by Lawrence Downes
Walking to the beach with my family on a hot Kailua afternoon, let’s say 1972. My toy foam surfboard clip-clopping against my knees, towel scratching my neck, rubber slippers squeaking on steamy blacktop. Around the corner of Kuuala Street, across Kalaheo Avenue, then down the skinny beach path, hugging a cinderblock wall under a thick, shady row of octopus trees and bougainvillea. Footfalls echoing on packed dirt.
Coming out onto Kailua Bay. A field of impossible blue, sky down to water. Squinting in the brilliance of the broad, white crescent beach.
My father swimming, in long, lazy lines parallel to shore. My mother sitting on the sand. Me, pondering the choices: sand castles or sand balls — wet double handfuls smooth-coated with dry sand into hard, sugar-dusted spheres; such a pity to have to whip one at your brother.
Kailua. The guidebooks say it’s basically a beach. But there’s a town wrapped around the beach, and, around that, a whole other side of the 600-square-mile island of Oahu — the windward side, a world away from Honolulu. Kailua is barely half an hour from downtown and Waikiki, but separated by a soaring ribbon of razorback mountains, the Koolau Range. The green lava wall is pierced near its summit by two sets of highway tunnels, like airlocks in time and space. The Honolulu side is dry and sunny, its postcard loveliness folded among high-rises, offices, airport and freeways. The Kailua side, where I grew up, is greener, quieter, lower and slower, with marshes and palms and that perfect bay.
The windward Oahu I know best is three communities: Kailua, Lanikai and their next-door country cousin, Waimanalo. They’re beachy but not snooty. Kailua has a downtown but no night life to speak of. It’s less a spot for touristic stimulation than a place you nestle into, as Hawaiian royalty once did, escaping dusty Honolulu since long before King Kamehameha’s day.
Two Beatles, John and George, mobbed in Waikiki, fled there once, in 1964. They were discovered, and so, eventually, was Kailua, although it and the rest of windward Oahu have managed to keep a reasonably low profile on Hawaii’s well-worn tourist map.
That may be changing, especially now that President Obama has claimed Kailua as his. He grew up in Honolulu, but Kailua is where he returns. This is his place called Hope, his San Clemente, his Texas hill country. Every winter the Obamas stay at the same rented house at one end of the crescent bay, whose waters he knows from boyhood, as he wrote in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father”:
“I still remember how, one early morning, hours before the sun rose, a Portuguese man to whom my grandfather had given a good deal on a sofa set took us out to spear fish off Kailua Bay. A gas lantern hung from the cabin on the small fishing boat as I watched men dive into inky-black waters, the beams of their flashlights glowing beneath the surface until they emerged with a large fish, iridescent and flopping at the end of one pole. Gramps told me its Hawaiian name, humu-humu-nuku-nuku-apuaa, which we repeated to each other the entire way home.”
In this story, either Gramps or young Barack was mistaken, since the humuhumu is a little reef fish, barely six inches long. But let’s give Gramps a break on his fish names, and allow Barack his childhood lens of magnified wonderment: Hawaiians do still fish here with spears and nets, often in darkness, and are done by dawn.
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Walking to the beach with my family on a hot Kailua afternoon, let’s say 1972. My toy foam surfboard clip-clopping against my knees, towel scratching my neck, rubber slippers squeaking on steamy blacktop. Around the corner of Kuuala Street, across Kalaheo Avenue, then down the skinny beach path, hugging a cinderblock wall under a thick, shady row of octopus trees and bougainvillea. Footfalls echoing on packed dirt.
Coming out onto Kailua Bay. A field of impossible blue, sky down to water. Squinting in the brilliance of the broad, white crescent beach. My father swimming, in long, lazy lines parallel to shore. My mother sitting on the sand. Me, pondering the choices: sand castles or sand balls — wet double handfuls smooth-coated with dry sand into hard, sugar-dusted spheres; such a pity to have to whip one at your brother.
Kailua. The guidebooks say it’s basically a beach. But there’s a town wrapped around the beach, and, around that, a whole other side of the 600-square-mile island of Oahu — the windward side, a world away from Honolulu. Kailua is barely half an hour from downtown and Waikiki, but separated by a soaring ribbon of razorback mountains, the Koolau Range. The green lava wall is pierced near its summit by two sets of highway tunnels, like airlocks in time and space. The Honolulu side is dry and sunny, its postcard loveliness folded among high-rises, offices, airport and freeways. The Kailua side, where I grew up, is greener, quieter, lower and slower, with marshes and palms and that perfect bay.
The windward Oahu I know best is three communities: Kailua, Lanikai and their next-door country cousin, Waimanalo. They’re beachy but not snooty. Kailua has a downtown but no night life to speak of. It’s less a spot for touristic stimulation than a place you nestle into, as Hawaiian royalty once did, escaping dusty Honolulu since long before King Kamehameha’s day.
Two Beatles, John and George, mobbed in Waikiki, fled there once, in 1964. They were discovered, and so, eventually, was Kailua, although it and the rest of windward Oahu have managed to keep a reasonably low profile on Hawaii’s well-worn tourist map.
That may be changing, especially now that President Obama has claimed Kailua as his. He grew up in Honolulu, but Kailua is where he returns. This is his place called Hope, his San Clemente, his Texas hill country. Every winter the Obamas stay at the same rented house at one end of the crescent bay, whose waters he knows from boyhood, as he wrote in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father”:
“I still remember how, one early morning, hours before the sun rose, a Portuguese man to whom my grandfather had given a good deal on a sofa set took us out to spear fish off Kailua Bay. A gas lantern hung from the cabin on the small fishing boat as I watched men dive into inky-black waters, the beams of their flashlights glowing beneath the surface until they emerged with a large fish, iridescent and flopping at the end of one pole. Gramps told me its Hawaiian name, humu-humu-nuku-nuku-apuaa, which we repeated to each other the entire way home.”
In this story, either Gramps or young Barack was mistaken, since the humuhumu is a little reef fish, barely six inches long. But let’s give Gramps a break on his fish names, and allow Barack his childhood lens of magnified wonderment: Hawaiians do still fish here with spears and nets, often in darkness, and are done by dawn.
Read more:
