We took our first trip off the Kona coast and went to check out the more rugged and rural north coast of the Big Island. A lot of the drive took us up the seemingly endless lava plain that makes up the northwest quarter of the island. It looks a lot like Iceland, except it’s sunnier and there’s more shrubbery. There aren’t any big flat surfaces for graffiti, so instead the Hawaiians write their roadside messages by arranging white coral on the black lava.

Once we got up off the coast, the landscape got greener, hillier and a lot more agricultural. We saw cows, sheep, horses, chickens, and even some goats. If not for the tropical plants and occasional sweeping ocean views, we could have been in Vermont.

We find the economics here to be mysterious. Hawaii is so expensive and isolated, how could you possibly make a living raising goats? Are all of these farms a source of amusement for rich transplants and retirees, or are they all just fronts for lucrative pot farming, or what?

I didn’t think to bring the cable that connects my phone to the car stereo, so as we do all this driving, we’re dependent on radio for entertainment. Hawaii is long on natural beauty but a little lacking in its musical culture. The radio is about 60% lite reggae, 25% lite pop and 15% Nashville country. Forget about hip-hop or anything edgy, there isn’t even a classic rock station. Thank god for NPR.

Our friend Katie lent us a book of hikes on the Big Island. The very first one it lists is the Waipio Valley. It’s a secluded spot between two almost vertical cliffs, with a little river snaking down to a black sand beach. The only way down is by a narrow single-lane road that you could almost rappel down. Here’s the view from the top.

The valley is inhabited by even crunchier hippies than the ones we met at the Kona farmer’s market. They have electricity down there, but that’s apparently a quite recent development. One of the “roads” is a six-inch-deep stream — we saw a grandmotherly white-haired lady nonchalantly drive her pickup truck up it. There seems to be some marginal tropical agriculture happening; again, how it all works financially is a mystery. It feels more like Jurassic Park than a farming community. Looming in the background is a pair of waterfalls plunging off the cliffside to feed the river. The trees are densely hung with vines, and there are colorful flowers of the kind that you see on Hawaiian shirts.

After we walked around the valley a little, we went out to the beach you see in the picture, which is truly epic. Not only does it have cliffs and god rays and the river winding through round porous volcanic rocks, but there are also horses roaming freely. I couldn’t tell if they’re wild or just have very laid-back owners. Anna observed that the only thing missing is rainbows and unicorns.

We dragged ourselves back up the cliffside road and drove up to the nearby Kalopa State Recreation Area to take in some more nature before it got dark. It’s a forest preserve with a lovingly maintained rainforest arboretum, and we basically had the place to ourselves. The park brochures are charmingly earnest and old-school, written on a typewriter. They’re dated 1992 but could easily have been written in 1952. There are trees with rainbow-colored bark and pink leaves, and prehistoric-looking ferns. The ground is littered with smashed guavas, making the place look like a tragic accident at the smoothie factory. We saw a lot of mongooses slinking around, and a couple of pheasants, descended from birds inexplicably imported from Nepal.

Before we left we stuffed our suitcases with bulk food and power bars from the Food Coop, and we’ve been cooking all of our meals since we got here. But after all the hiking we finally had our first dinner out, and it was a classy one, at Merriman’s in Waimea. The high-end locavore movement was late in arriving to Hawaii, but now it seems to have fully taken root, and Merriman’s is holding the banner high. We ate all kinds of local treats: pickled passionfruit, sauteed ferns, ahi, pork, lamb, and the most expensive and sensationally delicious cups of coffee of our lives. It was like boiled dark chocolate bars. In the movie of our trip, our waiter would be played by Johnny Depp in full manic mode. He had a Fu Manchu beard and his thumb and pinkie nails were painted a shiny turquoise. I asked him what the story was there and he explained without a trace of irony that it was to widen his shaka.

The tiki motif is getting old, but the music was nice, including a gorgeous lap steel instrumental version of “Wichita Lineman.” Way better than cheesy reggae.

The next day we got up bright and early to go on an organized snorkeling trip run by Sea Paradise in Kealakekua Bay, the site of the Captain Cook monument. We had wanted to hike down there, but development on the coast has made that difficult, and it turned out to be better to see it from the water anyway. Sea Paradise took us out in a catamaran, and I want to pause to enjoy that word. Catamaran. Catamaran! It’s fun just typing it.

