“Aloha.”

It’s only the millionth time I’ve heard that. Sonia, dressed in a long, floral dress, motions for us to bow our heads, and we receive leis around our necks. These leis are not the general welcoming color of orchid purple that we received on our first day to the resort. These leis are green.

We are here for the timeshare lecture.

A representative works us down to the bottom floor of the resort – shallow stairs and dim hallways with low ceilings. There is the smell of baking cookies. Ahead, like a near-death experience, a brilliant light shines through the glass doors, and we pass through to a dozen hotel portraits, stalwart and proud, looking over a luminous, angelic view of the cresting waves of Hanalei Bay.

This is where they will try to sell us property.

12:00 PM

“I’ll compress my usual 90-minute sales presentation to seven minutes.”

Covertly, I set my stopwatch.

12:20 PM

He’s still talking.

Over a flurry of satellite photographs, artist’s conceptions, blueprints, price sheets, whiteboard drawings, value propositions, room layouts, trading option sheets, and hotel point exchange brochures, his ninety-minutes-now-seven-minutes-now-twenty-minutes presentation drags on.

I’m scratching out my own figures on a piece of paper. Every once in a while the agent looks over to see what I’m writing. Selfishly, I shield my work.

12:30 PM

I stop the timer. He’s done.

Thirty minutes.

We don’t buy anything.

1:00 PM

“How’s it going, man?”

I look back. It’s the bellman, heading by with a cart full of luggage.

“Not bad,” I answer. “You?”

“Pretty good,” he says, his voice fading away. “Better if my wife wasn’t cheating on me…”

1:30 PM

The sand reminds me of Johnny’s Seasoning Salt. We are leaving soon. The clouds obscure the easternmost point of the island; the weather is changing. A rising wind is tugging at my shirt; I watch the surfers slip the lashing waves that rip back against my feet, digging holes around them, leaving a slime of salty wet sand on my toes.

There’s no plan today. I feel like having an ice cream cone – it’s a far cry from sailing four-foot waves in Na Pali, or dangling at thirty-six hundred feet. But desires are just that ephemeral; nowhere in the social contract does it say we need to make our inclinations match our surroundings day after day.

It still feels strange. I constantly question myself in times like these, standing, watching others move themselves in time and space. I ask what right I have to hang onto silence, stillness, storing up my entropy. Some never quit running.

8:00 PM

Nobody sits inside at the Cafe. Rain, shine, day or night, everyone sits outside. Dad and I sit down at a balcony edge table and order. Seven ounces of tenderloin in a thin wasabi sauce so minimal it looks like it was drawn on the plate in colored pencil. Miso-marinated prawns perpetually ready to burst.

Hanalei Bay is invisible, just a stretch of negative space in deadblack until the next shore’s lights. Past the balcony, it looks like there is literally nothing. By morning, we will see the verdant crag again, looming massive and fog-enshrouded. We will see the same schooner, beaten by bay waves, shoved first to port, then to starboard, tugging against a firm anchor.

I regret not being able to sail these islands. For reasons concerning outcomes of history, legality, and profitability, it’s not a circle I can hope to close for some years yet – Hawaii simply isn’t friendly to private sailing charter, not least for the situation of the weather, which can turn temperamental without warning, damning sailors to double-digit waves and gale force winds suddenly and without safe harbors.

Later, I walk poolside, navigating by gas-fed tiki torches and cyanotic underwater lighting. The beach disappears into the same nothing I saw from the balcony; proximity is no aid. I take a step and my foot drops into muck. I chance a look at the resort. It is a terraced fortress. It is a mammoth of beige lego pieces. A light burns in the penthouse on top – the bay’s only lighthouse.

I’m not sure whether it’s okay to want to go home now, but home is what I want.

5:30 PM

“It’s like portals, man, coming down from Princeville; it’s like every bridge you cross is a portal to another world…”

“What about these bone carvings?” I asked.

“Those? Those are just made of cow bones, man.”

Oh.

Rewind to 7:30 AM

They pack us on the boat. No shoes, they said. Some are dressed to impress, some are dressed less. Half an hour ago, we were all standing around the lobby of Captain Andy’s Sailing Adventures. Nobody said hello to one another, even though we’d be inhabiting the same boat for about six hours.

Dad and I stared at the sextants and talked chronographs until loadup.

The sign said dolphin spottings were possible. Reading the weather numbers, sailing looked possible, too.

9:00 AM

It’s still early. Breakfast was two pieces of blueberry bread. The rest of the gang is snorkeling. Sea turtles pop up occasionally, and the swimmers bounce between sightings, eagerly flapping flippers in front of the boat, then behind the back as someone makes a new sighting. Dad and I hang back with Captain Bernard, a native with a chiseled face, dark skin, and a floral print shirt. He’s proud of this boat – the Akialoa – but speaks even more emphatically about the future.

