Inside Editorial

Many times we forget how much things have changed, even though we have lived through the times and have seen them transform before our very eyes. Sometimes it’s because they are things we can’t wait for to change, like the creation of a brand new subdivision where we have a new home awaiting or a new sports complex for our children or roads and transportation conveniences that relieve traffic and make our trip to the mainland faster. In the last issue of Lawai’a, courtesy of Chris Cramer and John Clark respectively, we brought attention to the once great fish ponds of East Oahu and the Waikiki of old. Both areas saw tremendous changes over the last century that made our island life what it is today.

You don’t have to be a malihini (or newcomer) to the islands to overlook the effects of change as even those of us born and raised here almost always have no idea of what our island environment looked like just a few decades ago. We all just take for granted that it’s always been just so. Yet if we are able to compare time periods side by side, it really is shocking.

Keehi Lagoon, Oahu, has also seen tremendous change and it is the area where John Clark writes about shark riding in this issue’s Kela a me Keia. Once known as a one of Oahu’s greatest fisheries when it was owned by the Damon family, Keehi also had a vast supporting fish pond system. Today it exists as background to the State’s central hub of transportation and commerce.

The accompanying photos illustrate these changes to Keehi and surrounding areas over a 57 year span. One obvious change is the addition of Honolulu International Airport. But study them carefully and you may notice what happens at the boundary formed by what is today known as Nimitz Highway / Dillingham Boulevard, visible in the lower left hand corners of each photo. The most striking difference in the 1931 photo is that water reaches beyond the mauka (or mountain) side of Nimitz Highway and extends all the way into the base of Ahuimanu / Salt Lake / Moanalua. People watch media reports of flooding in Mapunapuna during extremely high tides in disbelief today but many don’t realize the area was originally under water.

In the lower left hand corner of the 1931 photo, you can also make out Salt Lake when it was really much more like a lake. With the shoreline in its original location less than a half mile away, stories of ulua caught in the lake are suddenly much more believable as you could easily imagine a lava tube connection. Without knowledge of how different things were, that same story today is often simply dismissed as urban legend.

Our time here on Earth is merely a snapshot in time. Ironically, we depend on snapshots like the two above to help us remember what it was like before ours. In issue Number One of Lawai’a, Brian Funai wrote about photographic images and how important they are for documenting our life and the very world we live, work and play in. To many of us in Hawaii, the very definition of “living” is our culture and heritage of fishing and eating seafood. Over the years, however, much of our heritage has suffered due to changes that we made and, sadly, we have ignored shapshots of those changes.

Here, we present some snapshots of just Oahu’s Keehi area for you to consider:

• When we take off or land in a plane on trips to Las Vegas, many don’t realize what the reef runway was built on despite its obvious name.
• When we flush a toilet, it goes to the sewage treatment facility on Sand Island, which many don’t know is the result of dredging and a coral reef reclamation project at the Diamond Head-side of Keehi lagoon.
• When our airfreighted overnight packages arrive, they are processed at the Keehi Lagoon Drive commercial area built on land filled over acres of former fishponds and estuaries.
• When we go to have our car fixed or to pick up building supplies in Mapunapuna, we visit warehouses and business that stand on what was once a vast wetland that once reached the foot of Fort Shafter.

Although this has been about Oahu, every major island has or will have its own “Keehi” on some smaller scale.

We live our lives and do things to assure a future for our children where they can do the very same things we revel in today. But as we do that, we should stop a while and take a good look back to see and understand what things were like and how they changed to bring us the life we have today. And, realize that it didn’t just happen around us but it happened because of and for us. Perhaps with a clearer view of the past and an understanding of just what and how much we actually changed, we may have a clearer vision of what we need to do for a better future.

These aerial photos from 1931 (above) and 1978 describe a drastic transformation of the shoreline and its man-made shift in boundaries from Keehi Lagoon to Diamond Head. Photos courtesy of State of Hawaii, Department of Transportation, Airports Division