It’s a shorter flight from Hawaii to Tahiti than from Hawaii to LA — only twenty minutes shorter, but the difference felt profound, as if Tahiti could be more accessible than its exotic name suggested. Though closer to Hawaii in miles, French Polynesia seemed far more distant than LA.
French Polynesia couldn’t possibly have a Walmart or a Sam’s or a Costco, or gridlock or freeways wending to “affordable” neighborhoods nestled among power pylons, transformers and oil vats from the land of Gargantua.
Could it?
Tahiti did not surge forward but rather lingered in the imagination as an outpost of Paradise.
Tension with the French seemed nominal, a minor distraction along with crumbling roads and seeping gutters — minimal nuisances balanced by minimal development. No golf courses, no rush hour, no road rage, no franchise burgers or all-you-can-eat array of American conveniences made for a bygone ambience and set the tone, which was soft as life’s essential goodness in simple effusion. What’s that sound? It’s the relative silence of the unencumbered world, where growth is still vegetative. French Polynesia still glowed, a tropical oasis lush with nature, isolated from a world of strip mall clutter that failed to meet the demands of a population unconstrained in its propagation and needs.
Where Oceania was French-flavored with an abundance of fish in aquamarine shallows of dazzling clarity, Hawaii seemed removed from tropical simplicity, building out. Greed and power as common denominators strove to dumb down deeper than at any time since the wagons first circled — or since Captain Cook got banged on the head at Kealakekua.
Hawaii felt more like Santa Monica than Hawaii.
That was Ravid Rockulz’s assessment and idle fantasy. He’d never been to French Polynesia, but he’d read and heard about it and pictured it and sensed it. He imagined it sometimes first thing in the morning, if the tourists would allow. Most often they interrupted his reverie on the way out to the dive site.
Like the tourist who stood beside him at the rail as the bow plowed the seductive undulation, serenely cleaving water so clear it hinted at meaning below the surface. The tourist spoke lowly, about his friend in LA who had a nasty rash on his arm with oozing sores to the elbow. The doctor gave the friend one unguent after another to no avail, till the strongest ointment in the world proved ineffective. Finally, the doctor broke the news: Another line of employment would be necessary, because working for the circus, planting elephant suppositories up to the elbow, would keep the rash coming back. The friend in LA asked, “What? And give up showbiz?”
Ravid didn’t get it at first. Hardly a dim bulb, he couldn’t see why anyone would want to stick his arm up an elephant’s ass just to make a living in showbiz. No joke is funny once parsed, and this joke, too, failed to rouse a chuckle. Rather, it made Ravid wonder how the ironic truth underlying most humor actually comes to pass. At least he understood the point of the joke, relative to showbiz, money and festering lesions.
He didn’t understand LA, except that it illustrated volume exchange in an urban setting. That is, pressure increases by one atmosphere for every thirty-three feet of depth below sea level. Nitrogen and oxygen remain proportionate at depth, about 80:20 — but pressure at sixty-six feet is tripled, so content triples in volume too. The critical factor is that nitrogen absorbs into the bloodstream much faster than it can leave, and excess nitrogen causes the bends if ambient pressure decreases too quickly. The gas wants to escape through the joints, causing them to twist.
Just so, with world population doubling again, pathogens increase proportionately. Percentages remain stable, though raw numbers rise to toxic potential. Human behavior with no ambient constraint is similar to human joints infused with nitrogen: bent.
LA looked bent, and the rest of the world was squirming.
Ravid (rah-VEED) Rockulz was born when Basha Rivka was thirty and beyond hope for a decent match. Still single and already elderly by community standards, a willful, anxious woman perceived as a spinster with resourceful cleverness, she got by in her hometown, Haifa. And so she would have spent her days, till that no-goodnik came along. And what do you know? Schtupi mit no chupi is what. Never mind, he left, and good riddance — and don’t ever think this cloud was not silver-lined, because it was. Mother and son remained friends, confidants in life, seeking solace or venting frustration in each other, as mother and son will do, and then some. Hearing her son’s doubts and concerns on the general decline of the natural world, she recalled the early 1950s when she was a girl, when people lived far from each other and were glad to meet, unlike now. Now, shoulder-to-shoulder, they defend an annoying concept known as “personal space.” In that awkward phase of physical failure known as “elderly,” Basha Rivka shared her son’s misgivings on the world at large, and frankly she wouldn’t miss this mess — after 120 years, of course.
