Main Street, Hawaiian Style : Hidden on the rainy side of the Big Island, little Hilo may be the most unaffected town in Hawaii.

This will take a little self-discipline. First, bypass the crumbling black lava plains and the sunbaked luxury hotels along the Big Island’s west coast. Next, cut eastward across the green slopes of the Kohala Mountains, and don’t be distracted by the roaring tradewinds and the clouds they hurl across the sky. Finally, steer southward. You’re running along the island’s damp east coast now, and before long you’ll be rolling into a Hawaii seldom dreamed of.

This is Hilo, maybe the most genuine old town left in these islands. It’s a ramshackle place, its rough edges surrounded by natural wonders, its downtown full of handsome but battered architecture that dates to early in this century.

Some 42,000 people live here, most in the suburbs, and the city is the seat of county government for the island of Hawaii. With the sugar plantations in decline, the government is also the largest employer in the area. Except for the Merrie Monarch Festival, a statewide hula competition that is staged here each April, the town itself offers no big-time tourist attractions (unless, I suppose, you count the banyan tree planted by Babe Ruth). Hilo International Airport, its grand name notwithstanding, currently receives only inter-island passenger flights.

“One of the beauties of Hilo,” longtime resident John Stough told me during my visit in April, “is that we don’t get those mobs right off the airplane.”

Of course, that coin has two sides, and Hilo’s sense of disconnection is one factor in the city’s relatively weak economy. As Stough spoke, he was standing before a brightly painted storefront. It looked like a new business and he looked like an optimistic entrepreneur. But he was a hired carpenter and the cheerful storefront, which held a music shop and boutique, wasclosing down after just six months. At certain hours, Hilo streets seem still to be awaiting the end of the Great Depression. Not all vacationers are in search of that.

So it is that if you go to the beach here on a sunny day, you’re likely to find not Californians or Nebraskans or Japanese, but actual Hawaiians and their children. (The beach won’t be of the long, broad, sand-rich variety seen in tourism ads, but the shores are plenty popular with local families.) Drop 20 cents in a Hilo parking meter and you have two hours to squander. Take a seat at Lehua’s Bay City Bar & Grill on Kamehameha Avenue, and expect a curious glance or two from the locals; owner Larry Johnson estimates that just one customer in 10 is a tourist.

But if you’re a traveler resistant to the idea of a one-note, snore-on-the-beach resort vacation, Hilo’s soggy setting and low profile can make it a welcome refuge. Think of Hilo as the tropical access road to Main Street U.S.A.--a handful of good restaurants, no high-class hotels, enough shops for a day’s browsing, a handful of beaches, an old-fashioned island flavor. And within an easy drive, a traveler finds an unsurpassable range of elemental wonders. Eleven miles to the north, 400-foot-high Kahuna Falls and 420-foot-high Akaka Falls roar to earth amid dense, diverse jungle blooms. About 50 miles to the southwest, an erupting volcano stages daily fireworks.

Only in Hawaii could such a town go underappreciated.

Human history in Hilo started about eight centuries ago, when Polynesian explorers are thought to have found their way to Hilo Bay. By the beginning of this century, various European, American and Japanese adventurers and missionaries had found their own routes in, and Hilo was a burgeoning business community, with whaling ships and traders stopping regularly.

(For a different perspective on Hawaii’s development over that time, intrepid travelers should proceed to Keaukaha Park Beach, between downtown Hilo and the city airport. There you will find a settlement of Hawaiian protesters, residing peacefully with their children under tarpaulin roofs and calling for a return to the sovereignty that Hawaii lost in 1893.)

But the weather changed the direction of things. First came the 1946 tsunami, a tidal wave that killed scores of people and sent tons of water crashing through Hilo’s waterfront streets. Then came another tsunami in 1960. Scores of businesses were flooded; others were scared away. Later, when tourism surged elsewhere on the islands, Hilo was passed by. (Though temperatures are mild, annual rainfall averages more than 120 inches.) The 24-block grid that makes up downtown Hilo became a neighborhood out of time--an island within an island.

“It’s been kind of a double-edged sword, living in a tsunami zone,” said Russell Kokobun, project manager of the Hilo Main Street Program. “It’s gone a long way toward preserving what we have here.”

Indeed, the non-profit Main Street Program, which aims to cultivate new life and commerce in downtown Hilo, maintains its offices near the waterfront in the 1912 S. Hata Building, a 20,000-square-foot Renaissance Revival once-condemned structure that reopened only last year. The old building, now dolled up with blue and red piping, stands in the middle of town, an Italian restaurant and various merchants operating on its ground floors.

Every Wednesday and Saturday mornings, island farmers hold a market next door, at Mamo Street at Kamehameha Avenue. Browsers choose among fresh fruit, exotic flowers, baked goods, and warabi (fern shoots, which run 75 cents a bunch), to name only a sampling. For $1, I could have had a dozen bamboo shoots. For $2, a bunch of Panama Red bananas, organically grown half an hour away. For $8, a dozen long-stemmed roses. Even on a rainy morning the marketplace is busy, and must set Hilo’s merchants to wondering what might lie ahead.

