Hawaii Journal: 2007 part 6

We flew back to Honolulu for our one night of pampering at the Moana Surfrider before returning to Newark. Our room was on a high floor, giving us a perfect view of the hundreds of surfers in the water outside the hotel.

When we arrived at the Surfrider, two young women in muu muus greeted us. One gave us a cup of real guava juice, not guava punch, which tastes like .. well, never mind, and the other placed a lei around my neck (Terry’s was of black beads). I was stunned by the heady fragrance of the pungent yellow plumeria. I got the point of leis. They feel like the smoothest velvet and smell like paradise, lying with a pleasant, evenly distributed weight around the neck. I’m going to pack mine and dry the flowers when I get home to see if I can preserve this fragrance, which climbs into your hair, your skin, your mouth, your nose.

“Partly cloudy, chance of showers” is the weather forecast every day. It is 6:45 am., the sun is shining, and the surfers are out. The trade winds are not blowing, so the surf is up on the south side of the island. The surfers lie in wait far offshore (at least it’s far if you are swimming), a few popping up to catch the waves of their choice. Some of them ride the waves laterally as they break almost into shore, others wipe out as soon as they mount their boards. There is a separate world out there, fun, dangerous at times, pleasant, congenial, physically demanding. They probably have their own means of eating and drinking on their boards, they spend so much time there. The aquatic version of a golf cart gave a ride back to shore to one of them. They take water safety seriously in Hawaii, as 20 or so people drown here every year.

I plan to go for a morning swim as soon as I finish writing this. I swam a long time yesterday, and never have had so much fun in the water. One can swim in Hawaii’s sea, and I lapped the beach 6 or 7 times. The water is powerful, playing with you, lifting you up, twisting you a little, crashing here and there. There was a sense of play stronger than any other place I have swum and I was exhilarated. We have asked for late checkout as our flight isn’t until 9:00 tonight, and I plan to swim as many times as I can.

I experimented by swimming once before and once after a mai tai. The swims proved nothing, as they were pretty much the same, but it was fun noting sensations with and without alcohol. I indulged once in a tropical drink, seated in a beach chair watching the sea. Terry had a margarita with some exotic red stuff around the rim—it had cayenne and sugar in it, I think, and some other tasty, but Hawaiian additions.

The Surfrider is filled with Japanese. A large Japanese group ate next to us last night, laughing a lot, the women mainly silent. I felt I had a glimpse into Japanese family life. There was the nerdy one, the misfit 21 year old with his spikey hairdo, sitting glum and disapproving at the far end of the table, the hip middle-aged man, with a white mesh shirt over a t shirt of another color, a baseball cap on sideways, the talkative storytelling woman, whose words always brought laughter, the woman sitting prim and silent most of the meal, smiling at the jokes – like a family anywhere, I suppose. Though I couldn’t understand the language, I had the impression that no serious subjects were touched upon – no common remembrances, or plan making, or heaven forbid, politics.

My opinion of Hawaiian music has changed somewhat – not that I would buy any CD’s of it to take home, but sitting outside on a terrace having a lovely dinner, watching the light catch the breaking waves, it sounds lovely in the background, especially with a singer like the one featured in the group at The Surfrider, a pure, high soprano, melting one note into the next as sweetly as you could possibly sing.

As we left the hotel a Japanese bride and groom arrived in a stretch limousine. She was petite, with creamy white skin and a pretty face. She looked like exploding cotton candy. The groom stood by in his silver tails looking concerned and awestruck, afraid to interfere, as two women bustled around the poof of a bride, gathering up great billows of fluff in their arms.

We’re in for a nine hour plane ride, but they always turn out to be not quite as bad as one thinks. It’s time to get home and get on with reality. It intrigues me to see how, with masses of people sometimes crushed together, as in an airport, or simply coexisting, as in a hotel, they get along. Driving along the roads in the north of Kaua’i, with their one-lane bridges, calls for a high degree of cooperation, yet drivers instinctively fall into the protocols, even if they have never been here before. At the airport there is tolerance for the other guy. The surfers are working in with each other, as they crowd behind the waves. The animal instincts which preserve us are calculating and projecting beneath our consciousness, making it possible for great numbers of people to slide frictionless past each other to their destinations, without spoken rules, and without a common language. Occasionally there is an asshole, but it seems to me that everyone else forms a block of solidarity when that happens, oddly making the bonds among those willing to cooperate even stronger. Traveling is a pain in the neck, but has gone as smoothly as one could ever expect for us.

Thoughts are turning to home. What do I have to do tomorrow? There is a six-hour time difference, so I will be a little peculiar for a while.