It is August, and August marks two years since we moved to Hawaii. Lincoln was 14 months, barely walking, and I was busy throwing up every breakfast, lunch and dinner in our hotel bathroom. We were experiencing the whiplash culture shock that happens every time we go from quiet, ultra polite, always focused on appearances Japan, back to America. I had forgotten America’s individualism while living in community focused Japan. We were surprised at big, loud trucks, and maids that carried on conversations while they worked.
We were reeling, trying to find a house and car and phones and getting the World’s Worst Sleeper adjusted to a 19 hour time difference, trying to find some food that I could keep down in a place full of new foods. Joe was starting a new job and I was curled up in a corner on the bed.
After that horrible first two months at the base hotel, we don’t come to base much now, really. Joe comes for work, but the boys and I go other places. We go to Lanikai and Honolulu and Waimanalo. If we stay on base, like we did those first few months, it is easy to forget where we actually live. All bases have the same low, beige buildings, constant police cars, and so many people in uniform that I always look twice (or three times) before greeting someone. I know, despite never having met people that I see, that they too are far away from family and struggling with the six dollars a gallon for milk.
And if these bases are that distant from Hawaii today, it is even easier to forget how distant they are from the ancient Hawaiians! The buildings and cars and runways are almost enough to cover how this land was used in the past; as a place for the Hawaiian royalty, with its fish ponds and its small remaining volcano, surrounded on one side by the Bay, and the open Pacific on the other.
Yesterday, on a rainy and blue day, Joe took us to a beach he runs past every day at lunch. It was sandy and rocky and filled with fisherman and their poles and buckets of small trapped fish.
And somewhere in the rain, amid the mist, the past seemed a little closer than it usually does, as if from out of the sea fog a group of fisherman would triumphantly appear over the horizon with their wooden boats.
On these sorts of days, I can almost see them on these shores. The military can surround palm trees with institutionalized housing, and cover the ancient volcanic peninsula with second hand, falling apart cars, it can put a running trail through the royalty’s ancient fish ponds, but here, on the edges of the water, it all falls away.
Here lie the black rocks that were once hot, flaming lava, hardening once it reached the cool waves, now in sharp, angular shapes from the thousands of years of waves hitting it. And beyond us lie the Ko’olau Mountains, where yesterday the rain brushed the tops of them with a soft caress, moving on towards us.
The boys flinch a bit at the cold rain, but just run into the waves instead of leaving.
Lincoln and I walk down to the fisherman, past the fisherman, to the little pools and waterfalls created by the crashing waves. “It’s like a little river, Mom!” he says, pointing to how the big waves cover the whole rock plateau and then move up the beach in small gashes.
The rain means the people stay away, missing the visions and the mist, and it is just us and the fisherman, in the waves, in the rain, in the same places where men and women have stood before, staring out past the breaking waves, wondering what is past the horizon or waiting for someone to come back.
Here, the ocean always leads us away from the shore, away from the stores and the two gas stations and the always busy Subway and the small playgrounds for small children. None of those things matter here, in the shadow of the mountains and in the spraying of the waves.
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