Sunny this AM. Warm. Birds twittering. Kids voices, giggles, then splashes.
The lanai here is private and large with comfortable chairs. A great spot to read, meditate.
Kate has two days without classes so we’re trying to figure out what to do today. Good rest last night, we both slept till 8 AM.
I’m on island time.
Night. Rain, steady. “Not good when you have to mow the grass and cut the weeds,” said a Japanese maintenance person here at the Grand Hyatt Kauai.
Kauai is another country, the oldest of the main Hawai’an Islands. It lies furthest to the west, in roughly the path the mid-Pacific plate has crossed over the hotspot now under Kiluaea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island.
It is far from the oldest. The trail of islands whose formation came on the hotspot stretches to the north and east.
The Hyatt, too, is another world. It has 52 acres of resort including a PGA championship golf course, two wings of rooms and 9 restaurants plus pools, tide pools, and an archaeological excavation on the grounds.
Our lanai here faces the pools and the grounds, but does have an ocean view though nowhere near as good as the one at the Westin. Still, there are compensations. The Stevenson Library is a bar cum sushi bar cum jazz club. Sounds good.
Flew here this afternoon in a twin prop plane with wings on top. When I stood on the runway getting ready to board, I felt like I was in Casablanca. This was two seats on either side of the middle aisle. One stewardess and pilots who looked like they might play in high school band. We had a flight delay because of a switch on the instrument panel had gone out, but the captain said, “Since it belongs to the de-icing sensor, I don’t think it should impede our progress.”
More tomorrow.
Today Molokai, across the channel, stands clear and tall, well, sort of tall. No clouds to shroud its ancient volcanoes. The ocean is calm and no breeze stirs the palms. Blue, blue, blue Hawai’i.
As has happened 61 times for me, the planet has moved on in its orbit, past the spot that marks February 14th. Today Kate and I bid aloha to Maui and aloha to Kauai. I’ll write next from the Hyatt Resort on the south shore of Kauai. On the 24th I’ll move to Da Fish Shack when Kate leaves for home; it’s on the north shore.
Last night Kate and I made our way to Mama’s Fish House, where, to my surprise, they now recognize us as repeat customers. I say made our way because Kate drove and I navigated using the %$@!! navigator in my phone. Which got us thoroughly lost. When I drive, my inner navigator works fine, I’ve found Mama’s several times, but as a passenger I got thrown off and relying on technology didn’t help. Sigh.
We did, however, make it. It was Valentine’s Day so Mama’s had a full house. The bay on which Mama’s sits is the best wind surfing in the world (or so they claim) and the waves and wind were monster yesterday. Must of have been good. We arrived after dark. We have seen the windsurfers, propelling themselves on surfboards fixed with sails, leaping from wave to wave. Very balletic and colorful.
Mama’s is a polished island wood structure with walls made of drift wood and flotsam, the occasional old door and whatever struck the owner’s whimsy. Inside, it has rattan light shades and tables covered with blue cloth decorated with white ginger leaves. They have expanded by 100% since I’ve been there, but managed to retain the intimate South Sea ambience.
We had an Island meal of opah, mahimahi, lauau pork, seared banana, ron baton lychee nut, star fruit and a surprising fresh coconut. Quite a birthday treat. The waiter brought out my macadamia nut crisp with six candles, special ones Kate brought, the flames burned the color of the candle. A happy birthday.
On the way back we ran into a road construction project that cost us 30 minutes at a time when we were both pretty sleepy. Not fun. Looked to me like they were laying fiber optic cable.
Final, and sad, note. Maui has grown too much. It is too crowded, too built up and not as much fun. The road construction was only the last inconvenience created by this development during our trip. I will be glad to get to Kauai.
Aloha.
And, once again, Sunny, Blue, Clear, Gentle Breezes.
