People who live in Hawaii have something they tell each other about their good fortune to live in what Mark Twain once called “the loveliest fleet of islands anchored in any ocean.”  They say lucky you live Hawaii.  What if you are born there and then move away as a child, however?  Do you still have any residual luck coming?  Can you go back and claim your birthright at some point, let them know that there has been some mix-up, that you were meant to live in paradise?  I have tried to make that happen many times.  Though it’s never come close to working, I seem destined to keep trying.

I first went back with my German girlfriend, Suzy, in 1996, on a package tour to Waikiki.  It rained from the moment we arrived to the moment we left, so hard that it was almost impossible to see the ground. 

The second time I went, in 2001, was for two weeks.  I traveled to five of the islands, Oahu, the Big Island, Maui, Kauai, and Molokai, seeing the best nature the islands have to offer while sleeping in a string of rental cars.  It does not take that long to drive around any of the islands and there are not many places where you can just pull over and get off the beaten track.  It was a long two weeks of ducking and hiding, never really getting comfortable anywhere, doing a lot of sitting around.

In 2008, I went back again and started off sleeping in a rental car, until I discovered a hostel by the zoo and another on the North Shore that I spent most of the week at.  It was during the US Open and one of the cameramen for the event heard me playing a song I’d just written and said he wanted to film me and then mix the performance in with some footage of the surfers. 

That was nothing more than an impulsive idea he was throwing out there, as after the contest was over, he didn’t show up to meet me in the parking lot.  It had at least given me two hours of false hope, however, much more than I’d gotten at any other time on the trip.  Hawaii is a tough nut to crack.

The fourth time I went back to Hawaii, in 2012, was the time I stayed the longest, working at a hostel in Waikiki.  It started off when my parents were invited to house-sit for some of their old friends from back-in-the-day.  I was planning on going over anyway, and this seemed like an incredible opportunity to connect with people and solicit some ideas for getting my foot in the door. 

My father’s friend was now head pastor of a small Lutheran church in Waikiki that had been my father’s first call after getting out of seminary.  That was right before my parents had dropped out of society to join the counterculture, becoming Jesus People, living like hippies and latter-day apostles from the New Testament.  That’s how I’d lived out my early childhood, going from commune to commune, home to apartment to house, like Jesus himself, who’d wandered from town to town with his followers. 

Now we were going back to house-sit in Hawaii Kai.  The idea was that my father would preach for his friend while they were away on the mainland visiting some relatives.  The house in Hawaii Kai was far from any attractions and as hot as a brick oven.  The dog that we were watching almost died of depression and old age.  My father now seemed to be more obsessed with finding a Walmart than trying to recapture his glory days.  I was supposed to be making connections.  Instead, all anyone told me was that it’s expensive to live in Hawaii.

The day my parents left, I tracked down a hostel on Lemon Road, that seemed more like a homeless shelter than anything.  It was fifty dollars a night for a bunk bed.  The bedding was stained, and I shared the room with two convicts who partied like we were living in a dorm.   When I came down in the morning, the manager asked me if I wanted a job, not working for money, but for my bed.  They had me working the graveyard shift at another slum property, where most of my clients ended up being hookers bringing their johns. 

The rest of the time I drank and played music in a garage with a few Samoans and a tribe of other outsiders who lived on the next property.  By the time I got a job in the Middle East, I had twenty dollars left in the bank.

Of all the places I’d been to in Hawaii, the only one that seemed even remotely like a place where I could make it was Hilo on the rainy side of the Big Island.  I’d been there in 2017, then again in 2020, right before the pandemic, for a further assessment.  It seemed the right size, a college town, with interesting old buildings downtown and a few places to play music.  Even that was expensive, however, and the rental rooms I’d looked into had been far from the center.

Now I was trying Hawaii again, this time with a new twist on an old plan.  During the pandemic I’d gone through a huge bin of family correspondence and found envelopes with the addresses of all the places we’d lived at during our scattered Hawaii years.  With the miracle of Google Maps, I’d be able to track the places down, just as I’d recently found all the places on the mainland that my family and extended family had ever lived.  I was also taking a book on Hawaiian Mythology that I wanted to learn about, and my father’s old ukelele, which I planned on loading up with mana energy.

With that plan in my mind, I found a round-trip ticket to Honolulu, booked a room in a hostel, and set off to Hawaii one more time to see what I could find.