid romance of it?” he would say. “Look what these engineers have done—reaching out their hands and gathering and diverting the storm wastage of streams over the edge of this valley thousands of feet here in the clouds.