Kaua'i Part II

The next morning, the children woke up much too early. At six-fifteen, the baby began to stir. By six-thirty, the three-year-old was up. So we got up too. We should go for a drive, I thought. Lorri gave me a playful shove, saying, "Hey, the kids are up. We should go for a drive."

So we did.

The morning was surprisingly brisk and the sun hadn't quite made it up out of the Pacific. We piled into the convertible, put the top down, and took off, heading back down the Kuhio Highway that we had driven in the dark the night before. It was a quiet morning and all we could hear was the rush of the wind as our car wandered down the road. In the morning light, we could see what we had missed on our drive up to Princeville. To the right, the land rose steadily to the foot of impossibly green mountains. The mountains were wrapped in clouds that shifted and swirled, always revealing and concealing different pieces of the mountainside. On the right, the island fell away quickly and as we drove over small ridges and shallow valleys we caught glimpses of the ocean that disappeared around the next bend. At one point the road dropped into a deep ravine and the trees crowded overhead, creating a canopy of leaves that tinted the early morning sunlight with shades of green and yellow.

"Where should we go?" I asked. As I said, I'd never been to Hawai'i. Lorri had been before, but she had visited other islands, Oahu and the Big Island. She shrugged and I drove. Ella chattered in the back seat, pointing out trees and clouds. I could see her in the rearview mirror, long blond hair flying out behind her, eyes half-closed with wonder. Ours was the only car on the road and we seemed to have the island to ourselves.

I saw a sign: "Kilauea Lighthouse." On a whim, I took the turn. I followed the signs away from the highway, secretly hoping for any sign of coffee. Beautiful tropical island or not, I was in dire need of coffee. On our right we saw a cluster of businesses: real estate, local art, a restaurant called the Lighthouse Bistro. And, to my great satisfaction, we saw a sign for the Kilauea Bakery. But I kept driving toward the lighthouse, promising myself that there would be coffee very soon. The road wound through some hills, finally coming to a stop at a small parking lot. There was a gated drive on one side, leading into what signs identified as the Kilauea National Wildlife Preserve. We were three hours ahead of the park's opening, so we parked the car and walked to the fence that stretched across one end of the parking lot. The land fell sharply, down cliffs where tenacious trees and scrub bushes clung to creases in the rock of the cliff. The sun was still coming up and we could see the lighthouse ahead and to the left, perched at the top of a cliff at the end of a penninsula. And below us the surf crashed madly in a rocky bay: the water was all foam and froth as wave after wave pounded the black volcanic shore. The water was a deep indigo color that exploded into white spray as the surf slammed into the sides of the cliffs. Sea birds circled overhead and roosted in nests built pell mell on the sides of the cliffs. Beyond the rocks and the bay and the surf, the Pacific Ocean stretched northwards, sparkling into infinity as the sun began to crest the horizon.

We stood at the edge of the cliff for a few minutes, not talking much. Another family was there as well and we took turns with each other's cameras. The other family left and we were alone again at the cliff's edge. Ella saw everything: the birds overhead and on the cliff face, the waves crashing below, the few wispy clouds in the pale blue morning sky. The sun continued to rise and I picked Ella up and set her on my shoulder. We watched the sun glide over the horizon, hearing the faint calls of birds above us and feeling the rhythm of the surf far below. The moment stretched out and I felt, as I had felt standing on the lanai the night before, a sense of ancientness, of time stretching back over millenia. At the condo my laptop waited, student papers to grade, research to follow up. But here I was, standing on the edge of the Pacific as eternity washed over my senses. There were no thoughts about work or writing or teaching, only the ebb and flow of time as the waves completed their journey across the vastness of the Pacifc Ocean.

A minute later -- or ten -- we walked back to the car.

We drove back toward the main highway and stopped at the bakery we'd seen on our way down to the lighthouse. When we opened the door, U2's Where the Streets Have No Name was playing inside. I considered this a very good sign. Ella wanted a cinnamon roll and Lorri and I ordered coffee and pastries. Lorri took the girls outside to find a table and I gathered our drinks as Bono sang. I've seen U2 live twice and both times, Where the Streets Have No Name is one of the concert highlights. The band goes silent for a few moments, a minute, two. The audience becomes still with expectation and then, ever so subtly, the music starts. The organ builds slowly and is joined by the Edge's chiming guitar, the notes familiar and full of expectation and hope and promise. Then the drums and bass begin filling the spaces around the guitar and organ and then the song really takes off and in concert the sound hits you like a rush of wind. Every light in the stadium comes on and for a moment, everything is illuminated and you can see it all: the band, the stage, and the audience, 35,000 strong. Everything is clear for that moment and then the lights fall and once again you can only see the band, the spotlight hovering on Bono as he stalks the edge of the stage. But for that one moment, you can see how you are part of the concert, how you fit in to the music and the audience and the simultaneous sense of community and individuality is almost overwhelming. The cliff at the lighthouse was revelatory in a similar way: the surf, the cliffs, the ocean were all waiting, with us, for the sun to come over the horizon. We were part of that morning, almost as if that place and that moment had been prepared just for us. There was an incomprehensible sense of perspective on the cliff that morning and I grasped, for a moment, an indescribable insight. As the sun came up I felt as if I could step back and see everything: I could see how all the pieces fit and I felt the distance between myself and eternity shrink. For a moment I could reach out and touch time. Then the lights fell again and I was standing on the cliffside with a sense of hope and expectation that rose and fell with the morning tide.

