There's an old guy with a bristly beard and a hard hat who hikes the Pali Highway every day. There's also a cute blonde girl who jogs while listening to a Walkman. These two hard-walking people are solely responsible for wearing down this path that parallels the highway. Ditches along the Pali
OK, that's not true. Well, it's probably not true. It's too deep to be a path, or a sunken sidewalk, even though it faithfully runs alongside the Ewa side of the highway, weaving in and out of the jungle. And it's not evidence of a seismic disturbance, like the San Andres Fault.
Nope. It's actually something you don't see much of any more. It's a ditch. A plain old garden-variety ditch. The kind your mother told you you'd be digging as a career path if you flunked algebra.
It's not for irrigation. This ditch carries water away from where it's headed. There were heavy, heavy rains in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and as a result, water flowed -- get this! -- downhill. The highway would get flooded because water headed straight for it. That's what you get if a road is in the middle of a valley.
A number of parallel ditches were dug, most out of sight of the highway. When too much water builds up on the slope, and it can't be absorbed quickly enough by the earth and plants, these ditches sluice it away in a different direction. They're kind of like firebreaks, except there's no fire, and nothing's broken.
But they only work if they're kept clear, which is why you'll occasionally see crews working on them. Which leads us to wonder how well these crews did in algebra.
Burl Burlingame, Star-Bulletin