Hawaiian Islands-Rediscovering Life on Oahu

The view is always the same. From nowhere, several indistinct green land masses rise up from the ocean, alone for hundreds of miles in every direction. As you get closer, they loom larger, and soon expose familiar lines of white wash extending as far as the eye can see, gliding into shore with a relentless persistence. The waves butt up against a narrow beach separating indistinct buildings which represent hotels, industrial plants, warehouses and residential areas. A person flying to Hawaii for the first time might be confused by the dense development. From the air it seems to cover every surface except the water. But this is O’ahu, a dichotomy of the Hawaiian Islands, both beautiful and heavily populated at the same time. For many years, before kids, it was our beloved home, complete with warm tropical waters and lush vibrant greenery. We got to experience the beauty of this island despite full-time work and adult obligations and on this trip we wanted to remember what had made us fall in love with it in the first place.

The Dream

As a father of two and a half (previous Mom gets the other half) I had long fantasized about returning to a life of adventures and stunning photography, wiling away the off-work hours diving into the surf, hiking the decadent beauty of yet another forest or cliff trail or simply lounging on the beach. For a long time, it was nothing but a fantasy. Hawaii is many things, but it is not cheap to get to with a family of four. Even if we decided to pitch a tent and barbecue hot dogs on a grill near the beach everyday (not that we would, there is way too much fresh fish available there,) ticket prices still average $500-600 dollars during most of the year. We would be shelling out close to $3,000 just to arrive at the Honolulu airport. The urge to return was strong, though, and with a little searching we discovered tickets for about $300 each, round trip. At those prices, the kids could miss a few days of school. Granted, lodging would still be a hefty chunk of cash no matter how you added it up, but after asking around, we discovered we had friends with timeshares and employee benefits. More bargains.

A month later, our gang of four, which included myself, my wife Lynn, and our two kids Zachariah (7) and Heather (5,) sat on a shuttle bus headed for the airport terminal, giggling with excitement. In two hours we were embarking on a plane to Hawaii after an extended hiatus of almost seven years. Despite the rampant tourism this paradise encourages, I had no doubt we could still experience the hidden Hawaii that opens up when you become a part of the everyday life there. Not long after we arrived, we discovered it would be easier than we thought.

Returning Home

After a day of recuperation in our two bedroom timeshare on the 29^th floor of the Hilton Hawaiian hotel, we woke the next morning and stuffed ourselves into our compact Acura rental. We were heading out to the North Shore to catch up with Lynn’s longtime friend Lana Kurt. Lana and my wife Lynn go so far back it was before us, and from what she tells me, those were wild times. Now settled with three kids and a husband of her own, she had invited us out to her beach house for the day.

Although Lana and Lynn hadn't seen each other in seventeen years, she opened their home to our family, which included my wife’s cousin Mary and her three kids, as if no time had passed. And what a home. The first time we wandered into the Kurt's backyard time seemed to suspend itself. The entry through the side gate opened onto a halting view of the light green and blue Pacific Ocean, so close it looked dangerous. We made our way in and strolled down a long open hall lined with sliding glass doors on either side. One side of doors served to close off the bedrooms while the other provided protection from the sometimes unruly expanse of endless raw turquoise water, which frequently came up and kissed the other side of their break wall.

Robinson Crusoe's Hideout

The backyard was a kid's dream. Two giant palms stood in the middle of the short grass lawn. Tom, Lana's husband, had bolted a wooden ladder between the two and hung a plank swing. "I actually built it for adults, not the kids. It's so you can sit there and enjoy the view." Tom, the co-owner of a build/design firm with Lana, had also hung a climbing rope with fat knots every couple of feet from the side of one of the palms, and between two smaller palms they had slung a hammock.

Then of course, was the unobstructed view, so close you could touch it. Or when the seas got too rough, so close you had to hide from it. There were no boats out, no surfers and unlike most of Hawaii, only sporadic patches of reef until about half a mile out. Places like this were known for sightings of the Hawaiian sea turtle, or Honu. "Turtles?" Tom replied when I brought it up. "Yeah, we have tons of them. We find them when we go diving out by that reef (the one half a mile out.) He adds with a smile, "sometimes too many. It gets a little scary." Although we didn't get out to the reef , we did get a brief visit on the beach that day. The brownish-amber shell of a sea turtle surfaced nearby where the kids were playing in the waves. The prehistoric creature held their attention until it finally sank below the waves again and disappeared. I surveyed the empty beach, the distant waves breaking on the reef, the dense jungle closing off the curving shoreline from further viewing. This place was otherworldly, and would seem deserted if I didn’t know better. Aside from the sound of kids playing in the waves and in the sand, there was only a blanket of heavy silence.

