On the weekend before the hurricanes there weren’t many signs. We went south, down the coast, leaving early, even as the mists cleared the mountains, trying to avoid the Saturday Morning Snipes that seem to live at our house at that time.
Eliot still kept some sass though.
Despite our early morning, we hit Waimanalo right as a crowd of people gathered; perhaps it was an ohana grilling, or a sports event held right beside the water, or a kayak competition. But the beach and parking lots were packed, and we retreated a bit north again, landing at a beach next to a prominent homeless community, walking down to the water next to a man in a sleeping bag, his arms outstretched and so still that I worried that he might be dead. (He wasn’t.)
On the Saturday before the hurricanes, the sun slanted off the sand, springing back into our eyes and highlighting the water droplets, and the surf was not so high we could not handle it.
So much brightness.
On a morning before the hurricanes, after four weeks of hitting the beach right as it started to rain, the only water was the waves, and the tears from Eliot when Joe took Lincoln out into the deeper water and he got left behind. And, in the days before the miles long ocean storm, there were barely enough waves to dislodge him from my lap when we sat a little close and the tide turned.
Ocean flying.
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On the night as the hurricane gathered itself near our island, I drive up the North Shore as fast as the wind swept across miles of dark water. In some places people with lawn chairs had gathered, right at the steep edge of the road, where sometimes the springing water drops jumped up past the rocks onto their out turned faces and their chairs.
I followed a car that somehow, even with the flashing reminders of at least twenty different cars, kept its lights off the whole way up, until it pulled off with one of the clusters of cars. A man got his lawn chair out of the car and sat with the others who had gathered with their drinks and chairs, waiting and watching.
The edge of the road.
The night that the hurricane starting hitting the Big Island, I pulled off the road, under the coming hurricane, finding my way down on some carefully balanced rocks and felt the wind whipping through my hair, drying up my eyes, and trying every once in a while to knock me off balance.
Somewhere in the clouds around the hurricane, far off in the Pacific, the long dark fingers had gathered up some cold salt water and some wind, and compressed it all together in a fist, and was starting to throw it all back out again, somewhere where it did not belong.
Sometimes even these beginning winds would rock the incongruent orange cones, the ones put out to warn the swift drivers that in this place, this close to the water, the waves might be just enough to keep them there.
In the dark before the hurricane, I bent forward to take a picture, and dropped my keys instead, suddenly straightening back up when I heard the clatter, and sure they had fallen the ten feet down through the cracks to the gathering waves below.
But, in an amazing victory, they had fallen right within my reach, and I did not have to call Joe to wake up the dismayed boys and come rescue me from an occasionally washed over highway.
So to celebrate it I got a McFlurry on the way home. Oreo, obviously.
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