Tropical Storms are for Hiking

One of the things that happens when you move from Okinawa to Hawaii is that, in Hawaii, people keep trying to get you concerned about Hawaiian hurricanes and you can’t ever take them seriously and so they’re offended and then you lose friends.

Ok, I’m exaggerating a slight bit. What actually happens is I can’t take a Category 1 hurricane seriously, and I especially can’t take a tropical storm seriously…until I remember that in Okinawa all the houses are concrete blocks with metal shutters over the windows, and here they are slats of wood with a few shingles on top. That’s when I start to wonder if I should be more concerned.

All of this was playing out in my head yesterday, as it looked like we were going to have to spend yet another weekend entirely inside, which makes my brain start to melt and my eyes forget how to see long distances and I forget how to cook food because I know someone out there in the world is making better food IF ONLY I COULD GET THERE but I am stuck inside, because the number of places and things you can do in Hawaii in the rain are practically zero. Unless you like to take toddlers on paddle boards in the rain, toddlers who have never even known an ounce of cold weather and who wake up sad crying in the middle of the night when the overnight temp sinks to 70 degrees.

And being stuck inside all weekend makes the boys start to panic about the fact that they have already dumped out all their toys four different times today, and there are no new toys, and they start to bring all their outside behavior inside, like their running around in manic circles and screaming at important things like a dropped ice cube, the fact that they can’t share two identical dump trucks, and that they’ve played with Mom and Dad for A WHOLE DAY NOW and the only game left is to play Step On The Dog.

We tried to Skype family to distract the boys but only succeeded in making the boys worse and that distracted the adults, because who really can concentrate on deep family discussions when boys are bouncing on the couch like howler monkeys fighting over the last banana?

And I started to sink further into the pit of Not Enough Adventure Despair (it’s a real disease!) and it started pouring harder outside and the temperament on the inside of our house didn’t look much calmer and it was still four hours until bedtime when Joe realized how dire the situation was. He informed the general disgruntled public that he didn’t care what we were going to do or where we were going but we were not staying in that house for even one second longer.

So we practically threw everything we thought we might need in the car, and headed through the tunnels on the H3 in the pouring rain hoping that once we magically passed the mountains the rain would stop, as it often does.

Not yesterday, of course. But Joe remembered a trail he had seen and somehow we ended up in Aeia, heading up the mountains of course, curving around higher and higher, the rain only getting stronger the closer we got to the clouds.

We prepared Lincoln for the rain and talked it up as an adventure and geared with boots and put together the water proof carrier for Eliot, and we started off.

And we tromped down the trail, quickly plastered in mud and rain, and it was something new, and it was outside, and we remembered that the rain can obscure the mountains and the entirety of Kaneohe Bay. But also, on some magical days, it can obscure our boredom, our irritability. And not even that, but it can wash it all away.

So this is to all the people who’ve decided they simply can’t stay where they are for one second longer, even if it’s raining outside. Whatever kind of rain that is, I get you. Staying still is harder then moving on sometimes.

Let’s relegate that boredom, fear, and monotony down to the mud with the puddles, and return exhausted but made new. Let’s move on and move out, because sometimes the very thing that keeps us trapped is what ends up washing us clean.