Hilo Days: A River Ran through It

Pity the kid who doesn’t have a river near home. There’s something adventurous about going down to the river and playing with your friends, getting wet, scraping your knees, netting mosquito fish, catching crayfish … it’s an integral part of growing up. Here’s one of my stories from my long-gone Hilo Days website:

The River

A stream – or as we called it, "The River" – ran through the cane fields not too far from our house. You got to it either by taking Wiliwili Street all the way to the end, then turning left on an access road until you got to the stream. Or, you could walk to the end of Ekaha Street, and reach the access road from the Kawasaka's property.

The stream was only about 15 feet wide, and just a couple of feet deep. You walked across a four-foot wide wooden bridge to reach the other side.

This little stream continued a long way. The only time it was ever visible was when it crossed the street between Carvalho Park and Hilo Memorial Hospital. It eventually joined up with the Wailuku River, which split near the backside of Hilo High School, forming the residential area known as Reed's Island, before coming back together near the hydro-electric plant behind the main post office.

Wildlife flourished in and around the stream. Typical of small Hawaiian streams, there were lots of crayfish that made their homes in the steep muddy banks, "mosquito fish" (or "medaka"), fantailed guppies, swordtails, red swordtails, snails, leopard frogs, bullfrogs, mongooses, centipedes and every insect known to man. There might even have been some dragonfly nymphs for all I know.

We usually played in the area by the bridge. The stream widened at that point, and there were a few large semi-submerged rocks to stand on. One rock in particular was flat, roughly round in shape with a diameter of about three feet or so, and jutted out into the stream just under the bridge. We stood there a lot.

At New Year's time, we used to bring our cherry bombs, Roman candles and sparklers down to the stream. We'd just wreak havoc on those poor aquatic denizens. I already told you about how we wrapped bread around the cherry bombs and blew up the fish.

We'd also catch crayfish, tie a Duck Brand to its back, and watch it try to reach the water before the firecracker blew. We'd light a Roman candle, and once it got started, lay it on the bottom of the stream weighted down with rocks, and watch the colorful incandescence pop to the surface. We'd light the sparklers and toss them in stream, polluting the water and air with the noxious fumes.

The crayfish were fun – but scary. They came in two flavors: young green ones, and old red ones. The green crayfish were no threat, but those crafty old red ones would head for your big toe straightaway while you were standing in the water paying attention to something else. The crayfish would then proceed to nip your toe with its big pinchers, hanging on for all its worth.

Even when you caught a crayfish, it would take a defensive posture with its pinchers in the air, wide open, ready to take off a piece of your skin if you weren't careful. You could pick them up by grabbing their back, but if you weren't careful, they'd snip your fingers.

If we had known at that time how tasty crayfish tails were, the stream's population certainly would have been sorely depleted. But we were from Hawaii, not Louisiana, so we didn't know crayfish tails from chicken lips.

Great fun, good times.