Hawaii, Emmy with Driftwood

During our first of several trips to Hawaii (1968), we were walking on the beach on the Island of Maui when Emmy saw a little piece of driftwood sticking out of the sand. As she kept wiggling it, and wiggling it, it ended up being a piece 5 feet long, with branches about 2 feet long near the middle, with a heavy 18” piece at the one end that looks something like a horse’s head.

It was too large to check as luggage on the airplane, so we took it to the dock, and made arrangements for Matson Lines to send it to Los Angeles on a ship. The man looked at it and said we should be thanked for cleaning up the debris on the beach, but we should wrap it in some cardboard, otherwise someone might think it was a scrap, and throw it overboard.

For several years we had it hanging over our fireplace on Archwood St. in Canoga Park, and after 25 years of desert heat on our patio, it still looks good.

A visitor in our home one day, who was a self-admitted expert in wood, said this was not from any tree he knew of on the Hawaiian Islands, it must have floated from some other island out in the Pacific. This is a piece of driftwood, that really did!