So they commiserated, mother and son, proceeding with her assurance that the next generations could better cope with their needs and consequences in a world of twelve billion people minus one when God chose to call her, which could well be tomorrow, or even tonight, or, God forbid, in the next minute or two. But she thought she had a decent shot at 2040, given her general health, genetic background, diet and exercise, which wasn’t so much but did include a walk every day to the market, so whatever she got would be fresh, even if overpriced by the heartless mumzerim who, God knows why, had the freshest produce.
Beyond that she was merely an old lady who frankly didn’t need to hear pessimism, misanthropy or other dark talk from her only begotten child, who was young and had his whole life ahead of him in a world surely destined to be his oyster.
“What kind of talk would you prefer, Mother?”
“You know, something else. Not the depression talk.”
“Do I sound depressed?”
“Don’t tell me how you sound. I have ears.”
Then she asked when he planned to move to LA, where he would meet his own kind, including a girl, who would give him a reason to live, and her too, with a family to remember him and his mother when they both were gone — after 120 years.
Ravid asked why anyone would want to live in LA. He asked the thin air, the clear blue sea and Basha Rivka, whose answer each time was a plea for a wife for him, grandchildren for her and a profession that would provide for his children and his old age — and maybe hers, too, because at his current income she’d need to be about 160 to cash in.
Ravid often wondered, How old is old age? He wondered as the 6:02 from Chicago passed overhead, and again for the 12:31 from Seattle, each flight delivering hundreds more tourists chilled to the bone, craving the balm and what still passed for the good life, even as development and traffic thickened. Because no matter how thoroughly and sadly overbuilt the beloved rock became, the question persisted: Compared to what?
Any flight arriving at any time from the other forty-nine states could deliver a few tourists who would choose him as their leader for probing the ocean depths. They would choose the boat that employed him, at any rate, and a dive leader makes a boat’s reputation, so the dive leader himself could be viewed as the object of choice. Besides competent guidance at ocean depth, a tourist or two may need assurance and guidance in the exploration of those other depths craved by the footloose tourist women.
Ravid’s smile reflected the bright, clear sky, because skill and success made him happy. No argument there, but Basha Rivka’s motherly concern was based on reason and a more practical path, with less of the clear-sky, blue-water razzmatazz and more of what a mensch must do to secure a future for his family — like wearing a suit and tie, for starters, and showing up at an office to make a contribution to society, for which he would be more reasonably paid than a water boy. So the suit wouldn’t be top-drawer goods from New York at the beginning. Never mind. Quality goods will come. You’ll see.
“You mean I should make more money?”
“And what’s wrong with more money?”
“Nothing, Mother. So why can’t you find someone to pay the best dive instructor in Hawaii more money?”
Then came the sigh and tongue clicking. Oh, he got the point, and they both knew it. What he didn’t get was the motivation a man needs if he’s to get ahead in the world. Was she not on his side? Did she enjoy the constant nudge? That was open for debate, though she had demonstrated, as only a mother can, her unequivocal love, no matter what. She had accepted her son’s resignation from the military on the grounds of opposing the military mentality — a monumental acceptance, given the place. “I don’t get it. You’re one of those objectors? One of those fellows with a conscience?”
“No. I don’t think I am. I think a conscientious objector doesn’t want to kill anyone. I don’t think I would mind killing someone, if I had to. I think the population should be thinned, but I don’t want to kill any thing, meaning anyone who is not human. The military is so stupid. Many stupid people have many stupid meetings where they say stupid things and come up with stupid plans for stupid behaviors that kill many things. I want out. I want no part of it.” Which was Ravid’s explanation at that time, to which his mother had the good sense to say nothing, not even a tongue click.
