Driving Home, page 28
Washington Post, 1997
Julia and Hawaii
WHEN WE STEPPED OFF the plane into the sauna weather of a Honolulu evening in late December, my old friend Paul Theroux was waiting for us at the gate carrying a brown paper bag, packed by his wife and full of gifts for my companion—a lei, a hula skirt, a straw sun hat, and a rainbow bikini. Everything except for the bikini, which I nixed, was donned then and there, while our fellow passengers surged past us. Hatted, garlanded, hula skirt swirling, my companion strode off toward Baggage Claim. She looked like the Tourist from Hell.
Julia is four, and it was for her sake, mostly, that we were here. I like the sea but not the seaside, and Hawaii has always struck me as too blatantly clichéd a destination. But four-year-olds have rigidly conventional tastes in travel (most brochures read as if they were addressed to four-year-olds), and for Julia there was still unsullied magic in the idea of sun, sand, sea, the “tropical paradise” with …
“Look! Palm trees!” she yelled, joyfully incredulous at seeing the illustrations to Curious George and The Enormous Crocodile spring suddenly into 3-D all around her. “Why do they have those rings on them?” Each tree had a tin sleeve on its trunk, fifteen feet above ground level.
“To stop the mice and rats from climbing up and eating the coconuts,” Paul said. Julia stored this piece of information; her first serious nugget of Hawaiian research.
On the drive into town, she gazed perplexedly at the familiar signs, streetlamps, traffic signals. “I keep thinking I’m in Seattle, but I know I’m in Hawaii.” To Paul she explained: “Hawaii is always hot because it’s nearer to the sun.”
At the seafood restaurant where we were meeting Sheila Theroux, Julia took the maître d’ into her confidence: “I know I look like a Hawaiian girl, but I’m not really a Hawaiian girl. Actually, I’m from Seattle.” The maître d’ did his best to appear astonished by this revelation.
The kids’ menu yielded pizza. “They have pizza in Hawaii!” Sometimes life just goes on getting better. But after one slice, and before the grown-ups were properly started on their hors d’oeuvres, Julia fell into a coma in Sheila’s arms.
Sheila Theroux is Hawaiian-born, of Chinese ancestry, and we settled into a discussion of the complex fate of growing up on Oahu before statehood, when the islands were tugged every which way, between the cultures of Asia, Polynesia, and America. As a child in Honolulu in the ’50s, Sheila had felt a “special relationship” between her native islands and the U.S. mainland—a telling phrase, most commonly used to describe the kinship between Britain and the United States, two sovereign powers. San Francisco, the nearest American city, was then half a world away across the ocean (it is as far from Honolulu as, say, Halifax, Nova Scotia, is from Caracas, Venezuela). Statehood came in ’59, but it was the arrival of the passenger jets in the 1960s that decisively Americanized the islands. The jets built Waikiki (“It was nothing—it was just a beach”). The jets brought soldiers from Vietnam for R&R, hippies, Minneapolitans on the run from their dreadful winters, and within the decade they robbed Hawaii of its proper oceanic isolation and made it seem to most Americans as little more than an offshore extension of San Diego. Now Oahu’s only freeway bills itself as Interstate 1—which, in a sense, it really is.
At dinner’s end, I slung my unconscious daughter over my shoulder and carted her off to a room in the Sheraton Waikiki, where a very few hours later I was woken by her announcement that it was “a beautiful morning.” It wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t morning. In the crepuscular light, well short of dawn, Julia was out on the balcony, already dressed in hula skirt and lei, watching pale explosions of surf on the black beach.
In fifty-four years of active fantasy life, I had never imagined that I might find myself on Waikiki Beach at 7 a.m. in a thin and chilly drizzle, helping to dig burrows for nonexistent rabbits. Unsurprisingly, we had the place to ourselves.
“It’s raining,” I said reproachfully. “Just like Seattle.”
“It isn’t!” Julia was leaping to Hawaii’s defense. “It’s hot rain. Hawaii is always hot because it’s closer to the sun.”
“I wish I’d never told you that.” We were bickering like an old married couple. I wanted breakfast; she didn’t. Getting overambitious in the burrowing department, I spoiled the warren. “Now you’ve made me sad!” In response: “Where’s your other sandal?” It was 9 a.m. before I persuaded her to hit the Rice Krispies.
