Blazing Through Lahaina

by Casey Dyson

			               I

Years before fire transformed it permanently, Front Street transformed annually for Halloween. Called the “Mardi Gras of the Pacific,” Lahaina became a bacchanalian parade, regressing to a madcap version of the debaucherous 1800s whaling port it once was.

Each Halloween, caricatures of history were shaken with two centuries of pineapple juice, cane sugar, and a dash of Hollywood bitters. Pirates of the Caribbean groped at Sailor Moons before being strained over crushed ice and garnished with an umbrella. Such vestiges of a fictionalized past walked the plank off of the Carthaginian whaling museum to populate my island childhood. The coral ruins of the historic prison couldn’t contain the reverie.

The best years of my Front Street Halloween experience were the elementary ones spent trick-or-treating in the neighborhoods off Front Street. The houses were not decadent. Many of them were squat and single-story. Many featured brown or green wood siding with yards bordered by rock walls. Descendants inherited these houses from immigrants brought to cultivate sugar in Hawaii.

Although each island is dusted with similar plantation villages, for one night each year, Front Street’s village absorbed the enthusiasm of the nearby festivities and stimulated the sugar economy by passing out full-sized 100 Grands and Pay Days. We learned to carry pillowcases. Otherwise, the kilos of booty ripped hard-earned bags of sweets and spilled treasure on the ground like an accidental trash bag piñata.

By middle school, we also knew not to wear masks. Lahaina was so hot that a mask felt like a commitment to pulling a sweaty sock belonging to one of Lieutenant Dan’s Vietnam cadets on and off all night. The final year I tried to trick-or-treat, a few folks told me and my friends that we were too old. The codgers refused to give us candy. Though I was indignant at the time, they were right. The holiday had grown routine, and our lazy costumes reflected our malaise. We were barely dressed up (think Shaggy from Scooby Doo: green shirt, brown pants, maybe some scruff scribbled on a chin). We were only in it for the candy haul we accepted as our right. The cracks in our entitlement began to show, but a new future became visible through those cracks.

I began thinking that maybe the booty of the bacchanal was a grander attraction than the provincial plunder when I slouched to Front Street as a short, chunky Shaggy Doo. The party vibrated on a frequency my costume’s origin character understood better than I. Nevertheless, to my pubescent eyes, the glistening bodies lent the event a mythic mystique. Being too young to engage was, in many ways, the best way to enjoy Halloween on Front Street. If my dad hadn’t been there to drive me and my friends home, we would have had the best night of our lives. Similar to mind surfing an impossible barrel, in my imagination, I got spit out of every hypothetical interaction like Gerry Lopez exiting a Pipeline barrel.

			       		      II

Outside of Halloween, I went to Lahaina to surf. Swell mostly visits Lahaina during the summer months. Two inescapable facts of summer in Lahaina are sun and dust.

The blacktop radiated transient rivers of heat. Unfortunate tourists labored up and down the street sweating through Hilo Hattie muumuus like mirages. Outside of Bubba Gump’s Shrimp Co, on the north end of Front Street, khaki shorts and a pun t-shirt might eddy under the monkey pod tree with feet slotted into Forrest Gump’s shoes. Waving in the shade of the sculpted shoes, he might sit down on the bench and pose for a picture next to Forrest's box of chocolates and suitcase.

Roiling south towards the harbor, a Greg “The Shark” Norman signature straw hat might be drawn into Lappert’s ice cream shop by the chill allure of the misters. On reemerging in the heat, ice cream drips down cones and over hands faster than tongues can lap it.

It’s not just the ice cream; everything in Lahaina sweats. Decades of irresponsible sugarcane and pineapple cultivation parched the red, volcanic soil. An errant trade wind gust shakes the particles loose of agricultural machinery or the mud boggers of a distant Tacoma. Riding the wind, red dirt sticks to all that sweat. Rock walls, sidewalks, and hedges became swathed in masks of red.

The ocean offers little reprieve from the heat. The leeward waters of the Lahaina harbor are protected from prevailing wind and currents by the West Maui Mountains. Stagnant salt water mixes with petroleum as tourist boat engines chug by. Percolating under the eponymous “merciless sun,” this miasma feels ten degrees hotter than the windward waters of my home break on the north shore. The water is several shades gray-er as well.

