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Lydgate
Saturday morning I was sitting out at Lydgate Beach Park around 11am. I was at a picnic table with my computer, working on Designers & Dragons, when I noticed a police car pull up behind me. A few minutes later a pair of police officers ambled up the beachside path past me, not really seeming to be in much of a hurry. An ambulance followed a few minutes later, and the paramedics, wheeled stretcher in tow, headed in the same direction. They seemed to move with a bit more alacrity, but they weren't running or anything.
After that, the emergency vehicles continued to pile up. Two more police cars and a second ambulance parked a bit further away, where the responders could hike across an open area to get quicker access to the place a few hundred feet up the beach where all the activity was. Then the third ambulance showed up and it went FLYING across the open area.
A few minutes later, the paramedics with the stretcher hustled back up the path, with a patient upon it. I thought he was hyperventilating at the time, but I now know they were using a LUCAS Device, which is a mechanical chest compression system.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I was seeing the aftereffects of Kauai's third drowning of the year. About one a month is average, with slightly more than half being visitors. The victim was pronounced dead at the hospital. I heard about it on the radio today when I went into town. It was a local this time, not a visitor. The mass influx of emergency vehicles was because another five people who'd tried to save the drowning victim also needed to be helped out of the water "exhausted and fatigued".
It's always sobering to be so near to death. But I also can't get out of my head those first two police officers, casually ambling up the pathway and talking. But maybe they knew the paramedics were the ones who could do something about the "unresponsive" swimmer who'd been reported. And those paramedics hadn't arrived yet.
--
Probably because I didn't know the circumstances, just that there'd been responder activity, something that's a constant undertone even here in paradise, I had a nice day out at Lydgate.
I dropped my dad and Mary off at the airport in the morning. (Other things I didn't know on Saturday morning: they both had COVID, which they tested positive for today. Fortunately, I did know that Mary had been under the weather, so we all wore masks when I drove them to the airport. I'm crossing my fingers that'll keep me safe, and I did test negative today, but I've been pretty tired since Saturday, something I'd previously assumed was due to being out in the sun most of the day. I'm also crossing my fingers that they can get some Paxlovid and that it'll help keep them safe.)
I got to Lydgate about 9.30 in the morning, had a sandwich for lunch, worked on Designers & Dragons Origins V6, moved picnic tables to get out of the sun, worked more, and then witnessed what I now know was a drowning.
Later in the day, I wandered the paths to the south side of the park and back. This was actually the first part of the east side multiuse path that got built, way back in 2001. It's a mile or two around Lydgate. The most interesting part is a big "bridge" on the south side of the path, which doesn't actually bridge anything, not even the stream that's just the other side of it, but it does drop you down a hundred feet or so to the shoreline via a lot of zig-zagging back and forth that's interwoven with little play areas. Very cool.
Unfortunately, it's never been properly connected with the better-knwon Ke Ala Hele Makalae path, which lies north of Lydgate, just the other side of the Wailua River, and runs several amazing miles alongside the coast in Kapaa and Kealia. You can actually (safely) make it from the one to the other nowadays, which you couldn't when I moved here, but the recent work trying to bridge the two areas waggles back and forth and there's one area that's dirt and sand, which is exhausting to bike through. (I've done it a few times.) Property owners who don't want the path seaside of them are the cause of the problems, including an association that claimed that every one of their residents needed to agree for the path, which of course didn't happen.
At the south side of Lydgate, where the path loops back on itself, I noticed that the beach is open for what might be a mile or more. Definitely something to walk some day, but a day that I have slippas, not shoes.
There was a pavilion right at the end of that loop that had a nice little pier that ran out over the sand. Beautiful and also pretty private as that side of the path is too far away for visitors to visit. (I have to guess the weird "bridge" was initially meant to be a tourist attraction, but there have been homeless encampments at the nearest parking lot since COVID, and so no one else uses it anymore and the whole south side of the park has fallen into disuse as a result.) I loved the privacy of course and did more work on Designers & Dragons Origins until my laptop's battery ran out.
Afterward I did a big loop up to the north side of the park. I think I've walked all the Lydgate pathways now.
--
When I got home, I looked at the Kauai Path website (https://www.kauaipath.org/) and was thrilled to see it'd had a very nice looking update. Over the last few years I'd wondered if the whole project was moribund, since the idea of having a multiuse path up the entire northeast corner of Kauai seems dead. There have been additions, but nothing like the major work in the '00s.
Excited by that, I sent mail to the project asking if there was anything I, as a professional writer and researcher, could do to aid the project.
I've actually wanted to do some volunteer work on island since I moved here. I sent in a request to join the Habitat for Humanity building projects soon after I got here, but I didn't get a response back for 6 or 12 months because the whole world got caught up in COVID, and by that time I'd already firmed up my schedule enough that I never could bring myself to throw it into chaos to do work for the project on weekdays.
But this seemed like it might be a place to contribute on something that I feel strongly about, and using my own expertises rather than hammers and saws.