Back at the airport, we found our flight to Lanai was delayed. Julia, unflappable and uncomplaining, crawled with her favorite bear into the space below the twin rows of back-to-back seats and took a nap. When the Dash 8 eventually began its sprint down the runway, she was enthralled by the takeoff, the sudden release from earth, the diminishing—and now sunlit—city. “We’re higher even than the palm trees!’
But the weather worsened as we flew south over an increasingly sullen-looking sea. We came down low over a rocky shoreline rimed with white, no more tropical in appearance than the Isle of Man. The landing gear plopped down from its cowling under the wings and we were almost on the ground when, with an abrupt snarl, the plane climbed steeply and Lanai faded out as we lurched, bumping, through the clouds. The pilot’s voice came over the intercom: he was going to make a second attempt to land at Lanai, but if the visibility defeated him again, we’d have to go on to Maui.
“I’m not scared anymore,” Julia said, as we twisted and bounced through lumpy fog. “I like it now.” I didn’t. I held her hand, more for my own comfort than hers. Red dirt materialized out of nowhere just beneath us, followed by the shuddering thump of the wheels on tarmac and the voice of the pilot, rather too plainly registering his own adrenaline level, saying, “Welcome to Lanai.” His passengers applauded him, Julia clapping the longest.
From the hotel bus, Lanai was unexpectedly forbidding. Patches of tawny rock showed through the mesquite scrub to which the abandoned pineapple fields were fast returning. Red mud sluiced along the roadsides. We skirted Lanai City, a meagre grid of dripping tin-roofed bungalows with tangled yards. “Are we still in Hawaii?” Julia asked, peering through the window at a world so far from the one I had painted for her that I felt like a snake-oil salesman. But as the bus started to corkscrew down the steep road to Manele Bay, the rain stopped, and there was a smear, at least, of sunshine on the gale-torn sea ahead.
All Julia’s doubts fled when we stopped at the hotel, where a uniformed bell captain hung yet another lei around her neck—to which I added the lei he tried to pin on me. Bowed down by flowers, and hugely, shyly grinning, Julia entered her paradise on earth.
Paradise—in the shape of the Manele Bay Hotel—is where the taste of Ralph Lauren collides with that of the T’ang dynasty: it has something of the English country house, something of the heyday of the Raj, something of the Venetian Lido, and enough ostentatious chinoiserie to fill a container ship end to end. From the grand public rooms at the center of this marvellous confection, one is led out to a maze of beige-colored open cloisters, through gardens packed with jasmine, palms, bougainvillea, orchids, jacaranda, where a winding stream, full of ornamental carp, is fed by a succession of prettily constructed waterfalls. In Xanadu …
The hotel’s preferred term for its own architectural style is “Mediterranean”—but that’s too modest. It is, rather, triumphantly American: American in its lavish capital investment, American in its lofty disregard for natural obstacles. For the southern, leeward shore of Lanai is dry to the point of being arid; when left to itself, it was a rust-colored cinder heap, nearly bereft of vegetation. When David H. Murdock, the Californian owner of Castle & Cooke and the Dole fruit company, the Kubla Khan of Lanai, took the island out of pineapples and into up-market tourism, he built a new landscape with imported dirt, moistened by water that was piped down from the wet, forested uplands beyond Lanai City. The Manele Bay Hotel’s scented domestic jungle and broad, spongy lawns are kept alive by an underground network of nighttime sprinklers. The place is—in the eighteenth-century sense of the word—a folly; a monument to the wily artifice of the hydraulic engineer and landscape gardener. In the can-do arrogance of its conception, it’s in the spirit of Las Vegas or the Grand Coulee Dam.
Our room, at the far end of the maze, was backed by a waterfall, fronted by a lawn, a ha-ha, then the sea. Julia was enchanted—by the green at our doorstep (“We’ve got our own field!”), by the marbled splendor of the bathroom and its fittings, by the expensive collection of Chinese breakables. She expertly raided the minibar, changed into her bikini, and went visiting with the neighbors along the row of oceanfront patios.
She was instantly at home here. Four-year-olds, of course, are born to room service; they know no other kind. What I hadn’t realized was how very closely the world of the resort hotel resembles that of the preschool. The young women who run the concierge desk are the controlling grown-ups; they set the curriculum and sort out squabbles. The fifty-five-year-old guest, in his beach romperwear, with bulging face and shrilling voice, is the two-hundred-pound toddler having a snit.
