I lasted only 20 months, and I felt the place's pervasive, anti-haole prejudice almost every day. Yet Hawaii, more specifically, Kauai, where I lived without one day off the rock, for 600 days, sticks with me in ways no other place (I've lived in Sun Valley, New York City and Los Angeles among others) has ever done.
One reason is the incredible physical beauty of the place. Kauai has Waimea Canyon, the "Grand Canyon of the Pacific," and a 45-minute drive north are the cliffs of the Napoli Coast, the most beautiful spot I've ever seen on this earth.
And Hawaii truly does have the climate of paradise. Folks who might have visited the islands twice in January, and got rained on both times, actually said to me once, "Kauai's weather is no better than Seattle's."
In my two years on Kauai it rained almost every day for about four weeks in January. But for at least 10 months each year, it was 83 at the height of the day, and 71 in the depths of the night.
Almost anywhere on Kauai you really can smell the tropical vegetation in the air, once the nearly perpetual daily sun goes down. And you really are never more than five minutes, if that, from the ocean.
Civilization, or what passes thusly in modern-day America, has planted on the island. There's a Borders, a Burger King, a Safeway, and recently I heard that a Starbucks has opened, surely a sign that the original culture is in full retreat. There are hotels full of tourists who often, after a few days, express boredom. After all, Hawaii has no Disneyland and no South Beach.
What Hawaii does have though is a transcendent myth. The Tropics. The getaway. Leaving an old life in the shattered glass of a cold, dirty northern city and drinking in the warmth of the South Pacific. Friendly, grass-skirted people. Beautiful girls (and guys, although the old runaway to the Tropics realm has been primarily a masculine one).
Even now an observant newcomer can see the remains of what once must have been heaven on earth for the right folks. But mostly, the myth is buried in commercialism and most importantly, the myth is based on falsehood, because, unlike Samoa say, the indigenous people are all but gone. Fewer than 250,000 of the state's 1.4 million residents can claim any Hawaiian blood.
The people who make the islands run, who pick up the garbage, make the beds and serve the Spam and Whoppers - the oft-mentioned locals - are likely to be from another island, yes, but not Lanai. Luzon maybe.
Filipinos, Japanese and even whites outnumber Hawaiians today. A local girl whose heritage was equally split between Chinese, Filipino, Japanese and Tahitian, danced the hula at one of the islands chain hotels for a year or two. "Listen brah," she told me "these tourists think I am what Hawaii is."
The girl was 5 feet 4 inches tall and110 pounds soaking wet. She was a third-generation Kauaian but to a genetical purist it would be a stretch to call her a Hawaiian.
In my second year on the island, I lived in a house in a Lihue subdivision, rented by two Hawaiian women. One was 75 percent Hawaiian. She was 6 foot 1 inch and 300 pounds. The other, half Portuguese and half Hawaiian, was 5 foot 5 inches and 225 pounds. They didn't fit the picture.
A couple of Filipino fellas I knew used to head to the hotel bars at night and pose as Hawaiians for the tourist gals who looked lonely. They claimed they did pretty well. "To them, we are Hawaiians, brah," they said.
In a way, yes. But in another way, no. But that is Hawaii of today. A confusing melting pot of people who aren't exactly what they seem.
Hawaii, despite all its problems and the advertising copywriter's likes, is different, just not in the way the corporate travel industry presents it to be. And when the damp, dripping skies of Northwest winter settle in over us as Alan Furst wrote once in Esquire, like "lead in a closet," I find myself pining for Kauai, despite knowing half the folks living there will always think of me as "a stupid haole."
I made some local friends, and I bonded with a few local haoles, too. All of them, even in December, are warmer and drier, and less affected by gloom than I am in these short, dark, dank Northwest winter days.
If I was independently wealthy, I'd live and love Seattle from April to October every year and then it would be aloha from November through March. The rain on Kauai is warm in my memory and I think probably even in actual fact.
Wish I were there, Brah. I do.[[In-content Ad]]
