Fight for the trees
Please, someone tell me it’s not true.
Ok, I admit I stopped going to that sacred beach a couple of years ago when the dust fence appeared and we all knew it was just a matter of time before a four-story obscenity replaced that open coastal field between the Courtyard Marriot and the Beach Boy resorts in Waipouli. I couldn’t bear to witness those humongous hundred-year-old trees there be axed to pulp.
Where’s the joy in taking a walk when one’s thoughts are so sad? But there was a fight going on for the age-old Ironwood trees along the shoreline — the trees that hold the beach in place, the trees that shade people, the trees the fisherman sit under, the trees that define so many of Kauai’s shorelines, the trees we love.
Someone please tell me it’s not true that they were felled yesterday. Please tell me we aren’t completely out of our minds. Please say these resort owners and builders don’t have the right to butcher everything right down to the breaking waves. Please, someone, tell me those beloved Ironwoods aren’t gone forever.
What is wrong with the decision-makers on this island?
Sick at heart, I loved those trees,
Wendy Raebeck, Kealia
It’s a Football Fever miracle!
Kauai is truly wondrous. What are the chances that I would find myself in a place where the beauty is stupefying, the residents are even warmer than the weather, the food is mouthwatering, and “Paradise” is almost a belittling description?
Well, speaking of chance, ponder the Football Fever Results in Wednesday’s paper. Truly amazing.
Eleven groups pick winners or losers, with plus or minus points in the game’s score, in fifteen college and NFL games; the set up reflects bettors’ early predictions of an approximately even likelihood. In theory, some expertise would enable the savvy to beat the odds and make some money. The Kauai results?
Kauaians, don’t wager on football at the Ninth Island! Every single Football Fever entrant has a losing record, with only MCS Grill and Poipu Bay Golf Club near even. Overall, sad sacks who bet all the contestants’ recommendations, at $25/bet, would be out just shy of $5,500. Ouch.
But Puakea Golf breaks the bank. Its record so far is 0-75; right, five weeks of a steady 0-15. To get even one week all wrong is statistically near impossible; one chance in 32,768. To do this five times in a row is, well, incomprehensibly weird: one chance in about 38 followed by 21 zeros, an amount several hundred times the number of grains of sand on Earth (estimated: I lost count). Tom Stoppard’s farce play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, opens with “heads” flipped 77 times in a row, to which Guildenstern comments: “A weaker man might be moved to re-examine his faith, if in nothing else at least in the law of probability.”
A unrivaled remarkable feat.
Jed Somit, Kapaa
