Kauai Travel Notes

Considering fractured skulls, diving boards and last meals

Airport herding- My wife seems to know what is happening, but I never do. ATM looking machines provide check in service and baggage tags. I manage to always confuse the two and get benched as far as arrival duty completion goes. I then follow orders and try not to think about willingly loading my family into a metal tube that somehow remains airborne almost all of the time. Then we are shoved and gushed and terminal percolated to security where the usual nervousness mixed with annoyance takes hold. Facial recognition machines are particularly creepy. Last year, TSA took a really nice Bluetooth speaker out of my bag and kept it after I forgot to remove it. We get through unscathed besides the ear melting chatter of an agent attempting to be friendly- it turns out, he loves baseball and was pretty good until seventh grade when things took a sudden downturn as far as his athletic talent goes. This human touch applied while being scanned and shoe stripped was almost weirder than the extreme seriousness bordering on menacing robot affect held by the other agents.

The smell of jet fuel, fry grease, human funk via stress hormone infused body odor.

Dragging ass and carry-on and second carry-on while surveilling nine year old daughter, and peripherally, the rest of the group- sister, wife, son, son’s girlfriend.

Sharply dressed soldiers looking like dangerous children in training move in small clusters with faces that say- this is it, this is all part of the adventure I signed up for, right? Kooks with some unspecified axe to grind or mind crunching drugs worming through their brains move pensively from gate to gate, to trash can to kiosk. Specifically, there are four different solitary men behaving not unlike homeless drug addicts, but with luggage. Exhausted and battered executives float along within the unfolding of yet another process in a day packed with a few hundred processes they must keep track of or at least be able to speak to in management doublespeak- saying nothing but sounding with it enough to pass as engaged in…whatever. Vibrant young adults immune to anything besides final destinations, deftly negotiate small spaces that open up where bedraggled families stop to arm twist and reprimand screeching children. We find a row of open chairs and watch the suffering and the delighted smash together in the endless flow.

Eyeballing the crew assembling at the gate is a new habit. I’m relieved to see silver haired Dad types after almost being killed by pimple faced pilots attempting to land in 65 mph winds a few years ago, an episode that included screaming, people vomiting and passing out- and me fixating on the sad fact that my last meal might be a disgusting Jack In The Box chicken sandwich ordered because every other establishment at the food court had long lines. On the second attempt I almost succumbed to the consciousness flattening G-force needed to pull us out of a sideways tumble as the wind jerked at the plane in ways I’d never imagined possible- a side to side up and down swirly bird motion. We rerouted to Portland. Upon landing, EMT’s rushed the plane to attend to the stricken, including an unconscious pregnant woman and a gagging elderly lady.

“We are refueling and will make another attempt shortly.”

Everyone rushed the front of the plane and demanded to be let off. The one good outcome was the realization that dying in a plane crash is painless. I can report that anyone experiencing a violent descent any worse than the one I survived would pass out long before splattering.

Flight- completely full, middle seat, arms folded for six hours. Listened to East of Eden which is fairly corny to a modern ear, but with enough juice to continue. Kathy has sharp animal teeth! Contemplated the dreary nature of flight attending, which is really cramped garbage collecting and snack distribution while uncomfortable people gaze at you demanding things, or ignore you entirely.

Lodging- the smell of rotting food upon opening the door. A pocket of spoiled scraps left un-obliterated in the garbage disposal was the culprit. After grinding the rotting slurry and flushing it deep into the plumbing, we attempted to blast away the odor by opening all the windows. This process was delayed by the fact that the large sliding glass door to the patio was locked and the switch normally in place to unlock it removed. This led to a questioning of my ability to see or to perform the operation of opening a door. Surely we aren’t paying to stay in a place that doesn’t allow patio entry. (The next day there was a drunken explanation given by whoever is in charge of maintaining the property that was nonsensical no matter how many times it was repeated- a person was then sent to unlatch the broken door while we were gone.) The spacious, clean, quiet two level condo was lovely but with not so comfortable dated furniture and a refrigerator that whistled and whined for a few minutes whenever a door was opened. The televisions required a series of complex and illogical feats of thumb on at least two remote controls and a rewiring of the HDMI cables, but we survived and enjoyed the surfing channel and local high school baseball while decompressing. Molding yoga pants left in the clothes dryer by a previous guest reminded us to keep tabs on our personals and for some reason caused me to consider that cameras might be strategically placed in fixtures and or decorative gadgets. Strange pants begat paranoid fantasies for unknown reasons-perhaps fatigue and an over fifty disgruntlement with all things related to travel, time off work and daily pattern obliteration. The brain shrinks, the old body recoils at the slightest suggestion of adventure. I congratulated myself on at least having recognized my impending stick in the mud codgerlyness, then became concerned that the next stage likely includes a complete loss of awareness of these tendencies and vowed to impose a youthful open mindedness on myself for the next seven days as a way of winning a battle in my war against decrepitude, knowing I will someday unconditionally surrender and become one of those inflexible, crabby and annoying old bastards everyone will forget ever enjoyed anything.

