A Magical Island in the Middle of the Ocean

*This is my love letter to an island sorely in need. Maui has been ravaged by storms and fire. There are links below on how to help from afar.

Once upon an age ago, an eight-year-old girl was put on an airplane– the first of three–and sent on a journey across the country and halfway across an ocean for a summer that would change her life.

I was that girl. To clarify, my parents weren’t trying to rid themselves of a problem child, sending her halfway around the globe for some peace and quiet.

Okay, they might have.

And they didn’t simply send me blindly. My aunt waited for me on the other end of the journey.

Snooker, as she preferred to be called, had moved to the island of Maui the year I was born. She was the mysterious and kooky person on the other end of a phone line, the breath of island air that wafted through on the occasional holiday, bearing a suitcase full of chocolate covered macadamia nuts, and necklaces of wilted flowers.

A flight attendant shuttled me from gate to gate in LAX, a friend of Snooker’s accompanied me from Honolulu to Kahului.

My aunt met me at the airport laden with more leis than my pre-pubescent neck could bear. She named the exotic flowers–ginger, plumeria, lokelani. My first memory of Maui is the heady sweetness enveloping me like the hugs my family didn’t readily offer.

We drove out of the city, through fields of tall sugar cane that gave way to acres of spiky pineapple plants. The road wound across the island to the slopes of the volcano. Snooker made me practice the name-Haleakala, the House of the Sun.

It was a grand start to my first adventure far from where I called home.

“Do you want to go for a swim?” Snooker asked after she showed me around the house we would share for the summer. She knew the answer. At that point in my life, I was part fish. Although, the plan was for me to learn tennis that summer as well.

Snooker had been a nationally ranked amateur tennis player.

But that first day, my future tennis career suffered a fatal blow. On the way to the pool, cutting through a horse pasture, Snooker stepped in a hole and broke her ankle.

Hindered by a cast that reached her knee, she wondered what to do with a hyper, inquisitive, and yes, bratty, young girl for two months. A young girl who had noticed the residents of that treacherous pasture.

“Can I ride the horses?”

And the rest, they say is history. My first ride took place around one of the pineapple fields that used to blanket the lower slopes of Haleakala. That was all it took. I was infected by the horse disease.

That summer I body surfed in the Pacific Ocean while Snooker sat on her tatami mats, probably cursing the sand that crept under her cast. I hiked into Haleakala with Snooker’s friends, whose children became my friends. We spent the night in a cabin on the crater floor, saw wild Nenes–the rare Hawaiian goose, and blooming Silversword plants–that grow nowhere else in the world.

I got freckles where my nose burned despite layers of zinc oxide. My hair bleached to near white, and my skin browned.

I discovered the best glazed doughnuts in the world from Komoda’s bakery. Went camping in the rain on the Keanae peninsula. Explored the Iao valley and its tall, green needle. Collected flowers on an estate, learned to make leis. I chased crabs on the beach in Kihei. Visited the Big Buddha at the Jodo Mission in Lahaina. Watched the cane burn in the distance. Learned how to pronounce Hawaiian words correctly.

Despite her injury, Snooker allowed me to experience the island she called home. She offered it to me in its entirety, and I loved it entirely in return.

When September came, I didn’t want to leave. When I got home, I dreamed of going back.

But I didn’t until 2007 to celebrate Snooker’s life in memoriam. So much had changed, but not that sense of wonder and love I’d cherished since that summer. I visited again in 2020, just before the pandemic. So many changes, but never my sense of wonder and love for the island.

It was never my home, but always in my heart.

Now, with so much lost, my heart breaks for those who call Maui home. For my ohana of far away, for the island that shaped a huge part of my life.