For decades, visitors to Hawaii have mailed lava rocks back to the islands accompanied by handwritten letters describing broken relationships, financial hardship, illness, and the uneasy feeling that something simply was not right after taking a piece of paradise home.

Transcript

Host:

Tonight on the Midnight Drive, there are some souvenirs you’re told never to take home.

A postcard, a seashell, a photograph, all perfectly ordinary.

But in Hawaii, there’s another item that has earned an almost legendary reputation.

A volcanic lava rock.

For decades, visitors have mailed them back to the islands accompanied by handwritten
letters describing broken relationships, financial hardship, illness, bad luck, and the
uneasy feeling that something simply hasn’t been right since they slipped that piece of
Hawaii into their suitcase.

Is Pele’s curse real?
Or is something else happening beneath the surface?
Tonight, we’ll wander through one of Hawaii’s most famous legends before disappearing
into another story that has captivated imaginations for generations.

The mysterious Menehune.

I’ve always thought souvenirs are strange.

You spend a week somewhere beautiful.

You experience the food, the weather, the conversations, the sunsets.

And somehow you convince yourself that what you’ll really treasure 20 years from now
is a magnet shaped like a pineapple.

Maybe it’s just me.

Never been much of a souvenir person.

I’d rather come home with a memory than a keychain.

That said, I completely understand the temptation to pick up something small
that reminds you of a place.

A smooth stone from a hiking trail, a shell from the beach, a pressed flower tucked inside
of a book, tiny little pieces of geography that somehow contain memories.

Which is exactly why I find one of Hawaii’s most famous legends so fascinating.

Not because it’s particularly frightening,
but because it asks a wonderfully uncomfortable question.

What actually belongs to us?
What actually belongs to us?
For decades, visitors have been warned not to take volcanic lava rocks from the islands.

According to local legend, doing so invites Pele’s curse,
bringing bad luck until the rocks are returned to Hawaii.

Now, if you spend enough time reading about this story,
you’ll quickly discover plenty of debate.

Some people insist it’s absolutely true.

Others argue it was invented to discourage tourists from carrying away pieces of the landscape.

Some historians suggest versions of the story evolved over time as the visitors’ numbers exploded.

And honestly, I love that nobody seems entirely certain.

Because certainty isn’t actually where my curiosity goes.

My curiosity goes somewhere much simpler.

Why do so many people mail the rocks back?
Every year, packages arrive in Hawaii from all over the world.

Inside, you’ll often find a single volcanic stone accompanied by a handwritten letter.

The letters are remarkably similar.

My marriage fell apart.

I lost my job.

My business failed.

I haven’t slept well since I came home.

Our vacation was wonderful.

Until we took the rock.

Please put it back.

That’s the part that fascinates me.

Not whether the curse exists, but the apology.

Imagine carrying a tiny stone around your house for months, maybe years.

Every time something goes wrong, your eyes drift toward the shelf where it sits.

And eventually, you decide that you’ve had enough.

You wrap it carefully, write a letter, buy a postage, and send it thousands of miles back across the Pacific Ocean.

That’s an extraordinary amount of effort.

Especially for people who claim they don’t believe in curses.

Notice something about people.

We’re remarkably rational, right up until life becomes uncertain.

Then suddenly, we’re knocking on wood, crossing our fingers, wearing the lucky shirt during football season.

Driving back!
Because we forgot the anniversary card.

We already know won’t magically determine the future of our relationship.

Superstition is strangely democratic.

It doesn’t seem to care whether you’re religious, skeptical, scientific, or deeply spiritual.

It finds everyone eventually.

Maybe because uncertainty is uncomfortable.

And rituals give uncertainty somewhere to go.

I’ve wondered if returning a lava rock functions less like breaking a curse, and more like making peace.

Maybe the act itself matters.

You acknowledge that something never belonged to you.

You let it go.

You move on.

There’s wisdom in that.

Especially in a culture that encourages us to collect absolutely everything.

Photographs, experiences, followers, status, property, proof that we’ve been somewhere.

Sometimes I think adulthood is mostly learning how to release things instead of acquire them.

There’s another reason the story has stayed with me.

Volcanic rock isn’t just a souvenir.

It’s literally new earth.

New earth.

The Hawaiian islands are still being written.

Deep beneath the surface, unimaginable forces continue pushing molten rock upward.

Slowly reshaping coastlines, one eruption at a time.

Stand on a black lava field, and you’re looking at land that geologically speaking was born yesterday.

That’s incredible.

The ground beneath your feet is still becoming itself.

Maybe that’s why removing a piece feels different than pocketing a shell.

It feels less like collecting and more like interrupting.

I could be completely wrong about that, but every story we’ve explored this week keeps quietly
pointing toward exactly the same idea.

Respect.

Respect the ocean.

Respect the roads.

Respect the stories.

And maybe respect the land enough to leave it where you found it.

I’ve also been thinking about the irony of paradise.

People arrive hoping to escape ordinary life.

And then they spend half the vacation trying to take paradise home with them.

What a bizarre thing to consider, isn’t it?
Pictures, videos, souvenirs, postcards.

All of the real-time posts that go on Instagram.

All of the real-time videos taken that go up on TikTok.

Little physical reminders that they were there.

But the older I get, the more convinced I become that places aren’t carried home in luggage.

They’re carried home in perspective.

I still remember the sound of waves outside my hotel room in Kona.