Pool- the website’s photographer successfully composed images making the pool seem four times larger than it is, but my daughter didn’t give a hoot. The layout was beautiful, with at least half of the pool in shade at all times. I find it sad that pools no longer have diving boards, but enjoy being able to relax the instinctive vigilance mechanism all parents have around pools these days. I recall being left alone for hours at a utilitarian, treeless, unmarked deep end, diving board type pool in Clearwater Florida in 1978. I worked the diving board so repetitively and for so long that hotel staff asked me to give it a rest every so often because I was annoying the guests with the constant board slapping. The board was old and long and bent nearly to the water’s surface on a good attempt, flinging you high in the air. It made a curious series of sounds like a giant wooden door was being pried open, thus the complaints. I suppose skull fracture and drowning related lawsuits ended the fun. I understand the path of least resistance taken by ownership, but all this safety is creeping up on us, maybe even adding to my early onset agedness. Maybe not. My parents loved and cared for me like champs but didn’t assume pool shenanigans could be without risk. They may have been eyeing me from a hotel bar patio or possibly enjoying some privacy in our room. I wonder if the logical growth of safety measures is adding to the current epidemic of all things related to an unceasing generalized sense of anxiety. It follows that over time people will adjust policies, rules and facilities to avoid the odd tragedy or mishap. An unexpected outcome might be a complete unfamiliarity with fun and risk taking- which grows a sense of empowerment in people, despite the occasional mangled corpse. The corpse reminds us of the horrors standing right next to the highest and most beautiful experiences. Once the horrors are mostly eliminated, we forget their realness and they become theoretical producers of generalized anxiety…or, maybe we were dumber in the past. It’s hard to know. I do know people do and think more or less what they are told by screens containing repeaters of information, usually in suits or formal looking attire of some sort- especially when messages are repeated over and over until a certain percentage of people absorb the repeated attitude, factoid, opinion or stance as if it were their own, achieving a sense of adult wellbeing and mindfulness eluding those who don’t hold various absorbed attitudes or beliefs and that all things safety related have grown in relation to the unceasing reportage of any and all tragedies, mishaps and murders globally, 24-7. This wasn’t the case in 1978. The world was unimaginably smaller and less filled with perceived horror.

Anyway, on our first visit to the pooI I was given a gloomy directive by the attendant. I was to turn off my bluetooth speaker if and when any other guests enter the pool area because speakers are not allowed. There are obvious reasons for this. I have experienced speaker wars at pools which escalate like most human conflicts left to naturally evolve without the controlling hand of regulators and rule makers. Imagine ruleless NHL hockey. We once treated ourselves to an overpriced hipster hotel in Seattle while attending a wedding. We couldn’t check in because the computers crashed. The hapless, dead eyed twenty-something clerks sat smugly reminding everyone that nothing could be done without the screen’s permission. “You can’t even get a key”- which of course isn’t a key, but a reprogrammable chip held in a credit card looking thing. Once in, the pool was amazing, but speaker wars raged. Three or four versions of electronic pop music smashed together to create something sort of interesting, but maddening-as if designed by Army Intelligence to torment prisoners withholding information. So, I didn’t snipe at the pool attendant. The waterfall sort of ruined the sound anyway. My daughter made fast friends with any child entering the pool, which was pleasing to watch unfold. “Hi, want to play?” The answer was always a resounding yes. By day two, she dropped the inducement to fun and simply designed rules to various games with a constantly rotating roster of playmates. This straightforward, beautiful and completely natural interaction only occurs during a small window of our lives, maybe years 8-11. Most younger kids don’t possess the social skills to form instant play groups, preferring solitary or one on one play. Beyond 11, there are complications as judgmentalism and terrifying levels of self awareness annihilate childhood’s golden years. I listened to the waterfall’s white noise punctuated by laughter, cannon balls and squealing. The kids, lacking a diving board, improvised by climbing the waterfall’s rocks and jumping into the pool despite the sign telling them not to. There is hope.

