Huliau - The Return Voyage

For every memorable year of my adult life, I have had one recurring nightmare.  In that dream, I am running for my life from a rapidly approaching, formidable wall of water that it is absolute certain, I cannot outrun.

For every memorable year of my adult life, in any of my many domestic and foreign homes, I have never lived anywhere near that possibility–never once lived on the edge of an ocean.  Until twelve years ago, when I met ‘Iokepa, and moved my life to these Hawaiian Islands.

I’ve never had that nightmare since.

This Saturday past, I was awakened at 6:00 a.m.–not by the ubiquitous roosters–but by an air raid siren.  (I was dreaming, it turns out at the time, of Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America, chosen in 1945 at a time when her religion was a significant factor working against her selection. )

‘Iokepa awakened immediately to the sound of the sirens and said:  “Kai e’e!” which means, in Hawaiian, tidal wave.  When you live on speck of dirt in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, hurricanes and tidal waves are apparently part of your consciousness.  They are not nightmares, they are fact of life.

We turned on our cell phone, we turned on our computer.  Since three in the morning, our silenced phone messages had been screaming warnings from family on other Islands–various versions of, “Get to high ground!”   The computer shouted email alerts from friends across other time zones.  We have spent much  of our lives here living in tents on  Kaua’i beaches.  Friends and family feared for us.

But this time we were high and dry.  It was our turn to  call with proffered help, friends who’s homes were coastal–and in danger–people with farm animals in need of rescue, people in need of a place to escape.

And every hour from 6:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m.–with a final blast at 11:15–the sirens screeched their message of doom.  Roads were closed; helicopters circled remote areas looking for folks without phones, computers or radios–there were plenty.

We gathered with our neighbors, and others, on the highest ocean lookout near our home.  It was hot and sunny, the ocean looked particularly flat and still.  People brought food and picnicked.  Hours passed, the threat passed.

So, I live for the first time in my life in a place where tidal waves pose potential disaster, and I no longer dream that nightmare.  Clearly, the terrifying wall of water that threatened me so that I could never ever outrun it, was something symbolically other–a metaphoric fear that no longer needs to awaken me.

I suppose that once I’d given up my glass house on that highest hill in Portland, my successful writing career, my family and my friends, to live in a tent on windblown tropical beaches…once I’d agree to enter the aboriginal nether land between the solidity of my five resolute senses and the fuzzier world of ancestral spirits…once I’d risked life, limb and sanity to leap full-steam ahead into this Native Hawaiian, “Walk of faith” with ‘Iokepa–once I’d agreed to all that, I’d already lived through the tidal wave.   Sorry, ‘Iokepa, I mean, through the kai e’e.

I’d already lived through the worst of it.