Seated among the bold colors of her futon, bedding and fabric store a few doors down Kamehameha Avenue, Utae Arai, owner of Dragon Mama, acknowledged that since moving here from Berkeley in late 1992, her gross income has been halved. But she’s smiling.

“I see a lot of potential,” she says.

Sig Zane, a clothing designer who has been doing retail business in Hilo for seven years, is another among the optimists.

“I remember five years ago, we only stayed open four hours on Saturdays, because the town was so dead,” Zane says. Now he stays open all day on Saturdays at 122 Kamehameha Ave., peddling $36 handmade cotton slippers and tiny notebooks bound between covers of rare koa wood. (The koa notebooks may seem pricey at $32, but just about everything is more expensive on the islands, and identical merchandise is $45 up the hill at the Art Center in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.)

Hilo is going to draw more people, Zane maintains, because “we don’t have any put-ons, basically. We’re the real thing.”

To the volcano. The 28-mile route from Hilo to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is lined with greenery, and rises through a succession of sleepy tropical communities: Kurtistown, Mountain View, and Volcano, a village just off Volcano Road.

The park visitor center, gift shops and the Volcano House hotel stand closely arrayed near the park entrance, and the rangers and exhibits offer fine background briefings on the volcanic action of the area. But seeing is believing.

Kilauea, the park’s currently erupting volcano--and how many tourist attractions outside the Mirage in Las Vegas can use those words?--has been spewing on and off since January, 1983. In that time, more than 170 homes have been destroyed, and a few hundred acres of land mass have been added to the island, as lava flows into the sea and cools.

The great, black caldera of Kilauea lies near the park visitors center, and it’s as barren and intimidating a landscape as one can find. But the most striking action on the day of my visit was down at the beach, where the lava was lapping into the Pacific.

I was astounded to find how easy it was to see this. You drive down Chain of Craters Road, following the park map directions across miles of black crust. When the shoulder of the road begins to fill with other parked cars, you park. Then you walk along the road until . . . well, about to the point where the road is obliterated by tons of what looks like hard, black bubble gum.

Some of this black bubble gum, the rangers on hand pointed out, is still soft, simmering away at many hundreds of degrees, and in spots the flow is hot enough, and liquid enough, to glow that strange, luminous hue of orange, even in full daylight. This, 90 minutes’ drive from downtown Hilo. “Been doing this six years,” said Bobby Camara, one of the rangers at the lava’s lip. “And I haven’t been bored yet.”

Stroll another 100 yards or so from the road, and there you can stand on a black sand beach and watch the earthen tide and the ocean tide meet. I’d never stopped to wonder what that kind of chemistry would sound like, but now I know.

Rice Krispies.

A volcano is no easy act to follow, and other diversions in and around Hilo do seem a little puny in comparison. Still, there is the Lyman Museum and Mission House on Haili Street, which offers a view of 19th-Century missionary life on the island; the early-morning Suisan Fish Market at the foot of Lihiwai Street; the Liliuokalani Gardens, a patch of ordered greenery near the aged banyan trees and faded hotels of Banyan Drive, and to the north of town there is Akaka Falls.

I cast my vote for the falls; their mists, foliage and rainbows operate as ying to the volcano’s yang . And as a bonus for those with an extra hour or so to pass, the route to the falls leads through the village of Honomu.

Honomu, a 19th-Century plantation town, has shriveled to 550 people, six churches and three picturesque blocks along Route 220. When I stuck my head in the Akaka Noodle Factory, healthy bowls of saimin (a noodle-based Hawaiian favorite) were going for $2.95, and two kids were raising hell over a game of Foosball.

Down the block at Ishigo’s General Store and Bakery, proprietor Sam Ishigo, 54, was clowning around with his dad, Hideo. The first Ishigo to reach the area, Hideo’s father started the store in 1910. Sam was born upstairs. These days, he balances the general store business with speculation in imports and exports, a pursuit he manages mostly by fax machine. Ishigo said he plugged in the fax three years ago, thereby prompting the complaint from one neighbor that he was “ruining the neighborhood.” All our neighborhoods should look so ruined.

Soon I was walking around downtown Hilo again, this time paying more attention to the fine points. Many of the town’s original lava curbstones remain, some with embedded metal rings on chains for tying up horses. At the Koehnen’s building at Waianuenue and Keawe, which now houses a furniture store and warehouse, a massive staircase is made of rich koa. Upstairs, along the beamed ceiling of Koehnen’s storage area, you can see a row of nails that once held saddles for sale.

Another downtown landmark--and rehabilitation target--is the Palace Theater, one of the city’s most fashionable spots in the late 1920s. It has been used more recently for community theater presentations. But when I passed by, the Palace’s comeback still seemed quite incomplete; the theater’s old neon sign lay on one side in the lobby.