Clean surf conditions made the balmy waves endurable, but the greatest pleasure often came from getting out after a session and rinsing in the hoses coiled at harbor slips. The fresh, cool gush of a hose was a visceral reminder that sweet mountain water once reached this former capital of Hawaii in such quantities that the chief’s house had a moat.

Now, the water previously stolen for cane and pineapple is siphoned to resorts. Nearby, in Ka’anapali, tourists golf on well-watered, non-native grasses and hit balls over artificial ponds. The green economic oasis in a desert of red dirt is no mirage.

			       		      III

My childhood home on the north shore was part of another plantation village abutting a sugarcane field. Absent of traditional seasons, cane growth marked the passage of time.

In the summer, rows of chunky, chalky, volcanic clay spread across fallow cane fields like the ribbons of an incoming swell on open ocean. My village was an island in that red sea. The buffer between houses and pesticides was not a beach, but a cane road and mound of red dirt describing the circumference of the agricultural land. Hill crests were punctuated not by surfers crowing and ejaculating plumes of spray, but by actual roosters with green, iridescent plumages. Invasive shrubs with tiny leaves sprouted here and there, popping with fluffy yellow-white flowers. Dense boulders dragged out of the paths of plows reinforced the borders.

Winter; I had been chasing romance for months at school, and the sugary stalks, now well overhead, provided cover for shooting other shots.

Spring; we received notice at my house that a burn was imminent. It commanded us to close the windows, bar the doors, and get out if we could.

During burns, cascades of black and gray ash mushroomed skyward. The fire reached such intensity of heat that black ringlets, some several inches long, sailed thousands of feet upwards, attempting to capture the sun like the demigod Maui with his fishing net. Reaching cooler air higher in the atmosphere, the nuclear strips of pesticide-soaked cane leaves became one-winged gargoyles corkscrewing back to Earth.

After a burn, soot covered everything. Long, black ringlets sometimes remained intact. But, whenever I touched one of these toxic tulips, the flower realized that it was not matter. Remembering this, it disintegrated. With each step, I left footprints in the Maui snow. My weight crushed the soot to a finer powder. A powder so fine that it seemed to disappear. Except that matter cannot be destroyed.

Inside the house, the finest of soots filtered through screens and between cracks in jalousies. The house smelled like a campfire for days. Monochrome countertops became tragic, impoverished marble. Dad and I sponged down hard surfaces. We finally had a reason to vacuum.

I heard that slaves on a Caribbean island once revolted against the ruling class by setting fire to the cane. Destroying the sugar crops would demonstrate slaves’ value as humans and the frailty of the economic system. When the smoke cleared, all that was left was the stalk of the plant. The stalk is the only part of the cane used in the manufacture of sugar. This act of furious desperation yielded a harvesting method that required fewer man-hours and fewer men. Working conditions did not improve. The practice of cane cultivation via environmental assault and hot damnation spread like…

			       		      IV

I smoked the devil’s lettuce for the first time a few months earlier. Similar to losing virginity, I imagined there would be pomp and circumstance. Instead, I was drunk in the garage at a party when some kids I wanted to be closer with passed me a joint. My friend and I looked to each other before saying yes, both for the first time. We were too drunk to know if we were high. All I got was circumstance.

The second time, I got knocked out of both of my divisions in a summer surf contest at Lahaina Harbor. The same kids were at the contest. We were friends by then. They had a room at the contest-adjacent Pioneer Inn for the weekend. They also had some weed. There was no need to rush into the hour-long drive home to the north shore. We knew some girls at the contest. Why not make a day of it? We decided we would get high in my car. I left my board top-down to keep the wax from melting. It rested on the grass of the contest green, in the shade of a bougainvillea bush.

Walking to the car barefoot at the sun’s peak was like being told to dance by a gun-slinging god using scorched pavement as bullets. It was ninety-six degrees in the shade. Only after standing under the banyan for several seconds would the heat raging in the depths of my soles cool enough to verify that another step was feasible. Waiting for my feet to register a sensation other than pain, I prayed against blisters and looked for the next patch of shade (or grass) I could jog to. Any white lines that hadn’t burned off the blacktop were too hot to trot on. The red dust next to the road was a fine silt of magma.

