The Beach at Cape Hedo

Maybe it was the 2L of apple tea and five hours of sleep. Maybe things really were as they seemed. Overall, I would consider myself a very happy person. With that being said, today was the happiest day I have had in a very long time. The odd thing is, I can’t place exactly why. No matter, when you have a day as good as mine was today, finding the root cause really isn’t important. What is important is to accept and absorb the happiness.

Today was a day like one I have not experienced in I-don’t-know how long. Everything was more beautiful. The sound of the waves deeper, richer. The sun brighter. The water somehow sweeter. The sand soft and forgiving.

To start with, I need to give a short background, dating back over a decade to the summer of 1997. That summer my best friends from high school and I visited “the cabin” on Lake Superior for the first time. We left mid-week after work, packed into a Mercury Cougar, and drove north through the night. We arrived at the cabin just before dawn. The five of us, too excited to be tired, made our way to the rocky shore and waited to greet the rising sun. I don’t know how the others felt about it, but for me it was a rare moment of clarity that I still appreciate to this day. A moment that even a 16 year old with no life experience realized was important for reasons that I didn’t understand then and probably don’t understand fully now. In a very real sense, it was a celebration of the here-and-now. Nearly every time I see the sunrise, I think back to that day and am thankful. I’m not exactly sure why, but to me, watching the sunrise is nothing short of magical. It is impossible for me to be unhappy during those elusive few minutes I watch the night separate from day.

Fast forward to last Thursday. An old friend from Hawaii sent me an email. Among other things, she wanted to let me know that she would be visiting Madison this weekend and was looking for some suggestions. That evening I spent an hour or so remembering Madison, coming up with suggestions of places to go and things to do. As anyone who has been there knows, Madison is a great place to be and I really enjoyed the chance to remember some of the wave-tops from my time in school. In her email she also mentioned places to see here in Okinawa. Since my trip to the Philippines got delayed, I had this whole weekend free. I took her advice and decided to visit Cape Hedo and Peace Park.

That brings us to today, this morning, 3:05am. Without hitting the snooze button even once, I was out of bed getting ready for my long drive to the very northern tip of the island. Somehow, it is nearly impossible to get out of bed at 5:00am during the week, but just like waking up for Saturday morning cartoons, I am generally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I choose to wake up early. It’s one of the great mysteries of mankind.

I was on the road before 4:00am and made only one stop on the way to buy some apple iced tea. I arrived around quarter after five and walked around on the park trails (I even remembered my headlamp) until I found a spot that I thought would give me the best view. From there I just sat and waited. Seemingly being so close to constant clash between the cliff and the ocean helps turn down the volume on an otherwise chatty mind. It is more likely that my brain was lagging due to the five hours of sleep, but I really think there was more to it than sleep.


As I waited for the sky to change colors, I lounged on a monument platform, melding into the jagged coral. I was comfortable, content. I was neither overly tired nor overly awake. I was just there, thinking of nothing, hearing the crashing waves, smelling and tasting the warm, wet sea mist, and seeing the darkness drip away from the softening sky. Soon what was black was blue and the gray clouds were white. A new day had arrived. As Kurt Vonnegut liked to say, which he attributed to his uncle, “if that isn’t nice, what is?”

I spent a short while scampering over the rocks, peering over the cliffs. I was considering moving on to my next destination and made my way to my car. Before leaving, I figured it would be worth while to at least go into the observation pavilion. Obviously someone thought the view from there was worthy of a sheltered structure, so why not look. After all, it was only 7:00am.


The view was worthy of the structure. It showed some beautiful cliffs plunging into the bay below. From there I could also see a beach that stretched to the east, the sandy coastline broken into segments by rough gray fingers of rock and coral. That is where I needed to be.


It had been so long since I had been to the ocean. In Hawaii, not a week would go by that I didn’t sail in Kaneohe Bay or swim at Kailua beach. Out here it is different. On the southern part of the island, I had only seen the coasts lined with industry; factories, power plants, and resort hotels. The aesthetically pleasing jumble of water and land interrupted by the flat surfaces and straight lines of ‘island escape’ vacations. Up here it was different. In fact, besides a random 30’ tall statue of a bird on a hilltop in the distance and the ever present cell towers, I didn’t see any man-made structures.


I took to the road by foot, snapping pictures along the way. It is possible that sleep was still clouding my eyes, but everything this morning seemed to glow. The flowers, the rocks, the birds; even the road itself was somehow brighter, more pleasant to look at. By the time I reached the sand below, I had already stopped half a dozen times to take pictures of things that, on any other day, would not be worth a second look. I paused for a moment on the beach, turned towards the sun, and continued on my slow, deliberate meandering.


By the time on my watch showed 9:00am, I had covered a fair distance. Besides the handful of campers I passed when I first reached the beach, not another soul had crossed my path. There were no tracks in the sand besides mine. As far as I could tell, the entire beach ahead of me was for me alone. I stopped on a level outcropping of rock and looked north to the water. A school of fish bobbed in the wake below me, changing directions for no apparent reason. I remained there for half an hour, just staring at the water and the fish, not thinking of much at all.

