Shipman Beach  |  Sage Warner

Is there really anything wrong with feeling insignificant?

Let me tell you about a place called Shipman Beach. Shipman is located in Puna, on the windward side of the Big Island of Hawaii; a region where using the water caught on your roof to do dishes is not a choice made for environmental reasons, but rather because your neighborhood lacks basic infrastructure. Where hippie communes thrive, papayas are grown and wild boars terrorize the people and land. Chickens are everywhere, the children wear no shoes and throw rocks and tangerines at your car (I know because I was one of them). If you by chance stumble upon a marijuana patch (and there are many) leave quickly, because its keeper could be nearby and if not, you could trip a painful boobie trap. In Puna the jungle really is wild, and the green creeps in from all sides.

There is a road that will take you to Shipman beach, but you’re not allowed to use it. The Shipman family is known to carefully guard the keys to the gates of their isolated estate, but shoreline access laws say they must share the sheltered cove on the edge of their sprawling lawns. To get to Shipman you have to park your car at the end of a red dirt road, leaving it to the mercy of the people of Puna, and hike an hour or so through the forest and along the shoreline.

This is where I always begin to feel insignificant. The trail takes you through more than one type of forest. Imagine walking through the tunnel in the center of a Lifesavers roll, only each color is a distinct chapter of the forest. First Ohia, then Waiwi, Autograph trees, Mango, Banyan, Ironwood pines and finally you emerge on the edge of a cliff which you follow until you reach the beach. The water swells.

There’s something in this combination of walking a path so absolutely dripping with nature, then standing on a point with no sign of man for miles in either direction and feeling the weight of water pound against the rocks. I hear the boom with my chest and feel the tremor of impact move up till my knees. It never fails to overwhelm me with the feeling of how small I really am. There’s another aspect of Shipman beach which tickles the senses and mind even more than the fantastic display of nature witnessed on the way in. Interestingly, its the one detail of the beach that is man-made and the smallest detail of them all: the sand. The active volcanoes on our island supply the beaches with beautiful black sand, but the Shipmans weren’t satisfied with this so they trucked in white sand to perfect their little patch of paradise.

Nature rejected this facelift and instead turned it into a small scale model of it’s larger system. The different weights of the light and dark sands don’t allow them to thoroughly mix, so the undersized waves, the bubbling springs and the stream in the middle of the bay continuously self-illustrate a micro-exposition of the way water manipulates earth. Watching this flux makes me feel so insignificant; it warps my sense of time and reinforces again how I’m just a small particle in a network of larger systems. Wow.

Here’s a short bio by the author:

I was born and raised on the Big Island of Hawaii, on the east side where it rains more than it does here in Portland. Not exactly the Hawaii that everyone has in mind when they fantasize, but still an amazing place. My dad is a woodworker, so as a kid I was always borrowing his tools to make whatever our gang of neighborhood kids wanted; slingshots, forts and go-carts (and always getting yelled at for not putting them back). Later in high school I got really into photography and became the girl who came to school with an SLR around her neck every day. After that, not sure exactly what I wanted to do in college, I was hired in a tiny shop as a florist and was finally able to admit to myself that I really just want to make things for the rest of my life. So I declared myself a graphic design major and haven’t looked back since because the deeper I get into it, the more I love it. I’ll be graduating soon (this is how I know Aaron and Ben).

As for interests… most things interest me. I’ve always been a big bookworm so I love stories and finding out about random things. I spend way too much time on the internet and bicycling around. I’m also deeply in love with plants: I have way too many in my living room, plus a little garden, and I’m the worst person to go hiking with because I end up taking pictures of moss the entire time and we never get anywhere.

You can find some of Sage’s design work on her Flickr page.