Notably, this resignation was not only from the military; it was from the Israeli military, that esteemed group of defenders held in awe and reverence, as if it were the Fertile Crescent’s very own boy band. These boys lived the credo, never again. Consensus on the credo was unanimous: Better to die fighting than in a fake shower with fifteen grams of black soap gassing the naked minions in preparation for the ovens. Oh, the score was known. The fans raved. Basha Rivka had been proud as any soldier’s mother but had suffered more than the usual angst; she was so worried for his safety, with the guns and bombs and other boys on the other side, some of them perhaps very nice boys, shooting at her son, whom they’d never even met. Once he quit the military, she could worry far less. “So. Let it be,” she’d said.
Quitting wasn’t so simple. It required a tortuous season of hearings, replete with accusations, character maligning and questionable patriotism. Ravid had known he could win only by allowing the foul names to be called, so he’d stayed mum, knowing that he was indeed a patriot and would be willing to fight in a real conflict in which killing people who hated him and came on to kill him would be natural. But the reality of his military service, like most military reality, was gratuitously destructive — against his conscientious values, from which he knew the difference between right and wrong. Of course such sentiment cannot be expressed, lest the conscientious one be deemed legally insane. That is, Ravid Rockulz could not continue to desecrate the reefs of Eilat with war games against an imaginary enemy guilty of intangible behavior warranting no response. Tearing up the reef with mines, dredges and sundry incursions was no longer tenable for an unlikely Jewish seal, a mere boy whose knees nearly buckled under the burden of his first tank of compressed air, who had learned to love the coral down to the little polyps.
Basha Rivka had asked when the little polyps would love him back. He’d assured her they loved him every time he saw them. How else could he feel so happy in their company?
That was some years ago. Since then he’d sorted things and settled in the tropics to live in wondrous joy, with sunshine, mostly calm seas and the most beautiful reefs the Central Pacific could offer. He recalled military reality when the United States Navy tested its sonar equipment in the name of national security, blasting decibels below the surface that literally tortured the whales, monk seals, turtles and fish for hundreds of miles. Ravid’s boat and a few others off McGregor Point one day in February witnessed the humpback whales breaching incessantly, as if to escape something or other. One whale breached over a small sailboat, sinking it. Navy rescue was on the scene in an hour, though the sunken vessel’s passengers had already been picked up.
The story never appeared in the local media, because the US Navy said it didn’t happen, that a tourist made a mistake in thinking a whale could actually fall onto a boat — that they had investigated and concluded that the event never was. So military reality claimed another day.
Besides military incursion on a big scale into Hawaii, where billions in defense contracts could advance political careers, other incursion also surged.
Tourism was up, what with terrorism threatening around the world and rampant on the airwaves of America.
Immigration to the fiftieth state was also on the rise. More tourists asked the simple, tough questions — and gave the answers in the same awakening. LA? Compared to Hawaii? Are you kidding? So they moved to the good life from LA — or from Seattle, Alameda or Portland, from Bakersfield, Boise or Butte. Start out in St. Louis and go through Missouri. Oklahoma City is not so pretty. You’ll see Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico. Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Pamona, Kingston, Barmaids, yadda yadda San Jalepeno... Life is not as simple as a lyric, but still, it’s fun to sing along. And a catchy lyric helped distract from the thickening density of bodies, cars and pavement.
Besides using distraction to avoid sadness, it was important to see how growth was good for everyone, because more people meant more money on yet another layer. More money meant more material comfort, along with the good life in Hawaii. And why not live in the middle of the biggest ocean in the world and still make the money? With the Internet, fax machines, cell phones, streaming data, a wireless world and ever-broadening bands, it could be done. Is this a great time, or what?
But the magic of Maui was sinking in a bog of discovery on a flood tide of chic, hip, cool and the new hot thing. Spontaneous raves could erupt at any time over whales, or movie stars spotted in the offing. Often nothing remained to be seen but the ruffled surface of a recent sighting, yet people stared tirelessly in hopes of another view, with disbelief that such potential in nature and celebrity could converge in one place, and that normal, working stiffs could see these things so freely. Ah, Maui. “Lucky we live,” and so forth and so on.
The place felt more like somewhere else, somewhere generic, convenient and crowded. After all, anyone stepping onto the tarmac as a resident could claim victory over the freeway, drive-by, suburban miasma: Every commuter wins the dream-come-true competition on arrival in the tropics, where the commute can continue in better weather. No one could doubt the glory when the Matson container arrived with their car only two weeks later. More Californians were taking the plunge, indicated by more Mercedes on the road with those clever vanity plates: MAWIBNZ. Feel the perfection: a Mercedes on Maui...
