We Interrupt Your Regular Programming

You are here again. Standing in the dark. No power. No phone service. Just a stoic SOS marking the space where cell phone bars used to be on your phone’s face. You hear winds howling and having tantrums in your trees, doing their best to rip them to shreds. Your nerves are shot, too. Not again, you think.

You accept the unpredictability of the elements. It is the failure of infrastructure that freaks you out. With no TV, you do not know what is happening beyond your back door. With no cell service, you cannot know what might be meeting you at your front. You are a sitting duck, stupidly wondering, How are we here again?

You know enough about Hawai’i to know that this question is naive. There is a leave what’s well enough alone energy in place of the can do spirit that defines where you come from. A fatalism that comes with the aloha. What will be will be. It is what it is. If you don’t like it, you can go right back to wherever you came from.

You are taking it. This hard pill is going down with your determination to make this place your home. Another test. A gut check asking, Do you really want this?, just days after your homecoming and months of travel.

Yes. It felt good to be back on Maui. You’d craved it. Calm. Soft. Safe. With August’s dramatic slowdown in tourism there is opportunity for an always delicious exhale and reset. To relish the last stretches of an unhurried summer.

But Lala came in like a lion. And you don’t mean that metaphorically. Parts of The Big Island are devastated. Here on Maui, there is some severe damage too. And you’ve taken some knocks here in Lahaina again. Big enough to trigger some PTSD. Strong enough to shut down your business, and everybody else’s, for two days. Dings sharp enough to slap you out of your summer reveries and pop you back in to this very real life that demands all of you now.

Survival demands that you stop reliving what has already happened and start dealing with where you find yourself right now. This time, Lala has effectively pulled you out of documenting your summer reveries and dropped you squarely in to the life that you must actually tend to and live. Water, food, electricity, a line out to the outside world. This is your entire focus. Rooting you directly in the business of home.

And as you sift through the fallout, a bigger truth surfaces: There is no safe place. You have simply traded one set of threats for another. There is danger everywhere. You have just chosen to take a chance on exposure to extreme climate change instead of the constant threat of crime. You have swapped urban decay and danger for hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and fire. Your dreams for this season must be calibrated too. An idyllic expectation of an autumn focused on home and hearth that you have been imagining and cultivating collides with the actual mess in front of you.

Hurricane Lala didn’t just interrupt your plan. It rooted you back in the reality of what it means to make Maui your home. The danger comes with the beauty.