by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1997 by Michael Finley

Historians note: I always take a computer on vacation. Whether it is a laptop or a handheld, whether it is to a cabin by a lake or a visit with relatives or friends abroad. I take my technology with me, and when I get there, I use it.

So it was painful to realize I would have to spend 16 days in Hawai'i (note the apostrophe) with no digital security blanket to clutch.

The reason being that our trip, instead of availing ourselves of the splendid hotels and resorts of Waikiki and Maui, would focus on the back country of Kaua'i and the Big Island of Hawai'i. We went to the islands to camp.

If you are wondering about the apostrophes, they are there because the Hawaiian language, limited to twelve lousy letters, relies on vowel pauses to differentiate words. The early missionaries simplified the language quite brutally, eliminating whole sounds. Thus the Hawaiian word for the Polynesian word taboo is kapu, which many Hawaiians pronounce tá-BOO. And Hawai'i itself is pronounced How-WHY!-ee.

From the technological standpoint, this is significant, for while the computer-crazed mainland is obsessed with the how of things, the people of the islands first want to know why. We know you can make the chip run faster, but why? They built this attitude right into the name of the place.

Anyway, we had to pack light to do our hiking, so the laptops was out. I had to choose one tiny object to take to remind me of the regular world. So I went to Best Buy -- which I am tempted to spell Best Bai'i -- and checked out their portable radios. The smallest I saw was a crystal set about the size of a kid's lunchbox. When I asked the guys in the blue T-shirts if there was a smaller radio, they just sneered at me. They wanted to sell big radios.

Anyway, fast forward to the rocky inland terrain of the islands. We've been hiking for a week, and thanks to Sun Block 1000, we are still as white as God made us. But everywhere we look we see how the red dirt islands must endure the onslaught of technology.

I remember a pitched battle at The Tunnels beach, between an indignant sunbather and a motorized rubber bottomed tourist boat which was encroaching on a fragile coral area. It was just like back home in the BWCA.

I remember once, climbing the rugged lava cliffs of the Na Pail coast of Kaua'i, a long-haired, bare-chested young man with no shoes or socks swiftly passed us by. being barefoot was his statement that he had gone native. we passed him a few hundred yards up the path, slipping a pair of $60 Spandex hiking socks on his bloodied feet.

When we reached the top we sat and looked for whales, whose oil was the technology that lit the world's lamps, until the herds had dwindled to a few. Didn't see any.

Elsewhere, we beheld the black sand beach fringing the Waipio Valley, the most ancient site in the islands, where Kamehameha I was born. The people there have resisted electrification, afraid it will open the door to big resorts moving in and plastering golf courses where their ancestors planted taro. On the other hand, the people of the 2,000 feet plunging valley have phones.

Having no phone, and no computer, I took a book with me to the islands, one I was assigned to read ages ago, but couldn't fit into my busy college schedule -- Herman Melville's Moby Dick. If you were like me and found it hideous hard going when you were younger, except for the Classics Illustrated version, which I dug, give it another look. Ninety pages of drama and 400 pages of whaling scholarship -- make your peace with that and you will do all right.

At one time or another, Melville and many of my favorite childhood authors spent time here. Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island), Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), and Jack London (The Call of the Wild) all dropped anchor in Oahu. Melville worked as a pinsetter in a Honolulu bowling alley. None of them did their best work here. How? Why?

(Incidentally, I stumbled in Hawaii on a curious literary trivia. Guess where Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, the one with the Mowgli stories in it? Answer: Brattleboro, Vermont.)

Our Hawai'ian guide and Willie Nelson-lookalike Hanalei (almost, but not quite the same name as the place where Puff the Magic Dragon lived) told us how the ancient people (he talked about them using the word I, as if he were his ancestors) lived simply.

The coconut was my buffalo -- I made everything from it, and I made medicines from the other plants. My women birthed without pain. And when my plants failed, they used mind over matter. I didn't take Advil, he said. And I didn't feel the pain. I can climb this hill without 4-wheel drive.

The part of the trip that was hardest was the part I like best at home, waking very early and sneaking up to my office to log in, or write. In the mountains, however, in the dark, there only the mountains to amuse you, and the dark.

One night early in the trip, high along the shoulder of Mount Kilauea, I dug into my pack and found the radio. In my planning, I forgot that reception might be poor. I spun the dial, heard bits of falsetto and ukulele, a bit of world news, then found an oldies station below the volcano playing the Kinks, and it was good:

Girl, you really got me going

You got me so I can't sleep at night.

And that night I couldn't. Around five I got up and tiptoed away. Beside the empty highway I found a path leading higher up the hill. Since the stars were good and there are no predators on the Big Island, I started walking.

I did not stop until the sun was just peeking over the rim of the crater of Kilauea, the fire-pit called Halema'uma'u. Across the caldera were thousands of steam vents shooting wisps of hot moisture, all curling with the slight morning breeze, like scythes of smoke, or disappearing question marks. I was in a holy place, possibly kapu.

How? I followed the stars, Hanalei told us, without sextant or compass. In my outrigger I brought water for 12 men for 40 days. Why? If I explained it to you, tourist, you still wouldn't understand. x

Michael Finley is co-author with Harvey Robbins of Why Change Doesn't Work.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com

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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