Hawaii Is a Warning

In November 1886, at a royal jubilee in honor of his 50th birthday at ʻIolani Palace in Honolulu, King David Kalākaua showed off a rather remarkable object that had recently come into his possession: a smooth, oblong calabash, made of koa and kou woods and wrapped with decorative brass, known as the Wind Gourd of La‘amaomao.

As legend has it, the gourd contained all of the winds of Hawaii—winds that could be summoned only by a person who knew what to chant to each one. The gourd itself was named for Laʻa Maomao, Hawaii’s benevolent goddess of the wind.

I found myself thinking of the gourd earlier this week as I observed uncommonly fierce winds whipping through the palm trees on the island of Kauai, more intense than I could recall ever having seen in Hawaii, and then again hours later as an emergency warning siren screeched out, alerting me to the horrific fire that those same winds had stoked on Maui, about 190 miles to the east. By the time the evacuation order came, Maui’s historic Lahaina town had no hope of being saved from obliteration. Officials now say that at least 36 people have died. And the whole thing happened incomprehensibly fast—so fast that people leaped out of the flames and into the ocean to try to save themselves.

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Back when I lived on Oahu, in a small bungalow at the foot of Diamond Head and near the surf break Tonggs, so close I could hear the waves through my bedroom window, I would often fall asleep with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center website open on my phone, glowing like an amulet under my pillow. I liked to see the green banner across the top of the site—no tsunami warning, advisory, watch, or threat—just before drifting off. But it never occurred to me to worry about a wildfire in the islands.

“Lucky we live Hawaii” is a common saying here, one that can seem treacly but is in fact an expression of earnest gratitude, deeply felt: an appreciation for the goodness of Hawaii’s people, for the abundance of the land, for the quality of the light, and for the overall softness of the place—the paintbrush needles of the ironwoods, the trees heavy with ripe mangoes, how the evening sky looks more purple in winter.

Terrible things happen here, like anywhere, and not just the horror of this week’s fires. Locals sometimes bristle, and for good reason, when people call it “paradise.” More than once, fellow journalists from the East Coast, learning that I was a reporter in Honolulu, said something like Wow, what do you cover? Hula dancing and mai tais? Comments like that made me realize how deeply ignorant people who believe themselves to be curious can be. They made me angry at what they could have discovered but never bothered to learn.

Hawaii is a place of tremendous complexity, as anyone who loves it can tell you. Maybe this is why it was so surprising that Lahaina could just burn to the ground, all at once, even when it shouldn’t have.

Ordinarily, Hawaii feels close-knit, like everyone knows everyone. After anything big happens, it feels even smaller. I spent much of yesterday talking and texting with friends across the Islands and with various Hawaii expats, all while Maui and the Big Island still burned. One friend told me about a friend of his who’d taken off for Maui overnight to fight the fires. Another’s young son was with his grandparents on Maui—everybody was fine, but they hadn’t had power or reliable communication for 24 hours. Another, a friend who’d spent her whole childhood in Lahaina before moving to Upcountry Maui, texted to confirm that her ohana, her family, is all okay and accounted for. The clear theme running through all of these messages—other than, over and over in both directions, Thank God you’re okay—was a pronounced sense of having been blindsided. I talked with several friends, all born and raised here, and none could remember a fire like this, or even contemplating one. Late-summer brush fires happened but were always easily contained. Like me, none could recall ever worrying about fire at all.

In Hawaii, children are taught to respect nature—the ancient fury of the volcanoes, the immense power and infinite return of the ocean. Hurricanes churn their way through the Pacific like clockwork each summer, but through the cosmic grace of physics and chance, rarely do they hit. (Hurricane Iniki, which devastated Kauai as a Category 4 storm in 1992, and Hurricane Iwa, which pummeled the Islands as a Category 1 storm in 1982, were the awful exceptions that proved the rule.) A week ago, when I saw that Hurricane Dora was still gathering strength and on track to pass several hundred miles south of the archipelago as a monster storm, I said a silent prayer of thanks and then promptly forgot about it. Hawaii was in the clear. But like everywhere else, it was only in the clear until all of a sudden it wasn’t. Here’s the question people keep asking one another in Hawaii: Since when do hurricanes start wildfires?

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Californians hate it when people are stunned by fire. I was one of the many wildfire rookies on the East Coast earlier this summer when the sky turned orange and the early-morning light cast evening shadows and whole cities smelled like campfires. And that was just because of the clouds of smoke drifting over from Canada. Still, the experience was newly apocalyptic to me. We’ve been living like this for years, the Californians complained. We told you it was coming for you too. They were right, of course. I wish they hadn’t been.

We live in an age of too much emotion, too much performative reaction, too much certainty, and entirely too much pessimism. All this shouting at one another has the effect of drowning out what actually deserves attention and concern, to say nothing of how it hurts our ability to come together and solve existential problems. But also—and this is a by-product of human resilience and adaptability, qualities that otherwise serve us well—sometimes understanding a phenomenon intellectually is not enough; it’s just not the same as the perspective you get when the flames are licking at your own door.

People in the Islands know in their heart of hearts that Hawaii is different from the rest of the United States. You can trick yourself into thinking that this will somehow protect it from the indignities of suffering elsewhere in the country, or the world. (La‘a Maomao, by the way, translates literally to “sacred distance.”) Sometimes this magic actually works. This time, however, it did not. And in the near future, sometime far too soon, another place will again feel viscerally the knowledge that we’ve all already absorbed intellectually for many years now—that we are running out of time to protect ourselves, and that when something beautiful burns, you can never truly get it back.