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HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND – Sherlock Holmes at the Volcano

HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND
By Kelly Moran

Sherlock Holmes at the Volcano

Sherlock Holmes once visited the Big Island – and now he’s coming back!

Holmes was an early crime-scene investigator. Keen-eyed and sharp-witted, this most famous of fictional detectives solved murders that baffled the police of the Victorian era by focusing on seemingly insignificant clues. Would we have “C.S.I.” on TV today without having first seen Holmes tracing footprints, or examining threads, pebbles and fingerprints with a magnifying glass?

Though based in London, he visited the Kingdom of Hawaii in November of 1890 with his friend and biographer Dr. John Watson. It was supposed to be a restful vacation at the Volcano House, but they found themselves confronted by a mysterious calamity of madness and murder with supernatural overtones, that came to be known as “The Volcano Horror.” To discover the cause, and to identify the killer, they had to take a dangerous plunge into a realm of terror and death, right there on the edge of the crater!

This all happens in a stage play written, produced and directed by my friend Hal Glatzer, referencing one of the short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sherlock Holmes & The Volcano Horror, March 4th, 5th, 6th, 12th & 13th at 7pm.
Sherlock Holmes & The Volcano Horror, March 4th, 5th, 6th, 12th & 13th at 7pm.

“Sherlock Holmes & The Volcano Horror” will be performed in the Theater at the East Hawaii Cultural Center, in downtown Hilo, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday March 4, 5 and 6; and at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday March 12 and 13. Tickets are $10 (EHCC members $8), and are available now from the EHCC Box Office: 935-9085.

Several of the actors also appeared in “The House Without A Key,” Glatzer’s Charlie Chan mystery, which was presented at EHCC a year ago, including Jake McPherson (as Holmes), and Steve Peyton (as Watson).

In Sherlock Holmes’s day, the Volcano House was a one-story log cabin, built in 1877, with a lanai on its long side and a big fireplace in the parlor.

VolcanoHouse1877
Volcano House 1877

It could accommodate 35 guests, and was owned by Wilder’s Steamship Company, an inter-island line. Since there was only a trail to Kilauea from Hilo – not even a road – most visitors were tendered ashore at Honuapo, in Ka’u, and driven uphill in horse-drawn carriages. When a new Volcano House was built next door, in 1891, the old log cabin became an extra guest-wing.

In 1921, a grand 100-room hotel replaced them both on the rim of Halema’uma’u crater, and the 1877 building was moved a few hundred feet back from the edge, to be used only for storage. That was fortunate because, when a fire in 1940 destroyed the big Volcano House, the old building was spared, and was pressed into service as a lodge once more, until the current Volcano House was completed in 1941.

Old Volcano House
Old Volcano House

After that, the old building sat unused and deteriorating until the 1970s, when it was rescued by a team of historically-minded carpenters. They restored it to its original appearance, and made it into what it is today: the Volcano Art Center, in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Go there now, and you can almost see Holmes and Watson talking and smoking by the fireplace, or sitting on their lanai, gazing out over the crater . . . .

The building that was used as the Volcano House Hotel from 1877 to 1921 now houses a gallery for the Volcano Art Center, in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
The building that was used as the Volcano House Hotel from 1877 to 1921 now houses a gallery for the Volcano Art Center, in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

I learned “The Story of the Volcano House” from a book of that name by Gunder E. Olson, that’s available in the Park’s gift-shop and at Basically Books, on the Bayfront in Hilo.

For more information about “Sherlock Holmes & The Volcano Horror,” phone Hal at 808-895-4816 or email him at hal@halglatzer.com.

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HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND – Crazy Tobacco

HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND
By Kelly Moran

Crazy Tobacco

          Folks here call it pakalolo – “paka” being the Hawaiian rendering of “tobacco,” and “lolo” meaning crazy.  And “crazy tobacco” is front-page news here because what it is . . . is marijuana.

          It should not surprise anyone that a lot of pakalolo is grown and consumed in our tropical climate.  Hawaii was also among the earliest states to allow the medical use of marijuana; and is the only state, so far, to have enacted such a law through the legislative process, instead of by referendum.

A discreet backyard greenhouse with four pakalolo plants.
A discreet backyard greenhouse with four pakalolo plants.

          But the Legislature did not create a legal framework for cultivation or distribution; and counties alone can not change state or federal law.  Still, in the 2008 election, 35,682 Hawaii County voters approved a ballot initiative that directed Big Island police to make the enforcement of state and federal marijuana laws their lowest priority; and it set the threshold for regarding possession as a serious infraction at 24 plants and/or 24 dry ounces of pot.

          The outcome certainly surprised the initiative’s 25,937 opponents, and may have amazed even its proponents.

          Where did all those supporters come from?  There were no exit-polls, but only a handful could have had medical marijuana certificates.  (Approximately 1,500 Big Island residents are registered patients.)  Surely some of the rest were recreational users, but no one is claiming that there are more than 30,000 pot-smokers living here.  Most of the voters in that majority, therefore, were everyday folks who are fundamentally generous in spirit, and concerned enough about solving local problems to feel that law-enforcement resources would be better expended on more serious crimes, such as those against people and property, and on combating more pernicious drugs, chiefly methamphetamine, which is locally called “ice.”

          Here on the Big Island, regardless of party affiliations, there is widespread sympathy for countercultural and/or Libertarian ideals, especially about conservation, self-sufficiency, and privacy.  The voters who approved this resolution clearly regarded pot as harmless or, at worst, a benign indulgence; and certainly not as a “gateway” drug to addiction or as a threat to “family values.”  It was a state Representative from the Big Island (Faye Hanohano) who in 2009 introduced a bill to decriminalize marijuana possession.   Not surprisingly, it was voted down.  But some such bill – or at least, one that enables cultivation and distribution of medical marijuana – will surely be introduced every year from now on, and will inevitably pass.

          In the late 1930s, just after marijuana was made illegal, a couple of scary movies were released, that painted pot-smokers as brainless dope-fiends, and the drug itself as capable of turning strait-laced teenagers into crazed killers.  Such movies have, ever since, been justifiably ridiculed.  So, while it may not be symbolic of anything, this weekend and next, at the East Hawaii Cultural Center in Hilo, UH-Hilo drama students are staging the recent pop-musical version of the most famous of those cautionary movies.  They are putting on “Reefer Madness.”