Later we sat around the long narrow table in the galley style kitchen, open like all the other rooms to the magnificent views and fresh ocean air, Tom and I prepped dinner and served up pupus. We poured fresh sangria into vast wine goblets while the ten kids from the combined families danced in at sporadic intervals to snack on the food before heading back out to the yard. We peeled shrimp, chopped peppers, onions and sirloin steak for kebabs we would soon grill over glowing coals.

On the table in front of us were three bowls of fresh ahi and tako poke. The fresh raw fish chopped up and seasoned with soy, scallions, garlic and a variety of other ingredients, is an island staple, Hawaiian comfort food. It is also fairly inexpensive to make. Local supermarkets carry packages of fresh ahi or ready made poke for about half to a third of what you would pay in a restaurant.

Get Lost in Hawaii, and Stay

I headed out to tend the coals on a simple Weber grill, and Tom soon came out and handed me a large tray of raw oysters in the shell, another inexpensive delicacy easily found in Hawaii, "These are all yours bro." "No problem" I said. And it wasn't. I had a cold Stella Artois in my hand and in front of me, a gorgeous ocean palette to gaze upon. The coals would soon steam the soft meat inside these rough hand-sized shells to perfection. Any more of this hospitality and they may never get us to leave. It would be easy to simply drop anchor in Hawaii, and never leave too, even if it wasn't at this Robinson Crusoe getaway at the edge of an empty Hawaiian shoreline.

It is, in fact, how our hosts came to stay here. On his way to Northern California after being released from an Australian prison on previous travels, Tom tells me he slipped away, scared out of his wits, and started looking for work. Eventually he and his wife Lana started a successful business. After 20 plus years, he doesn't regret the decision, and considering his beautiful family and current digs over the Pacific, one can see why.

Lana has a similar story, although as a teenager it wasn't her choice to stay. Her parents came from Hong Kong to build a better life and never left. Lana, a green eyed mix of Chinese and English with pale skin, light amber colored hair and a lingering British accent did not come to love her new home until much later. Not knowing any better, her parents enrolled her in schools where the students had little tolerance for her foreign good looks. As she puts it in a brief reenactment of her original King's English, "I had my accent literally kicked out of me."

This aspect of Hawaii is one no travel brochure is ever going to post a warning about; namely the subtle and sometimes overt prejudice by some locals against Haoles, a word supposed to refer to foreigners, but meaning anyone with light skin color in everyday use. The flip side of this occasional prejudice in the islands, aside from the addicting drug of paradise itself, is the friendliness and generosity. Friends made here are often lifelong and akin to family, and in general people have a live and join my family attitude. Maybe this is why the volunteer castaway/runaway stories are so common. For some, the land, air and pace of life are just too intoxicating to leave.

Gazing out over the steaming oysters into an endless turquoise sea, I knew this was an idyllic Hawaii. We had lived here long enough to know that it wasn't always like this. People had real lives with real life problems no matter where in the world they lived. Yet even as these thoughts formed in my mind, I knew that wasn't exactly true. Wasn't it always like this before? Sure we had to work, but the atmosphere of the islands still permeated the air in everything we did. The turquoise blue water? At one point we lived within shouting distance of Kailua Beach, a picture perfect travel destination, complete with silky fine beach sand, if ever there was one. Our first location in O'ahu was a laborious 8 minute drive to any beach from Waikiki to Diamond Head. The furthest we ever lived from the ocean? A transcontinental 5 miles, and that apartment was a two minute walk to the untouched Maunawili Falls trailhead.

I don't know what our chances are of finding an affordable beachside property on the North Shore of Hawaii, but it isn't necessary to be on top of the ocean to be inundated with the warmth of the Aloha spirit. Years after we had left, spawned kids and bought our first place, this tangible spirit of the people and land in Hawaii still ran through our blood.

There were about 16 of us at the Kurt's house that day, and as I brought in the last tray of oysters and set them on the table, the women, life time friends who hadn't seen each other in decades, were laughing with abandon about their past experiences and catching up on their present lives. Tom and I toasted our water glasses and sat down with them, while Lynn's cousin Mary grabbed her camera and jumped up to snap some pictures. In the warm light of the kitchen, with the sun setting on the ocean outside, those photos captured the deep joy that life here can evoke. We left Lana and Tom's house that night remembering why we had become so attached to our lives here. Hawaii has a way of turning friends into an extended Ohana, or family; and the land has a way of getting into your soul.

We had made it back to O'ahu and here, on an empty Hawaiian beach fronted by deep, calm blue waters, we had rediscovered our love of this place. As we drove away that night, we took a deep breath of the richly scented air and smiled. O’ahu was indeed our true home.