We had a good couple of hours bobbing around the bay among the banyan trees and giant boulders, gawking at the psychedelic fish and coral. It’s like being in a screen saver. If you’re interested in how complex forms emerge and self-organize through natural selection, there’s no better place to see it in action than in the ocean around Hawaii. The patterning on the fish is a dazzling display of cellular automata and reaction-diffusion. Steven Wolfram would be in heaven.

The magic isn’t just that the fish are so colorful and groovy, or that there are so many of them. It’s that they’re mostly so unconcerned by human presence. A few fish avoided us but most went about their business as if we weren’t there. The needlefish especially were willing to hang in my face making prolonged eye contact.

The weirdest thing I saw all day was a crown-of-thorns starfish. It took me a while to figure out whether it’s an animal, a plant or a particularly weird coral shape. It’s a good foot wide at least.

It’s a depressingly recurring theme: spectacular exotic creature turns out to be invasive or in some way harmful to Hawaii’s delicate ecosystem. The crown-of-thorns starfish isn’t an invader, but it is a problem. It eats coral, putting more pressure on the already beleaguered reefs, and its natural predator, the conch, has been fished nearly into oblivion.

Snorkeling is fun but exhausting. Two hours of it plus a boat ride on other end completely wiped us out. We mostly spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping.

First of all, what are we even doing here? Anna’s dad had been sitting on a timeshare for years, and he finally concluded that he was never going to use it. So he offered it to us, and we thought, great, Hawaii. Anna’s been before, but I haven’t been anywhere remotely tropical, much less here. So we decided to use up the last of Anna’s frequent flier miles from her former life working for international NGOs, and here we are.

We flew out of Boston because there weren’t any mileage flights available from NYC. Besides, it was a chance to see my cousin Jen and meet her new baby. We spent a jolly night, and the next morning Jen took us to Logan. We landed in Kona after our twelve hours of plane and airport time. Kona doesn’t have jetways; we walked down stairs to the tarmac. It’s been a while since I did that, it made me feel like one of the Beatles. Kona’s airport is open-air, with a roof but no walls. It was nice waiting for our luggage at the baggage claim in a gentle tropical breeze.

We’re staying in a condo in the midst of the most tourist-packed, overdeveloped strip of the Kona coast. Nevertheless, we woke up to an incredible variety of birdsong. Just looking out the window, we saw mynah birds, saffron finches and red-crested cardinals. It was kind of a buzzkill to read how all of these birds were introduced to Hawaii and have severely crowded out the native species. Still, they’re pretty.

The first order of business today was to go into town to rent some gear from Snorkel Bob’s. The web site is well worth a visit if you’re a fan of idiosyncratic copyrighting — Bob is fond of referring to himself in the third person. Eccentric though his business persona may be, Bob is admirably committed to ocean conservation and has some pretty tart criticism for aquarium enthusiasts. Have to say that I agree with him.

We planned to start our Hawaii experience proper with Puuhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park. The drive was rich with Hawaii-ness — we passed two ukelele stored in a hundred yards. On our way there we took a wrong turn and wound up at the Kona farmers’ market. I was abstractly aware that Hawaii has hippies, but this farmers market makes the Park Slope Food Co-op look like a Trader Joe’s in suburban Connecticut. Think anglo dreads, tribal tattoos, dogs in pickup trucks. A guy selling enormous breadfruit was excitedly talking about going on tour with David Nelson, a member of Jerry Garcia’s extended orbit. While we shopped, we were serenaded by a hippie farmer’s vague approximation of “Mother Nature’s Son” by the Beatles, played on a National steel guitar in open D tuning. A woman selling exotic vegetables of various kinds was also selling CDs by one Father Bubba. Of the ten songs, nine were titled after Bible verses, and the tenth was called “Jerry’s Gone.”

So, Puuhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park. It’s out on the end of a big flat lava plain. Plants like this kind of terrain, I assume because lava rock is so porous, so the vegetation is lush and dense. There are coffee and macadamia plantations and people’s fancy beach houses are surrounded by all kinds of exotic tropical foliage in bright colors. The coastline around the park is all black lava rock in fantastic fractal shapes. It’s like taking a walk around the Mandelbrot set. In places the rock is attractively set off by white coral sand.