Could it get any better? Yes, it could, if the top could go down. Wait! Is that a Ferrari? Oh...God!
Maui...
Ferrari.
With fantasy fulfillment ratcheting upward, the tropical magic faded. Ravid remembered his own first blush, comparing this landfall to the foothills of his youth. This seemed as lush, promising, teeming and alive — and as inviting to a man with an abiding reef instinct. The newly arrived compared Maui to Orange County, Sacramento or anywhere, USA, because this gridlock/strip mall aggregate was called Maui and fabulous.
Honolua Bay in the mid-90’s was full of living coral and reef fish. Ten years later, it was 90 percent dead from red dirt runoff — construction of mega-million mansions over the gulch left only a thin strip of live coral. On his last visit, Ravid saw a charter boat pull into the center with eighty passengers from a Christian dental convention. The first kids jumped in, then came up sputtering, “Oh, gosh! Wait till you see this! It’s unbelievable!” And so on, unbelievably, compared to Cincinnati, trending downward.
The recently landed took the degradation as collateral damage for the greater good. Burgeoning four-lane freeways with dividers replaced the country roads — with a certain je ne sais quoi compared to the 10, the 110, the 210 and the 405. A cane field converted to tract housing — known locally as “track” housing — was quaint, like Orange County just after the oranges went away. And genetically modified organisms cleverly arranged in rows looked just like corn but better, like a lifted face or tucked tummy, without a single worm or dark kernel. It was never so good in LA, and if more and bigger houses blocked the panoramic view of the biggest ocean in the world, at least they ran 6.5 to 20 million. Or 22. Or 29.9. Wow. It must be really perfect.
With markets so strong, prices so high, and demand practically bursting at the seams, this appeared to be it — the dream roll that would never end.
Ravid had landed nineteen years prior, hardly a moment on the geologic calendar that the mossback old-timers used to measure their originality, opening every harangue on how it used to be by establishing authority on time served: “I been here twenty-seven years, and I — ”
“Well, I been here thirty-three years! And I...”
Very few tenured veterans could say what they’d done, or contributed, or helped protect of the natural character in all those years. True seasoning was thought to occur by osmosis; the more years lived on the rock, the greater the legitimacy. Time spent and soulful connection varied directly, along with insight and authority on right and wrong. Annotation was mostly anecdotal, with relevance measured in beers, shots, doobies, odd encounters, easy snatch on long odds, repetitions and the like. The verbal resume was an invariable mix of alcohol and fun in the sun and on the sea, including bawdy adventure and cocaine back in the day, when an original old-timer could still take that punch.
Time recalled from the olden days was a source of pride: We used to get so...
Or, One time we had this...
Recollection still passed for social currency in some quarters, like Lahaina, where extreme inebriation twenty or thirty-five years ago was special, because boats and palm trees outnumbered cars and people. Many younger immigrants envisioned a future when they, too, would speak knowingly to the new arrivals, so they garnered their own rare times with all-night kink, nonstop drinks, reefer to sunrise and ocean time. These pursuits became tradition. The newest new crowd was younger, hipper and more chic than the last. The young’uns had a leg up on the latest look as seen on the hottest new stars of the screen, surf or sideshow.
Nothing changed, really, except for another crowd moving in, “going native.” Worse yet, besides the hormonally urgent kids coming for the action, their hot-flashing elders migrated with equal fervor; Macy’s went Tropicana on three floors with severely chic labels on hundred-dollar silk shirts and subtle palm tree knits. Wait a minute — make that a hundred and eighty...now two, two hundred...two, two, two...gimme two-fifty, two-fifty...okay, two and a quarter... Tropicana garb from the Johnny Mambo collection went fabulously well with Johnny Mambo furnishings in pineapple, banana and hula girl motif to underscore a feel for the new place and its fabulous lifestyle potential.
Parking became a problem, so the lots were expanded, then elevated. So much apparent goodness brought more tourists in need of cars, till the rock had two cars for every woman, child and man all the time. Shriveling quickly was the tropical wilderness and rural society — the old island style that defined and redeemed those days and nights of youthful indiscretion once upon a time, long, long ago, when people bonded to the place and each other.
