“See, here’s the log that those stampeding dinosaurs jumped over in Jurassic Park, and right over here is where they filmed the golfing scene in Lost, when Hurley found the golf clubs,” says twenty-two-year-old Novite Waiolama, my jeep-driving tour guide, in the middle of a Hollywood tour of spectacular, wide open Ka‘a‘awa Valley, just on the other side of Kahana’s eastern rampart.

“And if you ever watched 50 First Dates, this is the road where Adam Sandler put the penguin in the middle of the road, and near where he got beaten up by the bad guys.”

Novite, a burly, tattooed young man, jams the gears in the jeep as we lurch over hills and across muddy gullies, following a dirt road into the rolling, cattle-pasture meadows at the heart of the picture-perfect valley, with its drop-dead seaward views framed by fluted cliffs on either side. Simple signs memorialize some of the movies and TV shows that have been filmed here: Mighty Joe Young, Pearl Harbor, Godzilla, The Brady Bunch Movie, Windtalkers, Along Came Polly, ER, Magnum PI and something called Krippendorf’s Tribe, but neither Novite nor I have seen it.

We pass what looks like a giant lizard’s footprint carved into the dirt, about twenty feet across. “That’s Godzilla’s footprint,” Novite tells me. “We kept three of ’em. They used to be ten feet deep, but cattle from the ranch fell in, so we filled them in a little bit, made it more shallow so cows can walk in, walk out.”

Novite, who says he’s “ninety-five percent Hawaiian,” was raised in Kahalu‘u, in the neighboring district of Ko‘olau Poko. He says he was a tough, angry kid and got into more fist fights than he could count at Castle High School, so he wound up in the Olomana correctional school in Kailua. After that, he says he got his head together and now “stays away from trouble.” He has a girlfriend and two kids, a regular gig playing keyboards with a local reggae band called Pride Rhythm; and he has this job as a jack-of-all-trades, driving jeeps and boats for visitors to Kualoa Ranch.

The historic, 4,000-acre Kualoa Ranch, which encompasses three mountains, two valleys and five miles of coastline, was established in 1850 by Dr. Gerrit P. Judd, an American missionary who became a key advisor during the early years of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Still owned by Judd relatives, the Morgan family, the land-rich, cash-poor cattle ranch began to transform itself into a visitor-oriented, low-impact activities center in 1985. This was done to protect the spectacular land from development—and, at the same time, to keep up with the property taxes. The strategy proved to be a win-win: In 1980, there were five employees; now there are 140—and with not a hotel, condo or golf course in sight. The ranch first went Hollywood when Hawaii 5-0 began to film there in the early 1970s; the standard shooting rate is now $2,000 per day.

Novite, who studied to be a paramedic but fears he might not qualify because of his tattoos, has nothing but good things to say about his employers at Kualoa Ranch.

“The Morgans are solid,” he says, “real solid. They keep our land the way it’s supposed to be, and they give locals good jobs. I’m not just saying that cuz they’re my bosses, but I can tell you, these Morgan guys—John, Dave and Andrew—they’re out here every day busting their ‘okoles. They don’t act like the high mucka-muck kine.

“They take care of us, and we take care of them.”

When I lived in my shack at Punalu‘u, I often found myself mentally trying to configure this portion of the Ko‘olau Loa coast—Ka‘a‘awa to Kahana to Punalu‘u—into its own entity, especially as I drove home and entered into its blessed array of reefs, beaches, trade-wind-battered beach houses and mysterious, quenching valleys.

I got stuck on the notion that it must be a place apart, a separate, somnolent kingdom: O‘ahu’s Separate Kingdom. But there was no king, no queen—just this distinct feeling of a separate, riper beauty. Maybe it was the brunt of the trade winds and the feeling of being afloat; maybe it was the spilling mountains.

Via telephone, I ask Punalu‘u native Cathleen Mattoon, a Kauka relation like Eli Keolanui, about this idea.

“Well, I guess you could call us an almost stand-alone area,” the seventy-two-year-old community leader and mother of five says. Four of her children have stayed in Punalu‘u to raise their own families.

In the 1970s, Cathleen coined the phrase, “Keep the Country Country,” which has since become a battle cry to rally the troops whenever the rural nature of O‘ahu’s northern reaches is threatened.

“We’re preserving what we have, because it’s the way we like to live,” Cathleen explains. “Community, ‘ohana, lifestyle—we’re protective of these—this is what we can contribute to the rest of O‘ahu.”

I ask her if she’s happy most people just drive by. “Yes,” she says. “Well, we have a few stores … Ching’s and Kaya’s … but yeah, we hope people will go straight by.” She pauses, and thinks better about sounding too exclusive.

“You know, we share our water,” she offers. “Most of it goes far away—this is what we can share. And we’re happy to share our shoreline. We have lots of shoreline.” HH