As my 40th birthday loomed, my partner proposed that we go somewhere exotic to celebrate. I suggested the notion of a quiet island somewhere with good snorkeling.
Our travel agent said she knew the perfect place: Molokai.
We’d vacationed in Hawaii many times before, mostly on the Big Island and Kauai, but never Molokai. Small wonder. The island’s biggest claim to fame is that is was once home to a leper colony. Few tourists ever go there, yet went we did.
Flying in, it looked less like the tropical paradise I had naïvely anticipated and more like the New Mexican desert. The “resort” where we had reservations was hunkered on the parched, far-west end of Molokai. To call it a dump would’ve been an insult to dumps everywhere.
The place clearly was on its last legs, struggling to stay in business. The golf course looked like it hadn’t been watered in years. The tennis courts lacked nets. Our room was one of two in a flimsy, thatched-roof hut with walls so thin, you could hear the guy next door snoring all night. The trade winds were blowing so fiercely that spending any time on the beach first required digging a shallow trench, lest you be sandblasted by the gales. The ocean was so churned up, there was no snorkeling to be done. Bodysurfing meant risking your life. With little else to do, I went into the water anyway and somehow survived.
Meals at the resort’s only restaurant were barely edible. On an island literally surrounded by tuna and mahi-mahi, the fish served in the dining room was frozen and of mysterious foreign origin. After three days, trapped as we were, and with no rental cars to be had, we rented a couple of underpowered mopeds and headed out in search of a bakery some ten miles distant supposedly famous for its fresh-baked bread. By the time we got there, the bread was sold out, but we did see people who appeared to have had leprosy, missing fingers and parts of their noses.
I’ll spare you the details of how my partner subsequently crashed her moped, badly scraping up her arm, and how not a single motorist stopped to help. How we traded mopeds and how I sent her back to the resort to get medical attention while I began pushing the damaged moped in 90-degree heat. Cars whizzed by on that two-lane highway until finally, after what seemed like miles, two giant Hawaiian guys pulled over in their truck and got out with pistols shoved in their belts. “Terrific,” I remember thinking to myself, “murdered on my 40th birthday.” It turned out they were security guards working for a nearby cattle ranch. They hoisted the damaged moped in the bed of their pickup and were only too happy to give me a lift back to my hut.
None of that, however, is the point of this story.
After the two nice guards dropped me off, a cop friend from Los Angeles who happened to be vacationing with his wife on nearby Maui called to see how things were going on Molokai. I gave him the short, tortured version of our travelogue. He put me on hold for a minute. When he came back, he said, “I’ve booked you a room at our hotel in Lahaina. Get over here. Dinner’s on us tonight at the Hula Grill.”
Last-minute airfares be damned, we booked two, one-way seats on a puddle jumper bound for Maui that afternoon. We couldn’t get off Molokai fast enough.
There are some places you visit on this planet that settle warmly and forever in your heart, places to which you cannot wait to return. Molokai is not one of them. Maui is. Our escape to Lahaina and our vacation there in the days that followed were magical. We’ve gone back a few times since then. It’s an inspirational place to write. I edited a draft of The Kill Circle during one vacation on Maui and started The Three-Nine Line on another. With each visit, I’ve been struck by how welcoming the people are. Some of them no doubt were because we were tourists and because their livelihoods depended on tourist dollars. But the majority always struck me as being friendly and kind for the sake of being friendly and kind. That’s been my impression, anyway. Which is why, when recent wildfires destroyed much of old Lahaina, it felt like losing a family member.
The death toll in Lahaina has been nothing less than staggering. For all I know, some of those wonderful human beings we met over the years, who mixed our cocktails and served us our meals, who cleaned our rooms, who serenaded us at dinner with their guitars, were among the victims. Nothing can bring back those we’ve lost. We grieve their tragic passing.
In the end, you realize that buildings are merely that, buildings, no matter their cultural or historical significance. They can always be rebuilt. Lahaina will rise from the ashes and we will return to vacation there. Of both I am certain. Whether the new Lahaina resembles the old Lahaina is irrelevant. In the end, it is special people who make a destination truly special. It is the people who always matter most.