Monthly Archives: April 2022

A Waterfall Seen, A Fall Averted

by Woody

“When in Rome…” when one is in Hawai’i means attending a luau.

The hour drive north from Kona along the coast was spectacular and the traditional feast at the famous Mauna Kea Beach Hotel did not disappoint either.

A whole pig – slow-roasted for most of the day after being stuffed with steaming lava stones, then wrapped in wet banana leaves and buried over koa wood embers in a sandpit – took center stage on a buffet table fit for a king.

After dinner, on a raised outdoor stage, a history lesson of the island’s royalty was performed. This included reenacted battles and courtships, warriors blowing thunderous notes on conch shells, and hula dancers turning their hips into rhythmic earthquakes. It was a Broadway Show under the stars.

A luau sunset at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel.

And yet the highlight of the evening was neither music nor dance, food nor mai tai, but rather the ocean backdrop as the sun melted into the horizon with the lava beach so near one could hear the crashing waves.

Describing the sea’s deep shades of blue and bluer, and the warm oranges and golds of the finger-painted kaleidoscope-colored sky with scattered clouds slowly turning to streaks of flame, is like trying to describe Monet’s “San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk.” Words fail greatly.

The sunset was all the more personally special because this hotel, these grounds, this paradisial ocean view was perhaps my mom’s favorite place on earth. She vacationed here many, many times, including not long before she died 30 years ago. It is hard to believe today, April 29, would have been her 90th birthday.

As you can imagine, as I gazed at the sundown scene the salty ocean mist was not the only thing moistening my cheeks.Akaka Falls

“When in Rome…” also meant visiting Akaka Falls State Park near Hilo. At 442 feet Akaka Falls falls far shy of Yosemite Falls’ 2,425 feet, and yet its breathtaking-ness measures up fully for it is tucked inside a lush rainforest filled with wild orchids, draping ferns, towering bamboo, all with a soundtrack featuring a symphony of songbirds.

The short hike to the lookout point view of the Falls is undemanding with a paved path and stairs, and yet this site provided a challenge for some – and provided an additional memorable sight for me. Two men were struggling to carry a wheelchair with a pre-teen boy in it down a section of steps when a stranger heading the opposite way, having seen the Falls already, reversed course and paused to help them…

…and then patiently waited to assist them on their return trip up the path.

That kindness on the Akaka Falls stairs brought me full circle to the luau. Leaving the grounds, an elderly gentleman was ascending a long outdoor cement stairway and path when a woman behind him touched his shoulder to tell him his shoe was untied. It was a trip, fall and broken bone waiting to happen.

The man waved her away, not rudely but not politely either, and proceeded on. Her worry rising with each of his next few steps, the lady Samaritan pardoned him again and offered to retie his shoe for him. This time he smiled and accepted her help.

I smiled, too, for this woman’s kindness reminded me of my mom who did a similar thing once at the Mauna Kea. Sharing a dinner table with a very elderly couple, and seeing the husband stranger struggle with his knife, my mom cut his steak into bite sizes as nonchalantly as a mother helpfully retying a young child’s undone shoelace.

To be continued…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Ocean Rescue Rescues Memories

by Woody

A big-wave warning was issued at Magic Sands Beach, as previously mentioned here about my recent trip to The Big Island of Hawai’i, and a strong rip current carried a swimmer further and further from shore.

The lifeguard on duty, sitting in a towering chair, called out with a bullhorn for the man to come back in. Either the command was ignored, or the swimmer was unable to heed it, and he was pulled deeper out to sea.

Before tense seconds could add up to a New York minute, the lifeguard – imagine David Hasselhoff in the old TV show “Baywatch” and you have an accurate portrait – flew down from his perch, ran and dove into the surf, and swam like he was challenging for an Olympic gold medal.

David Hasselhoff as Mitch Buchannon in “Baywatch.”

“Baywatch” originally aired from 1989 to 1999, but my mind raced all the way back to “Quarrywatch” in the 1940s starring my dad as the fictional Mitch Buchannon in red swim trunks.

During summers in high school through medical school, Pop was a lifeguard at Muzzy’s Lake, a flooded rock quarry in Urbana, Ohio. He started out earning fifty cents an hour.

“That beat the heck out the twenty-five cents an hour I made at my first summer job when I was fourteen, pumping gas at Blue Synoco,” Pop, now 95, recalls vividly. “Gas was sixteen cents a gallon – I remember that because most customers bought a dollar’s worth which was six-plus gallons.”

At Muzzy’s he eventually worked up to one dollar an hour and notes: “That was good money!”

He earned it. One single summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Pop made 46 saves. Understand, Muzzy’s attracted upwards of a thousand people a day on weekends. Combine those crowds with a gently sloping bottom that in one blind step dropped off suddenly from friendly chest-deep water to 30-plus feet and you had the deadly ingredients for drowning.

Once, far outside the buoys marking off the swimming area, a car rolled off a towering bluff at the far end of the quarry and plummeted into deep, deep water. As it sank, Pop – an intercollegiate swimmer – raced freestyle to the crash site and dived down to the ear-popping cold depths in hopes of rescuing anyone trapped inside. It took three lung-burning tries before he finally located the car.

