POIPU, Kauai – I never thought I’d see the fabled “green flash.” After decades of squinting toward the evening horizon, hoping to see what my 8-year-old brain had envisioned as a fountain of green light erupting from the sun, I’d conceded defeat. In fact, one could say I was a member of team Tanqueray Flash—a term I’d serendipitously encountered in a book describing Kauai’s hiking trails.

“The only green flash anyone’s ever seen is through the bottom of a Tanqueray bottle,” the author’s father supposedly grumbled at a columnist who’d described the phenomenon in the LA Times. Gin bottles? Those I knew something about. Green sunsets, not so much.

But two Sundays ago, as I stood on Kauai’s south shore,