Menehune Magic

I love collecting local stories as I travel and my favorites so far are the Hawaiian legends about magical creatures and happenings. Since I've gotten to Kauai it seems like there's a whole lot of talk about the menehune, magical little people who live in the forest and perform great acts of construction under the cover of night. They're kind of like Hawaiian leprechauns, but instead of chasing after pots of gold, they build shit. The standard description is that they are short (between six inches and two feet), hairy, pot-bellied and dark skinned. Personally, I imagine them as a cross between an Australian pygmy and a Fraggle.

The part I love the best is that the legend of the menehune is thought to be based on an actual group of real people who once lived on the islands. Before those crazy Tahitians showed up in their out-rigger canoes about 1000 years ago, there was an earlier migration of people who hailed from the Marquesas Islands. (For those of you who have no idea where that is, it is also in French Polynesian in the South Pacific Ocean, about 1000 miles northeast of Tahiti). So those Marquesans came over a few hundred years before the Tahitians, spread out all over the Hawaiian Islands and were a magical, peaceful group of folks. Then the bigger, pugilistic Tahitians took over, driving the Marquesans to the furthest island north, Kauai, where they survived by living in the forests and practicing magic to keep the Tahitians away. The word menehune has its roots in a Tahitian word meaning "commoner." Makes sense for an oppressed people. Further proof for the origins of the legend is the fact that in a 1820 census of the island of Kauai 65 people reported themselves as menehune, which totally explains the fact that I thought I saw one at the 7-11 last week buying a case of Budweiser.

So everywhere on the island you see menehune stuff: Menehune Convenience Mart, the Menehune Water Company...but there is an actual place on the island that still has some non-commercial magic to offer. On the south end of the island in Puhi is the Menehune Pond, lying all quiet and peaceful in a valley right next to a river. Supposedly the menehune built it in one night by forming a long chain from the rock quarry to the river and passing stones all night long to build up the sides of the giant fish pond. Then they diverted the river a bit into the new pond and had their own permanent fish section of the grocery store where they could incubate and catch all the seafood goodness they could ever want. According to one version of the tale, the menehune built the pond for the king at the time. (They had some kind of deal where they were the king's own personal building crew and in exchange they were allowed to live their peaceful menehune forest lives). Their only condition is that no one watch while they were building since they wanted to keep their magical ways a secret. But of course a mischievous young prince and princess snuck out to watch them at work. Unfortunately, it was far past their bedtime and the lil' tikes got all tuckered out and fell asleep. The menehune discovered them and turned them into two giant rock pillars that you can see in the mountains surrounding the pond. That's what you get for messing with magical little building elves.