Not what I expected.

Hawaii is one of those places that you have images of in your head, from all-expenses-paid prizes on the Price is Right or airline commercials or Uncle Greg’s tropical desktop wallpaper or whatever. And it could be that if I went to Maui or one of the other islands, I’d see what I imagined. But Hawaii, or the Big Island, wasn’t sandy beaches and leis at all.

Traveling there somehow took over 24 hours straight of consciousness. I’m not sure how, really, but I’m increasingly realizing that time is made up. Also I read a book, for once in my life.

The first thing we noticed and that we would keep noticing is that Hawaii is very outdoors. The airport where we landed, in Kona, aside from being a Pizza Hut-ass airport, was notable for being made of several separate open-air stations plopped next to each other. It was weird. The rain could just blow right in! You went from one Pizza Hut where there was a check-in desk to another Pizza Hut where customs checked your bags like four times. If you ran really hard and jumped off a trampoline, you could probably vault over the tiny blockades onto the tarmac.

Is it “on Hawaii” or “in Hawaii”? Oh, prepositions. So absurd.

We were stranded at the airport for a couple hours. The bus was offline for the day and our Uber hailing got us nowhere. We asked a police officer what to do and he said gruffly, “Welcome to Hawaii. You’re stuck.” Eventually, we found the crowd of people at the end of the airport also waiting for taxis to come through. We squished in with three strangers when a free one finally came, and learned from our driver all about her 30 years there after having been born in England and moved to America. We were told about Hawaii Time, which is basically whenever you feel like it, and how welcoming and affirming the place was. I imagined making travel friends with our ridemates, which unfortunately did not come to pass.

Nae and I got a super spicy udon while we waited for our hosts. It made my face hurt. Our friend Rhonda dropped the most adventuring-y surfboard-topped car off for us to drive around in, then we picked up our friends Diggory and Micah, who were also flying in from the mainland.

We trekked halfway around the island to our first sleeping spot, in Ocean View, at the southern tip of the island. Our friends have an off-grid house out there, made of multiple small buildings (not Pizza Huts, sadly) with a catchment tank and solar panels. The stars were bright. We made friends with a chameleon we named Margaret. He liked leaping from heights.

I was grateful that Dig had the benefit of years in Hawaii ahead of us and knew what we’d like to see. Each day had a handful of interesting sights, like ominous steam vents on the side of the road, winding ravines layered in green,

leftovers of old lava flows that made the whole landscape stretch before us like Mordor (definitely eerier in person)

diving spots, (No thanks.) (There were strawberries in the ocean for some reason.)

and alien landscapes–particularly beautiful with pre-storm fog rolling off the hills behind us. I cut my leg up pretty bad on the rocks here when I slipped. Locals knew at a glance that “the rocks got ya, didn’t they?” The rocks make the sound of glass or porcelain when they knock together, but they’re somehow spongey-grabby and sharp too.

We learned of the local goodwill-signaling shaka sign, ubiquitous and fun (supposedly started by one railroad worker with fingers missing, and now everywhere! Wow, memes!). And that hitchhiking is a big, accepted thing there. We tried flavored dried macadamia nuts and Vanilla Dark Chocolate Coffee Bean Crunch, a tasty snack whose name you have to enunciate in full every time you eat it.

We drove out to fields that should definitely have had moo-cows in them, except they ended in the sea. There, the wind was apparently so turbulent, the occasional trees had grown sideways. I was too busy trying not to take too many pictures to take a picture.

We made more tiny friends.

The beaches there were were black sand beaches. Not as comfy on the feet, since the grains were coarser and bigger. But certainly beautiful, and stranger. Hotter in the sun.

We found “a good abandon”, which is what we call places that have been left behind to molder. An old resort covered in graffiti and dozens of big spiders. I’ll spare you the pics on that one.

And there were good local yums, like musubi (essentially SPAM sushi), peanut butter mochi, lychee fruipts [sic], yogurt droink, and… turkey.

Our second home away from home was also off-grid. I don’t think it had an address. No drinking from the tap, for fears of algae. Yes, wifi. No, trampoline. Yes, plenty of wild chickens to be friends with.

Oh, speaking of chickens! I saw a chicken cross the road on two separate occasions. Also, according to the local roosters, dawn is every ten seconds from 3am to 6am, often announced in quartets.

Let’s be frank. “Cock-a-doodle-doo” is just not correct. Too many syllables, at least according to Hawaiian chicken-speak.

It was fascinating, living an alternative lifestyle for a little bit. Nice to be reminded at least in glimpses of whole existences different from the one you toil in every day. Much out there to see and be and do.

One striking nighttime feature on the island was that all the outdoor lights everywhere were dim sodium lights. Dig said it was to keep light pollution low, ostensibly for the several (controversial) telescopes up on the mountainside. It created the effect of stepping back into the past, like an 80s movie, or a specific childhood memory I have of watching snow fall at night out in the street. Sometimes my favorite things about new places are the things you don’t expect to be different.

Driving in general on the island at night was weird because it was like mainland America. Inland highways were just like back home in Ohio. Same signs and patterns. But then a weird local flora pops up and reminds you you’re far away. Sometimes I say places are largely the same, but I continue to be astonished at how simple plant life differences can make a place feel so foreign.

The Hawaiian language really caught my attention. I noticed it had a very small consonant pool and practiced pronouncing everything I saw, getting along fairly well with the “more international” pronunciation of vowels. I actually started to build up a sizable little vocabulary using inductive reasoning. It was fun. I was tempted to sign up for a degree at a local university and learn the language while I was there.

One of the coolest parts of the trip was learning a little about sailing. Dig’s family runs a sailing school on the island, and we got to hang out and help a little.

