Lahaina

​I don’t have much to add about the excruciating disaster in Lahaina that even touches close to the reporting and video footage, and I can’t put my reaction anywhere in the universe of those whose lives are part of the community.  This is not intended to.  But that I feel as heart-sick as I do from just two trips to Hawaii, with one visit to Lahaina, speaks to how overwhelming and almost indescribable this conflagration is.
 
I’ve mentioned in the past that my friend Peter Carlisle was Chief Prosecuting Attorney of Honolulu for about 17 years, and served as Mayor there.  And I have good friends from Hawaii. So, my appreciation of their deep love of the state and its history from all our talks over the decades has them as its foundation.
 
On one of the trips, I went to Maui and drove to Lahaina to spend a couple days.  I didn’t know much about the town, but read up on it, and loved his whaling history.  Lahaina has a wonderful, sweet charm that was different from the grace of the rest of the state.  It had a sense of the past and world culture that seemed to be living all around you.  But most of all, I loved staying at the Pioneer Inn.  It permeated the Old World with simplicity and warmth, and I soaked it all up, reveling in knowing not only how it fit into the whaling past, but that people like Mark Twain had stayed there.  Its wood structure painted white, with wonderful wood slats in the windows, and a Polynesian sensibility crossed with New England sturdiness.  

(When I initially posted this article, I didn't think I had a photo I'd taken of the Pioneer Inn, but happily I was able to find it.)​

In fact, although the trip to Lahaina may have been 35-40 years ago, I had such a strong appreciation of the Pioneer Inn that even after all those years I have still kept a souvenir of the hotel to maintain a connection. 

Though a small souvenir, but it's brought great memories, a match book.

In the back of my mind, I had thoughts of returning to the Pioneer Inn.  But the moment I heard there was a fire crushing Lahaina, I know the hotel was gone.  And likely the town.  When I’ve thought of the Pioneer Inn over the years, I thought of “wood.”  And the town had that feel, as well.  It wasn’t going to stand against roaring flames.  Lahaina would be a place for memory.
 
And that’s what Lahaina is now.  Heart-sickening is the only word for me to describe it, and that doesn’t even come close to doing it justice.
 
It’s not just that everything has disappeared, and that emergency relief will be so difficult for people there to access.  But once they do, once they get their FEMA support, once they get their government assistance, once they get their insurance – there’s no Lahaina there to go back to.  It’s gone.
 
(There is also one other sickening aspect to this disaster.  It’s all the delusional, empty people who point to this soul-crushing loss and try desperately to say “Wait, this wasn’t a natural disaster at all.  Look at this photo and that shaft of light.  This was from aliens.”  Lahaina was a community about the natural world.  Nature was at its core.  And the winds and heat and flames that tragically came together in the changed climate world we live in today sadly become a part of that history.  Those who try to make it about something conspiratorially phantasmagoric not only demean themselves, but spit on the lives of all those who have lived in Lahaina over the centuries.  Happily, they missed by a lot.)
 
People will return.  Lahaina will be rebuilt.  Chicago burned down in flames, and returned to become one of the great cities of the world.  And there will be a thriving Lahaina.  At some point.  But Lahaina is different, Lahaina was about history.  And those structures are no more.  Those museums are no more.  But at least the thing about history is that it’s always there where it was.  So, while the Lahaina that returns will be new and different, there will be in its spirit the Lahaina that always was and will always be.  That may not be enough in many ways.  But it’s something.  And it’s important.

​Aloha.​