Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

It's September. This morning I I flipped the page on the calendar over and shouted to my four year old, "hey! It's a new month! It's September!" This seemed important enough to interrupt her drawing time (detailed vignettes of fancy girls in triangular dresses, backdropped by loop-dee-loop clouds). "Summer is over, now it's Fall." She gasped: "Oh no! So we can't go anywhere?!" I was puzzled. She broke it down for me: "Because it will be cold now?" She ran to the door to look for a library book scene of corn-stalks and pumpkins and scarecrows and maple leaves. Nope, not cold. Light green kukui nut leaves, pale yellow cascades of starfruit like pinatas, hard green mini grapefruits on the trees, bittermelon vines choking the compost bins. But still, Fall. The beginning of the new school year -- that rhythm that pulses throughout a post-school (or pre-school) life. The storing away of summer, reporting on my summer vacation, con...

So as a basically uninformed observer, Happy 50 years of Statehood, Hawaii! You were a chain of connected sisters in the family of Polynesia, and then you were discovered by the West, and everything changed almost instantly. Chiefs got gun-powder weapons, fought brutal battles. You became your own Kingdom-- you were a hub of the Pacific, with sudden wealth from whalers and traders and sudden death and misery from disease and consumer culture. Your people struggled and changed-- newcomers poured in to work, to live, to make gobs of money, to punish you for your sins, to learn your ways. Whalers got Hawaiian tattoos, Hawaiians wore missionary clothes and toppled their gods. Old taboos were discarded, new ones were stamped on your faces. Hawaiians poured away from the islands and scattered across the world-- marrying Indians in the Northwest, educating freed slaves in the East, and criss-crossing the continents on whalers. Most changed, learned new languages, never came home, and left tra...

So, what does your husband do? Really? What kind of degree do you need for that? How much does he make? Wow? Can you live on that? And how much is rent? Seriously, for THIS PLACE? How much would it cost to buy? How many bedrooms? Kids, did you hear that?! That's how much our house is worth! And how much do you spend on groceries? Wow. You guys have a car? Two? How much did you pay for that truck? Amazing. Wow, good thing we live in Idaho, eh honey? Well, nice to meet you!

Can't stand 'em, but Hawaii can't live without 'em. They harass monk seals, they drive erratically while trying to take pictures out of their car windows, they drive up costs and walk around in public places with nothing but their sunburns. But I have to admit, I kind of like 'em. As individuals, that is. I love chatting with the relaxed tourist parents at the beach park as our sandy toddlers chase or ignore each other-- like the grandpa from Minnesota with his grandson-- or the hip and happening parents from Seattle with their adopted Chinese daughter and expensive camera (and no doubt highly frequented blog). But my favorite thing-- and this is a confession-- is being helpful. My pulse quickens when a goofy red chevy convertible with four adults in hats and sunglasses slows down next to me on my walk and rolls down the window. Yes, I can tell you exactly how to get to the airport! The other day I was walking home from the grocery store and overheard a young sunbur...

Today Rosie and I went to our favorite beach. I buckled her in, drove less than a mile from our house through wide open pastures in the shadow of green cliffs, through a tunnel of Rainbow Shower Trees (their real name), and voila, we're at the beach: blue skies, shading palm trees, golden sand and pounding surf on a hot December afternoon. There was a huge storm last night-- the rain whipped our metal roof and the lightening lit the room. Our dirt road washed away by morning, and some new rocks are poking up through, jostling the car as I drive over them. And the ocean was still frenzied-- 10 and 15 foot waves breaking right on top of each other, pushing up over the lava rocks, and hiss-foaming long up the beach. Even the little protected baby lagoon water was wobbling with the heavy waves pounding over the break-- round little waveletts rolling quickly up the sand. We played on the playground. There were triplet boys, about 7, in matching khaki hats and long-sleeved rash guards (...

North of Kona, lava rock stretches like a crumpled black cloth for 60 miles. It's so open and endless it's dizzying-- like the long empty drive through Nevada or the Salt Flats. Acacia trees, thorny kiawe scrub, and patches of yellow grass grow crackling and dry on the older lava flows. Interrupting the black savannah, down by the beach, the resorts gleam in smooth green golf-grass oases. Are they good or bad? On the good side, sure, lots of locals work there-- I have friends who go down there, watering and trimming the lawns, distributing the towels, printing the paychecks, vacuuming, patrolling the grounds, clearing the buffet plates, watching the pool. Tourists come to the island to stay at these places and be spoiled and entertained and tanned and soothed-- and along the way they rent cars, eat dinner, buy souvenirs from other places where other local people work. So the tourist economy is doing a little trickling: tourists come, spend money, your boss makes money, so you g...