The director got back to me the next morning and said they were just talking about how they could better communicate to the public. So we're video-conferencing in a few days. Hopefully, that'll be a way to both become involved in a little corner of the community and give back a bit, neither of which I've really done since moving here.
--
That was my Saturday. Beauty right next to the dangers of that beautiful environment. That's Hawaii.
After that, the emergency vehicles continued to pile up. Two more police cars and a second ambulance parked a bit further away, where the responders could hike across an open area to get quicker access to the place a few hundred feet up the beach where all the activity was. Then the third ambulance showed up and it went FLYING across the open area.
A few minutes later, the paramedics with the stretcher hustled back up the path, with a patient upon it. I thought he was hyperventilating at the time, but I now know they were using a LUCAS Device, which is a mechanical chest compression system.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I was seeing the aftereffects of Kauai's third drowning of the year. About one a month is average, with slightly more than half being visitors. The victim was pronounced dead at the hospital. I heard about it on the radio today when I went into town. It was a local this time, not a visitor. The mass influx of emergency vehicles was because another five people who'd tried to save the drowning victim also needed to be helped out of the water "exhausted and fatigued".
It's always sobering to be so near to death. But I also can't get out of my head those first two police officers, casually ambling up the pathway and talking. But maybe they knew the paramedics were the ones who could do something about the "unresponsive" swimmer who'd been reported. And those paramedics hadn't arrived yet.
--
Probably because I didn't know the circumstances, just that there'd been responder activity, something that's a constant undertone even here in paradise, I had a nice day out at Lydgate.
I dropped my dad and Mary off at the airport in the morning. (Other things I didn't know on Saturday morning: they both had COVID, which they tested positive for today. Fortunately, I did know that Mary had been under the weather, so we all wore masks when I drove them to the airport. I'm crossing my fingers that'll keep me safe, and I did test negative today, but I've been pretty tired since Saturday, something I'd previously assumed was due to being out in the sun most of the day. I'm also crossing my fingers that they can get some Paxlovid and that it'll help keep them safe.)
I got to Lydgate about 9.30 in the morning, had a sandwich for lunch, worked on Designers & Dragons Origins V6, moved picnic tables to get out of the sun, worked more, and then witnessed what I now know was a drowning.
Later in the day, I wandered the paths to the south side of the park and back. This was actually the first part of the east side multiuse path that got built, way back in 2001. It's a mile or two around Lydgate. The most interesting part is a big "bridge" on the south side of the path, which doesn't actually bridge anything, not even the stream that's just the other side of it, but it does drop you down a hundred feet or so to the shoreline via a lot of zig-zagging back and forth that's interwoven with little play areas. Very cool.
Unfortunately, it's never been properly connected with the better-knwon Ke Ala Hele Makalae path, which lies north of Lydgate, just the other side of the Wailua River, and runs several amazing miles alongside the coast in Kapaa and Kealia. You can actually (safely) make it from the one to the other nowadays, which you couldn't when I moved here, but the recent work trying to bridge the two areas waggles back and forth and there's one area that's dirt and sand, which is exhausting to bike through. (I've done it a few times.) Property owners who don't want the path seaside of them are the cause of the problems, including an association that claimed that every one of their residents needed to agree for the path, which of course didn't happen.
At the south side of Lydgate, where the path loops back on itself, I noticed that the beach is open for what might be a mile or more. Definitely something to walk some day, but a day that I have slippas, not shoes.
There was a pavilion right at the end of that loop that had a nice little pier that ran out over the sand. Beautiful and also pretty private as that side of the path is too far away for visitors to visit. (I have to guess the weird "bridge" was initially meant to be a tourist attraction, but there have been homeless encampments at the nearest parking lot since COVID, and so no one else uses it anymore and the whole south side of the park has fallen into disuse as a result.) I loved the privacy of course and did more work on Designers & Dragons Origins until my laptop's battery ran out.
Afterward I did a big loop up to the north side of the park. I think I've walked all the Lydgate pathways now.
--
When I got home, I looked at the Kauai Path website (https://www.kauaipath.org/) and was thrilled to see it'd had a very nice looking update. Over the last few years I'd wondered if the whole project was moribund, since the idea of having a multiuse path up the entire northeast corner of Kauai seems dead. There have been additions, but nothing like the major work in the '00s.
Excited by that, I sent mail to the project asking if there was anything I, as a professional writer and researcher, could do to aid the project.
I've actually wanted to do some volunteer work on island since I moved here. I sent in a request to join the Habitat for Humanity building projects soon after I got here, but I didn't get a response back for 6 or 12 months because the whole world got caught up in COVID, and by that time I'd already firmed up my schedule enough that I never could bring myself to throw it into chaos to do work for the project on weekdays.
But this seemed like it might be a place to contribute on something that I feel strongly about, and using my own expertises rather than hammers and saws.
The director got back to me the next morning and said they were just talking about how they could better communicate to the public. So we're video-conferencing in a few days. Hopefully, that'll be a way to both become involved in a little corner of the community and give back a bit, neither of which I've really done since moving here.
--
That was my Saturday. Beauty right next to the dangers of that beautiful environment. That's Hawaii.