Untitled Document

25 February 2001

Waikiki

After a brief stop at Narita, it's wheels in the well at 7:46PM for a five hour and thirty-nine minute flight to Aloha-land.

We land after midnight, Seoul time, and by the time we snag bags and clear customs it is well past one AM. Outside, though, the dawn is here under Hawaiian skies.

We chased the sun on the outbound leg of the trip, and now we confront it, charge into it, cutting the night in half. When we emerge from customs we are draped with flowers. The air is moist from new rain and there is the smell of earth and sweet growing things. I am in a place that was once home. A place where my hair was brown, my marriage was new, and my children were born.

O'ahu is a lovely island. It is shaped like a triangle. Pearl Harbor forms a hollow circle in the middle of the base. Two steep mountain ranges form the left and right sides. To the right of Pearl, large dormant volcanic craters dominate the skyline on the gentle back-slope of the precipitous Ko'olau range.

The first of these is the Punchbowl, which it resembles. It bounds the northern limit of the downtown area and the concrete ribbon of Interstate H-1 clips its southern slope. Why they call it an Interstate I don't know. It is just one of those Hawaiian eccentricities. Punchbowl's crater is the Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, an island of solemnity in the midst of bustling Honolulu, urban nexus of the entire archipelago. Modest homes, built to the limited local climatic requirements, climb the outer wall of the crater almost to the rim. The lots on which they sit are worth around a half million dollars each.

From the rim there is a commanding view of the downtown all the way out to Waikiki. Diamond Head is revealed there as a vast low circle, much larger than the famous rising peak over the beach. Behind is the gray vertical mass of Koko Head, steep and majestic. In Hawaiian the word O'ahu means "gathering place." Were it not for all the people here, and their cars, I'm sure it would be described as the prettiest.

In this pretty place we have nothing on the agenda for the day. We have crossed the dateline again, losing the day we gained coming out. We are now only six time zones away from home, although our bodies will take a couple days to sort it out. We are scheduled to stay at the Outrigger Surfrider- one of several Outrigger towers along the Waikiki strip.

This can be maddening, but we lucked out today: bags, people and reservations all coincided. We used to stay at the Hilton Hawaiian Village on official travel, but the Japanese bought it along with most of the rest of O'ahu, and the Government has lost the contract. The Village was a fine place to stay, a sort of campus in the concrete towers of Waikiki. It is what started the beach as a fabled destination, along with Arthur Godfrey and his uku'lele.

he tower at Honolulu International used to be named for Godfrey, recognition of the favorable impact of his Hawaiian segments on his national radio and TV shows. You don't see his name much, anymore. Conrad Hilton's name is still very much there. He used to anchor Waikiki at both ends, with the Village in the east and the upscale Kahala Hilton at the west with its penguins and dolphins in the courtyard. Even if the Japanese own them, they are still the Hiltons.

Hilton got the idea for inventing Waikiki as a mass tourist destination right after the war. In the '20s and '30s, the Matson Liner Lurline and her sisters docked at Aloha Tower, right downtown, and that was the destination. Hotel Street was just that- it serviced the visitors with rooms and amenities. It did not hit the skids until the tourists went to the beach. In my day, it was an edgy place to play. Don't take anything to Hotel Street you can't afford to lose.

The Mo'ana Hotel was the first resort hotel on the beach, and with the digging of the Ala Wai canal, the swamp behind the beach went away. The Mo'ana is a gracious building, more like an enormous bungalow than a hotel, and Waikiki began to be a destination of its own.

Diamond Head dramatically looms above the beach, the glint of the sun on rocks convincing early sailors that there might be riches on that steep eroded slope. There were riches indeed, but they came as the hotels began to transform the beachfront into a concrete strip. Next to be built was the pink palace of the Royal Hawaiian, the hotel that defined Waikiki through the war years. Imagine barbed wire on the beach to prevent landings. Gun emplacements. The bar packed five-deep with Navy officers from Pearl and Army Officers from Ft. Ruger, located on the backside of Diamond Head crater.

After we checked into the Outrigger, I wandered around the downtown. The rest of the delegation was fired up to go windsurfing, but I was tired and I wanted a haircut and time to do laundry.

I walked the beach, savoring the warmth and the brilliant blue of the sky after the bone chilling cold of Seoul. Beach gear and outrageous shirts filled the elevators. I looked at the tourists, young ones packing the open-air bar downstairs named after Duke Kahana'moku. Duke was the prototypical Waikiki Beach Boy and early popularizer of surfing. There were older tourists and families by the pool. I recognized with a start that I was a tourist, too.

It is always disorienting to come back, having once been part of it. Hawaii is just like the hotel business. There is a front of the House, and there is the back of the house. Executed properly, the front never notices the back. The appearance is perfection. But the back, the staff part, is what makes it all happen. And the back of the house in O'ahu can be a gritty side of Paradise.

he multi-ethnic composition of the population are united only by a casual contempt for the Ha'olis. The schools are lousy. Prices for everything are crushing. Real estate cycles between boom and bust. Native activists and statehood revisionists rant in the background. The one-party system that controls everything from City to State government is venal and corrupt.

The political sub-text for everything is the American coup that stole the Sovereignty of these islands and made it our colony. And above it all is the pervasive fiction that there was a time when there were wise and gentle Polynesian Kings.

But by God, the front of this house is beautiful.

That night we went to the Kobe House of Beef, a Benihana's-of-Tokyo knock-off that was great fun. The cooking is the floor show, a culinary samurai our host. As we were seated around the big flat grill the waitress stressed to us that they had no Kobe beef there, far too expensive.

The entertainment was superb. Shrimp flew with deft razor cuts from an knife drawn old-west quick-draw style from a holster on the waist. The beef, Kobe or not, was tender and the lobster succulent. My favorite part was the slicing and stacking of an onion which produced a quite realistic miniature volcano. With the addition of some cooking oil, it even gave us a small vegetable eruption.

he Kirin beer was cold and the companionship mellow. After dinner we wandered back across the grounds of Fort DeRussy, an Army coastal artillery site that proved too sturdy for demolition. Now it is the only green space at this end of the strip. We will run west in the morning, toward Kapiolani Park and Diamond Head.

It is Dr. King's holiday tomorrow, and a major parade is scheduled in honor of the day, right down Kalakaua Avenue in front of the hotel. The night ends in a very loud nightclub for a nightcap, watching the vacationers enjoy their liberty. They seem to be having fun.

Then we drift home in the soft air. The tractors are grooming the beach of cigarette-ends and trash. The elevator is bereft of beach-goers. I leave the door to the lanai wide open, unconcerned that Ninja thieves will swing in from balconies above.

The drapes rustle with the gentle trade winds. And while the view is that of the moonlit concrete tower next door, I can hear the surf. And the whoosh of traffic.

And sirens.

That's the Waikiki lullaby.