Yesterday I was up for an adventure-- something new. I flipped through my handy-dandy Lonely Planet Big Island Guide book for inspiration and found an enticing-sounding entry about A-bay at the Waikoloa resort. Showers, white sands, mellow surf, the opportunity to trespass at the fancy hotels? Sounds good. So I packed baby in the car (she chanted, "Beach! Beach!" the whole way) and made for the coast. We get to Waikoloa and I'm driving along-- past the King's shops and the Queen's shops, past golf courses and over-watered manicured golf lawns. I try squinting at the microscopic map in the Lonely Planet book but it's no help pointing me which windy road to follow to get to A-bay. Finally I'm nearly at the Hilton (think indoor canals, trains, massive marble statuary) and I see a tiny sign "Public Shoreline Access Parking." The law in Hawaii guarantees that all beaches are public access. So private landowners have to provide some kind of access corr...

So what is there to do in Kohala, the little nubby tip of the Big Island? First, drive up the mountain road listening to the Lilo and Stitch Soundtrack-- Kamehameha Children's chorus and Elvis, baby. Admire the burly cattle in the green pastures, the moth-eaten cactuses, the spindly iron-wood trees, and the odd over-wrought houses with stone lions in the driveways next to the ramshackle lean-tos. Drive down the hill to Hawi, past all the old plantation houses. They could be anywhere-- Waikapu, Maui, or Lihue, Kauai-- tight orderly little gardens of Ti leaves and potted orchids, Japanese-influence high sloping roof, latticed crawlspaces. I can imagine the interiors by conjuring up my husband's grandma's house: the memorial Japanese dolls, the hand-quilted pillows and light quilts, the ironing board draped in ti leaves to weave into leis or wrap around rice balls for a beach picnic. Drive further into Hawi: pass scruffy dusty hippy hang-outs: canvas houses and outdoor kitchen...

This weekend we hopped on a plane and went to visit Kauai for a couple of days. Yes, the airfare was outrageous--I bought a roundtrip from SF to NYC for less a couple of years ago-- but it was an adventure. And besides, it was the patriotic thing to do-- spending a bit of our economic stimulus money on a mini vacation (which doubled as a chance for a job interview). And after four days on the Garden Isle, I went home with this profound impression: All of the Islands are different from each other. The Big Island is big. Kauai, Oahu, and Maui are small. We have vog, they have clear blue skies. They are green and verdant jungles, we are yellow rangeland plains. They have a lot of good food, we have a little bit of good food, spread few and far across the island. And maybe I'm nuts, but everyone was very friendly on Kauai. I kept nudging my husband and saying, "am I nuts or is everybody friendly on Kauai?" The museum lady let us in for free, the shopkeeper pinched baby's ...

For ten years, George Kahumoku Jr. has been hosting a Hawaiian music camp on Maui. He invites famous slack key and ukulele players to teach a group of enamored haole mainlanders to play (and make leis and chant and sing in Hawaiian), while feeding them gussied up Hawaiian fare at the open aired Mauian hotel in Napili. For a week they get to be immersed in Aloha, Ohana, Mana, and Kaukau, playing Hawaiian music by starlight while the waves crash on the beach. It's overwhelmingly picturesque. I got to go a while ago because of a gracious research grant. So while everyone else were cultural tourists, I felt like an observer, on a mission to parse this odd experience. On the first day of the camp I drove up through the windy cliff-roads to George Kahumoku’s beautiful big house and great garden and taro-patch. George opened the gate and set us all to work. He’s a big Hawaiian guy- very busy all day—and his wife is a skinny haole lady, Nancy. She was the ticking clock that kept everybody ...

Tourists are interesting to observe. A great deal of time is spent posing and negotiating pictures—I half observed one struggle—a family with several kids posed for the grandpa’s camera- the 8 year old boy’s shirt was rumpled. The grandmother said, bafflinglingly, “the orange stripe is crooked! Do you want everyone to see you like that Andrew? Do you want me to tell everyone?” So then he had his arm over his face for the rest of the poses, with mother saying his name like a sneeze over and over, grandfather growling, grandmother whining and threatening. Poor kid, what’s the point of taking pictures? To preserve the joys of childhood? Tourists, on the whole, seem pretty friendly. Three year old boys must throw rocks over cliffs, their mothers must scold them. They are cheerful and trusting with each other—swapping cameras, flirting with each other’s children. They are gruff and overly buoyant with the locals—crazy young shirtless brown guys jumping off of the bridge into a rocky river 3...

The timeshare guy winked at all us poolside tourists and chuckled into his karaoke microphone--"Don't forget to ask for kamaʻāina discounts!" For what? "Local discounts" growled my husband. The tourists were happy to hear about a sneaky way to "stick it to the man" in Hawaii, even though most of them probably immediately forgot how to pronounce the words and certainly no vendor would be hoodwinked by a sunburned tourist in white shorts and a new aloha shirt. But still. These discounts are in place to mediate some of the puffed-up prices, an apologetic shrug to locals for having to put up with the general ransacking of Hawaiian culture and landscape. The discounts at hotels and shops and restaurants are the kind of gentle slacking of the rules and prices that folks will give their cousin, their auntie, their cousin's auntie, and her good friend-- but made official. Tourists asking for it makes vendors check IDs and generally takes the friendly loca...