After the fish had moved out of sight, I found myself wanting to swim. More than wanting, really: needing to swim. As strange as it may sound, it was as if the water was calling me, drawing me in to it. For a while, I ignored it. I reasoned against it: I can’t swim alone. I’m two miles from the nearest person. What if there is a rip current, jellyfish, undertow, rogue shark, poisonous coral, or I just pass out for no good reason at all? It’s too dangerous, after all.

In the end, the call of the water was more persistent than my less-than-rational safety concerns. I again walked east. I stood at the edge of the rock and saw what had been beckoning me.

The beach was nothing short of a dreamscape. Yellow sand shone brilliant in the low angle of the morning light. Smooth stones sparsely dotted the water’s edge. Moving away from the water, the beach inclined slightly and the stones increased in size and frequency. The beach, barely one-hundred feet long and forty feet deep, was protected by a half-moon of fifty foot walls embracing the scene below them. The walls resembled a steep amphitheater. Lush, green plants taking root in the broken, uneven slope softened the harshness of the walls, despite their best attempts to look hostile with their sharp, barbed leaves. A few boulders stood tall at the north-eastern edge of the crescent. The clear water rhythmically rocked back-and-forth, sliding up the sand and gently tumbling back into the cove, only to try again moments later. This hidden beach, devoid of all others, was waiting for me.

I climbed down the wall and sank into the soft sand. Without really knowing why, I began taking off my clothes. I nearly got naked, but thought better of it, and stopped when I got to my Under Armour spandex. Close enough, I suppose. The sun and wind against my skin made me laugh out loud. I sprinted to the other end of the beach and pulled up into a hockey-stop, driving shin deep into the wet sand. I galloped back to where I started, jumping and twirling and laughing, and not even knowing why. I ran to the water and submerged myself. I knelt in the sand and fragments of shells and stared out at the dark blue waves as they mixed with the edge of the reef and transformed into avalanches of white froth before setting into the cove like a turquoise satin sheet. I was filled with more energy than I knew I had. I felt like I could have done anything in that moment. Right then and there I was completely and fully happy.

My mood remained constant for the remainder of the morning. I stayed on that beach and let the absolute beauty of it all engulf me. I swam. I skipped stones. I jumped off rocks into the sand and I helped finger-nail sized hermit crabs climb out of my footprints. I sat and I stared into the ocean. And I stared. And I stared.

I tried to leave multiple times. Every time I stood up to go, I would take two steps and sit back down. I didn’t want it to end. I sat there for hours, my mind still and free of noise. The sun, the wind, the rocks, and the waves were all that occupied my thoughts. It is such a rare and pleasant occasion when you can think of nothing. I had no nagging thoughts. I had no real concerns. When I was thirsty, I drank my apple tea and water. When I was hungry, I ate Triscuits with tuna fish. I was satiated. I was filled to the brim with contentment and it was dripping from my pores.

Eventually the pendulum began to slowly swing back towards center. The food ran out and my drinks went dry. I still didn’t want to leave. I stayed until mid-afternoon. I tried to take some pictures of the beach, something to remember it by, but already, just a few hours later, I look at what I took and don’t see what I saw earlier today. I suppose it is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate an experience with something as flat and lifeless as a picture. In the end, it wouldn’t matter who took the pictures. You can't re-live moments past, no matter how carefully re-crafted the scene. I'm not saying that art can't be beautiful and inspirational, but not even the finest art is a worthy substitute for first hand experience.

It’s funny, really: the pictures I took are nothing but ones and zeros, the same as these words I type. They must be processed and brought to life by circuits, memory chips, and electrical currents. Without those pieces to the puzzle, they do not exist. They are virtually real, at the very most.

Really, the same could be said about my whole experience today. The beach itself was and is there, independent of me and my experiences. But it was me—my mind—that made it come to life, that made it real, even if only for me. The particular combination of influences in this instance, the real-world ‘ones and zeros’ of sand, sun, and water—as well as a week of too little sleep, too much tea early in the day, and too many days and nights of doing nothing but reading—all of that combined is what my mind made into the picture of happiness I saw and experienced on the beach today.

It begs the question: would all of that have been there without me? Was the beauty inherently there, or was it only there because my mind convinced itself that it was so? Were the ones and zeros already in place and only needed to be sorted and processed by my mind? Does that mean that each individual being creates his or her own reality? Is that reality pre-determined, set in code, waiting to be processed? How much of a choice do we have in seeing or not seeing beauty and experiencing happiness? Is it always there, underlying everything we do, and we just succeed or fail in picking up on the indicators, processing the code?

I’m done. I guess all that really matters is that I had a great time on the beach today. All was right in the world. Whether or not that was only in the world I created for myself is irrelevant.

It is now past midnight. Unfortunately for me, the tea is still keeping me awake, and there are no Saturday morning cartoons to prevent me from abusing the snooze button in four hours and fifty-four minutes.

Monday morning. I woke up with a headache and bloodshot eyes. The inevitable hangover from the day before. The headache was probably due to the tea. The bloodshot eyes from staring at the sun and water for eight hours. I’m not even sure what the ramblings from last night were about, but I’m leaving them in. I think I was high off tea, if that is even possible.