Growth begat growth. The Chamber and the Visitors’ Bureau raised a cry of victory when a magazine in New York, staffed by residents of New York, called Maui “The Best Island in the World.” Maybe the magazine staff commuted from Jersey, or any part of the megalithic region. Sorely missing from the “best” criteria was a measure of the magic that had spared some islands from the ratings competition — the magic of no airport with connecting flights from New York, precluding assessment for a nebulous determination of “the best island” as judged from that most chilling of islands, Manhattan.
The flood of people, strip malls, parking lots and gridlock had displaced the old feeling. Making ends meet soon became a communion in itself, an unholy one. Coming up with rent money and then groceries while immersed in beauty and wonder had seemed like a trick, a good one, till resources waned and aloha became a useful word to compensate for what had gone away.
Ravid remembered Pu‘u Olai not so long ago. Pu‘u means “foothill.” Pu‘u Olai is the cinder cone on the shoreline, between Makena Beach and Black Sand Beach — make that between Oneloa (onnay-loa), or long sands, and Oneuli (onnay-uli), or black sands. A small bump at the base of the volcano, Pu‘u Olai is a steep trek for the physically fittest. The payout is the wide world pulsating with mana — energy and life force — from Kaho‘olawe to Alenuihaha, to Molokini and McGregor Point, spanning the glittering sea. In a beautiful balance between glory and bounty, Pu‘u Olai had wild tomatoes in vast tangles on top, sweet and tart, till the top got as crowded as the beach and tour boat traffic near shore got as thick as the Foodland parking lot. No more wild tomatoes at the summit, with so many tourists following written directions to the secret tomato grounds that you simply must see. No freshwater shrimp in the aqueduct higher up Haleakala. No more guava or lilikoi to pick freely along the roadside for miles, no more noni, avocado or lemon. All for sale now, they became a topic for a few people mumbling about “not so long ago,” and many more chattering, “fabulous, unreal, you simply must...”
Kapu means “forbidden” — or “keep out” when posted on a gate; the land is private, accessible by invitation only. The guidebooks advised visitors to ignore those signs, and so they did. They’d spent so much to come so far, and look at all those other people in there, wandering around, revealing themselves as a terminal nuisance.
Kihei Road was sparsely traveled for years, except for traffic to Paradise Fruit and that first funky snorkel place. Now hundreds of refugees from a world gone to seed paid daily rent on a few square feet of concrete under a canvas canopy for the chance to separate tourists from a few more dollars, often for seashells taken live from Indonesian reefs and sold as Hawaiiana.
The veteran residents stopped counting time on the rock. Resigned to degradation, decline and humans’ inhumanity to nature, many went mum. Whether transplants arrived decades ago, a year or two ago, six months ago, or last week, their experience foretold what would come next. People see what is happening, or they move away from what they can’t abide only to see it again. The veterans on Maui took refuge in the soft-spoken humility that is necessary and available to island culture.
Nineteen years ago was fairly recent on the tenure totem. The time passed fast and slow, reminding Ravid how long it was since the rock felt tropical, since the spore growth of opportunity had shown its toxic fuzz, then smothered the beauty and drowned out the repose. The Ford dealer moved from a modest, aging showroom on Main Street in Wailuku to a massive outdoor facility covering two acres in Kahului for both new and used inventories that Must Move this Month! A man on the radio yelled at everyone to Get a car! Get a truck! Get an SUV! Those cars, trucks and SUVs were stickered at MSRP plus six grand, or nine, and the salesmen would nod sanguinely if a white guy offered MSRP, because the sticker price was for your average Filipino, proud of the dollars in his pocket representing his skill and endurance to get them.
Ravid had told his salesman that the sticker-shock game could make a guy want to move to a tropical island. The salesman had asked back, “So? When you leaving?” then stepped up to remind Ravid that he, the salesman, was of Hawaiian descent, and with one more marriage on the right side of the genetic fence, his grandchildren would have “blood quantum.” He personally agreed that the place had been ruined, and he wanted nothing more than those fucking airplanes to stop bringing the fucking haole tourists over, and Ravid could get the fuck out whenever he was fucking ready.
