NOTICE
IN CASE OF TIDAL WAVE
Rule 1--Stay Calm
Rule 2--Pay Hotel Bill
Rule 3--Run Like Hell

Who needs a closet when your place laughs at tidal waves? Tsunamis, or monster tidal waves generated by volcanic eruptions, leveled Hilo in 1946 and 1961. So I asked Dean, the reception clerk, "Should I worry about tsunamis?"

Perhaps he didn't understand me. He answered, "I have your credit card." Or, per Rule 2, maybe Dean understood me well.

I knew one thing for sure: I was at Uncle Billy's because of Callahan. While he spent all the money, I stayed in a three-bulb place. Callahan had sized up this story idea as "Rich Man, Poor Man" and announced, "Kindred, you may visit my suite, but remove your shoes at the door."

He checked in at the Four Seasons Resort, a pleasure palace on the island's west coast. Eternally cerulean skies there run second in beauty to vacationing movie stars who radiate the glow of the rich, famous and well tended.

I checked in at Uncle Billy's in Hilo, a town of about 40,000 people on the east coast that's famous for its eternal rains. At 140 inches a year, Hilo gives Seattle lessons in mildew.

As a result of this arrangement, Callahan may have snorkeled with Meg Ryan. I stood in the rain with Ed Elkins.

"Rains here every night," Elkins said at 6:30 one morning. "But it lets up and everything's real pretty."

Sixty years old, he retired after 35 years as a barber in Charleston, S.C.

"You playing golf here?" I asked.

"Just touring. That, and dialysis."

Bright's disease had taken both his kidneys. "I go for dialysis Monday, Wednesday, Friday. There's a nice medical center here. It's no problem.

"People who complain about dialysis, they're mad at their sickness.

"What good does that do? It makes it worse. I'm not mad. Why be mad when you're alive and in Hilo, Hawaii?"

So it rains.

Big deal.

"Rainsuit, must have," said Ted Miyahara. The wisp of a man sat on a bench outside the starter's office at Naniloa Country Club, a nine-hole public course across the street from Uncle Billy's.

"Tarp, must have," Miyahara said. Blue tarpaulins the size of blankets flapped from cart roofs, there to cover golf bags.

Cheap golf gloves of synthetic materials work best in rain, Miyahara said. "Cheaper, better grip."

Though rain is a nuisance, it seldom causes Miyahara and his buddies to give up a round. "Can be dark everywhere," he said, "but if we look out there, over the ocean, and we see one blue spot in the sky, ah, we play."

Naniloa is a flat, simple, public course distinguished by bottlebrush trees. It costs $32 for 18 holes with a cart. Players wear blue jeans, shorts, tank tops, T-shirts and sneakers. No signs identify tees and yardages; tee markers are concrete blocks halved, sometimes doubling as trash bins. Fathers and sons tee it up at twilight.

In the gloaming, my second shot at 18 stopped so near the cup that even I made a birdie--with a witness to boot, an old, graying, one-legged man on the starter's bench.

"A 5-iron?" he said, as if he'd seen me swing a thousand times rather than once.

"Yes, sir."

"167 yards."

"I don't know."

"167 yards," he said, not asking, telling.

William (Chu-Chu) Kanuha is 82, a native of Hilo, once a banker, now retired. Evenings he brings in Naniloa's flagsticks.

"I've always lived here," he said. "Except for World War II. Europe, Germany. That's where I got this guy."

He touched his prosthesis. He also has a new hip joint.

I asked, "Do you get to play much?"

"Four or five times a week is all."

For $19.50 with cart, we played at Hilo Municipal, a real golf course with lava-rock stream beds and elevated, tilted greens granting no favors to the incompetent.

As for how we played, I'm happy to report the result:

The one-legged hustler won the money.

Then he chauffeured me to dinner at his favorite Japanese restaurant, after which he suggested where I should play next.

"Volcano," he said. "No better place on Earth."

You drive south on Route 11. You round a rising curve. Sha-zaam!

Suddenly, your eyes can't see it all. Mauna Loa fills the sky. It's an active volcano 13,677 feet high. Its slopes fall 30 and 40 miles to the ocean. Measured from the ocean floor, the volcano is twice as high as that Himalayan pimple, Mount Everest. It's the largest volcanic land mass in the world.

You look, awed, and you decide, yes, gods live up there.

For $63, you can play golf on the gods' grounds.

Even as I paid, Reynold Lee, then the pro at Volcano Golf & Country Club, asked, "What're you doing all the way out here?"

"My buddy's at the Four Seasons on the other side of the island, and I'm at Uncle Billy's."

"You got ripped."

Au contraire. Wild turkeys on the Volcano's seventh fairway. Seldom-seen Hawaiian hawks above the second. Nene geese nesting (signs advise that anyone harming the state bird can be fined $250,000). Pine and ohia trees decorate Volcano's testy layout.

I hooked up with Mike Combs and Skip Langell, mainlanders-turned-Hawaiians who play together at Volcano maybe 240 times a year.

"The climate's perfect here," Combs said. "It's quiet, and it's beautiful. Because it's out of the way--you're probably the only 'tourist' here--it's not crowded. It's one of the few places in Hawaii that you can play in four hours, not six."

"This golf course," Langell said, "is the best-kept secret in Hawaii."

Good. Otherwise, anyone who ever stood on the third tee would invite a thousand friends to Volcano next week. From that tee, you see the snowcapped summit of Mauna Loa and you hear--yes, you hear--a whisper, "Stay. Right here. Stay."