Hawaiians say the word "aloha" as both "hello" and "goodbye." It is a beginning and an end. But it was only when I went there that I learned the word is so much more than that, that it is something close to sacred.
The week before I left for Hawaii was one of the loneliest weeks of my life.
I was living at an arts centre across from a water filtration plant on Toronto Island. Leaves were still on the trees, but summer was over and the crowds had faded. The ferries that chugged back and forth all day long between the island and the mainland were mostly empty. Whole days went by without me saying more than a few words to anyone.
I was there to work on a novel about a teenaged competitive swimmer who is terrified of everything about life outside the pool. I wrote chapters on the far edge of a pier, sitting on a red wooden bench that kids had carved their names into. I wrote chapters sitting on the beach, staring out at the vastness of Lake Ontario. Always alone, always smoking too many cigarettes.
When I was 14 and read the first book that changed my life, I was so in awe of novelists that I was certain I was going to be one. I was certain of a lot of things then.
This spring I turned 40 and felt like I was drowning in a boredom I had no one to blame for but myself. Almost everything about my life had become dull routine. Work, kids. Work, kids. I wanted joy and courage and the challenge of trying new things. If my life was a book, I would have stopped reading it.
There were times when I was elated working on the novel because I hadn't chased anything new in a long, long time. I kept reminding myself while I was on the island that the life I wanted was still possible. But it was a dream like the tiny white sailboat that was always bobbing out on the dark water of the lake – still out there on the horizon but probably too far away to swim to.
The overwhelming sense that everything about my 40-year-old self was a tired cliché only made things worse.
But then there was Hawaii. I had always thought of Hawaii as Magnum P.I., surfing, Don Ho, grass skirts, ukuleles, leis and luaus. People I know who have gone told me it's the most beautiful place on Earth, but none of them could quite explain why. So a day after I got home from the island, with best wishes from my very patient wife, I was on a plane to paradise.
Kailua-Kona, on the west coast of Hawaii Island – the Big Island, as everyone calls it – was not the lush dreamscape of grass skirts and tiki torches I imagined all of Hawaii to look like.
The main drag overlooking Kailua Bay is lined with stores selling tourist kitsch, sushi restaurants, a few tattoo parlours, a Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant and sports gear shops. People sat on the sea wall smoking cigarettes. Others stood on it, lazily casting fishing lines in to the water. Buses chugged by.
I joined a group and we packed in to a six-wheel all-terrain vehicle and rumbled up into the hills of Kohala, about an hour's drive north from Kailua Bay, to hike a trail made by a plantation owner in the early 1900s. The trail was dotted with flowers bursting with colour – pink-and-white ginger buds, one flower with a yellow centre and white petals that spun around it like a pinwheel, the yellow hibiscus, Hawaii's state flower. We passed six waterfalls and swam in the seventh.
That night, after the sun had gone down, we boarded a boat to go swimming with manta rays a few hundred feet offshore. Wearing masks and snorkels, a foam pool noodle under our feet, we floated in the Pacific Ocean, all of us holding on to a board with lights that shone down in to the water. The light attracted plankton, and the plankton brought the manta rays. I thought we would see them down on the ocean floor. I was wrong. They came swooping up, doing barrel rolls to gobble as much plankton as possible. At one point, there were eight of them with wing spans as big as 10 feet across doing an endless series of languid loop-de-loops close enough that one of them brushed my chest. All of us floating there could hear each other yelling "awesome" and "oh my God" or just laughing with wonder, the sounds coming muffled and delighted through our snorkels.
I went and got a tattoo the next morning, my first. I had gone paddle boarding alongside a pod of dolphins in Kailua Bay and then walked to a tattoo parlour just off the main drag. I got a black line of three waves I had drawn tattooed just above my left ankle. Plenty of people back home and on my tour group asked me what my tattoo was, but no one asked me why.
