On Black Sand

We keep two Punaluʻu in our vocabulary. One is the windward Oʻahu town we drive through on Kamehameha Highway, golden sand and ironwoods, mist coming off the Koʻolau. The other is a bay on the Kaʻū coast of Hawaiʻi Island, and to reach it we had to do something unusual for us: get on a plane.

Punaluʻu's sand is basalt. Lava met the ocean, shattered on contact, and the pieces have been grinding finer ever since — every grain a fragment of the island's oldest argument with the water. Palms lean over the bay, and honu haul out on the dark slope to warm themselves, so you keep your distance and lower your voice. The sand does not glitter. It absorbs. Under the afternoon sun it drinks light like wet ink.

We went for the ink, which sounds strange until you have stood on it. We had been arguing for weeks about whether to give the marks a second color — a gray, a wash, something to soften the hard edges — and we had come to the darkest ground in the archipelago to settle it. We sat on it until the sun went down, and the argument ended without anyone winning it.

Black is not an absence; it holds, and gives back slowly.

Because then the sand did what we had read about and not quite believed: it kept the heat. An hour after sunset we were sitting on ground still warm as bread, the ocean going gray-silver in front of us, the beach radiating back everything the day had put into it.

That is the closest thing we have to a theory of ink. We print in black — one color, no hedging. On the Kaʻū coast black is the ground itself, the youngest island in the chain wearing its origin openly, and it is not flat or empty. It holds more than any color we could have added to it. Our ink should work the same way, we decided, sitting on that warm dark slope: it should take what the drawing put into it and give it back slowly, wash after wash, year after year.

We flew home the next morning with sand in the backpack seams, and some of it is in the shop floorboards now. Kaʻū keeps its beach; we keep the lesson. Put the black all the way in. Let it hold the heat.