Thankfully, it was empty.

When a tow truck arrived at the scene, Pop dove down, down, down a fourth time to attach a chain so the car could be pulled out. It was a “Baywatch”-like episode in real life. Indeed, in photographs during his final years lifeguarding at Muzzy’s Pop seems chiseled from quarried stone at 6-foot-3 and 205 pounds and comes into black-and-white focus like Mitch Buchannon with a crew cut instead of longish curls.

In more than half a dozen summers in the tower chair, Pop – and his best friend and co-lifeguard, Dunny – had only one death occur during their Quarry Watch. A young boy, with a congenital heart problem it turned out, quietly sunk down underwater. There was no splashing, no struggle, no telltale sign of trouble for a lifeguard to see.

Meanwhile, the boy’s parents were not keeping a watchful eye and eventually sounded the alarm too late. Their son tragically drowned in less than three-feet of water that he could stand up in.

Happily, the Magic Sands Beach lifeguard towed the struggling swimmer to shore with the aid of a small torpedo-shaped buoy.

Isn’t it funny that traveling on vacation not only creates new memories, it can also rekindle old ones.

To be continued…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Sad Goodbye To A Merry-Go-Round

by Woody

The chronicles of my Hawai’i adventures, previously promised to continue today, are postponed a week in order to share about a dear friend I lost last Sunday.

There is a good chance, if you live in or have visited Ventura County, she was your friend as well. I say “she” because just as ships are lovingly considered female, so too should merry-go-rounds.

The carousel at Ventura Harbor Village spun round and round for the very last time, to be replaced – as too often happens to nostalgic treasures – by something new called “progress.” Wild horses could not have kept me away from saying a final goodbye to these mild horses that gallop gently in circles. The hand-painted menagerie also included a giraffe, zebra, rooster and St. Bernard.

The circa-1970s carousel found a home at the harbor in the mid-1980s and in 1990 I took my then-3-year-old daughter on it for the first time. A fair guess is that we returned a hundred times more, at least, in the years that followed for what she called our “Daddy Dates.” While we rotated among numerous eateries at Harbor Village, we always, always rode the carousel.

And always, without exception, my daughter rode Rudolph. I think she initially picked him because it was summertime and she thought that was the funniest thing in the world – Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer being here in the warm sunshine instead of at the snowy North Pole. Ever thereafter she continued to politely hand over her arcade ticket at the gate and then rush excitedly past all the other animals and climb aboard Rudolph.

My daughter and I have enjoyed other carousels near and far, from the Ventura County Fair to Monterey’s Cannery Row, from Disneyland to Disney World, from San Francisco’s Pier 39 to New York City’s Central Park, but nowhere has she found another Rudolph and so always she has been a little disappointed.

Indeed, while some merry-go-rounds are bigger, or have brighter lights or shinier paint, the Harbor Village carousel will forever remain my favorite because of all the memories it carries with my daughter – and son, too, although he has never adored it quite so dearly. Yes, on the soundtrack of my life’s happiest moments the calliope music of the Harbor Village carousel plays a verse.

Adding to the melancholy of the farewell day, my daughter – herself now a parent of a 3-year-old girl – was unable to make it down from the Bay Area for a final carousel “Daddy Date.” Happily, I took an equally beautiful date. One of my favorite pictures of my wife is a black-and-white portrait when she was 5; now, as she sat astride the St. Bernard, I imagined her in living color at that age.

When I first started taking my daughter on the carousel it cost all of dollar as I seem to recall. This time it was four bucks per person, a bargain nonetheless because a five-minute ride on a time machine is priceless.

As I emotionally orbited round and round, I took a selfie video to send my daughter. My quick-thinking wife did something even better – she made a video call and that is how our little girl “virtually” rode her beloved merry-go-round during its last go-round. Naturally, she teared up saying goodbye even from afar.

“Don’t cry because it’s over,” I said over the phone, repeating a quote by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, “smile because it happened.”

I need not tell you which carousel animal I rode. Some of the red paint has worn off his nose, but to my wistful eyes Rudolph never looked finer.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

A Small Pleasure on The Big Island

by Woody

Third try was the charm indeed.

Early in the pandemic, seemingly a decade ago, my wife and I had a long-planned trip to Hawai’i – my first ever – cancelled. A year later, after arrangements were again all made, a tsunami-sized COVID-19 surge forced a second postponement.

At long last, we recently made it to The Big Island, to Kona, to Lyman’s Bay where we stayed in a lovely one-bedroom retreat with a postcard view of the ocean brought to life.

We filled the week with sightseeing and snorkeling, with a day hike to Akaka Falls and an evening luau under a sky as pink as the inside of a conk shell, yet one of the biggest highlights was our tiny third-floor balcony. It was here where we started each morning by watching surfers carve their moves into the waves like hands writing script in invisible ink on the water’s surface. Evening happy hours were spent similarly.

A song lyric from The Beach Boys – “Catch a wave, you’ll be sitting on top of the world” – played in my mental jukebox as the wave dancers lined up, usually no less than two dozen of them, waiting and positioning to catch their next turn on top of the world.

