Vacation Buy Rights
There are people who pursue fun, who plan fun things, who enjoy life and then there’s me. That might be somewhat of an exaggeration, but I am on a hamster wheel of getting to day job, day jobbing with all its oddities and thwarted ambitions (a tornado of my own and other people’s), and then hectic homelife where homework is half done and chicken nuggets are starting to burn in the oven and I forgot, again, to put the laundry in the drier and it is starting to stink. Do I perceive life with a negative bent? Maybe. But at this juncture I feel a little bit entitled to it. Oh, and we also now have a dog that regularly pees in my kitchen and has chewed up two dog beds and now a couch.
On one hand, I have a wonderful life I should feel proud of: two beautiful children, a husband who more than pulls his weight, a job that sounds respectable, the golden retriever I always wanted my family to have; we are all healthy. On the other, I am bone tired and overwhelmed by a feeling that I am responsible for everything with no time or energy left to really enjoy anything: birthday party planning, family event planning, dishes, laundry, vacuuming, and now I can add to this list cleaning up dog pee (in my kitchen, no less). In short, there isn’t a whole lot of time to sit and enjoy the people I love or to even reflect on the good. And fun? Well fun takes planning these days and that is just another thing to add to the to-do list. Can’t someone else plan my fun (without charging me hundreds of dollars?) I’m not even sure what I would find fun anymore.
Vacation is supposed to be an antidote to all of this. Go on regular vacations, and it will help your mental health, like regular flossing helps the health of your gums (I don’t like flossing, another thing to remembet to do). My husband has always wanted to take the kids to Hawaii, and with his new job and mine, we were finally in a position to be able to take that long awaited trip. I would like to visit other far-flung places I have not yet been, to feel again a feeling of awe and wonder. To remember the world is wide. But getting my husband to take a vacation can be a battle in itself, so Hawaii was the carrot I knew he would go for. And so it was that we planned a trip to Maui, to stay near where he and I stayed on our first trip together nearly fifteen years ago — the sparkling turquoise waters of Kaanapali.
I was nervous about staying in Kaanapali. I had heard there were people camped out there, in protest to many things including the short-term leases tourists use when people after (but also before) the Lahaina fire needed housing. My husband is a nostalgic kind of a guy, one of the reasons I fell in love, and was dead set to go where we had been on our first trip and then our honeymoon, and the island he had first visited with his family as a kid, and we had already booked a place (sigh, a short term rental) and that was that. I made a feeble grumbling about it but he just kind of looked stared me down and I didn’t pursue it further. In truth, there had always been encampments (or at least there had been years ago), and I had always been disturbed by them, and saddened by a place that was so heavily reliant on tourism, pampering the wealthy-enough-to-visit, while there were people in need — who lived there — parked next door, pushed out onto the very edge of paradise. This is a dynamic that exists everywhere I have lived — in Los Angeles and here is Mesa, Arizona, a problem that has worsened in cities across the United States. But we were on vacation, and we paid a lot of money for an escape. I didn’t want to feel like I was part of an invading army of entitled people (we had paid a lot of money to be there, damn-it!). But, I was. Can you see why my husband calls me the NFL, the No Fun League?
Though the sun was shining and water sparkling and the mostly gentle sometimes gusty wind blowing, the trauma of the fire was in the air if you paused long enough to listen and were willing to perceive something other than paradise. People had been dispersed, displaced. Bits and pieces of conversation caught my ear. Our waitress, who looked very much like one of the hotel patrons, tanned and fit, was reunited with a friend who had come to visit. She said to him, “It’s harder now and I didn’t think it would get harder. I’m glad to hear others have had the same experience.” What was harder? I wanted to ask but didn’t, but I did notice her friend ordered a double shot of what looked to be tequila at ten in the morning.
The guy who manned the beach shack where we checked out our kayaks explained that he had been to Arizona once, on a layover as he and his family were leaving town because of the fire. “We had to get out, at the same time it was hard to get out,” he said. I wanted to ask so many more questions, but it seemed rude to pry into the unpleasantness. My philosophy is people tend to tell you things if they want you to know them (this approach has its downside, in that I spend a lot of time wondering). The next day, I watched another man and his family chat him up and ask all sorts of questions about the fire, but they knew him, had been yearly regulars to this beach. I couldn’t hear all the words, but I could tell the topic by their tone of voice, the stiff, solemn way they stood. I tried to eaves drop until my family migrated down the beach.
