While there, I experienced things that were beyond all right reckoning. Chief of all absurdities were the tourists (of which I was one) who seemed to wander about, devoid of observable purpose, zombie-like, and in need of scripted activities or tours to keep their minds occupied. They seemed ill at ease near the jungle, or on the seashore, or in any of the locals’ shops. Many of them engaged in behaviors that seemed to placate by way of familiarity: eating dairy ice cream in a locale where shave ice was the preferred chilled treat, obscuring authentic food trucks in favor of more outlandishly priced “gourmet” restaurants, or lounging (fretfully) at the beach where they seemed to wholly misunderstand the concepts of “tropical” and “beach”. It was odd to see - stressed biotic computers who’d purchased an expensive voyage to a place that was purported to be relaxing yet failing to evidence proof of the island’s endemic soothing effects. Despite their unease, I felt certain that, if asked, most would have quailed at the suggestion of overindulgence in pharmacological venues to calm their nerves.
As I said, odd.
Aboard the island I felt quite the foreigner for even being alive and imposing my consciousness on that place. The sham feeling persisted, was highlighted even, during interactions with the locals. The hotel lobby had a bar in which I spent some time (natch) and in that bar was a nice barkeep named Chris whose skin was the color of coconut shells. The ones available in supermarkets, not right off the tree. You know, the ones that fall on cartoon characters’ domes. In another part of the country, I’d have considered him Latino, but on the island I made him to be Native Hawai’ian (Hawai’ian Native?). He was good at his job, a conversationalist, impeccable drink maker, and possessed of the most important quality for a barkeep – knowing when to hold peace and let patrons mull the world.
Towards the last night I was there, I engaged with Chris over gins and tonics, and we discussed the nature of the island and how it’s changed. Chris said that until about 10 years ago (sweet Jesus that was 2006) the island had been a sleepy idyll, eschewed by many for the pleasures of Maui. Then, development took off and left the infrastructure behind. We talked of economics, and our children, and our histories, and how he’d been fortunate enough to buy a house and keep it. We chatted for a while, as other patrons came for “to go” Mai-Tais in plastic, lidded cups, and at the end of my rationed, public drinking time, he stood me two of my G&Ts and wished me a good trip home.
Outside of my already established interpersonal relationships, it was the most human interaction I experienced on the island.
At the resort, I continually felt the weight of what seemed to be the entire simulation universe. This feeling was magnified, especially when reflected in the constant undulations of the resort’s pool’s surface. I kept thinking that the waves and their propagation could explain something about the deeper nature of the physical world and were somehow analogous to the early mysteries of cosmology that resulted in the formation of the observable space around us. The phrase “localized space-time distortions” (as if I know fuck all about quantum anything) sounded nice and spooky, so I went with that and felt quite clever.
As I sat, drinking, and baking in the sun, and watching K figure out how to operate a snorkel we'd found in a bag on another pool deck (the bag was marked as being free to a good home), this line of thinking persisted. Despite the mental energy I was devoting to a topic I'd never understand and much like my vacation on the island, these thoughts too were shams, and only existed in my fallible brain because I’ve taken to ingesting things and watching way out of my depth lectures on YouTube as a form of entertainment after my small family goes to bed without me.
You could think it strange, but it's a good way to fill the time when you're alone and trying not to think about your impending death.
While we vacationed in our sham paradise, my friend, D, had an anniversary service for his son, whose funeral mass I attended. Since that heartache, he'd erected a memorial bench on a trail in Eagle River and the event was a trek out to the bench to honor the memory of one gone too soon. I'd been invited to go, via Facebook, but had to decline owing to the Kaua'i trip. In the aftermath of the service, when photo evidence appeared online, I studied the image in the suite where we were incomprehensibly staying. There, in the breeze of the tropic afternoon, was a snow-bracketed and candle-lined bench and I regretted, wholly, not being able to be there for him, or to light a Marian or St. Jude (one of my favorite saints) candle, or to pray in silence with those gathered at the site. My absence from something so concrete as the memorial shifted my perceptions of the island's irrealism into previously unattained levels and the desperate wish to return home seized me with fury.
When the trip was over and we safely arrived in Alaska, a visit to the mailbox found a package containing a Christmas present from D (a book about writers and drinking, obvi) with a personalized encouragement handwritten on the title page. Later, I sent a thank you email expressing my inability to return such a thoughtful gift and received such a kind response that it made me wonder how I'd been so fortunate to know, much less befriend, such a man. His simple act of continuing to exist seemed a massive refutation of all the vacation's apparent falsehoods, a grounding, a vast, calming effect in a world where air travel and resorts and spa visits and lu'aus and shell leis fill our collective brains as something to be sought after and procured, all while abhorring the question of why those such things are desired in the first place.
{A beautiful, warped, and incomplete family, smiling in a place beyond comprehension.}
