Island Style
Island Style
Suck It Up & Get Back in the Water
Beach Lessons From My Father
- As you’re packing the cooler, remember a little too much is the perfect amount. The coldest drinks are going to be at the bottom. The beer goes in first.
- Carry meat tenderizer in your beach bag for jelly fish stings. Pat stings with wet sand; don’t rub. Suck it up and get back in the water.
- If you’re caught in a rip current, don’t fight it. Relax. Slowly work your way across the current, usually parallel to the shore until you’re free. Once out, if you continue to swim a little farther parallel, there’s a good chance you’ll hit another current that will take you back to shore. Do not tire yourself out by fighting the current or waving your arms or shouting. I’m busy. You can handle this.
- Ice cold water from the beach showers isn’t cold. Suck it up and get back in that water. No way you’re coming near the car like that.
After washing all the sand off, if you walk correctly—high, flat, carefully placed steps, no flicking your slippahs or dragging your towel, you can make it to the car sand-free. Otherwise you have to start all over.- At volleyball, old and treacherous beats young and enthusiastic every time.
- Spitting into a swim mask keeps it from fogging, but unless you’re a tourist or spear fishing you don’t need a mask. Just open your eyes. It’s good for you.
- If you don’t want someone to pee on your foot, watch out for wana when climbing around the tide pools.
- When the sun sets, get out of the water. Sharks come in and feed at dawn, dusk, and through the night, especially near harbors and the mouths of rivers. Better you don’t swim there. Everybody knows sharks prefer white meat, and you look way too haole to chance ‘em.
- Run to the big wave, not away.
- Nobody ever died from rolling up the beach no matter how much ocean and sand they coughed up. Told you to run to the big wave, not away. Now suck it up and get back in the water.
Pele Dreams
Living in the shadow of a volcano, there were many nights when I imagined lava pouring down Haleakala’s mountain sides and pooling in the hall outside my bedroom door. My sister and I even had a game where the floor was white-hot lava and you had to leap to safety chair by coffee table by couch.
Our mother was not amused.
Like Californians and earthquakes, mid-westerners and tornadoes, Big Island residents know that someday Pele’s fires will dance again, a ticking time bomb on a geological time scale of a minute or millennia.
Developers and bankers want to think a hundred years or more. My grandfather was in the insurance biz when developers in the 1970s and ’80s wanted to build on lava flows. He refused.
“There’s a reason it’s a lava flow, Lehua. Never build on a lava flow or a dry river bed.”
Probably some of the best advice he ever gave me.
Hawaiian Daze
I once heard a kumu hula say that he never left Hawai‘i because everywhere he stepped he was taking aloha with him. It’s something I’ve tried to keep in mind, particularly when the endless snow and ice outside my window starts to grind on me.
I’m not alone in wanting to beat the winter blues; it’s about this time every year that several local businesses sponsor Hawaiian Days celebrations with plastic leis from Taiwan and samba music from Brazil. When all the paper floral decorations, blow up coconut trees, and neon green cellophane grass skirts come out, so do the comments. People who know I’m from Hawai‘i say things like, “Bet you’re glad you have real seasons now; you can’t have Christmas without snow!” and “Try this Hawaiian taco—it has pineapple!”
People who really know me simply give me chocolate and space. With proper barefoot weather my sense of humor returns.
More than 25 years ago as a blushing bride I went to waaaay rural Montana to meet my new husband’s extended relatives, neighbors, and family friends. I was perched on the edge of a couch trying to keep all the names straight when one older guy, probably a WWII vet, said in all seriousness, “Hawaii? Huh. So, tell me, how do you like being in civilization?”
“I’ll let you know when I get back,” I snapped without missing a beat.
Granted, probably not the most endearing or tactful thing I could’ve said, but honest. I grew up in a suburb of Honolulu City, not a grass shack. Unlike him I’d lived with more people, tv channels, restaurants, and shopping malls around than cows.
One lone Montana cowboy’s misconceptions about Hawai‘i isn’t really noteworthy. But Hollywood’s version of Hawai‘i crops up even in places you’d think should know better.