Haole is a Hawaiian word introduced soon after Western contact. Its literal meaning is “without breath,” deriving from Captain Cook shaking hands rather than touching noses in greeting — rather than sharing the essence of life, which is breath. Ha is “breath.” Ole means “without.” Haole came to connote “outsider,” meaning those whose families originated outside Hawaii, whose greetings were without breath. Then it came to focus on outsiders of beige complexion and not on those of Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Tongan or Samoan descent. Then it was meant to denigrate Caucasians.
Well, Ravid didn’t want a new Ford, anyway, but he had felt the sting. The exchange convinced him how nice life would be on a tropical island — an island with no car dealers. But what could he do, stay on the run from a world outrunning its headlights? And who was he to scorn a world out of pace? Every day seemed to end in a dead heat, with fulfillment and pessimism crossing the line in a photo finish. Ravid had a recurring thought: Tahiti. His more recurring thought was his job, which he loved.
Some nights he got laid, which trumped all analysis in the short term. A young man staring up, fatigued from an honest day’s work and hormonal depletion, feels good, like a man fulfilled. Besides that, a floating angst based on over-development could cloud whatever beauty was left to encounter. Should he stay angry, forfeiting happiness? Ravid had related his car salesman encounter to a Hawaiian friend who had assured him that the car salesman in question immigrated to Maui via Honolulu from Rarotonga. The car salesman got fired in Honolulu. Besides that, his family descended from a genetic line that included ample Caucasian blood and many other car salesmen, and the car fellow’s hatred would find another focus if white people weren’t so convenient. Aka Leialoha had the power to calm the space around himself and anyone near it, to put smiles on faces and warmth in hearts. Aka had laughed, “You do da work. Nevah mind.”
Smart man, Aka, with sound advice. The work was the best antidote. A man of true kuleana must view Maui as evolving and still soulful, as a place easing into the peaceful aftermath and small death of human penetration. Still magical, rife with flowers, mad with color and scent, termites, centipedes, red dust and heat ripples, the place must still be loved for its wrinkles, its wear and tear, its ultimate surrender to gravity. Just look at this ambient femininity, this context, this immersion in beauty and nature, this life of effusion and greenery.
You want to talk about a place gang-fucked and left for dead, just look at LA. Millions called it home and had to fly back to it — had to nose under the yellow-brown cloud one more time to live like mites on a scab spanning the horizon. Sure, orange groves used to be there, but time marched on, and you had to value the chic bistros, swinging hot spots, dazzling cabriolets and hard bodies of surgical precision — or you were left with naught. On the bright side, the standard for sanity itself adapted to LA, proving people all the more capable of enduring, after a fashion.
Many people could not adapt to life on a scab but felt the madness and corruption as a festering sore; society in any modern urban center was a ruse for money, promulgated by media deferring to advertisers and their values. Family values, petroleum values, investment conglomerate values; these things worked together for the good of society according to the tenets of the profit motive that first motivated mom ’n’ pop. Movie stars often ranted against the death of nature, children going hungry and social injustice. They could raise scads o’ dough, but few things changed, except for the number of problems, challenges and bad situations brought to light. More people looked for someplace else to move to. But where could they go to avoid the onslaught?
How long before they think of Tahiti? How long before LA takes over French Polynesia and ruins it, too? What am I talking about? I’ve never been to either one.
So thoughts schooled, frenzied, faded and ended on any given night. Anxiety and gratification hummed their yin-yang mantra of work and play, of life and nature, of worry and a woman more willing than a man needs her to be. How sweet it could be, with any option open to a fellow who could roll his head across the pillow to the soft, fuzzy purring nearby. Then he and the cat drifted to dreamland, her little outboard purring a sweet, soft wake.
Sometimes she woke him in the night, licking his forehead or touching her nose to his. Hers was cold. If he opened his eyes, she purred again, which set the world to rights. In her little font of love, the madness shrunk from foreboding magnitude to one tiny problem in an imperfect world, a problem profoundly solved by a gentle scratching of her chinny chin chin.
He hoped that what’s-her-name, the other female in the bed, was comfortable.