Aloha in Difficult Places

I know that you guys never have any stress on weekends, but instead fall into family time kindly and gently. Because that’s always what we do. We never struggle with the weekend routine change or go into the weekend with totally different plans. (Typical weekend plans for all of us: Me: “Quick, let’s move to New Zealand and never come back!” Joe: “Let’s go somewhere close and familiar for 2 hours.” Lincoln: “Let’s watch Mighty Machines all day long!” Eliot: “Let’s find people to jump on for hours on end!”)

So after some gentle adjusting of everyone’s plans (read, everyone was pushed the very end of themselves and there was some yelling and a few tears) we agreed to stay on island but find somewhere new and save movies and jumping on people as important things to happen for later in the day. Of course, even after we’d agreed on a destination, we argued about WHICH WAY WE WERE GOING TO GO TO GET THERE because marriage is hard and only one person can drive the car. (I’m just being honest here, people. I know you guys never have these problems.)

And we ended up finding somewhere new but familiar to us that morning.

If we felt we had found the end of ourselves earlier in the morning, we just had practice for the rest of our day. If there is an end to Oahu, it is here, at Kaena Point, where the paved roads give way to dirt, and the dirt roads give way to paths. A quarter of a mile down the dirt path is where the tourists give way to the locals, many of whom come stocked for the day, and some of whom drive their old trucks around the gate and slowly through the deep potholes, as far as they can go, before they are forced to abandon them because of the leftover rocks from the shield volcano that push them too close to the cliffs.

It is here where Hawaii’s contrasts are so vivid, and they were very strong to us after the contrasts of morning when everyone wanted different things and no one woke up ready to handle the differences that always occur in family. The busyness of Ala Moana Mall, only 60 minutes away and the biggest outdoor mall in the world, is a far cry from the local men fishing for their dinners on the deserted beaches here. Its rocky beaches are as opposite to smooth Waikiki as anywhere in the world. Here, sometimes visitors come to park and look, but they rarely hike, and they rarely go down to its rocky beaches with its heavy waves. Here, cracked, dry dirt lays beside the biggest ocean in the world.

But here is where the big waves are, even more so then in Waimea Bay, where many of the surf competitions go (write up of that here). But this place does not draw the surfers like the Bay does, or the buildings and people like Waikiki does. The waves get even bigger here, but the rip tides are deadlier, the currents stronger, the jagged coral more plentiful.

But it is also here where the sea life is the fullest, where snorkelers can see the most, because the water that threatens death for people provides enough life for masses of coral and fish, even down to the Humuhumunukunukuapua, the reef trigger fish, the longest word in the Hawaiian language for one of the smaller fish.

Here, brown mountains rise on one side, lowering down to rough red dirt. And the vivid blues and greens of the ocean on the other side, filled with sea life, gives way to its hard black coral and deserted beaches. And we came with the boys, ran down the red dirt road, threw the white rocks into the blue, blue sea, and found the crabs carefully hiding in the rocks that could break us if we went too close.

 

It turns out that we’ve driven past the end of Oahu many times. We’ve just always passed it on our way to something more important, like Waimea Bay or Waikiki. And it turns out that the end of Oahu, with its hard waves and paths and beaches is both beautiful and difficult. It’s not really a great place for people who can’t trek the path or swim the waves and who fall easily on the sharp coral.

But what the boys really did was provide another contrast to this place of contrasts. Baby feet and hard sand, small legs on trails that are miles long, unlearned swimmers on the edges of the biggest waves on island.

But maybe the end of Oahu and the end of ourselves is where we really learn to live with each other, where we really learn to be careful of each other and where we really learn that where there are hard waves, the coral smooths out, eventually. Because maybe, eventually, that’s where the beauty comes from after all.