As at preschool, the hotel day is organized around mealtimes, with, between meals, what Julia’s Seattle school calls “sensory activities,” centered on the pool, the spa, and the beach. For the adult guest (if that’s not a contradiction in terms), the trick is to adjust to being four years old again. You have to learn the school rules: no swimwear in the public rooms … elegant resort attire is acceptable in the restaurant … You have to slot yourself into the regimented spaces of the school day. I settled for the activities known to Julia as Quiet Time and Stories—lounging on our patio reading Trollope’s The Bertrams and trying to put names to the neighborhood birds.
The birds, as it turned out, exactly mirrored the human sociology of the islands. Very few were native to Hawaii. Most had been introduced within the last hundred and fifty years—foreigners who had thrived in the balmy climate with its easy pickings, just like the Chinese, the Scots, the Filipinos, the American mainlanders, the Samoans. So the starlings, who roosted noisily each evening in the palms above our waterfall, were descendants of birds brought to New York in 1890 by a misguided Noah, an Englishman named James Edmund Harting, whose mission it was to supply the New World with all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. The house sparrows had come over from New Zealand in 1871; the black-hooded mynahs from India in 1865; the cardinals from the United States in 1929. The many Japanese guests at the hotel could wake to the familiar dawn chorus of Japanese bush-warblers, resident aliens in Hawaii since 1929. And so it went. Lanai was an island of immigrants, more Filipino than Hawaiian native; a cultural salad of exotic birds and people, deposited in mid-Pacific by the plane- and shipload. The imported bric-a-brac in our room, the German family from Munich staying two doors down, Julia’s and my own presence here—we were all authentically part of the salad. In Hawaii, nearly everything and everyone comes from somewhere else; so being a tourist in the islands isn’t a matter of embarrassment, as it so often is elsewhere. Here, the vast majority of “the locals” are, like the sparrows, just visitors who stayed put.
Meanwhile Julia, in the care of the Children’s Activity Center (“Let’s pretend I’m going to school in Hawaii”), was conducting a strenuous social life on her own behalf: she played bingo, she went on epic scavenger hunts, she watched movies, she attended poolside pizza parties, and she fell in love with her swimming instructor.
I was walking to lunch, The Bertrams in hand, when I was hailed from the pool. “Daddy!” Julia, in rainbow bikini, was wetly reclining in the arms of a mahogany-tanned twentysomething beach god. “This,” she said, glowing with pride in her conquest, “is Kenjy.” “Hi, Kenjy,” I said, reaching down with the fake bonhomie that, I guess, all fathers learn to exercise in this situation. Kenjy, with Julia riding on his back, lapped the pool.
“I shall not forget this day in my entire life,” said Julia.
Next morning, she awoke at six forty-five, sitting bolt upright in her bed and announcing, “I love Kenjy.”
“I know,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
Over room-service breakfast, she tried another tack. “I hate work,” she said. “I like it where we have fun all day, like in Hawaii.”
“What work are you talking about, Julia?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, in an airily dismissive tone that was new to her. “Like all your typing.”
I saw in a flash how the writer’s life was being compared, most unfavorably, with the carefree existence of her swimming instructor. “My typing,” I said, “is what brought us to Hawaii.”
“You’re kidding,” said Julia, spitting out Rice Krispies as she laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of my remark.
The Therouxes were due to join us on the island on Friday. Paul and I had planned a vinous weekend of gossip, and he was billed to introduce my Saturday-night reading at Lanai’s other hotel, the Lodge at Koele (which, via the Lanai Visiting Artist Program, was how typing had brought Julia and me to Hawaii). But I woke on Friday morning to the brushfire crackle of rain on the patio: our ocean view had gone, and from the radio I learned that Lanai airport was closed to all traffic.
