Hawaii Isn't What You Think It Is

You’re listening to Tide and Light. Episode Two. The first time I felt like I was actually in Hawaii, I was lost. Not lost in a scary way. Just turned around, on a back road on the east side of the island, somewhere I had no business being with a rental car and no signal. I’d been to Hawaii twice before that and I want to be honest, I don’t think I’d really been there at all. I’d been to the version you get handed.

The pool with the swim-up bar, the beach with the rented chairs, the drive to the lookout where everyone parks and takes the same photo and leaves. I’d been to Hawaii the way you’d visit a movie set. And it was lovely, and I had a wonderful time, and I came home and I could not have told you a single true thing about the place. So this trip, the third one, I rented a little car and I just drove, with no plan, which is a thing I’d recommend doing carefully and not at all the way I did it. And I got lost. And I came around a bend and the road was suddenly running through somebody’s actual life.

There were houses, real ones, with trucks in the yards and laundry on the lines and kids’ bikes dropped in the grass. There was a little store with a hand-painted sign and a couple of old men sitting outside it in plastic chairs. There was a church, small and white and clearly the center of something. And I realized, with this strange drop in my stomach, that I had been coming to a place where people live, and I had managed, twice, to never once see them. I’d seen the postcard. I had never seen the island.

I pulled over, eventually, by the little store, because I genuinely had no idea where I was. And one of the old men in the plastic chairs looked at me, and looked at my rental car, and didn’t say anything mean, but he didn’t have to. He just told me, kindly enough, how to get back to the main road, the road I’d been so proud of myself for leaving. And I drove back the way I’d come, and I felt this odd mix of foolish and grateful, which I’ve since decided is one of the best feelings you can have when you travel. Foolish because you got something wrong. Grateful because you finally noticed.

I’m Lily Mae, and this is a show about travel and art and the slow beauty of living intentionally. And today I want to talk about Hawaii, because it’s the place I keep coming back to, and it’s the place I’ve gotten the most wrong. I want to start with the thing nobody really says out loud, which is that there are two Hawaiis, and most of us only ever meet one of them. There’s the Hawaii that exists to be visited. That one is engineered, in a way, and I don’t mean that as an insult exactly, but it’s true. The resorts, the luau with the fire dancers, the dashboard of recommended experiences, the leis at the airport.

It’s a real thing, and people work hard inside it, and it’s not fake, but it’s curated. It’s a version of the islands built to be consumed by someone who has a week and a flight home. And then there’s the other Hawaii. The one with a history, and a language, and a deep, complicated story about how it became a place that visitors fly into. The one where there are families who have been on the same land for longer than there’s been a country flying its flag over it. The one where the word for the land, aina, which is pronounced eye-ee-nah, doesn’t mean scenery.

It means something closer to the thing that feeds you, the thing you belong to, the thing you’re responsible for. And those two Hawaiis exist in the same place, on the same beaches, under the same sun, and the wild thing is how completely you can spend a vacation inside the first one and never even brush against the second. I did it twice. And I don’t think that’s an accident, honestly. I think the first Hawaii is built, on purpose, to be easy, and the easy thing is almost never the true thing. The first version is designed so you never have to be uncomfortable, never have to be confused, never have to learn a single name you can’t pronounce.

It hands you a softened, frictionless island, and most of us, tired from the flight and ready to relax, take it gratefully and never look up. I’m not even blaming anyone for that. When you’ve saved for a year and you have six days, the last thing you want is homework. But I’ve come to think the friction is where the real place lives. The discomfort of not knowing, the small awkwardness of being a guest who’s still learning the manners, that’s not the thing getting in the way of the trip. That, it turns out, is the trip.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be easy to start lecturing, and I don’t want to do that. I’m not Hawaiian. I’m a person from the mainland who fell in love with a place and is trying to love it well, which is harder than it sounds and which I’m still not sure I’m doing right. So I’m not going to stand here and explain Hawaiian culture to you, because it isn’t mine to explain, and the people whose it is have said it far better than I ever could. What I can tell you is what changed for me when I stopped treating the islands like a backdrop. The first thing that changed was that I got quiet.

I stopped arriving with a list of things to do and started arriving with a list of things to learn. I read before I went, real books, by Hawaiian writers, about Hawaiian history, the parts that are hard and the parts that are beautiful, and a lot of it is both at once. And I’m not going to pretend that reading a few books makes you understand a place. It doesn’t. But it does something smaller and useful. It makes you arrive humble.

It makes you arrive knowing that the thing in front of you is the surface of something very deep, and that you’re a guest standing on top of it. I think a lot of us travel like the place came into existence the moment our plane touched down. Like the whole island had just been sitting there, blank and waiting, until we showed up to give it meaning by enjoying it. And Hawaii, more than almost anywhere I’ve been, quietly refuses that. There’s so much that came before you, and most of it isn’t yours, and learning even a little of it changes the way you stand in a place. You walk softer.