Princeville- Kauai’s north end is so wildly beautiful and soul calming that you feel like you are living inside the sleek otherworldliness of an early James Bond movie with the violence and intrigue removed- exotic plants, trees with multi-colored bark and innumerable flowers abound. There are extremely athletic people jogging as throngs of oldsters amble slowly about with half grins and nowhere in particular to be strides. This is what they worked all those years for and it’s just as advertised. You get the sense that each day spent getting gently buffed by the warm breezes of Kauai’s north shore is an easily recognized blessing. To the casual observer, the snowbirds carry a slightly dopey, serene aspect not unlike the gaze of newly indoctrinated cult members. This goes to show that those of us still grinding away in the work a day world haven’t had our skulls pried open by the serene awesomeness of Hawaii and can’t quite relate to the happiness quotient on display.

But, it’s not all sun blasted zen serenity. There is a dark edge lurking about on the edges and sometimes smack in the middle of prime Kauai bliss zones. Like most places, there is a substantial drug problem on display. It might be more noticeable due to the general state of amazingness that abounds. There are the occasional zombie sightings- unfortunates with sunburned faces, ragged clothes and eyes that suggest desperation long forgotten and replaced with oblivion. Encampments look like knots of tents and tarps partially blended into the tropical walls of green and are easily missed unless you are paying attention.

You can spend large amounts of money on designer doughnuts or regular old groceries. Food trucks and coffee shops are high quality, expensive and pleasant destinations once you let go of the idea of solvency- this isn’t the place to consider costs.

Locals are pleasant enough. I recognize the low level irritation with tourists they hold because I too live in a tourist destination and find their presence sometimes annoying. You’d think we’d know better, but we tried to chat up a woman tending to her yard. She muttered something without looking up. It was decided to take a shortcut through a residential area while walking to town from our condo to investigate landscaping methods and housing trends. After being snubbed we noticed quite a few tourists taking the same shortcut we thought we discovered. The woman wasn’t keen on being a kind of living exhibit for strangers from all over the world as she picked at the low cut grass in her front yard. We resisted the temptation to chirp at another woman harvesting oranges. We wanted to tell her she was gathering oranges and isn’t that neat. Something in the way she carried herself suggested this idiotic comment was a common source of mild irritation so we just whispered “oranges, she’s picking oranges from her yard” to each other and moved on.

1 Hotel Hanalei Bay- If you don’t feel like spending a thousand dollars a night to stay at 1HHB, you can ditch your ride with the valet and spend the day eating, drinking and beach frolicking at one of the most beautiful places imaginable. Surrounded by lush mountains, Hanalei Bay is a blue jewel, suitable for swimming, surfing or simply languishing in a state of perpetual stunned wonderment. The beaches are penultimate examples of what you dreamed a tropical paradise might be while scraping ice off your car during a Midwest winter. The resort’s high endness is somewhat comical and offers an interesting look into the rarified world of the financially endowed. The first thing I noticed is that someone is charged with misting the entire complex with perfume- some variation of sandalwood. My wife detected a low level mustiness my nose missed entirely and suggested the perfuming might be an attempt to mask a persistent moisture problem. It is immediately apparent that the staff and clientele reside in a world that successfully embodies the presentation and aesthetics of humans that inhabit glossy covered magazines. Everyone is beautiful and sports pro styled hair and clothing that somehow relates to the eyes a price point miles out of reach. They walk with a perceptible level of arrogance that emotes naturally as if bred in like the Lipizzaner Stallion trot. If you look close enough, you can see a frightening brew of hyper focused intelligence and simmering rage in the eyes of some of the men- Division Presidents and CEO’s unable to groove with the sandalwood who are most comfortable sizing up situations for deficiencies as far as some mission statement goes and eviscerating those responsible. The staff are accustomed to interacting with the riff raff in a pleasant, detached manner, but several guest’s noses winced visibly out of joint upon seeing my disheveled, rotting cantaloupe look cluttering up an otherwise perfectly tailored environment- honed to the finest detail in an attempt to achieve wall to wall 24-7 expensive relaxation vibes. There are massage rooms, meditation nooks, lotion and perfume samplings and endless levels that seem haphazardly thrown together but are covered in handsome wood, candles and generalized softness to such an extent you don’t notice the goofy layout at first. You are required to take an elevator to a long sand edged interior walkway to another elevator to descend a complex set of stairs where a long path that hugs the complex’s edge leads you to a series of pools and tiki bars before reaching the beach. Lingering there, you’re as close to paradise as you will ever get- and no amount of rule making can change the fact that the ocean’s unpredictable currents can kill you by pulling you away into the blue expanse or the raging and roiling surf smashing your skull on hidden rocks, making all the sun kissed beauty and gentle persistent breezes that much sweeter.