Under The Rainbow

You can't buy that.

On this pile of volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the fish of the day is the same at every restaurant. A few fishing boats arrive with ono (wahoo), so everyone is serving ono. Passion fruit and papayas and five kinds of avocados are cheap; blueberries are unaffordable. Dark clouds hover over the land late in the afternoon but offshore, the sun turns the ocean into a brilliant yellow mirror.

Everything feels less urgent here. But the mainlanders still speculate loudly about the ETA of their next cocktail and the departure time for their next activity and the details of their next dinner reservation. The residents stop and smile and say, “Aloha” and sometimes they respond to an urgent question with patient silence.

On the way back up the one-lane road from Waipio Valley (25%, the steepest grade in the United States), our tour guide stops the van because two mainlander’s Jeeps are blocking our path. They are convoying (against the rules) and uphill drivers have the right of way, so they’ll have to back up. Our guide doesn’t get out to tell them this. He turns and finishes his story about Uncle Johnny, who lives in the valley below and throws rocks at mainlanders disobeying the 5-mile-an-hour speed limit. Finally, one of the drivers walks over to our van.

“He’ll have to back up,” our guide says, like he’s just casually voicing the natural order of things.

The other driver tries to back up and almost hits the rock wall, then swerves very close to the guardrail, which our guide described as “decorative” as we were descending into the valley. As his friend gets into the driver’s seat to fix things, a woman hiking down the path approaches the driver’s side window of our van and, without greeting our guide, announces, “We’ve been trying to call you all week! No one has called us back. We’ve tried over and over again. Why doesn’t anyone pick up the phone?”

The guide looks at her, amused, and doesn’t speak.

“We wanted to take the tour! We had questions about whether or not we can get to the ocean down there!”

“When you get to the bottom, take a right at the stream and you can follow it straight to the ocean,” our guide says. “But make sure to take a left there, too, so you can see the waterfall. You don’t want to miss the waterfall.”

Our guide is concerned that this woman, who has been addressing him like he’s a customer service rep or a malfunctioning appliance or a stubborn stain on her pants that won’t come out, will miss the waterfall.

When we were still back in the valley, our guide stopped the van in the middle of the stream, and then asked us, “You hear that music?” He was talking about the sound of the water flowing downstream.

He turned around. “Anyone ever have a bad day?”

We say sure, we’re fucking mainlanders, dude. We have bad days all the time. Someone doesn’t call us back and we freak the fuck out. Someone writes an email the wrong way and we freak the fuck out. We can’t get shit done and things are moving too slowly for us and everything feels stuck and we lose our fucking shit. Most days are bad days on the mainland, aren’t they? Maybe? We can barely fucking remember, honestly.

“You get a beach chair, two beers. Put the chair in the water. Put one beer in the water. Crack the other beer. Take three sips. Listen to the music. Bad day gone.”

“Can’t buy that,” he adds. Then he turns back around to drive.

(Yes, I know. Magical brown man heals high-strung whites, who bought that.)

Back at the resort a few days ago, an older white grandmother was watching her two grandkids play with two Asian kids from a nearby table. They made a mess together, so the kids’ mother came over and started to clean it up.

“Don’t do too good a job or we’ll want to hire you,” the white grandmother told her.

Sometimes reality is so warped it takes all of your words away. Imagine living on a pile of volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific and everyone on the rock says “Can’t buy that” to each other repeatedly, and you all eat the fish that comes in on the boat, and you all pick fruits off the side of public roads (coconuts and papayas and bananas, free to the public!), and you all (most of you!) believe in sharing, and patience, and honoring nature. But you’re also forced to interact with people who view everything – all behaviors, spaces, moods, emotions, experiences, nature itself, the planet, the universe – as purchasable consumer goods, neatly ranked by price.

It must feel like welcoming a hoard of unseeing zombies into paradise.

Even guilt and self-hatred, the semi-enlightened zombie’s emotional labor, just feel like more high-strung mainlander off-gassing. So instead I’ll slide into the understated peace of this place. People who haven’t been to Hawaii sometimes view it as tacky or garish, but they’re thinking of Waikiki. The big island is spacious and mellow and down to earth, like Kansas but a trillion times better. It feels good just to exist on this pile of rock. You wake up to the sound of rain and eat bananas and papayas with lime juice squeezed on top, and when you walk up the big hill in Kohala and look back at the ocean in the morning, it looks like this:

I guess you can buy that, technically speaking. But you can’t buy the feeling that you don’t own it and you never will. You can’t buy the sensation that everything on this planet is yours but nothing is yours and it all might disappear soon. You can’t buy a way out of mortality, the knowledge of which includes the sublime realization that you don’t matter and you do matter and your life can be anything you want it to be and even when your life far surpasses your wildest dreams, it won’t matter one tiny little bit. You can’t buy this humbling.

I don’t know what I want lately. I’m trying to reach a distant star with my words. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I want one can of beer in the water and three sips from the other one. I want to be out of earshot from zombie grumbling and zombie platitudes. I want to slide across that mirrored ocean. I want to eat whatever fish show up at the dock.

Do you see that tiny boat, out on the edge of the horizon? I think it might be coming this way. What will it bring me? I am under the rainbow, in the middle of the ocean, inside the question mark.