Category: Uncategorized

Hawaii presents itself

Touchdown! Honolulu, Oahu, HI. Technically not on Hawaiian soil yet. September 2024.

Just over 49 hours after our plane took off from Maui Monday morning, I’m sitting here trying to make sense of it all. Not the time there. That’s easy: it delivered in ways unanticipated, surprised almost hourly, relaxed me more than has occurred in years (decades?), and sated our senses. Translating to TikTok language, it was “awesome.” No, that’s not it. The sense I’m searching for has to do with much more than that.

I’m 70. When I marked my 37th birthday I had only the barest of inklings that less than two weeks later my marriage would end. I’d been working on sprucing up our former house, a recent rental being prepped for sale, and I looked forward to a vacation to Honolulu, Hawaii, in about a month’s time. I learned my life would take a different course about 10 days after my birthday. A couple of weeks after that, my soon-to-be-legally-ex-wife convinced me to cough up my travel vouchers for her close friend so that they could go to Hawaii. (I stubbornly had thought I would still go: traveling in a chilly, no, frosty silence on the plane and finding separate lodgings. I guess I’m thankful she convinced me not to.) She enjoyed Hawaii, I had a hollow experience at a regional blues festival. Don’t read into this too much. She wasn’t a horrible person, just a helluva lot more pragmatic than I. Many signs pointed to the ultimate demise of our marriage. I just didn’t want to acknowledge them.

This experience plus a relocation to the Eastern US Coast put Hawaii into a “maybe someday” category. I watched as my brother and his family visited time and again, including the year of my second marriage in 1995. After five, ten years, it seemed everyone had been to Hawaii but me. That was unfortunate, because then my contrarian nature kicked in. I’ve been contrarian since childhood. I didn’t attend popular movies precisely because they were popular. Everyone’s going to Hawaii? Well, not me!

My new wife wanted to go, though. A financial impossibility by the time we moved to the West Coast, it continued to be so after we returned to the East Coast. By the time we maybe could have afforded it, my job precluded it. Then I retired at the end of 2019, and 2020 being our 25th anniversary, we set our sights on Hawaii. But 2020 wasn’t kind to us or anyone else. We spent that Silver Anniversary eating take-out pizza and watching TV. Sad. As we emerged from Pandemonia, I studiously ignored the idea we could go to Hawaii. Then 2024 arrived. Our mantra became, “just book the trip.” Instead of equivocating about a possible trip, just figure out if you can afford it and if you can, book it! We did. A few logistical glitches will be discussed in future entries, maybe, but we flew there as planned, and actually stayed an extra day due to a bit of poor planning on my part.

Those weren’t my only issues with traveling to Hawaii. If we’d consummated a trip to Puerto Rico in February 2022, I would have resisted Hawaii. But PR had smarter, more restrictive Covid protocols than the mainland US, and that year I doubted we could meet them given the logistics of a Covid testing thing. We approached 2024 and its mantra of “just book the trip” with the knowledge that this year marked the 30th since we met, and the threshold of our 30th anniversary in 2025. So I came through: I booked a European river cruise for 2025 and booked Hawaii for this year.

At 70 I’ve had more than 60 years of thinking Hawaii is a lush, tropical chain of islands. It’s not–not the lushness part. The Trade Winds blow SE to NW which coincidentally aligns with the main islands of Hawaii. The Big Island takes the first shot of those winds and their weather. The east side of the island, anchored by Hilo, catches constant fog/mist and gentle rains. It measures its rain in feet-per-year. To a lesser extent, this pattern extends to the other islands. The east coasts catch rain, the rest of the island is semi-arid grasslands ranging from a lush grassiness to a dry volcanic scabland I knew well from growing up in eastern Washington State. Oddly (to me), the destination vacation spots are on those semi-arid sides of the islands.