The park has some historic Hawaiian temples, but the main attraction for me was the wildlife. I’ve never been anywhere with this kind of marine biological density. Just poking around the beach and tide pools, we saw crabs, sandpipers, a rainbow of fish and two sea turtles.

So then, snorkeling. It’s pretty magical. One second, we’re fumbling with the masks and flippers at the water’s edge among a bunch of other Americans in swimsuits like on any other beach. Then all of a sudden it’s like being dropped in the giant coral reef display at an aquarium. In the first ten minutes out there were coral, sea urchins, Moorish Idols, yellow tang and parrotfish. The high point was chasing a three-foot needlefish around its slow-paced routine.

Snorkeling is also terrifying. Just breathing with my face in the water took some convincing of myself, that’s a pretty deep reflex that needs to be overcome. I didn’t quite get used to hearing my own breathing resonating so loudly in my head. Also, getting tossed around by the surf so close to so many jagged rocks was unnerving. We swam all of a hundred fifty feet, but it was enough action for an afternoon. People who scuba dive: you are crazy. Humans have no business underwater. Still, I’m looking forward to doing some more admiring from the surface level.

Our creation stories start with the assumption that we’re the most important thing in the world, the reason for everything else’s being. The story that science tells relegates us to the periphery. Life has mostly been smaller and simpler than us. I think it’s important to recognize that we might very easily wipe ourselves out, and the microbes will barely have noticed we were even here.

Seeing numbers with nine zeroes in them doesn’t help in imagining the time scales involved here, so I’ll also use the convention that the entire history of the Earth is taking place in one day. In this analogy, one “hour” on the clock is about 192 million years.

midnight (4,600,000,000 years ago)

Earth forms from space dust left over from the new sun.

12:21 am (4,533,000,000 years ago)

Earth collides with the planet Theia, causing rings of debris to form. The rings last for millions of years until they coalesce to form the Moon. (Check out this fun visualization of what the modern Earth would look like with rings.)

2:36 am (4,100,000,000 years ago)

After a lot of volcanic excitement, the surface of the Earth cools enough for the crust to solidify. The atmosphere and oceans form.

3:08 am (4,000,000,000 years ago)

The earliest known life appears. How? In the fifties they thought it was a lightning strike in the primordial soup. Newer theories center around RNA molecules or phospholipids forming little bubbles.

DNA emerges and quickly out-replicates whatever other self-catalyzing chemical reactions are happening. During this time, the atmosphere has no free oxygen.

3:42 am (3,900,000,000 years ago)

Late Heavy Bombardment: the rain of giant rocks from space on the Earth reaches its peak. The oceans boil away completely, more than once, but life persists underground.

5:42 am (3,500,000,000 years ago)

Lifetime of the last known common ancestor of every living thing today. Did it look like this?

8:18 am (3,000,000,000 years ago)

Photosynthesizing bacteria evolve. They release the first free oxygen into the atmosphere, which is a poison for a lot of other bacteria. The moon’s orbit is still very close to the Earth, causing tides a thousand feet high. The planet is continually wracked by hurricane-force winds.

1:01 pm (2,100,000,000 years ago)

More complex cells appear, with various organelles and other internal structures.

These cells probably start out as symbiotic communities of simpler organisms, co-evolving to become inseparable, like modern mitochondria and chloroplasts.

3:44 pm (1,200,000,000 years ago)

Sexual reproduction begins, so child cells no longer need to be exact clones of their parents. The pace of evolution picks up.

4:48 pm (1,000,000,000 years ago)

Simple multicellular organisms appear in the oceans: first colonies of algae, then seaweed.

8:06 pm (600,000,000 years ago)

Cell colonies evolve into sponges, the earliest multicellular animals. Next come jellyfish, with muscles, digestive systems with mouths, and the beginnings of simple neural nets (no brains yet.)

The ozone layer forms, filtering some of the sun’s radiation and allowing the microbes to creep out onto land without getting cooked.

9:12 pm (540,000,000 years ago)

Worm-like creatures get more specialized and complex, with circulatory systems and everything.

9:24 pm (505,000,000 years ago)

The first vertebrates emerge, jawless fish resembling lampreys.

