Saving Big Blue

Their long limbs and spindly green needles stripped from their wide, cracked brown bodies, the dismembered logs, some up to 80 feet long and 15-feet wide escaped the steely teeth of the huge buzz saws of the lumber mills along the coast of Alaska's Yukon forests.

Half submerged, pushed by the North Pacific trade-winds and led by the ocean's natural currents, the log escapees, with the rhythm and regularity of migrating birds, would land thousands of miles away on the shore of Hawaii's Kamilo Beach. It has always been this way and Kalina's family knew well the secret of turning these trees into canoe's and surf boards.

Kalina's father, Etana, a proud, muscular man with an ever-present smile, a descendant of Kings of Hawaii, would haul the tree trunks inland where he and fellow islanders, using ancestral craftsmanship, converted these monstrous logs into the 15' surfboards he and his ancestors used to ride the waves that greeted the sun-drenched shore in a burst of blue-green bubbles and frothy white foam.

As she grew, Etana told Kalina, a thin, Carmel-colored girl, with jet-black hair that framed her curious, expressive face and extraordinarily-rare blue eyes for a native Polynesian girl, stories of "great woods sent by the gods." Etana taught Kalina about the privileged life they led on the Big Island, a place the world had come to know as paradise.

But today, her life and paradise had changed. Standing on the beach, Kalina no longer feels sand between her toes, but tiny bits of plastic mixed among the now barely visible shoreline. Where once were sea shells, star fish, and crabs, now, plastic bags, plastic bottles and nylon fishing nets covered the coast, as if the ocean purged itself of human toxins.

Kalina fondly remembered how her father took her here, taught her to swim, to free-dive, where among the bright colors of the coral reefs and the fantastic hues of the sea anemones that swayed in the gentle undercurrent of the ocean, Kalina would glide, able to hold her breath for up to six minutes. Because of her great skill Kalina was able to play with the turtles as they gently tugged and ate the deep green sea grass.

Kalina no longer surfs at Kamilo Beach. She no longer free dives. She no longer swims among the Monk Seals or the Manta Ray. She sadly thinks of the the green turtles, their mouths closed shut, wrapped in fishing line, or the bottle-nose dolphin, whose constant grin seems to have disappeared replaced by a frown, disgusted from eating plastic bags it thought was jellyfish.

Today, Kamilo Beach is still famous, but for a different reason. When once it was the beach the "gods had blessed with the best timber in the world," today it is best known as "plastic beach."

Kalina wonders, as she turns and walks back inland, taking a last look at the beach she once loved, "Is it too late? Will it ever change, can it change?"