Kaua'i, Part I

I didn't want to go to Hawai'i.

I'm not much for the sun and the beach. The beautiful people who usually inhabit the beach often make me acutely aware of my pale flabbiness, a situation of which I am already aware and need no reminding. I dislike the way sand gets into everything: hair, ears, nose, between the toes. Sand seems to have a special ability to work its way into the bits and parts of your anatomy where you least want to have sand. I wasn't sure what I would be doing for a week in Kaua'i.

Let me back up for a moment. My sister-in-law was getting married and she decided that the best place for it would be in Hawai'i, specifically on Tunnels Beach on Kaua'i's northern coast. My wife and her sister are really close so there was very little discussion about whether she would go. But I thought I could weasel out of it on very reasonable grounds: the plane ticket would cost too much; I would fall behind with my dissertation; someone would need to watch the dogs; I had no interest in the tropics. I ended up going anyway, even though the plane ticket did cost too much and I did fall behind on the dissertation and we had to pay someone to watch the dogs.

Sitting on the beach was just not my idea of fun. I mean, when I was a kid, I travelled pretty widely with my family. My parents were big believers in the summer road trip and we drove everywhere. We drove all over the Pacific Northwest and up and down the west coast, camping and seeing stuff. I visited the Redwoods and Crater Lake and the Olympic Rainforest and the Oregon coast. Mount Rainier National Park was my back yard and I hiked and climbed all over the smaller peaks and valleys. We drove to the family farm in Iowa every summer and along the way we'd stop in Yellowstone, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Wall Drug (the capital of American road trip kitsch), ending at my grandparents' beautiful farm tucked in a valley near the Mississippi River. We tried different routes some years: one year we headed south through California, stopped for a couple days at Disneyland, trekked across Death Valley, visited the pueblos at Mesa Verde, looked at the Four Corners (there's really not much else to do there), and gaped at the mind-erasing vastness of the Grand Canyon. From the farm we'd take side trips up to the Wisconsin Dells or to Chicago. Once or twice we drove back to Washington by way of Missouri, taking in the Ozarks and driving across the empty expanse of Kansas into Colorado, skirting the edge of the Rockies and stopping in the Grand Tetons. We took trips to British Columbia, riding the ferry to Victoria on Vancouver Island and having high tea at the Empress Hotel. When I was a sophomore in high school, I went to Barcelona, Spain, for the 1992 Summer Olympics and when I was a sophomore in college, Mom and Dad took the whole family to London for the ten days after Christmas.

Travelling has been a priority for my wife and I: since we've been married, we've gone to London and New York and Washington, D.C. and we've taken multiple road trips to Southern California, Las Vegas, British Columbia, and western Montana. The point -- if there is one -- is that I've travelled and all my travels had convinced me that I had no desire to go to Hawai'i. It seemed overpriced and cliched. It seemed . . . boring?

Nonetheless, we went. A friend of mine scored us a great deal on a convertible rental car and for once, our horrible timeshare ownership worked in our favor: we were going to stay in a condo at a lovely resort in Princeville. I still didn't really want to go. When I was a kid, bouncing around the backseat of my parents' Ford Tempo as we meandered across the American West, I had always thought it would be cool to visit every state in the country some day. So as I finalized our plans for Kauai'i, this childhood goal seemed to be the best reason for going to Hawai'i: I could mark one more state off my list (only 23 more to go!).

Our flight took us from Dallas / Fort Worth to Phoenix to Honolulu to Lihue. Seriously. We were going to do this twelve hour marathon with a three month old baby, a three year old toddler, ourselves, and all of our stuff. And we really have never learned how to travel light. Somehow we managed with our sanities intact and found ourselves, finally, in our rental car at the Lihue airport on Kauai'i. It was dark, everyone was exhausted, and we just wanted to get to the condo. We drove north on the Kuhio Highway and soon the lights of Lihue faded behind us. Or more accurately, the darkness enveloped our car, erasing the man-made lights of Lihue as if they had never existed. I knew this kind of darkness because I grew up so far out in the Cascade foothills. I understood the way darkness is different when it is completely natural: not so much the absence of light, but the presence of night. I couldn't hear them, but I could imagine the night sounds of the island: insects, night birds, rustling leaves, and the faint surge of the surf on the beaches and rocks. Perhaps, I thought, this may be ok.

We arrived at the condo and unloaded all of our stuff as quickly as possible. The girls barely stirred and my wife and I fell asleep almost as soon as we hit the bed. I woke up a few hours later and went out to get a drink of water. I took my glass and stepped out onto the lanai on the back of the condo. The lanai faced the ocean (so I had read on the condo website) and there were no manmade lights on this side of the building. The landscape was indistinguishable from the inky black sky. There was no moon, but there were thousands of stars, burning fiercely in the night sky. I couldn't see the ocean, but I could hear the surf and I felt something in the night air, something primal and ancient and more real than any night sky I could remember.

This may be ok.