I felt a chuckle inside when I saw the little Hilo bridge was still there.
Thank God they hadn’t found it and torn it down.
As I stopped my car on one side of the bridge to let another car pass over, I saw this polite gesture was a ritual done every day for the last 100 years.
It was a place to show aloha a thousand times a day.
It’s a charming old bridge, the one by Haihai Street in Hilo, covered with moss like it belongs in the past.
A bridge that’s a bridge to Hawaii’s past, letting cars drive over its back, like it’s done for over 100 years, and there it was, hiding from ugly ole progress.
But as cosmic things go, a few days later I read that they’d sniffed it out and found it hiding in the bushes, just 3 blocks from the shiny KTA shopping center.
When the County Council found this unique treasure its days were numbered. Soon this part of history would be history. The bulldozers are starting up.
How did this happen? How could the County Council do such a thing?
To find the answer we must view the dull ambiance of the council chamber and the somber environment in which the members sit every other month. The council does many good deeds but they are underappreciated.
Let’s just say council meetings do not draw a Super Bowl crowd. Lines of eager fans do not circle the county building, dying to get in.
If you tune to public channel 55 you will see nine lonely council members sitting in front of an empty room. Where lively, concerned citizens should be there is an empty hall with only the sound of a lone coqui frog creaking in the last row. To pass the time council members take turns telling the coqui frog his 3 minutes are up.
This boredom is made more stressful by the need to prove their worth, so they scan the island for anything that might need fixing, or not.
One councilman hired workmen to secretly go to a fire station to rename and repaint the name of the station. Another idea was to install a traffic light in a place that would make cars back up, making the whole town of Kona late for work.
Thinking up unnecessary projects at meetings beats listening to a coqui frog. Which brings us back to the old bridge in Hilo.
After a hundred years the council decided to make a move. The reasoning was that firetrucks can’t make it over the bridge. They’ve been driving over it just fine for 10 decades. So that’s no reason. A firetruck might use it for 10 seconds a year, with no loss of time getting to a fire.
Slap some cement on that bridge and it will be good for another 100 years.
I hope that our respectable council returns to doing great things like having more gun control and keeping poison spray away from our schools.
So, please leave our beloved bridge alone. It’s a part of the history of Hawaii. It deserves a big ceremony and a plaque of historic places.
Dennis Gregory writes a bi-monthly column for West Hawaii Today and welcomes your comments at makewavess@yahoo.com.