When I got to Kaua'i, "The Garden Isle," I discovered the picture postcard of Hawaii I had imagined. It is the oldest of the main Hawaiian islands, and so has benefited from the miraculous forces that have given birth to them for the longest. Everywhere I looked, there were hills and mountains so green they looked plugged in to some vital power source.
This is what makes Hawaii so transfixing. The entire chain of islands has been formed by volcanic eruptions and the miracle of life, creating a lush paradise bursting with vitality and suffused with a mythology so passionate and beautiful – the fire goddess Pelehonomahou, who is said to live on a volcano on the eastern edge of the big island, Haikili, the god of thunder, Lono, the god of peace – and a language so complex and musical that you begin to sway in its rhythms, lulled by it, all of it convincing you that if this place is possible then any miracle is possible.
I kayaked up the Wailua River and then hiked through what was once known as the valley of kings. The trail ended at another waterfall that I swam in. I realized I love hiking. It clears my head. It helps me see with fresh eyes.
But as much as I love being in water, and as much as I loved hiking, it wasn't until I got behind the wheel of a 4x4 utility vehicle – think ATV on steroids – that I knew Hawaii had changed me forever.
It was my last day there. I drove out to a private ranch overlooking the Hule'ia River Valley. I tied an orange bandana around my face like a train robber. I put on goggles and a crash helmet. We had to do a test drive up a small hill and around rocks. Hit the rocks and you wouldn't be allowed to drive. I was so nervous because there was no way I was riding shotgun. Everyone passed the test, thankfully.
My vehicle had four seats, a roll cage and an engine like you wouldn't believe.
We hit the trail and I understood the need for the bandana and goggles. The red dirt from the path was being kicked up into huge clouds. I motored along the trail out into the open vista, the sun high in the clear blue sky, going faster and faster until we reached the bottom of a tall hill with a steep vertical incline. Some people drove up it slowly, tentatively. Up until this point our group had been driving in a tight single file. This was our chance to go as fast as we wanted. I was smiling and laughing as I waited at the bottom for my turn. I knew exactly what I was going to do, and it was exactly the thing I usually don't do.
I gripped the steering wheel with both hands and hit the gas pedal. The roar of the engine was deafening. All I could see was the blue sky above a thin red cloud. I didn't know when I reached the top of the hill whether I would crash into someone or take flight. Joy and fear were indistinguishable, like when you're a kid on a roller coaster. I reached the top of the hill and skidded to a stop, elated.
I knew that experience would always stay with me. The night before, something else happened that I still think about. I had driven to the St. Regis Princeville Resort, one of the most beautiful hotels I've ever seen, with views looking out over Hanalei Bay. I spent some time talking with a woman named Stephanie who works at the hotel. She told me stories of performing in a Hawaiian musical group in Egypt back in her singing days. I told her how much I loved saying "aloha" as a greeting and a farewell, how much I loved the Hawaiian language.
"Did you know that 'aloha' is actually two words?" she said. " Alo means 'I wish for you' and 'ha' means 'the breath of life,' " she explained. When chiefs met, she said, they would lean so close to one another that their foreheads almost touched and say the word, the breath of each person entering through the mouth of the other, a sharing of not just breath but something sacred. That idea still resonates in my mind.
I learned more about myself during those two weeks on Toronto Island and Hawaii than I have in the past five years. I don't want to let any of it slip away.
While researching my novel, I discovered something fascinating. Some competitive swimmers are too freaked out by open water to ever venture more than knee-deep in to it. One former Canadian Olympian told me he would never swim in a lake. "Why not?" I asked. "Where do I turn?" he said. I've been haunted by that ever since. The pool tells you how to act – follow the dark line of your lane, turn at the wall. The clock determines your success. The open water is boundless, imposing upon each of us the freedom to choose whatever direction we want and whatever kind of swimmer we are going to be – swim hard into the waves or drift with the current?
That's why I got the tattoo. To remind myself what kind of swimmer I want to be in this world.
Aloha.
The writer travelled as a guest of Hawai'i Tourism Canada. It did not review or approve this article.