9:30 pm (475,000,000 years ago)

Fish evolve jaws from their frontmost gill arches. They also develop stylish armor plating on their heads and thoraxes. The first plants and fungi move onto land.

9:42 pm (450,000,000 years ago)

The arthropods appear. Since their exoskeletons support and hold water in, they’re the first animals to move onto land, starting with millipedes and centipedes, then spiders and scorpions.

9:54 pm (400,000,000 years ago)

The first insects and sharks appear.

10:06 pm (360,000,000 years ago)

Some lobe-finned fish develop legs, maybe to maneuver through shallow plant-choked swamps. Some of these creatures make short trips onto land.

Plants evolve seeds that protect their embryos, enabling them to spread more quickly on land.

10:24 pm (300,000,000 years ago)

The supercontinent Pangaea forms, eventually providing the name for a great Miles Davis album.

Evolution of the amniotic egg gives rise to reptiles, who can reproduce on land. Insects resembling humungous dragonflies are the first animals to fly. The vast forests of clubmosses, horsetails, and tree ferns will eventually fossilize into coal and oil.

10:42 pm (250,000,000 years ago)

The Permian-Triassic extinction event wipes out about ninety percent of all animal species. Yikes.

10:54 pm (220,000,000 years ago)

Early reptiles diversify into crocodilians, dinosaurs, and pterosaurs. From another reptile branch, the synapsids emerge and evolve into the first tiny ancestors to mammals. (You can see the remnants of our lizard forebears in the scaly tails of rats.)

Conifers become the dominant land plants. Plant-eating animals get bigger to house the long digestive tracts it takes to digest the not-very-nutritious pine trees.

11:00 pm (200,000,000 years ago)

Dinosaurs survive a mass extinction and grow enormous. Modern amphibians emerge, including frogs and salamanders.

11:04 pm (180,000,000 years ago)

Pangaea begins to break up into big land masses. The biggest is Gondwana, made up of Antarctica, Australia, South America, Africa, and India. Antarctica is covered with lush forests. North America and Eurasia are still joined. The first true mammals appear.

11:13 pm (150,000,000 years ago)

Giant dinosaurs dominate the land, the ones we all learned about in second grade. The earliest birds evolve from therapod dinosaurs.

11:18 pm (135,000,000 years ago)

Microraptor gui, a two foot long dinosaur in Northeast China, has bird-like feathered wings on four limbs.

11:19 pm (130,000,000 years ago)

Plants evolve flowers, setting off a major burst of animal co-evolution, like bees.

11:21 pm (125,000,000 years ago)

Ancestors of placental mammals that look like mice live in small shrubs in China.

11:37 pm (75,000,000 years ago)

Lifetime of the last common ancestor of humans and mice. Birds with teeth roam the Northern Hemisphere.

11:40 pm (65,000,000 years ago)

The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event wipes out about half of all animal species, including all non-avian dinosaurs. It’s likely caused by a giant asteroid landing off the Yucatan Peninsula.

Without the dinosaurs, mammals can and do get bigger and more diverse. A group of small, tree-dwelling, insect-eating mammals branches out into the ancestors of primates, treeshrews, and bats.

11:44 pm (50,000,000 years ago)

Ancestors of whales walk on land like modern sea lions and swim like modern otters. Ancestors of manatees walk like hippos and also swim like otters. The ancestors of dogs, cats, bears and raccoons are meat-eating, weasel-like tree climbers.

11:47 pm (40,000,000 years ago)

Primates diverge into lemurs, tarsiers, monkeys and apes.

The earliest elephant is the size of a large pig.

11:49 pm (37,000,000 years ago)

Grasses evolve. The first dogs appear in North America.

11:53 pm (22,000,000 years ago)

India collides with Asia, pushing up the Himalayas. The first bears are the size of foxes and hunt in the tree tops.

11:54 pm (20,000,000 years ago)

The African plate collides with Asia. Gigantic animals roam South America, including eighteen-foot-long giant sloths and flying birds with twenty-foot wingspans.

11:55 pm (16,000,000 years ago)

Whales begin to use echolocation. There are sharks the size of buses.

11:56 pm (13,000,000 years ago)

Human ancestors speciate from orangutan ancestors.

11:57 pm (10,000,000 years ago)

Monkeys proliferate, and the apes go into decline. Human ancestors speciate from gorilla ancestors.

