As many of you are aware, one of the greatest shows on television has decided to push its fourth season’s start date to the very end of January 2008. For those of us entranced by Lost’s delightfully complex storylines and enigmatic mysteries, that’s a helluva long time to wait. In the meanwhile, we’re supposed to get by on little snippets of video that create more questions then answers. Fear not, disillusioned fans. I have for you all a story about our long-delayed show that’s filled with adventure, excitement, mystery and a couple of radical surfer dudes.

Our story begins some 3000 miles off the coast of California, on a little island known as O’ahu. When my fiancé and I booked our trip to the island paradise of O’ahu, we joked about running into Matthew Fox or Terry O’quinn whilst sipping Mai Tai’s on Wakiki Beach. Of course, that didn’t happen. But it got us thinking. What if we could find one of the locations they film the show? We knew that they filmed it on the island and the island isn’t that big. So on our second day there, we decided that after an early morning trip to the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and a hike up Diamond Head, we’d head out on a trek to “get Lost”. And that we definitely did, but not nearly in the way we originally intended.

When renting our Mustang convertible that morning, our Hertz representative commented on my t-shirt, which was black and featured the fabled numbers of the Valenzetti Equation. She asked if we were fans of the show. We quite emphatically confirmed her inquiry and told her we were interested in finding any of the locations where they filmed show. She said that while they filmed all over the island, they did have a special site where you could see some of the sets of the show, right from the beach. And since Hawaii’s beaches were all public property, you could walk right onto the set. We were shocked and agast when she even pointed it out on our map!

“Head to the Northwest part of the island,” she said. “That’s where they film almost everything. They still have some of the plane fuselage there and everything!”

This rather ambiguous clue was enough to get us primed for adventure, despite any real concept of where we were going. And thus we set off towards the vast and rather overcast NW corner of O’ahu to seek our destiny. All we had to go on was a tip from our car rental and the hunch that whatever beach they filmed at would have to be at a point where the highway was at least 0.25-0.5 mi inland. You see, highways form a tight perimeter around the island, hugging rather close to the beaches all around. There were only a few points, especially in the NW portion of the island, where the highway was far enough away from the beach so as not to be visible. We marked these and headed Northwest from Waikiki to the island’s North Shore.

Travelling up Kamehameha Highway, we headed first through the sleepy surfer town of Hale’iwa. There appeared to be nothing there, however. The highway skirted the beach for much of the journey. And when it didn’t, there were a plethora of surf shops and cafe’s about that certainly would have made filming quite challenging. “No, it had to be more remote”, we thought. So we trucked on. Looking at our detailed map of the island, I saw that Kawailoa Beach seemed to have at least 0.25 mi between its shore and the highway. So we headed there next. Nothing. Waimea Bay Beach Park wasn’t much further on, though. So we headed there next. While this beach was large enough to have been the host to a disassembled aircraft, it would have required quite a bit of careful camera work and CG to hide the rather conspicuous Kamehameha Highway in the background. We were disappointed, but I had another brilliant idea.

“What if we check out this ancient ceremonial site, babe?” Pu’u O Mahuka Heiau State Monument was supposedly the largest of the island’s ancient sites of worship. It also featured a large panoramic view of the area, according to our map. I thought maybe we’d get a better idea from up high. So we decided to follow the signs up the mountain, despite the rain that had begun to fall. As the road became more treacherous, my fiancé became ever more nervous. Add to the terrain random husks of abandoned cars on the side of the road and things were starting to look REALLY suspect. I was reminded of Dan Ackroyd’s “Nothing but Trouble”, fearing the we’d reach the summit of the mountain and find not only an ancient sacrificial site, but the trophy corpses of recently deceased tourists as well. But I was determined to get to the top. After driving over a stretch of concrete that had collapsed in the center and looked as though it was about to sink into the mud beneath it, we finally reached a clearing and some parking spaces. We parked and got out in the light drizzle, despite murmured protests from my better half. I told her she could stay in the car, but she insisted on coming along as I scouted out the site. It was amazing. A vast, black plateau stretched out in front of us. On closer inspection, it was composed of diced pumice and obsidian. I looked to my left and saw what appeared to be a totem of some kind. Colorful cloth had been draped about the totems, as well as various pieces of fruit. This seemed to indicate that perhaps someone was still using the site for its original purpose. Without even discussing it, we high-tailed it back to the car and headed out of there as fast as we could. Fortunately, with our heads still attached.

At this point, we had almost gone to the NE part of the island, so we decided to double-back and head to the far NW point, seeing if anything along the way even remotely resembled our quarry. We drove down Farrington Highway, all the way past the Dillingham Airfield and Camp Erdman to Kaena Point. The road abuptly ended. And we had found nothing. The foilage was just too thin to resemble anything like a jungle and none of the beaches even remotely reminded us of our favorite show. We were forlorn and fearful that we may never reach our destination. At this point, it was about 3:00 PM. “Hey, we’ve got some time in the day yet, babe”, I encouraged. What if the lady was right, but our destination lie on the other side of Kaena Point, just South of it? There were many caves over there, our map said. There also was a forest reserve. That had to be it, I thought. There’s no where else it could be. Well, there was. We just were too dense to notice it.

On our long way around the island to its far Western side, we once again passed through Hale’iwa. We drove south almost to Honolulu before hooking back up North on 93. Through Ma’ili, Wai’anae and Makaha, we saw nothing but miles upon miles of tents belonging to the homeless millions that populated the island. We made it all the way to Keawa’ula Bay and once again, our road ended. There was no where else to go. We had failed. Little did we realize it, but our destination, our Brigadoon, was so very close to us. Indeed, we had driven right by it three different times that day. But it took another day and another adventure, for us to really figure out how to get Lost.

For more talk of Lost, be sure to check out the podcast I co-produce: Shots in the Dark: The Official Podcast of ShotgunReviews.com.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Lost, Shots in the Dark, Television, Vince Scalabrino. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.