While the surfers in this corner of paradise were nearly all adults – perhaps paddling out before going in late to the office; or diving in in the early evening on the way home after a full workday – they came into focus like school kids at play during recess.

One morning, when there was a “Big Wave Warning” all day for swimmers and snorkelers at nearby Magic Sands Beach just a mile south, the number of surfers in Lyman’s Bay swelled twofold to catch waves that were nearly triple the size of the previous few days’ head-high curls. Even super-sized, the waves broke as if in slow motion, gently almost, left-to-right looking on from the beach, and maintained their form so long they could be ridden for what seemed like a full minute.

Our final evening on our beatific balcony in Kona, the waves were so ginormous, and the Monet-painted sunset so impossibly gorgeous, that in addition to surfers lining up out on the water, runners and walkers and cyclists stopped en masse along the narrow-but-well-trafficked beachside road to gaze. Some cars even pulled over and parked, their occupants joining the entranced crowd.

After the sun melted fully into the horizon, the spectators gradually resumed their runs and strolls and rides. In turn, the brotherhood of surfers likewise grew smaller and smaller as one after another grabbed his or her final ride, happy and tired and probably looking forward to coming out again tomorrow morning, or next evening, or the upcoming weekend.

Eventually, there were only three surfers remaining in the bay, in the water, in the deepening darkness.

“That’s his last one,” my wife or I would say when one of these night riders caught a wave—

—but each time that surfer would paddle back out.

The longer this stubbornness against the dark went on and on, the brighter my already bright mood became until it shone like the rising moon. No matter their ages, I realized, these three men were at heart still boys at play.

It was as if they were shooting baskets in the driveway, or practicing skateboarding tricks in the street, and their mothers had just called them in for dinner on a warm midsummer’s night and they shouted back: “Just five more minutes, pleeeease!”

Or, in this case, “Just one more wave!”

To be continued…

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

 

This ‘News’ Has Expiration Date

by Woody

BREAKING NEWS: The items in today’s column expire at midnight.

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HOLLYWOOD – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today issued a press release announcing it is rescinding Will Smith’s “Best Actor” Oscar and will return it only if the star of “King Richard” slaps Samuel L. Jackson in the face … and lives to tell about it.

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COOPERSTOWN, NY – Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred today announced another new rule aimed at shortening game times. Beginning with Opening Day on April 7, batters will get only two strikes and three balls.

“Two-and-one is the new full count,” Manfred noted.

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LOS ANGELES – The Super Bowl champion Rams today announced they have signed actor Will Smith to a one-year deal for $22-million as a defensive lineman.

“His head slap is reminiscent of the great Deacon Jones,” Rams General Manager Les Snead said. “With Aaron Donald and Will together, no opposing quarterback will be safe.”

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SILVER SPRING, MD – The FDA, citing a series of recent scientific studies, today declared that chocolate chip cookies are a “super food” high in antioxidants and taste.

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NEW YORK – National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell today announced that beginning with the 2022 season, the NFL will address its Traumatic Brain Injury and concussion epidemic by having all players wear 1930’s-era leather helmets without facemasks.

“We feel this will stop the players from using their heads as weapons,” Goodell said.

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NEW YORK – In stunning medical news, more than 13,000 oncologists in the United States, and nearly 200,000 other healthcare workers specializing in cancer treatment, filed for unemployment today after losing their jobs.

“It’s the most wonderful news imaginable,” one newly unemployed oncologist said. “We have wiped out cancer with a vaccine so there just isn’t any work for us anymore.”

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WASHINGTON, DC – “Whoa, not so fast!” Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Vivek Murthy said today regarding the eradication of cancer. “The vaccine only saves the lives of those who will take it.”

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SOMEWHERE IN LOW-EARTH ORBIT – Jeff Bezos, The World’s Richest Person with an estimated wealth of $165 billion, today proclaimed from his Blue Origin capsule: “I win, I win! I am the champion of World Monopoly! Now let’s reshuffle the Chance and Community Chest cards, and I’ll start all over with $1,500 – 2 x $500, 2 x $100, 2 x $50, 6 x $20, 5 x $10, 5 x $5 and 5 x $1 bills. This time I’ll even pay when I land on the Income Tax space. Good luck, everyone!”

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WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of Education today announced it will use the bulk of a $164-billion windfall from an anonymous donor for a national curriculum in MAC – Music, Art and Creative writing – and place an emphasis on attracting the very brightest students.

“While we recognize STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – helps make life better,” a spokesperson explained, “we feel without question MAC makes for richer lives.”

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EVERYTOWN, USA – Millions of Baby Boomers marched nationwide today in apology for their previous grumpy-toned complaints about Millennials and Generation Z being overly coddled with inflated senses of entitlement.

The marchers’ signs included: “Millennials Are Magnificent!”

“Our College Education Was Affordable – Sorry!”

“Gen Z Rockz at Volunteering!”

“What The Heck Is TikTok?”

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NEW YORK – The Pulitzer Prize Board today announced a surprise award honoring Woody Woodburn.

A board member explained: “Woodburn is not as good a writer as he should be; he’s not as good as he wants to be; but thank goodness at least he’s better than he used to be.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com