11:58 pm (5,000,000 years ago)

Volcanoes erupt and create Panama. Mammals from North America cross the isthmus and cause extinctions of South American mammals. Human ancestors speciate from chimpanzee ancestors. The largest known primates reach twelve feet tall in Asia.

11:59 pm (3,700,000 years ago)

Australopithecus afarensis leaves footprints on volcanic ash in Kenya.

11:59.04 pm (3,000,000 years ago)

Early hominins live on the savannas of Africa, where they’re hunted by giant cats.

11:59.38 pm (2,000,000 years ago)

Meat-eating Homo species coexist with Paranthropus, hominins who eat plants and termites. Homo habilis uses stone choppers in Tanzania. Broca’s area, the speech region of the modern human brain, begins to emerge.

11:59.40 pm (1,800,000 years ago)

Homo erectus emerges in Africa and migrates to other continents, mostly South Asia.

11:59.46 pm (1,750,000 years ago)

Armadillos the size of cars live in southern Peru.

11:59.76 pm (700,000 years ago)

Common genetic ancestor of humans and Neanderthals.

11:59.82 pm (500,000 years ago)

Homo erectus in China use charcoal to control fire, though they may not yet know how to create it.

11:59.94 pm (195,000 years ago)

The earliest known Homo sapiens live in Ethiopia.

11:59.95 pm (160,000 years ago)

Homo sapiens in Ethiopia practice mortuary rituals and butcher hippos.

11:59.953 pm (150,000 years ago)

“Mitochondrial Eve” lives in Africa, the last female ancestor common to all mitochondrial lineages in humans alive today.

11:59.959 pm (130,000 years ago)

Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East begin to bury their dead and care for the sick.

11:59.969 pm (100,000 years ago)

Humans live in South Africa and Palestine, probably alongside Neanderthals.

11:59.974 pm (82,500 years ago)

Humans in Zaire fish using spear blades made from sharpened animal bones.

11:59.977 pm (74,000 years ago)

An enormous volcanoic eruption in Indonesia causes the human population to crash as six years without a summer are followed by a thousand-year-long ice age. Volcanic ash up to fifteen feet deep covers India and Pakistan.

11:59.988 pm (40,000 years ago)

Jared Diamond’s “great leap forward.” Humans paint and hunt mammoths in France. Most large mammal species disappear, probably because of the expanding human population.

11:59.990 pm (32,000 years ago)

First known sculpture in Germany. First known flute, made from a bird bone, in France.

11:59.991 pm (30,000 years ago)

Humans enter North America from Siberia, as well as the Solomon Islands and Japan. Bows and arrows are used in the Sahara. Fired ceramic animal models are made in Eastern Europe.

11:59.992 pm (27,000 years ago)

Neanderthals die out, leaving Homo sapiens and Homo floresiensis as the only hominid species. In Eastern Europe, humans invent textiles and press weaving patterns into pieces of clay before firing them.

11:59.994 pm (20,000 years ago)

Oil lamps made from animal fats on shells are used in caves in France. Bone needles are used to sew animal hides in China. Wooly mammoth bones are used to build houses in Russia.

11:59.995 pm (15,000 years ago)

The most recent Ice Age ends. Megafauna extinction begins in the Americas, again, probably because of humans.

11:59.997 pm (10,000 years ago)

The human population reaches five million, presumably causing the extinction of Homo floresiensis and the woolly mammoth. Humans domesticate gray wolves into dogs, and in the Middle East, begin to develop agriculture. Hunter-gatherers in Japan create the earliest known pottery. Humans now occupy every continent except Antarctica.

11:59.9975 pm (8,000 years ago)

Humans hybridize bread wheat from emmer wheat and goat-grass.

11:59.9980 pm (6,500 years ago)

Humans domesticate rice.

11:59.9991 pm (3,000 years ago)

Humans in Eurasia start using iron tools.

11:59.9997 pm (1,000 years ago)

The human population reaches one hundred fifty million.

11:59.99995 pm (150 years ago)

The human population reaches one billion.

11:59.99999 pm (40 years ago)

Humans walk on the moon. The human-caused extinction event accelerates.

midnight (present)

The human population approaches seven billion.

And then what? Your guess is as good as mine.

See a version of this post on Quora.