“The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.” – Blaise Pascal
A strange feeling crept up on me this morning. Contentment. This is not a feeling with which I have much acquaintance, so when he comes along, it is notable. The Pascal quote is perfect here. Reason still finds ambitions or reasons for ambitions, reason still finds competition or reasons for competition, reason finds problems to solve or reason to solve problems, but the heart, my heart, my Valentine heart says, enough. Enough. And, good enough.
In that spirit I spent two hours this morning wandering around, sitting down for a while and writing poetry, then over to a sunglass shop to buy a case for my sunglasses to replace the one lost in transit. Strolling away from Whaler’s Village, I headed toward the surfers portion of Ka’anapali to watch.
Several years ago Kate and I were in Mexico City in September. I went to the bullfight. It was an odd experience, but the thing I want to draw attention to here is that September is when the novice bull-fighters try to prove their skill so they can move up in the ranks, to the better fights later in the season. Watching the surfers here, on the west side of Maui, means watching the novice surfers trying to catch waves, stay on their boards, ready themselves for the 15-20 foot waves now crashing against the northern shore.
One young woman, on a blue surfboard with a white strip near the tip, tried, then tried again, and once again mounted a wave, only, each time, to have the board flop out from underneath her. I came to admire her tenacity. No sulking. No quitting. She’ll make it someday soon, I’m sure.
Now I’m back in the hotel, during what would be nap time at home and feeling just a wee bit tired. Hope I’m not getting sick. That would be a bummer.
Back from a workout. Slower today. As I went out on the lanai before I headed for my aerobics, I noticed a disturbance in the calm. A rustle of waves preceded a fluke, it fanned in the air glistening with water, then followed the great body down. A birthday wish from an ocean mammal to a land mammal. Mahalo.
As I walked along the ocean, I reflected a bit on the peculiar fate of my nuclear family. Mom died early. Dad lived several unhappy years in a marriage ill-fitted to both him and Rosemary. Mary ended up first in Malyasia, then in Singapore, following her interest in linguistics. Mark traveled the world from Vladivostok to Moscow, Moscow to Turkey, Turkey to Israel, then, by some route to Bangkok which he found just right. They’ve both in Asia almost longer than I lived in Alexandria. Though I’ve remained stateside, I have developed, quite independently of them, an interest in Asian art, cinema, literature and, of late, philosophy.
Then, too, there is love affair with the Islands. What is it about our lives, childhoods in the most common of Midwestern smalltowns, parents with no interest as far as I know in anything Asian, that lead us, all three, by quite different routes to turn our faces east? It would be easy to cite the ascendance of Asia in the last two decades as a magnetic influence, but in fact all three of us have had our interests prior to those decades.
There is one thing common to all three of us, the wanderlust. Mom was overseas during WW II and Dad found traveling significant for its own sake. I suppose this gave us all a sense of rootlessness, or, at least, made it easy to detach ourselves from the familiar, and so opened us to the wide world. What strange motion in the quantum sphere torqued our attention toward China, Singapore, Thailand, Japan I do not know. But, it is a fact.
Highway 61 valentine’s day on Maui
Spaceship earth has come again, for the 61st time, to the spot on its journey that marks the day of my birth. This time, as at least for two others, I find myself not in the heart of North America, but, rather on the western Pacific shore of Maui. It is a good place to celebrate a birthday. As Tom Crane pointed out in a recent comment, the ocean is the mother of us all.
On this day she pounds the northern shores of the Islands with grim fury borne of winter storms in the Alaska/far North Pacific. The Maui News carries warnings of high surf, dangerous conditions, news to warm the heart of every surfer here for just these events.
The Islands give me a primal sense of being at home. My body relaxes and this time my mind has gone along. The willingness of my Self to sink into the warmth, the moistness, the cheerful sunniness found here give me a feel for what the womb might have been like, a place of floating in security, knowing love as physical, all-embracing. No better present.
Clouds have rolled in and the temperature dropped. Well, not too far, but enough shortsleeves chilly. It’s night here. The clouds over Lanai looked on one end like a crocodile (complete with eye) and on the other just like an elephant. An omen?