The five of us skittered from the Lahaina Banyan to awnings to the shade of street signs on the way to my cherry-red, manual transmission GTI with 5% tints and black leather interior. Five of us piled into the five-seater. The car was set to broil.

Shirtlessness is a matter of comfort as much as surf-culture machismo in Lahaina. It is a special brand of sweat that forms at 10,000 Fahrenheit between human skin and dead animal hide. Hot boxing took on new meanings as we passed the baby j around the sweaty cab. Paranoia preceded the high, so we refused to open the windows. Unlike the first time I smoked, I was sober at the start of this joint. And it was daytime. I knew I was stoned before I got out of the car.

“Breakwall,” a languid left chugging outside the harbor break wall, starts on the south side of Lahaina harbor. “Harbor,” where the contest took place, is a crispy, occasionally chunky right with a peppier left that eventually consumes itself over a shallow reef. Harbor is on the north side, past the harbormaster and the harbor mouth.

By the time we reached the dark sand of the puny beach on the side of the harbor opposite the contest, I was uncomfortable. We sat and began talking to somebody’s girlfriend. In front of us, surf schools operated in the closed-out whitewater south of Breakwall. Dressed in reef-walkers to protect feet from reef, rash guards to protect backs from sunburn and chests from rash, as well as elastic “swim trunks” with mesh liners to keep the goodies intact, flamboyant white tourists “surfed” for the first time. Sufficiently bubble-wrapped, tourists let instructors push them into already crumbled waves on foam-top surfboards.

Proximity to the strange, striking, sober female made my high more uncomfortable. I needed bubble-wrap for my brain. I fixated on all of the questions I didn’t know the answers to but felt too embarrassed to ask: Was I hot because it was hot or because I was high? Would any quantity of liquid quench the thirst I felt? Would I ever be sober again?

We eventually got the nerve to wander back to the contest. There, the elementary scientific principle that Earth spins, causing the sun to move across the sky, became tangible fact. My once-shaded surfboard was rehearsing a torture porn scene under the merciless sun. I had avoided blisters on my feet but not on my board. A six-inch diameter shield volcano bulged from the exposed bottom, commemorating my high in Lahaina.

			               V

As we laughed and trash-talked, the organizers began wrapping the contest for the day. Heats were done, but the sun still winked over Lanai in the distance. In the foreground, the water was now clear of surfers, and the swell was building.

We five derelicts grabbed our boards. We ran down the sidewalk, passed the Carthaginian, passed the boat refueling pump, passed the harbormaster, passed the “no jumping” signs, and plunged into a balmy Pacific smelling subtly of diesel. Hugging the red buoys indicating the location of the man-made channel, we rode the artificial current out to the empty lineup.

The wind died and the sea glassed off. Oil-slick surface conditions lent profundity to the reflections of yellow and orange bursting forth over Lanai. The southerly swell pulse dispersed chunky, slabby rights and head-high lefts that went roping along the reef. Slingshotting down the line in the dwindling light, invisible were the sharp brain corals smothered in brown film that was slowly strangling them. I synergized feeling the acceleration and freedom of clean, open wave faces. I strung together two, three, and four-turn combinations like opalescent shells on an orange thread.

Last-minute sunset cruisers boated by and we waved between waves. Two of us were regular and three goofy, so we split peaks often. There was little time for conversation as I found myself in rhythm, arriving back at the peak just in time to swing on another juicy Cheeseburger in Paradise, cheddar dripping from all aspects.

The sun dipped further behind Lanai and for a moment, red-pink rays lit up the clouds. As darkness prepared to swallow Lahaina, cotton candy drifted on the flaming sea. For a moment, the clouds burned so bright that it felt as though a new day was dawning.

Author's Bio

Casey Dyson was born and raised in Hawaii. Inspired by a childhood spent in the water, Casey often writes about Maui for surf publications and for his website, Yellow Payphone. Whatever the topic, Casey deploys analytical techniques picked up earning his Master’s Degree in Cultural Studies. Casey teaches English in San Francisco and continues to surf.