I remember warm air that somehow felt like flowers and salt at the same time.

I remember looking across the Pacific at the sunset and realizing
there was nothing between me and Asia except for water.

Those memories weigh absolutely nothing.

Yet they’ve stayed with me far longer than any trinket ever could.

And maybe that’s why the legend works.

Not because Pele reaches into a suitcase looking for stolen rocks.

Because it gently reminds us that some places aren’t asking to be possessed.

You’re listening to The Midnight Drive.

We just got finished talking about Pele’s Curse.

And in this next segment, we’re going to be talking about the Menehune.

You know what I love about Impossible Stories?
Every once in a while, you stumble across something that just shouldn’t exist.

Not supernatural necessarily, just unexpected.

And that’s the space where the Menehune live.

Depending on who you ask,
they’re tiny people who inhabit the forests and valleys of Hawaii.

They’re master builders capable of constructing fish ponds, temples,
roads, or walls in a single night before disappearing with the sunrise.

Some descriptions paint them as mischievous.

Others portray them as deeply skilled craftspeople
who simply prefer to remain unseen.

I’ve always found that second version so much more interesting.

Maybe because I’ve met people like that.

Not tiny people.

That would certainly make this a very different podcast.

I mean, the quiet experts.

The ones who never introduce themselves by listing accomplishments.

The carpenters whose joints fit together so perfectly they almost disappear.

The mechanic who listens to an engine for 10 seconds and somehow knows exactly what’s wrong.

The grandmother who cooks an entire holiday meal without opening the recipe book even once.

Real mastery has a funny way of becoming invisible, doesn’t it?
When something is done exceptionally well, we stop noticing the effort all together.

And maybe that’s why stories like the Menehune survive.

They give extraordinary craftsmanship a face.

Or perhaps they remind us that remarkable things
often happen while nobody is watching.

There’s an old saying that success happens overnight after 20 years of work.

I think about that every time I hear stories of impossible construction.

And when I say impossible construction, it’s usually music.

And think about all of the musicians that seem to just appear overnight.

That’s exactly what they’re talking about.

It appears like they just emerge out of the ashes overnight.

But many rock and pop stars are well into their 30s and have been building all of it
for over 20 years.

Imagine walking up to a stone wall, stretching across a valley that wasn’t there yesterday.

The legend says tiny builders worked through the darkness.

Reality probably involved countless ordinary people carrying one stone at a time.

Which version is more beautiful?
I’m not sure.

I don’t.

Because folklore has a remarkable ability to preserve emotional truth
even when historical details become blurry.

I also love that the Menehune aren’t conquerors.

They’re builders.

That’s rare!
Most legends celebrate kings, warriors, explorers, people who take
the Menehune create fish ponds, roads, temples, places where communities gather.

There’s something wonderfully hopeful about a culture that keeps telling stories
about anonymous builders instead of famous heroes.

I’ve noticed we don’t celebrate builders nearly enough anymore.

Everybody knows the celebrity.

Almost nobody remembers the engineer who designed the bridge.

The mason who laid every brick.

The electrician who made the lights work.

The people who quietly improve the world without expecting applause.

Maybe every society needs legends that remind us invisible work still matters.

I’ve been thinking about that for a while, recording this Hawaii series.

Nobody listening will ever know how many notes ended up in a field journal before becoming
these conversations.

They don’t know about the paragraphs that we deleted.

The ideas that didn’t work.

The rabbit trails that quietly disappeared before they didn’t serve the story anymore.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

The final piece should feel effortless, even though it isn’t.

I think about old cathedrals sometimes.

People travel across the world to admire stained glass windows and soaring ceilings.

Almost nobody knows the names of the stone cutters who spent decades shaping individual
blocks that would eventually disappear into the finished building.

Anonymous excellence.

There’s something deeply beautiful about that.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of the need to receive credit for every contribution.

Maybe that’s another reason why I love road trips.

Nobody applauds the person who painted the lane markers.

Nobody thanks the engineer who calculated the bridge supports.

Yet we trust their work every single day with our lives.

Invisible craftsmanship surrounds us constantly.

Maybe the Menehune are simply folklore’s way of saying,
somebody cared enough to make this well.

I like that.

I really like that.

There’s another detail I find strangely comforting.

Most versions of the legend insist the builders leave before sunrise.

They’re never interested in standing around while everyone admires their work.

They simply move on.

Can you imagine how different the internet would be if more of us adopted that philosophy?
Create something, leave it a little better than you found it, disappear.

No victory lap, no comment section, no desperate search for validation, just quiet craftsmanship.

Maybe that’s unrealistic.

Maybe people have always wanted recognition.

But I still find myself drawn towards stories where the work matters most.

Perhaps that’s why these legends continue surviving generation after generation.

They’re quietly preserving values.

Humility, skill, patience, community, respect.

Those words keep following us this week like they’re old friends.

The Pacific Ocean taught us patience.

The night marchers taught us respect.

The green lady reminded us that love keeps searching.

The faceless lady reminded us that identity matters.

And now the Menehune quietly suggest that some of the most meaningful work in the world
happens long before anyone notices it.

I don’t know whether tiny builders ever walked Hawaiian valleys beneath moonlight carrying
impossibly heavy stones.

I do know that every place I’ve ever loved bears the fingerprints of ordinary people
whose names historically were quietly forgotten.

I do know that every place I’ve ever loved bears the fingerprints of ordinary people
whose names historically were quietly forgotten.