Spirit of Aloha | Features | November/December 2006

My Hawaiian Aloha
By Jack London

Love at first sight

Hawai‘i is the home of shanghaied men and women, and of the descendants of shanghaied men and women. They never intended to be here at all. Very rarely, since the first whites came, has one, with the deliberate plan of coming to remain, remained. Somehow, the love of the Islands, like the love of a woman, just happens. One cannot determine in advance to love a particular woman, nor can one so determine to love Hawai‘i. One sees, and one loves or does not love. With Hawai‘i it seems always to be love at first sight. Those for whom the Islands were made, or who were made for the Islands, are swept off their feet in the first moments of meeting, embrace and are embraced.

I remember a dear friend who re­solved to come to Hawai‘i and make it his home forever. He packed up his wife, all his belongings including his garden hose and rake and hoe, said, “Good-by, proud California,” and de­part­ed. Now he was a poet, with an eye and soul for beauty, and it was only to be expected that he would lose his heart to Hawai‘i as Mark Twain and Steven­son and Stoddard before him. So he came, with his wife and garden hose and rake and hoe. Heaven alone knows what preconceptions he must have entertained. But the fact remains that he found naught of beauty and charm and delight. His stay in Hawai‘i, brief as it was, was a hideous nightmare. In no time he was back in California. To this day he speaks with plaintive bitterness of his experience, although he never mentions what became of his garden hose and rake and hoe.

But to return. Hawai‘i is the home of shanghaied men and women, who were induced to remain, not by a blow with a club over the head or a doped bottle of whisky, but by love. Hawai‘i and the Hawaiians are a land and a people loving and lovable. By their language may ye know them, and in what other land save this one is the commonest form of greeting, not “good day,” nor “How d’e do,” but “Love”? That greeting is Alo­ha—love, I love you, my love to you. Good day—what is it more than an impersonal remark about the weather? How do you do—it is personal in a merely casual interrogative sort of a way. But Aloha! It is a positive affirmation of the warmth of one’s own heart-giving. My love to you! I love you! Aloha!

Well, then, try to imagine a land that is as lovely and loving as such a people. Hawai‘i is all of this. Not strictly tropical, but subtropical, rather, in the heel of the northeast trades (which is a very wine of wind), with altitudes rising from palm-fronded coral beaches to snow-capped summits 14,000 feet in the air; there was never so much climate gathered together in one place on Earth. The custom of the dwellers is as it was of old time, only better, namely: to have a town house, a seaside house and a moun­tain house. All three homes, by automobile, can be within half an hour’s run of one another; yet in difference of climate and scenery, they are the equivalent of a house on Fifth Ave­nue or the Riverside Drive, of an Adi­ron­dack camp, and of a Florida winter bungalow, plus a 12-months’ cycle of seasons crammed into each and every day.

And what is true of O‘ahu, is true of all the other large islands of the group. Climate and season are to be had for the picking and choosing, with countless surprising variations thrown in for good measure. Suppose one be an invalid, seeking an invalid’s climate. A night’s run from Honolulu on a steamer will land him on the leeward coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. There, amongst the cof­fee on the slopes of Kona, a thousand feet above Kailua and the wrinkled sea, he will find the perfect invalid climate. It is the land of the morning calm, the afternoon shower, and the evening tranquility. Harsh winds never blow. Once in a year or two a stiff wind of 24 to 48 hours will blow from the south. This is the Kona wind. Otherwise there is no wind, at least no air-drafts of sufficient force to be so dignified. They are not even breezes. They are air-fans, al­ternating by day and by night between the sea and the land. Under the sun, the land warms and draws to it the mild sea air. In the night, the land radiating its heat more quickly, the sea remains the warmer and draws to it the mountain air faintly drenched with the perfume of flowers.

Such is the climate of Kona, where nobody ever dreams of looking at a thermometer, where each afternoon there falls a refreshing spring shower, and where neither frost nor sunstroke has ever been known. All of which is made pos­sible by the towering bulks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Beyond them, on the windward slopes of the Big Island, along the Hämä­kua Coast, the trade wind will as often as not be blustering at 40 miles an hour. Should an Oregon webfoot become homesick for the habitual wet of his native clime, he will find easement and a soaking on the windward coasts of Hawai‘i and Maui, from Hilo in the south with its average annual rainfall of 150 inches to the Nähiku country to the north be­yond Häna which has known a downpour of 420 inches in a single twelve­month. In the matter of rain it is again pick and choose—from 200 inches to 20, or five, or one. Nay, further, 40 miles away from the Nähiku, on the leeward slopes of the House of the Sun, which is the mightiest extinct volcano in the world, rain may not fall once in a dozen years, cattle live their lives without ever seeing a puddle, and horses brought from that region shy at running water or try to eat it with their teeth.

One can multiply the foregoing examples indefinitely and to the proposition that never was so much climate gathered together in one place, can be add­ed that never was so much landscape gathered together in one place. The diversification is endless, from the lava shores of South Puna to the barking sands of Kaua‘i. On every island breakneck mountain climbing abounds. One can shiver above timber line on the snow-caps of Mauna Kea or Mauna Loa, swelter under the banyan at sleepy old Lahaina, swim in clear ocean water that effervesces like champagne on 10,000 beaches, or sleep under blankets every night in the upland pastures of the great cattle ranges and awaken each morning to the song of skylarks and the crisp, snappy air of spring. But never, never, go where he will in Hawai‘i Nei, will he experience a hurricane, a tornado, a blizzard, a fog, or 90 degrees in the shade. Such discomforts are meteorologically impossible, so the meteorologists affirm. When Hawai‘i was named the Paradise of the Pacific, it was inadequately named. The rest of the Seven Seas and the islands in the midst thereof should have been included along with the Pacific. “See Naples and die”—they spell it differently here: See Hawai‘i and live.

(From Stories of Hawai‘i, Mutual Publishing, Honolulu. Used with per­mission.)

Features Archive