“They’re gonna get this new 65-footer. Real slick. Being built right now in the U.S. Virgin Islands – we’re going to take people on all-day tours, and guess who gets to drive it.” He gestures excitedly toward himself.

I ask him if he’s going to get to charter it on its maiden voyage from the USVI to Hawaii. His face falls visibly.

“I don’t think I can get anyone to cover my shift,” he admits.

10:00 AM

The dust cloud from a white Bronco streams over the top of the dunes at Barking Sands. Naval security. Barking Sands is a missile test range. The Bronco simply drives back and forth all day. We keep time with our sister ship, the Spirit of Kauai. The boats race at twenty-two knots, making around the southwest edge of the island for the Na Pali coast.

Flying fish erupt ahead of our bow wake, blasting forward ahead of the spray on dragonfly-like wings, skimming only inches above the surface. The crowd, jubilant, watches a superior specimen fly for several hundred feet before giving up. Cheers erupt.

No sign of the frigate from Day One.

10:30 AM

We are surrounded. Off the Na Pali coast, spinner dolphins begin to chase and dodge our boat. A group of twelve or more orbit us. I watch and film a dolphin with a clipped fin, keeping an eye on him. He switches from one pontoon, to the other. As we pour on the speed, the dolphins keep up, jumping and twisting.

Everyone is crowded around the bow. I look back for Captain Bernard. He is at the wheel. He is smiling.

We pass rock formations, waterfalls, secluded beaches. Na Pali, the southwest coast of Kaua’i, is being eroded faster than any other coastline in the world. The shear rock cliffs face swells of fifty feet in severe winter storms, that scrape and slough the igneous rock to powder.

The water is an unimaginable shade of blue. Reefs are everywhere. The waves are picking up, as is the wind.

11:30 AM

We finally sail. The boat, a fifty-five foot Gold Coast custom catamaran, isn’t made for sailing.

“We realized the rudder was too long,” Captain Bernard explains, hand-over-handing the wheel as we steered up to a reach, “It was so long that the prop wash – just the force of the water coming off the props – was bending the rudder.”

“What’d you do?” I ask.

“We chopped it in half,” the Captain explains proudly. “‘Course, it doesn’t sail as good as it used to, but -”

By the numbers, all of the gear is there. Mainsail, jib, yards of line, tackle and stoppers. But the jib is cut at an oblique angle, more for sightseeing than sailing, and we’re only making seven knots downwind. We won’t get home on this and the Captain knows it.

For now, though, I enjoy. Someone gets sick – the soda crackers come out. I thank my lucky stars and open another Heineken.

3:00 PM

“So this is a constant-speed propeller, right?”

My father – ever the pilot. Not far from the dead fields and gray slate frigate of yesterday, we’re standing on dry, red clay. Dad is inspecting a propeller. I’m watching the windsock. Fifteen knots – good to sail on, but I have no idea whether it’s good to fly in. In fact, secretly, I’m hoping it’s not.

Because I’m scared.

Let me back up. We’re standing on a beach, father and I.

12:00 PM

“You know what I think that is?”

I’m watching the riptides crumble sand into brackish khaki water, curling it back with monstrous force. Warning signs, again. Caricatures of drowned swimmers, human geometry swallowed by water geometry. I’m watching the riptides and I have no idea what he thinks that is.

“I think that’s a tsunami warning system.”

I look back and see four green saucers on a pole. At the top lay a crown of solar cells. The system looks new, freshly painted, speaking of recently-released government funding and academic zeal, merged together in a single, unholy product with a shape only true utility could produce. Even cell-phone towers were prettier than this.

“There are sensors out in the water.”

Indeed there are. Well – there are now. Tales of a mountain of black, boiling water surging through southeast Asia seem to be the stuff government proposals are made of; private or public, we find our inspirations in storytelling. There were numbers before. Probabilities, calculations, and risk mitigation routines. Now, there’s tragedy.

I have my eyes on the riptide, and my mind on the sky – we’re going to be up there in a few hours. We signed on to try something new, something dangerous, something interesting to both of us. They’re called ultralights. A hang-glider, strapped to a little cockpit with wheels, strapped to an engine. Space for two. A way to see the island. A way to experience flight.

Experience flight.

3:21 PM

I’m five hundred feet up in the air and my stomach is like a puppet on a string – various pieces of it are being yanked up and then dropped earthward as turbulence rattles the little cage I’m buckled into. We are climbing rapidly – five hundred feet a minute. More and more land drops away as the propeller behind us chews up the sky and bellows wind under the huge cloth wing. We are flying, and an old familiar sensation creeps up on me, rising from the historical muck of my very youngest days of flying. The feeling of fear.

