On the way back to the hostel, I stopped and laid down on a strip of grass besides the Duke statue at Waikiki Beach.  I didn’t care if I was breaking the law.  My back and legs were hurting, and I wasn’t the only one lying there.   Right across the street were hotels that cost thousands of dollars a night to stay in.  Most people can’t afford that.  There was still a sizeable contingent of homeless people on the beach.  They were taking up tables and benches.  A few were lying in the grass a few feet away from me.

I got up eventually and stumbled towards the ocean, the setting sun casting a golden glow on the water.  Before we’d moved to the mainland, in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial, I’d come to Waikiki Beach with my fourth-grade class at the end of the school year.  Walking out alone on a rock jetty, I’d looked into the water and seen a naked toddler being swept out to sea.  I’d jumped in and grabbed him, holding him up over my head until we got back into the shallow surf.  The mother and some of my classmates had seen me that day and made me feel like a hero.

Where was that hero’s welcome now?  On this day I could’ve been invisible, or even worse, gotten into trouble just by looking so rootless.  There are poor people all over the world, yet only in America are they blamed for being poor.  The idea is that we could’ve been anything and yet chose to fail, out of laziness or moral ineptitude.  That is a bitter pill to swallow when it happens to you.  Every citizen deserves a place to lie down, at the very least.

There was an old woman in a hula outfit, walking around taking pictures with the sun at her back.  She might’ve been there to represent the old days.  Until very recently, they’d had hula shows on the beach and in the International Market.  Perhaps, they’d return at some point, but any sense of Aloha on Oahu has long been an endangered species. 

When I got back to the hostel, I took the book I’d brought along, Hawaiian Mythology, by Martha Beckwith, down to a hammock in the common area.  I was a generation older than most of the guests and though I felt friendly towards them wasn’t about to sit and do shots with them, not any time soon. 

I’d gotten a look at the guy sleeping above me and he was even older, lying in bed, so flat he was hardly discernable.  The fact he was in bed already showed how much he had going on.  One of the strange twists about Hawaii is that some folks that can’t afford nursing homes stay in youth hostels.  I was well on my way to being one of them.

It was a big book to get into, as thick as a phone book.  I started at the very beginning.  Who are the Hawaiians?  They are Polynesians, the indigenous island people of Oceania in the Pacific Ocean.  There may have been two waves of migration to Hawaii, the first from Micronesia and the second from Tahiti.  They are polytheistic, meaning they believe in many gods, and animistic, meaning they believe that every natural thing on the planet, people, animals, rocks, plants, water, soil, fire, have souls.

The way that information and tradition was passed down was by storytelling.  The ancient Hawaiians had petroglyphs, but no written language so everything was memorized and transmitted from generation to generation in the form of chants, dances, and stories.  There were two types of stories.  A kaao was a make-believe story, told for entertainment, while a moolelo was a historical narrative, about the gods or the ancestors.  The moolelo, or sacred stories, were only told by day.  You could get in big trouble for messing around in the middle of them, just like a fidgety kid in church.

The Hawaiians called their gods akua, and they could be anything in nature.  The god that a family might claim as a guardian god was called an aumakua.  The child of a god born into a family, always with special, remarkable traits, like Hercules, the son of Zeus, was called a kupua.  Above and beyond the everyday gods that inhabit the islands, the Hawaiians also believed in four great gods, Ku, Lono, Kane, and Kanaloa.  Tiki gods are usually carved to represent one of these major deities.

Before the coming of the Westerners, the Hawaiians lived in a society that was broken down into four classes, the Chiefs, Priests, Commoners, and Slaves.  It was dictated by a very strict set of tapus, or regulations.  The old ways began to crack around the time that King Kamehameha rose to power, influenced by contact with outsiders such as Oriental sailors and the first missionaries.  Oral recitation of their own legends began to get mixed with stories from other cultures and sources such as the Bible.

There was a lot to read about.  In the meantime, was it true that we lived in a free society now, or had the four classes only changed names and faces?   When I tiptoed into my room that night, I stood beside my bed and looked at the old man in the bunk above me, his face wrinkled up in worry, trying to escape, through sleep, from a room that was flooded with noise and light.  With enough money, you can sleep like a chief.  Without it, you’re just lucky not to be on the street.