Despite my refusal to overtly pry, people’s stories kept finding their way to my ear, blown about like bits of dying ember. The Lahaina Cannery Mall reopened while we were there, and the lady at the toy store said, as she was ringing up my son’s two model planes, “you are my second customer since the fire.” Another waitress said she lost her store in the fire. “But I was insured,” she said. “Many other weren’t.” She wore diamond hoop earrings and I wondered if they were real *(tacky for me to wonder, I know.) In another conversation overheard, a man lamented, “I haven’t heard from her since, I’ve tried contacting her.” His friend said, “Well you know she left the island. I don’t think she plans to come back.”
A man who worked at a golf course, in hospitality, as he explained it (which I am fascinated by the idea tha tone can work in hospitality), said people showed up at the golf course disoriented, realizing they were without their golf clubs, as they had lost them, lost everything in the fire. “Of course we let them use our rentals,” he said. What it is like to lose everything and show up to the golf course to get your mind off it, in shock, realizing that though the sacred green carpet of the golf course is untouched, you are not.
Driving the highway through Lahaina, I could see the blackened skeletons of trees and buildings. One stretch you can see what clearly had been a residential neighborhood, completely incinerated. The debris removal was underway and dotting the devastated stretch were men in yellow vests and here and there construction equipment, which looked to me like overgrown toddler toys. It would take far longer than it should, but the devastated parts of Lahaina would be rebuilt. A fire like that, that claimed the lives of so many, that sent many of the survivors fleeing the island, seems like it should be the end of a story, the final world — but it never is, which on one hand seems horribley rude and insensitive, cruel, really, but I suppose we should be thankful.
We could not get down to see the famous banyan tree that sits at the waterfront, but I googled it and found a recent article detailing the status of big old storied tree. What I remember most clearly is the tree was measured to be expanding during the day and retracting at night, a sort of regular heartbeat, a sign of hope as the humans tending to the tree maintained their vigil. That tree, a living embodiment to human hope. Another story of that tree is it in an interloper, planted by foreigners, who sought if not physically, then spiritually, to subjugate the native islanders. And that is a scourge not even a fire can kill. But that doesn’t make for as nice of story, so for the sake of maintaining the sanctity and symmetry of this beautiful symbol, I will cast it aside.
When you spend as much as one must spend on a Hawaiian vacation, you expect things to go perfectly. I mean, at that price! What we paid for was peace of mind and calm and a break from all those everyday chores. What we got was a daily trip to the Lahaina Safeway and repeated loads of laundry. Oh, and there was a trip to Costco in there, when we first arrived. After a harried twenty-four hours of frantically getting ready for the trip only to sit through a long teeth chatterer of a flight the last place I wanted to be was playing metal cart tetris. My husband liked the Safeway because he felt we could save money making our own meals. Looking at the receipts, and then the inevitable stuff we threw away when we left, I wasn’t so sure we came out ahead, a regular theme of the trip.
We spent our last night at a resort on the Big Island, which I thought would bring a reprieve from the laundry, but no. They had a self-service laundry. “Free tide pods!” my husband yelled in delight. I think doing laundry provides him a sense of control, like vacuuming. You may ask, if he was doing the laundry, what did I care? Well, we all had to sit there and wait until he had started a load. And then he had to go back every so often to check the load. Sigh.
Also in regards to this single night stay a resort, we ended up spending $50 per adult and $22 per kid for a buffet breakfast (pressed for time and it was convenient). This was not a champagne breakfast that might justify the cost, just an absurd amount of ordinary breakfast fare, with some exotic options thrown in, and downright un-edible oily tasting breakfast potatoes, a point I will be sore about until my dying day. (I live for breakfast potatoes and really, how hard are they to make well?!) And you are kind of forced into choosing the buffet, since an omelet will run you about $30 anyhow, and that doesn’t include coffee or juice or potatoes or toast or waffles or pancakes. So through a bit of smoke and mirrors and the scarcity of convenient and quick breakfast options, you are forced into it; you are led to believe, you know what? it’s really a deal. You don’t think that eating toast AND a waffle AND a pastry probably isn’t a good idea for your wallet or your health. No, you don’t think at all. Your lizard brain takes over and you you repeat under your breath better more, more better, now, with whipped cream on top! And forty-five minutes later, twenty minutes of which were spent in line at the omelet station watching the omelet maker wipe her brow as she made three omelets at a time for a never-ending line of perfectly nice but expectant, entitled guests, you leave, understanding you and all the other sun damaged, fun beachwear clad people have been had. Well, at least everyone is doing it, you think as you head off to bob in the pool that overlooks the ocean, where later you will order another painfully overpriced meal at the poolside café.