Thankfully, I’ve harbored a strong desire to go to the Big Island since the 1970s when I knew Betty Nahoopii as a young reporter in Monroe, WA. She and her husband organized trips to the Big Island, and she gushed about all the amazing and weird stuff one could see there. This was the island I had to visit. Here’s where the Fates kicked in. One of my cousins lives on Maui. I planned to visit her and that island for a few days, then we would shuttle over to Hawaii and spend a week there. (“We’ll get a taste of Maui, four or five days, and then we’ll relax into the Big Island,” I said.) When I found out I couldn’t fly directly out of Hilo to the mainland (thanks, Southwest), I begrudged the day we would lose to fly to Honolulu and then overnight there to catch the next morning’s flight to the mainland. Therefore, I flipped the trip around because I could fly directly out of Kahului, Maui. We were tethered to Southwest because of all the points I built up as a consultant over the Twenty-teens. Another stroke of fortuitous luck: Southwest only flew into Hilo–not Kona. Virtually every other airline flies into the dry side of the island where Kona is located. For a week, therefore, we got a true tropical experience. Our room:

Our room at the Grand Naniloa. All drapes pull fully back, and the sliders provide a wraparound experience on the lanai. Hilo, Hawaii, Hawaii. September 2024.

Our definition of “fortuitous” lies in spending most of a week in an established city on the biggest island of the archipelago. We drove to the west side of the island and Kona on our final full day on the island. Kona proffers the worst of resort-oriented vacationing. We could discern no true center to the “city” and all that seemed to be there was hillsides covered by vacation houses and condos, marinas full of boats, and more American Standard Fare shopping centers in a few square miles than we saw in almost all of Hilo. A semi-pathetic National Historic Park offered the only draw for us. We sweltered in the dry heat, gassed the car, and beat a quick retreat to the east side of the island.

Maui brought the opposite, in the sense we found ourselves in a copy of Kona. After flying in around 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, I discovered Google Nav hadn’t lied. We were in for a one-hour drive to our condo on the extreme north end of the resort coast of the western, resort area of the island. It resembles Kona in many ways, though a bit more lush. We had to drive an hour back the very next day to meet my cousin and her husband for lunch the next day. Returning from that delightful reconnection with her (after 50-ish years!), we resolved to hang out on the quiet resort coast of Kapalua and so we did.

I know this: “Hawaii” means a different thing to the large majority of people who aren’t us. Ocean stuff? We’re not going to snorkel, dive, sunbathe, surf, fish, jet ski, kayak, or anything else related to any strenuous activity. We’re going to look at it, hike along it, sit on the beach and marvel at it, poke into tidepools if allowed, and if none of that works out, we’ll drive along it and take photos from on high. Our idea of a vacation doesn’t extend to reserving a pickleball/tennis court, doesn’t include (usually) any guided tour, doesn’t include a helicopter ride into a volcano, and sure doesn’t get defined as “hanging out at the pool under a cabana for a week while waiters bring us drinks.” We’re not going to spend all our time fixing our own meals in a condo.

What does Hawaii and by extension “vacation” mean to us? Stay tuned. I’ve not decide how to present everything, but I know that I’ve got about 750 photos to back it up! Here’s one:

Our view looking down from our wrap-around balcony at the Grand Naniloa Hotel, Hilo, HI. September 2024.

letters

A letter from my father to his cousin during WWII

During my adult years I developed a letter-writing habit. Perhaps it was always there, instilled by people who could count on nothing so much as a letter. Phones were problematic. Nothing else existed for communication except telegrams–“someone better be dying or sending us money”–or an in-person visit. Obviously one didn’t jump in the car and drive 285 miles across the state just to discuss the weekly news, find out the latest on your cousin’s marriage, or to  shoot the breeze. (I’ll admit that in college on several occasions I more or less did the latter: I would pick up and travel a couple hundred miles or so just to say “hi” to the family, and as a young man I would routinely drive dozens of miles on a whim late in the afternoon to catch a dinner in a nearby city or visit a girlfriend or somesuch.)

