A settlement rises out of the lava rocks and around the lagoon. Voices and wind rustle through the coconut trees. She is floating on the waves, far out at sea. There is a distant rumbling. Water whips up around her, lashing her body. A strong current drags her out, sends her skimming back at rocket speed, seaweed smashing into her face, her shell. She is reeling on the wind, over the sea, high above the land. The ocean is on her tail, flying with her through the air. She exalts in its freedom, flings her small fins outward and screams.

“There, there, Cowrie. Auatu. Mere is here. The wave won’t drown you. Besides, there are no coconut trees in Aotearoa. It’s in your imagination. You are a strong swimmer. You can enter back into the wave. It does not have to eat you up.”

A dash of sand hits Cowrie’s face as children run by and she sits up, wondering why her recurring childhood nightmare has followed her to the shores of Punalu‘u, Hawai‘i.

Cowrie touches the coconut etching twinned to the bone hei matau Mere gave her before leaving home. She remembers fingering its soft edges as a child and dreaming of a woman who could live in the sea protected by her dark brown shell, a woman who would skim the waves to shore and dive back through them to the waiting ocean. But sometimes the dreams would turn to nightmares. Mere would always be there to comfort her.

She digs her toes into the hot, black sand of Punalu‘u Beach beside an oval lagoon fringed by coconut trees and a thatched hut housing local artifacts. Cowrie has not been inside yet. At the far end of the beach, the remains of a stone heiau or temple which she’d explored earlier. Ahead, the glistening calm ocean. In the distance, a line of people streaming in from a tourist bus to the thatched hut behind the lagoon. She places her towel and water bottle in her pack and begins walking up towards the village at Pahala.

Crowds file into the small museum to see the mural painted by Herb Kawainui Kane. It features Punalu‘u as it might have been two centuries earlier when the beach housed a village of thatched huts. Women prepare food under the shade of the trees while men work on the canoes. At the far end of the beach a heiau, Kane‘ele’ele, rises up out of the sea-spray like a vision. The mural is painted on a magnificent curved wall, as long as an ancient canoe, as high as a coconut tree, and reinforced against earthquakes.

The guide explains that the painting depicts Punalu‘u Beach village and heiau which was destroyed by a tsunami in 1868. Later, a twenty-foot wave rose up over the beach crashing down upon the museum they stand in now, destroying everything and pushing mud knee high up the wall. But the mural, which extends to floor level, was completely untouched. A tourist asks how this can be so. The guide shakes his head and says, “It is protected.” He does not tell how his grandmother had seen a giant sea turtle with the head of a woman at the peak of the wave as it surged upwards. How the turtle had dived back into the wave and remained, far out at sea, looking over the beach protectively until the storm was over.