You ask before you take. You stop narrating the island as a thing that happened to you, and you start understanding that you’re the one who happened to it. I remember the first time I learned that a beach I’d loved, one I’d photographed without a second thought, sat right next to something that mattered enormously to the people there, a sacred place, with rules around it that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with respect. And I felt this hot wash of embarrassment, the embarrassment of realizing you’ve been loud in a room you thought was empty. But underneath the embarrassment was something better, which was the beginning of actually seeing where I was. The second thing that changed was the food, and I mean this more seriously than it sounds.

On my first two trips I ate where the apps told me to. Which meant I ate, more or less, the same meal a person eats in any beach town anywhere in the world. On the trip where I got lost, I started eating where the line was made of people who clearly lived there. The little plate lunch place with no website. The lunch wagon by the harbor that’s only there until the food runs out, which is usually by one in the afternoon. The Saturday market in a town whose name I’m not going to say, where the woman selling the most extraordinary things you’ve ever tasted has been doing it from the same folding table for thirty years.

And the food was incredible, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was that food is where a place keeps its memory. What people cook, and how, and who they learned it from, that’s history you can taste. You learn more about a place from one honest meal than from a week of the engineered kind. And you put a little money into the hands of someone who actually lives there, which matters more than I understood when I started. There’s a thing that happens, too, when you eat where people live instead of where people visit.

You end up in conversations. Not big ones, usually. Somebody asks where you’re from, and you ask what’s good, and they tell you, and then they tell you something else you didn’t ask about, because that’s how people are when you’re not rushing them. That’s how I’ve learned most of what I actually know about Hawaii. Not from a tour. From a woman at a market explaining why a certain fruit only shows up for a few weeks, and what her family does with it, and how her mother did it differently.

From an old man telling me, gently, that the word I’d been mispronouncing all week had a meaning I’d never have guessed, and being kind about it instead of cold. You cannot buy those moments and you cannot schedule them. You can only put yourself in the kind of ordinary place where they happen, and then be quiet enough to let them. The third thing, and this is the one I keep turning over, is that I had to make peace with being a repeat visitor. Because there’s a tension here that I don’t think you can resolve, you can only hold. I love this place.

I keep coming back. And every time I come back, I am, in some small way, part of the weight on it. The traffic, the prices, the water use, the slow pressure of a place becoming more about its visitors than its people. I am, very politely, part of a problem I care about. And I used to deal with that by not thinking about it, the way you don’t think about a lot of things on vacation. Now I try to think about it on purpose.

I stay longer and go fewer places, which I talked about last time, and it turns out that’s not just better for me, it’s gentler on the island too. One person staying two weeks in one town is a different thing than the same person racing across three islands in the same time. I rent from people, not from the big places, when I can. I learn the actual names of things, and I try to say them right, which is the smallest possible courtesy and also somehow not small at all. And I stopped, this is a real one, I stopped sharing the exact locations of certain places, because some of them simply cannot survive being loved by everyone at once. I’ll talk about all of that more in its own time, because it deserves more than a paragraph.

But it started here, with the lost afternoon and the white church and the drop in my stomach. There’s a moment from that trip I think about a lot. I’d been invited, sort of accidentally, sort of through a chain of friendly people, to a thing at a beach in the evening. Not a luau, not a show. Just families, a lot of them, gathered the way families gather, with too much food and kids in the water and somebody’s uncle playing music that was not for anyone but the people there. And I sat at the edge of it, because I knew I was at the edge of it and that was the right place for me to be.

And I painted, a little, quietly, the light going down over all of it. And I remember thinking, this is the thing the brochure can’t sell, because the second you could buy a ticket to it, it would stop being itself. This was just people, at home, in their home, and I got to sit near it for an hour. That hour did more to teach me what Hawaii actually is than every guided thing I’d ever paid for, combined. So I don’t have a tidy way to wrap this up, because the subject isn’t tidy. What I have is something closer to an invitation, and it’s a quiet one.

The next time you go somewhere that exists in two versions, and most beautiful places do, see if you can find the road behind the brochure. Read the hard history before you go, not just the highlights. Eat where the locals eat, and tip like you mean it. Learn to say the names right. Stay long enough that the place stops performing for you and just goes back to being itself, and you get to be near that for a while. And carry the thing I’m still learning to carry, which is that loving a place comes with a responsibility to it, not just a right to enjoy it.

Hawaii will show you what you came to see. The beaches are real, the sunsets are real, the water is exactly as warm and as blue as the pictures promised. But if you pay attention, if you get a little lost on purpose, it’ll show you something else entirely. And that something else is the part you’ll still be thinking about years later, on a gray afternoon at home, when the postcard has long since faded. Next time, I want to talk about what travel actually does to creative work. Because I noticed something strange a while ago.

I’d come home from a trip and immediately make the best paintings I’d made in months, and I couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t the scenery, it wasn’t even the rest. It was something stranger and more useful than that, something about how being somewhere unfamiliar rewires the way you see. So that’s where we’re headed. But for now, here’s the one thing I’m most sure of about the place I love most. It is so much more than the version you were sold.

And it’s been waiting, patiently, the whole time, just off the main road, for anyone willing to slow down enough to find it. I’m Lily Mae. This was Tide and Light. Get a little lost on purpose. I’ll see you next time.