To get to the North Shore I had to first travel to the shopping mall at Ala Moana and transfer on to the 60 from there.  Ala Moana was the place where we would go to window-shop back during the money-less days when I was growing up in Hawaii.  There were big koi ponds and a Japanese department store with a life-sized statue of our favorite superhero, Kikaida.  We might have gotten an Orange Julius on occasions, but our trips there were strictly for looking.  The only time we bought something was when my brother rolled a model Volkswagen Bug, made for holding shot glasses, down a flight of stairs.

There was a drunk man sitting on the bench when I walked up to the corner of Kapahulu and Kuhio.  He was yelling at the cars passing by, but left me alone.  After arriving outside of Ala Moana, it was only a few minutes before the 60 came pulling up.  We traveled over the Pali Highway and passed through Kaneohe.  The windward side of the island looked drab and muddy on this day. 

A homeless man was hanging from one of the handrails, trying to stretch out the muscles in his back.  A transient woman was in the seat next to me, drawing pictures on the dirty window.  We stopped at the Polynesian Culture Center and I could see large tikis of Ku, Lono, Kane, and Kanaloa, in the parking lot.

The North Shore of Oahu is the most famous surfing destination in the world, known for its massive waves during the winter season.  Around the bend from Turtle Bay is Sunset Beach and just past that is the Banzai Pipeline.  I got out at Sunset Beach with my ukelele.  The waves had recently been as high as fifteen feet, but on this day were closer to nine.  Large sections of tide were sweeping back and forth between the shore and the break.  There was no way I’d ever paddle out into that, yet I got out my ukelele and pitched it in the sand like a board.

This day would be the culmination of my trip.  I sat in the sand and played with the heart of a big wave surfer.  There was one song that I’d been working on the entire time I’d been in Hawaii, just that one rhythm and melody.  I’d sent thousands of words toppling over the falls but only some of them had stuck, enough to have a structure.  The chorus and first verse were finished.  The second verse echoed some of the situations in the first verse.  Nothing at All is about a man who chases a dream so far that he can never get back to reality.  From what I’d seen of reality on this trip, I wasn’t sure it was worth getting back to.

After an hour I got up and walked down to the Banzai Pipeline, one of the greatest places for tube riding in the world.   Here the notes flew down the neck of my ukelele like they were the ones getting tubed.   From there I journeyed down to Shark’s Cove and took a lunch break at Foodland.  I got a half a rotisserie chicken and iced tea and went and sat down in the shade of the pine trees across the road.  I sat down on a bed of leaves and pine needles and enjoyed my own little luau, before picking up the ukelele and working some more on my song.

When I walked up to the bus stop, there was a man walking down the highway wearing a robe, Chinese mask, and long black wig.  It was hard to know if he was involved in a theatrical production or out practicing magic as a free-lancer.  He rode all the way to Haleiwa and then got off and continued walking down the road.  In the meantime, there were about four of us waiting for the 52 to take us to Honolulu down the center of the island.

When I got back to Waikiki there was a guy yelling at a fire hydrant.  That made about as much sense as anything, certainly as much as playing music for the sea.  There are spirits in everything, some of them good, some of them bad.  We abuse some.  We seduce the others.  What does it all really mean at the end of the day?