Should I say, “Aloha”?

Such a completely different world, leaving Santa Clotilde for the north coast of Maui.

I came here with my parents when I was in sixth grade, Christmas vacation 1979-80. That was twenty-nine years ago. My parents came again, without us, twenty-five years ago. Lots more built-up, of course; still gorgeous. My dad and I spent an afternoon circumnavigating the northwest corner of the island, still very desolate with very narrow, winding roads. I don’t have too many photos from that drive; scenic vistas did not always offer a place to pull over.

We are staying at a very lovely condo; our balcony overlooks the surf and the mountains of Molokai. We walked down to snorkel Honokeana Cove; I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was startled when I looked down and saw a giant sea tortoise right under me! We saw probably six or seven turtles that morning (Declan tells me that he clearly saw more turtles than me), and we have the good fortune to be in Maui during the migration season of the humpback whale, so we have seen lots and lots of whales. Whales breaching, spouting, thumping…I have not been able to get a really good shot on my iPhone camera, but I have to remind myself, as always: “take the picture in your head.”

It’s been very nice and relaxing hanging out with my parents; I am reminded not to try and overschedule things. Maui is so gorgeous, so expensive. A cup of takeout coffee is $4.25; one maki roll at the take-out sushi place is $20; my dad paid $50 for a baseball cap, a pound of coffee, and a piece of banana bread. In 2007, I spent three weeks in the north of Spain with Julie White. “We haven’t really met any freaks on this trip,” I mused. “That’s because we are staying at decent hotels and have a rental car,” she reminded me. “The freaks are down at the bus station with a loaf of bread and a box of wine.” So…not too many freaks on this trip, either. Walking around in downtown Lahaina, a beach bum/surfer dude/Hawai’ian native passed me, walking in the opposite direction. “Buds?” he asked surreptitiously, making the universal sign for joint-smoking by inhaling through his thumb and his index finger. I was flattered that I looked like a possible client.

But most of the native Hawai’ians that I see are doing yardwork, or working at Safeway. My experience here is very limited, and I am staying in an expensive tourist area, but still, to me, it is striking.

At the local Mail Services Plus, where I went to print my Haleakala Sunrise Permit (national park ranger still on duty, despite the government shutdown!), I stood at the counter to pay my $2.50 for five minutes on the computer and one page of printing. “Have you been waiting long?” said the man who walked in. “Do you need a hug?” Well, I hadn’t been waiting long, but a hug is always nice, and we shared a brief embrace with a laugh. My dad told me later I had “no threat sensor.”

Hiking to the Nakalele Blowhole, I greeted some people hiking back from the ocean. “Good morning!” I said cheerily. “Aloha!” they said in return. Is it too pretentious of me to say aloha to people? I looked up the meaning of “aloha”; Wikipedia tells me that it means “love, affection, peace, compassion, and mercy, commonly used as a simple greeting but has a deeper cultural and spiritual significance to native Hawaiians; it also means ‘to be in the presence of the divinity, or in the presence of (alo) the ‘divine breath of life (ha).'” Much nicer than good morning! Like namaste “I salute the divinity within you”.

We did some deep sea fishing and caught a number of trigger fish, a goat fish, and a gray snapper, but only two of them were keepers. It was nice to see Declan enjoy hanging out with my dad. And we woke at 2 AM to drive up Haleakala to see the sunrise on top of the 10,000 foot mountain. “Clouds on fire,” is how someone described it. Driving down, we drove through the clouds around 3000 feet, so we were literally a mile above the clouds when the sun rose.