by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1997 by Michael Finley

Inlander: "We do that in Minnesota, too -- 'Whatever.'"

It was my misfortune to miss the last two weeks Minnesota weather to travel with my family to the Hawaiian Islands. We camped, snorkeled, hiked, swam and sprawled among the beauty. It was the vacation of my life.

In about 1910 D. H. Lawrence wrote a haunting novella called "The Man Who Loved Islands." In it, he depicted the blissful solitude of living further and further from other people. For centuries, Hawaii lived that way, protected by its distance from everything else. Distance kept even nature at bay. Before the arrival of humans, species found the island at the rate of one every 10,000 years.

This slowness translates to fragility. Some 95 percent of native animal species that existed when Captain Cook dropped anchor in 1795 are extinct today, driven into oblivion by species imported by the Europeans, Americans, and Asians who descended on the delectable islands.

But I learned that for all its splendor, Hawaii is also a place for worry. While Maui is growing rapidly, the rest of the archipelago is experiencing economic sluggishness. Prices are high -- a gallon of unleaded gas costs $1.80, and so does a dozen eggs. As many people are leaving the islands in search of opportunity as are arriving for the same reason.

Everything must be imported, from cars to steel to lumber to paper to frozen vegetables. Every incoming plane is loaded to the gunwales with packaged goods. Just about their only exports are colonial commodities -- pineapples, sugar, some coffee beans and macadamia nuts. And none of these products is seeing any growth.

Remoteness forces Hawaii to be a closed economy. There isn't a decent industrial site (oxymoron alert!) on the islands. Hawaii is so remote it requires a minor league all to itself, so that the Honolulu Sharks, Maui Stingrays, and the Kaneohe Bay Dawgs have someone to play.

Their only successful industry is tourism, and there are worries that tourism will suffer as the world discovers less compromised paradises, such as Thailand, Trinidad, and Tasmania.

(For statistics on Hawaii's straits, visit the state's official Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism web site at http://www.hawaii.gov/dbedt/.)

One exception to this economic island torpor has been the explosion of Internet usage. You and I, living on the vast prairies of the mainland, have found the instantaneous, nearly-free pleasure of e-mail exhilarating. Imagine how much more liberating it is for people who live on islands you can drive the entire periphery of in an hour and a half, who live farther from another land mass than any other location on earth, to be handed the power to communicate at will to anyone you want, anywhere in the world?

To the islander mentality, e-mail comes close to abolishing islandhood. It changes everything. It unhinges one's sense of reality as radically as the sight of horses must have unhinged native Americans.

In a country where everything is expensive because everything is scarce, the digital universe is a cornucopia that never empties. You can download a file without burning a drop of oil, indeed without consuming the original. Like a magic bookshelf, like the story of the loaves and fishes, it is dizzying to a land dominated by scarcity.

We met an Oahu woman -- well, we never quite met her, because she was going through a phase in which she was spending 16 hours a day posting on Usenet and inhabiting online chat parlors. Though she was the partner of a good friend of ours, she could not pry herself from the keyboard long enough to shake hands. You've heard of the Internet Jones -- she had it bad.

I suppose it is in the nature of paradise to be lost, to give up a bit of itself with each snapshot, every breaking wave. Will digital technology be the crowning indignity then, electronically erasing the Pacific Ocean from the map, like an effects utility in CorelDraw?

Thankfully, we are not there yet. Bits can do miracles, but they cannot entirely vanquish distance. You cannot download a two-by-four, Star Trek-style, or upload a coconut. Despite the Denny's signs and valet parking Paradise will survive And though the Internet may pull you apart from your life, surfing far from the waves of Waikiki, the ubiquitous flowers enfold you in their perfume.

When we were there, we camped, snorkeled, hiked, and swam, and ate sweet pineapple with our hands. No computer, no modem, just sand and sun, and after dark, the fireworks of lava tumbling into the sea. From the jaws of snowbound Minnesota, a man who loves islands says Aloha. x

Michael Finley is co-author with Harvey Robbins of THE NEW WHY TEAMS DON'T WORK.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com

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