Once when I was a musician in high school, a bunch of us were touring the US performing in places as diverse as Carnegie Hall and Disneyland. We were in a big New York City department store when one of my friends decided to purchase something.
The cashier was New York chic: stilettos, pencil skirt, lots of black eyeliner and red, red lips. To us she oozed sophistication.
“So where’re youse guys from?” she asked. Apparently, we didn’t blend.
“Hawai‘i,” my friend said.
“Cool. Don Ho, right? But just so you know, we don’t take your kind of money.”
“You mean Traveler’s cheques?”
“No foreign currency. American dollars only. It’s store policy.”
My friend blinked, took a $1 bill out of her wallet, ripped it in half, and tossed it on the counter. “Damn,” she said. “Our money’s no good here. Let’s go!” and stormed out.
It was awesome.
But not really aloha. I try to remember that when some clueless but well-intentioned babooze asks if I had movie theaters or in-door plumbing growing up.
After all, I don’t get big cowboy belt buckles, either.
The Power
Last night I had The Power.
At least that’s what we called it when we were kids. He who controlled the tv remote ruled the world as far as we were concerned.
During my childhood our father was King of the TV. Like most Maui families, we had just one, but it was a huge color 24 incher. On it we watched all four stations broadcasting from Honolulu—CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS—fine-tuning each with rabbit ears and something that looked like a socket plug we hooked precariously to various shelving brackets mounted on the wall behind it.
In the days before ubiquitous channel changers, there was a low-tech solution that followed a totem pole chain of command.
“Lehua, change the channel to 3,” proclaimed the King.
I nudged my younger sister. “Channel 3,” I said.
As she commando crawled to the set (Do. Not. Block. The. View. Ever. You are not a window or a door.), inwardly I sighed. Another Sunday afternoon spent watching Let’s Go Fishing, instead of the Million Dollar Movie Matinée. It didn’t matter which—any movie would do, even though I never figured out where the million dollars came in.
There was always an outside possibility that Dad would fall asleep. If that happened, we could chance ‘em by turning down the sound and carefully, slowly, easing the dial to another station. By the time I was 6 I’d perfected the art of soundlessly changing the channel to Olympic gold medalist levels.
The first real tv remote we got made a clicking sound each time you pushed the button. To this day, my Dad still calls the remote the clicker. You couldn’t enter a number; it just advanced through the channels each time you pressed the remote, eleven clicks to go all the way around. It was a fancy one because it also turned the tv off and on and the volume up and down. Really fancy ones had color control.
Possessing the clicker gave you The Power to decide what the rest of the minions could watch back in the days when if you missed a show, you missed it forever.
When I was a kid there were two exceptions to the forever rule: The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz. I remember both movies playing every year until I was 10 or so. I’m pretty sure I was married when I finally saw what happens after Maria sneaks out of the Von Trapp family mansion carrying her guitar and the Cowardly Lion runs from the Wizard and jumps through the window, the 8 pm mark in each movie. When you love stories there’s nothing worse than The King of the TV’s bedtime edict that had The Power’s ability to shut them off.
Last night, propped with pillows on the sofa, I had The Power. Kids and hubby were also sprawled in various positions and we were watching a Family Show, our name for the handful of programs we watch together. We never watch a show live anymore; we wait until it’s convenient.
In our house, The Power works a little bit differently; it’s less about what gets watched as it is about who’s responsibility it is to fast-forward through the commercials, pause the show when someone says pause because they want to make a comment, and turn the volume up or down.
Holding the mighty clicker like a scepter last night I realized The Power isn’t a power anymore. It’s a chore.
And no one wanted The Power because then they would have to give up their laptops, iPads, and smart phones and actually pay attention to the show, which didn’t matter because if they missed something they could always ask me to back it up or find it again online if it got erased. They could even watch the same recorded show at the same time in a different room.
I wasn’t Queen of the TV; I was TV House-Elf. I sighed. Another bubble popped!