Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Under the Hula Moon | January/February 2007

Under the Hula Moon
By: JOCELYN FUJII

Spaced Out

Photo: Brett Uprichard

When was the last time you drove around O‘ahu? I was inspired recently by a friend’s account of her own circle-island tour, in which she stopped at or drove by Hanauma Bay, the Blow Hole, Sandy Beach, Makapu‘u, Waimānalo, Coconut Island, Kualoa Park, Lā‘ie, Sunset Beach, Hale‘iwa, Waimea Bay, Waialua Sugar Mill, the Mokulē‘ia polo fields, and the Dillingham Airfield, to the end of the road at Ka‘ena Point. She didn’t have time to cover the leeward coastline on the other side of the Wai‘anae Mountains, but she managed to stop for Kahuku corn in Lā‘ie, chocolate éclairs at Ted’s in Sunset Beach, a sandwich at Kua ‘Āina and dessert at the Dole Plantation. I was impressed by my friend’s ability to compress time, enjoy herself, see the sights and perfect the art of holoholo, going out for pleasure. What’s more, she’s a lifelong resident of O‘ahu, and residents are notorious for driving around the island only when they have friends visiting from afar.

“I got back into town with enough time for a bit of grocery shopping until the going-home traffic improved,” she concluded.

A circle-island drive around O‘ahu, like hers, is 99.5 miles, according to the 2005 State of Hawai‘i Data Book. Throughout the state, the only point-to-point drive surpassing that is on the Big Is­land, where the Hilo-to-Kona drive, via Nā‘ālehu on the southern route, measures 123 miles. Between these extremes statewide are many short jogs, such as the eight-mile drive between Waikīkī and the Honolulu International Airport, and the mile-and-a-half between downtown Honolulu and Ala Moana Center. Compared to the continental U.S., these di­men­sions are much like scale models, a juxtaposition of expansive ocean views with the vertical communities lining the coastlines. In island societies such as ours, where space is disappearing fast, life on the ground is increasingly supplanted by the necessity for vertical living.

On a recent vacation in Northern California, my husband and I spent a week with some friends at their 2,500-acre ranch. At this ranch, infinity came to the doorstep: You could look out to the horizon from any deck or window and see nothing man-made, just birds, sky and tawny hills dotted with oaks and redwoods. The ranch is so expansive that the guest house is two-and-a-half miles from the main house, across a spectacular landscape of winding road and tree-covered streams and ravines, interspersed by open space.

Bird­song rang out constantly, a family of blue grouse visited the main house daily, mules and horses grazed in the pastures and a dog cavorted in the yard. Wide-open spaces and a sense of privacy soothed the senses. The horizon was clear and uninterrupted, and the night sky was brilliant, unhampered by light pollution.

At the end of our trip, we encountered an equally pleasing scenario at the other extreme of the spectrum. In Sausalito, we visited what was formerly a 46-foot fishing trawler (with a Mercedes diesel engine) that Deirdre Slevin, adventurer extraordinaire, has converted into a stellar home on the water. It was a magazine spread come to life, a style editor’s dream: a boat on Sausalito Bay, spare and enlightened (easily as stylish as a chic Paris apartment or a converted loft in SoHo), accented with a modernist red Italian sofa and glowing cork floor, warmed by underfloor heating. Its aesthetic statement, underscored by the economy of space, was masterful and profound.

I could imagine such a home in Hawai‘i, where space is the premium luxury and perspectives of space are compressed. As a child growing up in east Kaua‘i, I went to the shoreline to find comfort in a horizon unencumbered by other forms. To others, this was a lonely perspective that accentuated our isolation as islands. Most of my friends preferred to see other islands offshore, such as Ni‘ihau from west Kaua‘i and Lāna‘i and Ka­ho‘olawe from the west and south Maui shores. These days, however, the inkling of isolation is a luxury of the past. With development pressures on the North Shore of O‘ahu, higher visitor counts, more cars on the road, and a burgeoning population, we have little choice as islanders but to grow vertically in the urban core and relinquish our attachment to the ground. Only then can we preserve what’s left of open space and rural communities and have anyplace left to holoholo.

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