King Kamehameha Meets the Lord of the Airwaves
In praise of the Bishop Museum and a far-out time warp
I mentioned a couple entries ago that I once binge-watched all 279 episodes of the original Hawaii Five-O (minus the one with a hanging scene that was pulled from syndication after a viewer imitated it). The show was hot shit when I was a little kid, and I have this primal sense memory of it being on at my grandparents’ house. The theme song has a deep connection for me, and that iconic title sequence is still a marvel.
Of course, I found a lot to fall out of love with while trying to watch twelve seasons of a police procedural, especially when the show really started running out of gas in the last couple years. But a lot of my lingering fascination with the state of Hawaii came from the exterior shots of that show.
I never believed I’d scratch any particular Five-O itch by going to actual Hawaii. The show’s fifty years old by now. I assumed the whole place would look different, and that my fascination was as much with the big-finned cars, lime green couches, and burnt orange shag carpet as with the natural island beauty. I never would have suggested Honolulu as a vacation destination just to take a nostalgia tour.
But if you pull up Season 2 of the show, in the episode “King Kamehameha Blues,” the plot involves college kids pulling a heist to steal a sacred cloak by breaking into the Bishop Museum, an archive of Hawaiian history founded in the late 19th century. It’d been long enough since I saw the episode that I’d forgotten that completely when we decided to hit the museum as our last stop before dropping off the rental car and flying home.
But the big three-story hall where the Hawaiian artifacts are displayed might as well have been in a time capsule. There’s an authentic grass hut, brought in a century ago and rethatched several times since, and it’s in the exact same spot as it was in the show. There’s a life-size plaster model of a whale, with one side cut away to show the organs and skeletons, and it’s hanging in the same place.
We streamed the episode two days after standing in that very room, and the half-century between lead actor Jack Lord and us seemed to vanish. Even the display cabinets and their fixtures and hinges were identical. I’d gotten a little thrill seeing the stairs at the Iolani Palace, the headquarters of the fictional Five-O unit, scene of many “McGarrett dashing down the steps toward his car” transitions, but this? This was like finding out you’d walked through a time warp.
I tell you all that to tell you this: if you ever go to Hawaii, make the Bishop a priority. Sure, it seems counterproductive to fly halfway around the world to the most beautiful place there is and then go stand inside. But this place will reward a dedicated day (or two) of exploration. The Hawaiian hall I’m talking about here explores everything from the most ancient gods of the first settlers to the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s, in exhausting, fascinating detail.
We didn’t even get to look at the rest of the place, or check out their planetarium. In a way I’m glad, because had we fallen down this rabbit hole earlier in the week, we might have lost out on one of the other adventures we enjoyed, or been more likely to avoid braving the rain because we knew we had indoor options. And it’s also quite an incentive to make our way back there someday, hopefully sooner than later.
You don’t need to know all that history before you stand on a beach or watch a luau or hike up a mountainside. But history is context, wherever you are, and knowing why a place is, and how it got that way, can only make you a more respectful and mindful passerby on someone else’s road.