An intense kona storm was dawdling through the islands. Gleaming rods of rain were drilling holes in the lawn, and the dry creek bed just to the west of us (the favored haunt of the Japanese bush-warbler) had become a foaming torrent of red water. It was tearing up small trees by the roots and flinging them into the ocean. The waterfalls were running red, and so was the ornamental stream, which had burst its banks and was drowning the orchids in the gardens. The hybrid carp were nowhere to be seen. “Poor fish—I expect they’re dead,” said Julia. Our usual elevator was out of order: it had sprung a leak, and red water was dripping through the shaft. At the top of the stairs, six Filipino maids were trying to stanch the flood by pushing at it with long brooms. I rolled up my trouser legs, hoisted Julia onto my shoulders, and waded the last twenty yards to the main body of the hotel.
Towels from the pool had been requisitioned to do duty as sandbags in the great hall, and worried engineers, in overalls and tool belts, were exchanging notes over two-way radios. Julia befriended a wet kitten that was taking refuge from the downpour. A brief lull in the rain revealed that the sea itself was stained red with runoff: a half-mile-wide band of water the color of dark tomato soup now encircled the island.
We were marooned in our stately pleasure dome. Bands of would-be travelers were begging the concierge staff to make planes fly. The lobby was piled high with their luggage. “I have to be in New York tonight!” “I have to be in Tokyo tomorrow!” The only way off the island was by boat to Maui. “But it’s rough, and I get seasick!” wailed a toddler in her sixties.
Things were quieter below. Couples were bent over million-piece jigsaw puzzles. Single men were making tents of two-day-old copies of the Wall Street Journal. There were novels—John Grisham or Danielle Steel, depending on the reader’s gender. Several men were deep in a book titled Golf Is Not a Game of Patience. People would stare out into the gray yonder, then consult their watches importantly, as if they expected their bomb to go off at any moment.
With Julia dispatched to the children’s center, I finished The Bertrams and went off to browse through the hotel library, where I encountered my daughter, who was on a scavenger hunt. “Have you seen Kenjy?” she said.
Getting through to Honolulu on the phone was like trying to raise Bora Bora or Uttar Pradesh: Paul’s voice was a whispery vibration in the wires. “Tomorrow!” it croaked, from another world.
So I got Julia as my dinner date. For my entertainment she juggled the silverware. She conducted a physics experiment involving the horizontal flow of liquids (apple juice, in this case, and the experiment failed). She slid under the table (“Let’s pretend you don’t know where I am—”). She waved at strangers and kept up a running commentary on their varying degrees of baldness, redness of face, girth, age, prosthesis, and fashion-victimhood. All this had an eerily familiar ring to me—though, as I remembered it, such behavior usually emerged only toward the end of the second bottle of wine.
The staff—pineapple pickers, retrained for the hotel trade—extended to both of us a smiling tolerance that went far beyond the call of duty. They indulged Julia; they talked to me of their children and grandchildren. Unaffected, with none of the solemn snootiness that tends to go with jobs at a $400-a-night hotel, these cheerful and elastic islanders seemed the best possible advertisement for Murdock’s economic revolution.
On Saturday morning it was still raining, with the cloud-ceiling pegged to the ground. The weather system had stalled over Lanai and showed no sign of budging. No flights in or out. No Therouxes. Our long-planned weekend was a bust. Julia splashed through the cloisters, clutching a fallen coconut she’d found in the grass. She took in the thrashing palms, the rusty flood, the glum adults staring at the weather from their dripping patios. “I love Hawaii.” She had an appointment with Kenjy at the children’s center.
I pride myself on meeting the ordinary happenstances of traveling with equanimity, but Julia was making me feel a rank amateur. “So do I,” I said. We passed the concierge desks, with their throng of grown-ups throwing tantrums. Julia marched through them, full of happy purpose, while I bumbled in her wake. She was in command of the vacation now; she had the Manele Bay world at her fingertips. “Come on! This way!” And I obeyed—glad to learn from my daughter, at this late stage, how to travel gracefully.
New York Times, September 1997
The Turbulent Deep
IN 1990 I MOVED from England, where I kept a boat on the Blackwater estuary, to Seattle, from where I sail a thirty-five-foot ketch. The move took me from shallow to deep water: from sandbars and swatchways, where the depth-sounder dickers around the ten-foot mark, even in the middle of a buoyed channel, to the abyssal inland sea that stretches from Puget Sound to Glacier Bay in southeast Alaska. Here, the depth-sounder searches in vain for an answering rebound from the dark seafloor, where the giant bedroom-eyed Octopus dofleini reclines on its soft bed of silt.