I was excited that I remembered some boat words from my childhood reading Redwall, but there was a bunch more lingo to grok before we climbed into a boat.

And man, I’m glad we did.

I can’t swim, so I was a little anxious about going out into the bay, but it was a perfect example of the payoff of constantly walking out of your comfort zone. Nae and I followed captain’s orders with adjusting the sails, which felt very piratey and fun. When I sat on the edge of the boat as it skimmed over the rippling waves, my feet could just kiss the water. I tried to be aware of the name of whatever positions we were in with the sail relative to wind direction. The boat was small, so you felt it lean and fight a little with the weight of the wind, but being that close to the natural forces was invigorating. It is correct to adventure and explore, I told myself. Fuck offices, I told myself. YOLO, I may have actually said out loud to myself.

I learned to tie a couple knots, how to handle a parking a boat in its “slip”, and how not to fall in the water as you’re disembarking. Though I came close a couple times. Real close.

Having a squad to travel around with and be with day to day and work together with is comforting. Like a fish being put back in water. I guess I’m family oriented in some way, or something. A social animal? Whodathunkit.

On the days we crossed the full breadth of the island to get from Hilo back to Kona, we went over the middle of it, on the single highway, past Mauna Kea and a military base and pretty much nothing else. It was cold up and empty up there, so much land without any settlings, the odd bush or tree or rock maybe. A little eerie.

Another adventure we went on was to see a lava tube, which looks like what would happen if an earthworm the size of a whale surfaced for air as it was eating through the ground.

We actually had a pretty scary thing happen with the wildlife while we were there, that fed my existential dread. I was already in a weird brain state, pressed up against gigantic, heavy rocks and thinking of the sheer power of even small facets of the Earth’s natural forces, the planet itself but a tiny speck. With everything in the world as it is lately and my own rumination, sometimes I drown a little in how much chaos there is. It’s a difficult feeling to explain–the words won’t do it justice. I like to say that remembering emotions is like remembering the taste of pizza. You remember having the experience, you have a vague concept of what it’s like, but until you’re in the same set of circumstances with the same set of stimuli–i.e., eating an actual pizza–your brain just can’t quite grasp the fullness of the experience. But while I was already in the life is fleeting and fragile state, one of the lava tube goats we made friends with was hit by a car on the highway we had parked next to. I had to hide in the car.

I don’t know what purpose sharing that anecdote has. But it felt like I needed to share it. Things shared are often filtered, shushed, and I think that can make the impact of hard things a little more traumatic when experienced for the first time. I dunno.

We did plenty of goobing.

There was certainly natural splendor.

The contrast of cozy modes of civilization amid this sublime scenery made me all the more grateful for the little corners of comfort we’ve carved out for ourselves. Man’s ongoing, often faltering, but nonetheless precious effort to make gentler the life of this world. Pancake diners are indeed a good.

We did little rituals together, like each of us a drawing pig on flood-soaked playing cards, or ribbing me about the fact I could never shut my door right to make the light go off in the car, or making callback jokes about nudist turtles on the beach. The spontaneous bonding and reference activities that I so love.

Another harrowing tale! A couple times, we were on The Safety Boat for the sailing school. We were out on the bay with a dozen kiddos practicing their sailing. These kids were like 7-12 years of age, and their prowess at the prow made me feel very much like an underachiever. They were all absolutely adorable, and whip-smart. They made me remember previous realizations that intergenerational interaction can be a great source of wisdom and experience, that we’re all, perhaps unsurprisingly, people, and that we can learn from each other. I felt that the children could teach me to be needlessly joyful in a moment. I met one tween and then three minutes later had a showdown about who was a bigger fan of cinnamon rolls, which of course prompted me to go get a Cinnabon to prove my dedication. And for what, whimsy?!

Anyway, we were the safety boat. The motorized ranger on the field, corralling and helping as everyone was borne about on wind and waves. And we’d just strapped a brand-new, $5000 outboard motor on. The maiden voyage was interesting, because as we were reaching the edge of our territory, one measly turn of the tiller dislodged the motor and sent it plunging into the ocean.

You don’t want your boat engine to go underwater. It’s bad. Even more, you don’t want brand-new, expensive engines to go underwater. But, in a twist of fate, the captain had just been reminded to wear the kill cord, the little piece of spiraling plastic, attached to a person, that chokes the engine the moment it gets yanked. So it shut off immediately, which ultimately spared the motor. But there was still the problem that motors don’t float. Dig grabbed it by the gas line just as it plunged into the deep, and then my sister Nae leapt up and got it by its handle just as that flimsy rubber tube popped off. We tied the motor down, had a panic attack, and waited as the rocking waves pulled us further and further away, out of radio range. Eventually, Rhonda came along with the other boat, wondering why we were goofing off instead of helping. She towed us in, and then we learned that the trailer for our boat and the trailer for her boat both broke down on the way to the dock. So we were a little shaken, and couldn’t even disembark.

All in the name of adventure! Woo!

It was good practice using grounding techniques. They’re becoming more and more useful in my daily life. I’ve helped several friends step out of an oncoming panic attack in the last year by using various calming techniques. Might not hurt to google them, if you get a chance. World’s a scary place sometimes, need a bat belt. Don’t forget to install a juice box.

I don’t know that I have any thoughts of summary or a unifying theme to share about this trip. Honestly, it’s been a while since I got back, so the in-the-momentness has fled. But I would encourage you to shake up your routine, if you haven’t in a while. The right kind of stressor can be good for you. But maybe wear a life jacket.

Oh, on the flight home, I summoned courage and talked to my seat neighbor, and we ended up swapping numbers and meeting for dinner later and becoming friends! I found out they had worked on a theme park my friends and I have been planning to visit. So that’s another point in bravery’s favor. Do it!