Jim, my pilot, follows Cole, the pilot in my father’s ultralight, and we race for Waileau crater. As we do, Jim guns the throttle and follows a current up; I look over his shoulder to see the digital readout peg at 3,600 feet. Below me, everything is ants. Ant people. Ant cars. My nervousness kicks in, and I suddenly can’t control the shaking that takes over my legs. As Jim eases the throttle, my control returns. Take a breath.

I have no idea what I’m doing up here. I had the same confused feeling exiting the Grand Caravan at 10,000 feet two years ago on a tandem skydive.

They say my old man has air in his bones – that he’s made for the business. Maybe I’m trying to figure out if I’ve got it, too. If I did, maybe that’d just be another way to get closer to him.

Or maybe I just have no idea what I’m doing up here.

3:40 PM

Thirty-six hundred feet, and we’re closing on the crater. Helicopters below us fly a counter-clockwise pattern past waterfalls, dropoffs of over a thousand feet. Jim brings us up to the crater, exposed up to craggy green scraping the bottoms of clouds. The turbulence worsens, drops of rain appear on my face mask.

“Wettest place in the world,” Jim says, pointing to the green slice at the top. “Right up there.”

Maybe that’s the point of this. Places. People. Best-of. Jim and Cole have been in the business over thirty years, with an attitude and local knowledge to match. You don’t find extraordinary people doing ordinary things. You don’t become an extraordinary person doing ordinary things.

It’s my turn to fly now. We bank the contraption over the water and he hands me the controls – you steer with a big metal bar. Up is down, left is right. Simple. And then he turns on the iPod, leaves the controls to me, and begins to dance in the cockpit.

I really have no idea what the hell I’m doing up here.

3:00 PM

There are whole fields – owned by the Agribusiness Corporation – where nothing grows. Perhaps it’s only the season, but they look dead. Parched, desolate, they dot the western sweep of Kaua’i – the dry side.

I’m driving back from the Wailaeua lookout – thirty-five hundred feet of canyon dropoff cinder cones slashed through the green hills, when I spot the dead fields.

We’ve passed U.S. Navy missile ranges, NASA radar centers, and narrowly avoided crashing through the gate of an Army ammunition dump. Every type of warning sign, every cautionary insignia, all manner of symbolic attendance has been thrown our way as we circumnavigate the island. It seems everyone has a stake in this little dot of land in the Pacific, and as the fiefdoms battle for control of the land, the sea, and the skies, the signs sprout up like weeds, directing tourists and the island’s residents back and forth, bouncing among the remaining free zones, ricocheting off the bounds of corporate farms, missile sites, and naval no-sail zones.

And in the middle, scorching in the heat leeward of the Kaua’i hills, are the dead fields. They pass on our left, our right, flocked by those same signs – Do Not Enter. Restricted Area.

I’m picking out something on those fields now – something that stands out against the dry, the brown, the lifeless. Tall and curved, striped – it’s a sun umbrella stuck in the dusty ground. Below it: a man, a chair, a cooler. His toes touch dirt, his hand reaches in the cooler. In the middle of the field, he sits, waits, watches the waves on the west shore.

The man sits at his station, guarding the field. Behind him, in a nearby field, another umbrella, another man. They sit, they wait. Umbrella, chair, cooler. Sitting, waiting, leisurely guarding the dry, lifeless ground from a little tropical outpost. There are dozens of them, one in every field for miles.

In the background, silently surgical, lurking off the west shore, a Navy frigate turns south, showing her broadsides. The string vibrates, tension holds against the island.

Drive on.

7:30 PM

We’re on the seawall, dangly legs catching spray on the south shore of the island. Over beers, my father and I alternately discuss love, life, and the island.

There are constant whispers of a Superferry – an inter-island transport for cars and people – in the papers, on the lips of the hotel workers, and in signage around the island. Behind us, an arrow proudly points the way to the loading dock – the site that the new supervessel will dock to take on cars and passengers. But not yet. The Superferry didn’t make it. Protesters jammed the harbor, and turned it back.

Three lights in the dimming sky suggest an aircraft on final approach, coming our way. Sailboats dance just off the harbor, using navigational buoys as impromptu race markers. Dozens of kayakers and surfers bob and slip the waves a few hundred feet away.

I feel Kaua’i as a beautiful place resistant to overdevelopment. They say it’s what the “normal” islands used to look like twenty years ago, and perhaps it’s only through the outcry of the citizenry that things haven’t become more corporate. Signs of it are everywhere. Hardly a building over three stories. No investment banks. Real estate offices that still sit next to t-shirt stores.

The sun is going down, and the spray is becoming more pronounced as the land breeze scrapes pressure off the land and distributes it back to the sea. Behind us, a gate opens, and cars drive off in a quiet procession, emerging from the proud future site of the Superferry.

It’s the next morning’s paper that brings the news of furloughs at the Superferry site, carried through the day previous. Our day at the seawall, at the site of the Superferry, was their last. The cars we saw leaving were the exiled workers.

Drive on.