Kate’s still sick. We’re lying low, somewhat reminiscent of our first trip here during the Nagano Winter Olympics. These two Minnesotans spent a lot of time inside, watching triple axles, double toe loops, Eddie the Eagle and slalom races. A peculiar, but, in some strange way, apt, first time here.
Spent much of the day reading, A Secret History, by Donna Tartt. A wonderful, odd book about classic’s students who commit two murders.
Tomorrow night we head over to Mama’s Fish House for my 61st birthday. This is the second or third birthday I’ve celebrated here. Feels like just the right place.
Sun. Ocean. Blue. Breezes. Palm trees. Sand. Molokai in the distance.
Aerobics this am, 7:00AM. Walked from here at the Westin along Maui’s west shore. At the end of the walkway headed north is the Maui Sheraton. They have provided a historical marker, set in bronze and attached to a piece of black lava. It explains that the lava napali (cliff) just ahead was, in the belief of the Hawai’ian people one of the places where souls jump off for the afterlife.
The sign reminds me of the observation that developers name their work after what they removed to create it: Fox Run, Oak Grove Estates. Those are shameful, but when a hotel sits on land sacred even by the business owners admission, then we have moved into another category of insult. Call it blasphemy. Idolatry. Worship of a false god. Call it what you will, but imagine the feeling.
It made me consider all those Catholic churches built over Celtic holywells and all the Celtic holy days sequestered by church liturgists, then absorbed into an alien creed. The violence done to the sacred reality of another is, often, not obvious at a historical remove, but for those of us whose ancestors dressed the wells or leapt off the cliff to paradise, we remember.
At the sacred cliff I turned around and headed out on the beach. Boy, did my heart rate climb while I hiked on wet sand. (I take along my cardio rate gear when I travel.) The ocean has its way and I forgot that, walking down below the beaches crest. I thought I could move fast enough to avoid the incoming surf. Nope. Sand laden shoes and socks now drying on the lanai.
Sun sets over Lanai. Below our lanai a slack key guitar and vocalist play Hawaiian melodies.
Kate and I sat on our north facing lanai just 20 minutes ago and watched a pod of whales move between Molokai and Maui, then head towards Lanai. They breached and spouted, flukes slapping the ocean when they dove. The humpbacks come here each year during this time for mating, then they head back north.
The strangeness of the whaling imagery comes into clear relief when these behemoths play. In fact, there is now a small industry involved in whale watching. One way to find the whales from the balcony is to follow the whale watching boats as they head for the pods. Which seems backward and perverse to me, somehow.
Dinner just came. Catch of the day: ono with fruit salsa. Thai chicken wings. Thai coconut bisque. Smells good.
Bye.
77 clear skies. sun. blue ocean, white surf. sunburned tourists. no snow here. (but, there is on the mountains)
Kate and I went down at her suggestion to the pool side bar and grill. We sat in lounge chairs and ordered lunch. I didn’t last long. I don’t like the direct sun, nor do I like laying around with other folks who seem only interested in laying out in the sun. This must be some Puritan instinct, but seeing other folks lay in the sun, drinking, then swimming, then eating and drinking and laying about pushes some kind of button. Probably my own fear that I’m as lazy as they appear to be.
I know. This is vacation, right? Well, even there, I like more active vacationing, hiking and visiting historical sites, that sort of thing. When I got to Maui, I said to Kate that I planned to do nothing, but in the end I find it difficult. Since I can’t drive the rental car, I can’t get to the places I’ve gone during other visits. Not a terrible thing at all, but the option of sunning doesn’t add up to much to this northern curmudgeon.
On the bright side I got to talk to Dakesh in Bangalore about my internet connection. This time he bypassed the hotel’s server and gave me a straight shot into the network. Says I won’t have anymore trouble. Hmmm.
Naptime.