Many of Hilo’s buildings lag further behind, either idle, underutilized, or unsafe because of their deteriorated condition. “There are buildings on this very block that I wouldn’t set foot in,” Hilo resident Tom Steed warned me one day.

But then the building that houses Elsie’s Fountain Service doesn’t look too inviting, either--and it’s priceless.

Elsie’s soda shop has been open at 339 Keawe St. since 1940, and all its green, red and orange Formica remains in place, having escaped both tsunamis. Tuna sandwiches are advertised at 95 cents (which sounds cheap, but keep in mind that Elsie’s original 1940 menu offered ham, eggs, toast and coffee for 85 cents). The shelves also offer Bactine, shoes, toenail clippers and rolling papers..

Elsie Shinohara, 82, stands behind the counter in a sweater. Her husband, James Shinohara, stands by her in a bow tie; he’s worn one each workday for more than 50 years now. The two usually open for a few hours every morning, when regulars who date back decades gather at the 14 seats along the red counter.

Once, said Mrs. Shinohara, Hilo had four or five stores with fancier soda fountains. “They’re all gone now,” she said. “Eventually, I think they’ll tear down this building. I think they’re waiting for us to get out.”

No doubt the Shinoharas will get out one day. That will make one more tidied patch on this archipelago, and one more downward tick in the steady depletion of the islands’ distinguishing characteristics. Which is why it’s important to see places like Hilo while they endure.

As Groucho Marx or Don Ho or somebody should have said, any Hawaiian town not dependent on tourism is probably worth visiting.

Beyond Waikiki, Jerry Hulse explores Oahu’s laid-back northern shores. Island Noodles, Rita Ariyoshi samples the popular Hawaiian fare called saimin.

GUIDEBOOK

High on Hilo

Getting there: From LAX, Hilo-bound travelers must fly first to Honolulu or Maui, then connect to Hilo International Airport on the Big Island of Hawaii via Aloha or Hawaiian airlines. For Los Angeles-Hilo travel through Friday, cheapest restricted fares begin at $309 on Hawaiian Airlines. After Friday, cheapest restricted fares go to $459.

Where to stay: There are no high-end lodgings in Hilo. Most guidebooks send travelers to the crescent of waterfront hotels on Hilo’s Banyan Drive. I stayed at the Naniloa Hotel (93 Banyan Drive, telephone 808-969-3333), which is one of those, but I don’t particularly recommend it. Though it has a prime location overlooking the bay and was recently renovated, the place still feels shabby. The view from my high-up room was compromised by dirty windows, the bathroom was tiny, and my laundry came back gray and scrambled. Double rooms: $96. (This figure, like others here, excludes Hawaii’s 9.17% room tax.)

Next time, I’ll save money and stay at the Hilo Hotel (142 Kinoole St., tel. 808-961-3733), which sits by a park in the middle of downtown and offers 27 Spartan rooms. Rooms for two run $39 and $45; for $85, you can get a two-bedroom suite with kitchenette, two bathrooms and a shower.

The Kilauea Lodge (P.O. Box 116, Volcano Village, tel. 808-967-7366), near Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, offers a woodsy common room and dining room, 12 rooms and a menu with ambitious European entrees. Rooms for two run $85-$105.

Inside the park, Volcano House (P.O. Box 53, tel. 808-967-7321) offers 42 units with koa furniture, roomy closets and a constant parade of tourists through the lobby and restaurant. Crater-view rooms for two, $131; non-view rooms for two, $79. Volcano House also rents rustic cabins with shared shower and toilet facilities, with rates of $32 per night for two people.

Where to eat: Lehua’s Bay City Bar & Grill (11 Waianuenue Ave., local tel. 935-8055) is a popular watering hole among locals and often features live music; burgers go for $7, entrees $10-$16. Roussels (60 Keawe St., tel. 935-5111) offers New Orleans-style cooking in an old Masonic building with high ceilings and wood floors; entrees $13-$28.

I didn’t get to eat in Restaurant Fuji at the Hilo Hotel (142 Kinoole St.; tel. 961-3733), but the atmosphere is handsome and tranquil, and many locals laud it as the top Japanese restaurant in town; entrees $8-$14.

A warning: The Volcano House Hotel & Restaurant, close by the visitor center at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, may lure you for lunch with its convenient location. Resist. The buffet ($11 for adults, $6.75 for children 11 and under) is just plain cafeteria food. (I don’t know about the dinner entrees, which run $15-$26.)

For more information: Contact the Hawaii Visitors Bureau, 3440 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 502, Los Angeles, (213) 385-5301. Also, the Hilo Main Street Program at 308 Kamehameha Ave., Suite 202 (tel. 808-935-8850) offers free literature and an excellent annotated map for a 17-stop downtown walking tour.