Leaving Fantasy Island

Copyright © 2018

By Ralph F. Couey

In a few days, we'll be on the road again.  Our three-week sojourn in Hawai'i is ending and the time has come for us to return to the real world, however reluctantly.

It's been an eventful time.  We spent time with family again, people we just don't see often enough.  I had several helpings of shave ice (can never have too much of that), many meals of local delicacies, and shopping.  I visited my old ship, twice as it turns out, walked hand-in-hand with my wife in the magnificent glow of a Waikiki sunset...oh yeah, and almost experienced the end of the world.

Most people who come here are also on vacation, and spend time visiting the sights, visiting the beach, and eating way too much food.  But for us, it's a trip home.  My wife is an island girl, born in Kona on the Big Island, and raised in Pearl City.  Most of her family is still here, including her feisty,  but completely lovable 91-year-old mother.  We do spend some time doing touristy things, but most of the time we hang with family...or just hang, period.  It becomes a great time for rest and recovery, a space of timelessness between what we had to do and what we have still to do.  Cheryl is mulling over contracts and we'll have to make a decision at some point as to where we will go next.  She tried to land a contract here on O'ahu, but they're few, far between, and quickly snatched up by other travelers.  She also applied for a couple of permanent positions, but won't hear about those for a couple of months yet.

I've never been fond of heat and humidity, difficult to tolerate by the Irish in me, but most days the northeast trade winds blow, making things marvelously tolerable.  During the summer, the temps sometimes rise into the 90's, and those days are the ones when the trades stop blowing.  It makes for an uncomfortable time, since very few of the homes here have air conditioning.  You enjoy the trades when they blow, and just endure the other days.  For someone like me, that means just sitting and sweating.

But this is a beautiful place, home to people of unusual warmth and welcome.  Hawai'i seduces you.  It starts when you arrive from some snowbound locale and discover not just another place, but perhaps even another planet.  The route from the aircraft gates at Honolulu International lies along passageways open on either side.  Immediately, you are entranced by the soft breezes and the fragrant smells of tropical flowers.  It is on that walk to baggage claim that you first fall in love.  Most folks when they arrive and check in at their hotel, will make a beeline for the beach, settling down on blankets and beach chairs with that marvelous smugness of someone who has escaped the travails of winter.  Once the sun goes down, they sample the other-worldly entertainment and the incredible mixed palates of delicious foods, representing just about any cuisine you can imagine.  If you're lucky enough, perhaps you may dine on a hotel patio, caressed by the soft breezes and utterly entranced by the beauty of a heart-stopping sunset.

We still do some of those things, but mainly we're here to visit family.  We get together to eat, play mini-golf, shop, get shave ice, and engage in that social activity folks here call "talking story,"  We visit other family in other places, but somehow that familial love combined with the backdrop of paradise makes things even more special.  

This evening, we returned from dinner at a Japanese restaurant.  I sat at the kitchen table writing, while distracted by the beauty of the sky as the sun dipped behind the Ko'olau mountains.  It was hard to imagine that we have only three more full days left before we must climb back on a plane and return to chilly Colorado.  But I can also remember and treasure the time we've had here, and the salutary effect that family time has had on my wife.  We have made some new memories here, and revived some old ones.  We could be happy living here, but it's just too expensive.  Homes that might fetch $50,000 in Chicago, Kansas City, or St. Louis here go routinely for three-quarters of a million, and go up from there.  Clearly, there's no way, short of a really big lottery win, that we could afford to live here.  In fact, not very many can afford this place.  Young folks are paying to add a second story to their parents' homes and living there, because the construction costs are far less than buying a place of their own.  Walking through the neighborhoods, its not unusual to see houses with six or more cars parked there, clear signs that the kids still live at home.  

Jobs are scarce here, especially those that pay enough to support an independent lifestyle.  You could ask why young people don't just move somewhere cheaper with actual jobs, but have to understand that Hawai'i is a strongly family-oriented culture.  People try to leave, but the pull of family and the familiar is just too strong.  Many young people will remain content to live a life of poverty, simply because being poor in Hawai'i around family is so much more satisfying than being prosperous and alone anyplace else, especially in places where they have winter.  I've known Hawai'i people in other places, and there is a lingering sadness about them, almost as if they are in mourning.  Once this place gets it's gently beautiful hooks in you, there's no letting go.

There is a bittersweet feeling about being somewhere you love, and loves you back, and knowing there's no way on God's green earth that you could survive there economically.  In that respect, Hawai'i is a kind of fantasy island.

Next Wednesday afternoon, we will leave all this behind and head for a layover in San Francisco where I will change from shorts and t-shirt to jeans and sweatshirt before flying back to Denver.  We'll stay there for a few frantic days while we tend to some family and medical business, handling constant phone calls from nurse recruiters.  Once that decision has been reached, we will once again pack up the Santa Fe and head to wherever the next job awaits.  We're hoping for southern California, while still holding out hope for Hawaii.  That unknown is part of the juice of our new lives.  Someday we may grow tired of that, but that day has not appeared on our calendars yet.  

But wherever we end up, we will be carrying with us the memories of a beautiful place, framed by a wistful fantasy that is likely never to come true.

But if they did come true, then they wouldn't be fantasies, would they?