On this subject of beach wear, what I wear at the beach in Hawai’i bears no relation to what I wear in real life, a whole separate wardrobe! I have a store of things in a plastic bin at the top of my closet, items accrued from several long-ago tropical vacations, one of which was my honeymoon, hopeful I would have cause to wear them again. It’s been over a decade, but this trip, I was finally able to dust it off that overpriced pink cotton tropical flower number from Tommy Bahama, the one with spaghetti straps. Actually, what happened was I took it out, decided it was for a much younger woman, and deposited it in my “going to Good Will” drawer. I then felt sorry for it, and for the older me who thinks I need to wear mumus and put it in my suitcase. (I did wear it, dear reader, but with an unbuttoned linen shirt on top so I was less Forever 21 and more, I don’t know… middle aged mom from a Land’s End catalogue.) What I am most excited to tell you about is my shoes, my hideous shoes! Just for this trip, I bought a pair of Birkenstocks, reminiscent of the hippie kind we all think of, but in a modern white, lightweight material. Yes, I purchased a pair of shoes very reminiscent of a white Styrofoam cup (and aren’t those illegal, at least in California?)! I’m not sure where the urge to own a pair came from. I haven’t been in style in at least ten years so why the sudden urge to buy something a little ridiculous and so outside of the realm of what I normally wear? I don’t know -but I saw enough teenagers and twenty somethings sporting the same ugly shoe that I felt quite stylish indeed and this satisfied the vain small-minded creature who remains in my core, my inner twelve-year-old. I even wore them with my pink flowered spaghetti strap dress and white linen shirt. You see, this is a shoe that doesn’t go with anything and therefore goes with everything. The wide stubby shoes may not have flattered my wide stubby feet, but who cares! I felt young and alive and somewhat free!
Which brings me to the fact that while a certain part of me clearly thought I was about to have the same kind of tropical vacation with my husband as I had before children, that certain part was pretty much sad the whole time. I’ve been a parent now for ten years, and I adore my children, so you think I would have figured this out… that travel with children requires constant feeding and redirecting of energy. But I had visions of romantic walks on the beach in my head, and of fancy uninterrupted dinners, of snorkeling with the fishies. The reality was the children would swim for ten minutes, become ravenous hangry monsters who couldn’t bear life until we managed to order chicken strips and fries. The first part of our stay was at a condo, with the idea that we could cut costs by cooking our own meals. But let’s just say we had enough “I’m hungry now and no I don’t want a granola bar!” emergencies that we didn’t save as much as one would expect. Also, the one snorkel boat tour we did was lovely (check out the Maui Magic!) but the children were done snorkeling after five minutes and so I as mom had to dutifully go back on the boat with them to ensure they didn’t upset the other guests or fall overboard. I, too, was scared to snorkel, convinced Jaws was at my heels, but my children were supposed to keep me in the water with their enthusiasm for the sea turtles. They did not get that particular memo.
My husband and I did walk on the beach, sans children, but it was not the moonlit dreamy stroll of ten years ago. It was a march in silence, with me wondering why my husband was not inclined to romantic overtures at what should have been the proper time, but seemed to be brooding, scowling inside that I was forcing him on a walk. Back in our condo, he confessed that his knees hurt, aggravated, he said, from a hike I had forced the family to take the day before. The fun I had planned had apparently been torture.
I have at this point misled you into thinking the trip was miserable. It wasn’t, not any more miserable than my everyday existence. And like my every day, there were many delightful moments I would do well to linger on a little more. I had fun when we were taking a family walk on the beach and we saw two sea turtles mating. At least, I had watched enough Discovery Channel in my youth to understand that is what must be going on, with one large turtle on top of another, bobbing in the surf. “Look, a mama and a baby!” my daughter exclaimed in delight. “Yes,” we said, “Look at that!” Those turtles had none of our human cares and uptightness and it was refreshing. We couldn’t yell at them to go get a room; the ocean was there room!
I had fun when we stood in line for ice cream at a window in an assuming strip mall north of Hapuna Beach on the Big Island. It was a short line, but moved very slowly, manned by a single older gentleman who only knew the island time. Waiting in line is not something I am particularly good at, but we had nothing better to do as we counted down the last remaining hours of our stay. The sun was warm, and the people sharing the line were as unpretentious and unhurried as the man scooping the ice cream. A sign in colorful marker taped onto the window read, “Be kind.” Frighteningly large wild goats wandered the other side of the road, giving us a giggle and thrill. Thankfully, they weren’t inclined to cross the road to stand in line (or stomp over us) for ice cream. Whatever they were doing, walking this way and that, was totally free.
