On Oahu, I’d already discovered, you can stand in Waikiki in bright sunshine, and watch it raining like hell up on the Pali. High up among the mountains of Kauai there’s supposed to be a rain-soaked region that’s the wettest spot on earth. Molokai was apparently no exception to this weather rule. The visibility, angle, and distance were poor for the particular stretch of windward coast in which I was interested. Well, I could hardly expect Hawaiian Airlines to fly reconnaissance for me, although it would have been convenient. I did, however, get a chance to observe that, as the maps had indicated, the next stretch of water wasn’t nearly as wide as the first one we’d crossed. Then we were coming up on the island of Maui with a small mountain range at one end and a tremendous, cloud-capped volcanic peak at the other: Haleakala, the House of the Sun. I’d seen ten-thousand-foot mountains before, plenty of them, but mainly in the western U.S., where they rise out of country that’s a mile high to start with.