Ultimately no other communications medium served the role of the letter–certainly not telephones. During the first ten years of my life (into the early-1960s), my family paid only for party-line phone service. When you picked up the phone, if someone was talking, you just put the receiver back on the cradle of the desktop-model black telephone. In addition to scrimping on telephone charges by having a party line, my parents learned from their parents that one didn’t make long distance calls on whims, one didn’t linger on long distance calls when they were made, and one didn’t call collect except in the most dire of emergencies. Today’s ubiquitous carrying of a smartphone makes one instantly available. Today our calling plans include the costs of everything–long distance, calls between carrier systems, voice mail, the addition of extra lines, and the ability to download data to our handheld computers. It makes the concept of the desk-bound black telephone seem a relic from further back in the past than just 50 or 60 years.

Habitually writing a letter, though, became ingrained into me even as others my age leaned into the idea that long distance phone calls could be made more often. I’m sure the phone company (there was but one no matter where you lived) made it easier somehow, with a calling plan or discounts or something. My family wrote. It hadn’t been a long time since letters were the only form of communication other than telegrams (see above). My grandparents were born just as telephones were being introduced to the world. It took many years for telephone lines to be strung to all the corners of rural America. One wrote, and one wrote often. Young men with reputations to uphold stayed at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) where they were encouraged to “write your mother”. My parents undoubtedly had access to telephones in their homes–especially my mother since her father worked for the telephone company. Beyond the house, in the dormitories and fraternities/sororities of college, and perhaps even as new graduates, they didn’t have their own telephones. Letters sufficed.

I remember the letters from my father’s parents (mostly his mother) which arrived weekly. Grandma would type them on thin onion-skin paper so that she could put carbon paper between two pieces of paper and thereby make a copy as she typed. One would be sent to my father, her elder son, and one to my uncle, the younger son. To be fair, grandma would alternate pages of the carbon with originals because the carbon copy was fuzzier. A three or four page letter would alternate between black (original) and blue (copy) pages. That was a lot of news! Grandma believed in not wasting the paper. Margins were about 1/4 to 3/8 of an inch all the way around; the letters were single-spaced.

My mother’s parents were less frugal. My grandfather’s employment entitled them to lower-cost telephone service, and my grandmother was more likely to pick up the telephone to communicate, usually on a Saturday morning. I know this seems to negate what I wrote earlier, but this was an exception due to Grandpa’s privileged employment status. These calls were not frequent: no more than two per month. I believe my grandfather wrote his only daughter occasionally, putting pen to paper longhand like many people did, writing cursively.

My parents thus inculcated letter-writing into me, a habit which has not been broken these 50 years since I left home. Our communications became much more frequent and regular with the advent of email. For the last 15-20 years of their lives, my parents would email a letter to my brother and me, usually on a Saturday. My brother and I would each respond to that letter with our own, and the weekly news would be transmitted. In the two years since my mother died and left us to our own devices, my brother and I continue to send the weekly weekend emails, although we also use texting for shorter notes. It pains me to see this skill die out as younger people today disdain email entirely and communicate in other, more terse formats. After thousands of years the letter appears to be dying out as a common form of communication between friends and family members. This rewiring of our brain and of society does not bode well. Humans, never great at believing the best about strangers, have retreated into communication silos out of which we had only recently been attempting to break.

I doubt I will see the next evolution in communications between friends and family members unless someone comes up with a method to visit one another in person easily and on a whim, a la the transporter we see in our sci-fi stories. The face-to-face video calls (FaceTime, et al) would seem to bridge the gap between letters and that instantaneous travel. It will have to do. I don’t see the point: an emailed letter is more convenient because it doesn’t demand that I drop everything to answer it. The video call won’t permit me to derisively laugh at the foibles of others (without their knowledge), encourages me to make sure my bladder is empty, doesn’t let me study the words to make sure I understand what the sender wants me to understand, and gives me nothing to refer back to an hour later. On the other hand they permit the sharing of laughter, of music, of certain sights which might be within the range of the device. Ultimately, though, the video call remains a “call” and not a literary device–and for that reason I mourn its seeming demise.