January 29, 2024

We may never get to Prince of Wales Island, Alaska, but we can visit it in our minds.

Our six-hour flight from Honolulu to Seattle left three hours late, at 12:30 AM. I thought of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” which begins “on a train bound to nowhere …” Seattle would be our nowhere, on a gray dawn of fog and sheets of rain.

Reggie had the window. He appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He looked out at the darkness, like the singer in Kenny’s lyrics. I was trapped in the center seat, too tired to sleep. First we talked weather. I mentioned I had read about temps in the 20s in our home town. Too bad we were leaving Hawaii, I said.

He answered: “I worked for Alaska Airlines in western Alaska, loading aircraft. It could get down to negative 60F. Sometimes you’d be out in it for a couple of hours.”

At that moment I felt small griping about the South Carolina cold snap. Sixty degrees below zero. “It’s not just cold,” he said. “It hurts.” 

He talked about how to dress for -60F: layer over layer over layer to retain body heat, then something heavy on top. Even then you can’t stand it for long.

Reggie is a Prince of Wales native and a member of the ancient Haida tribe, which has lived for centuries on and around the Haida Gwali archipelago, formerly Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British Columbia. He was on his way to his home in Ketchikan, Alaska, on Revillagigedo Island abutting Alaska’s Panhandle. Ketchikan is a bustling town of about 8,000, and famous for the world’s largest collection of standing totem poles. It’s known as a cute tourist destination, although I don’t know anyone who’s been there.

Never heard of Haida Gwali? Or the Queen Charlotte Islands? Neither had I. At home I got out my atlas and did some homework. Primitive ancestors of the tribe may have settled the area more than 12,000 years ago. Centuries later they defended their way of life against White traders and settlers and the Canadian government. Canada changed the name of the Queen Charlotte Islands to Haida Gwali in 2009. The tribe now claims ownership.

Reggie hails from Hydaburg on the western coast of Prince of Wales. The island is part of the Alexander Archipelago, which amounts to dozens of islands pocked by narrow bays and streams. Prince of Wales is about 130 miles long and 65 miles wide and, along with Revillagigedo, is deep within the Tongass National Forest, the country’s largest, at 17 million acres.

All this took me back fourteen years. In 2010 my son Michael and I arrived in Yellowknife, the provincial capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories, known for brutal cold. We then flew by seaplane 60 miles across trackless lakes-and-forest wilderness to a fishing camp. It was June, but the nights were freezing. Like the Tongass, the land stretches beyond the imagination.

Reggie would get to Prince of Wales from Ketchikan by ferry, a three-hour passage across the Clarence Strait. The Strait flows into the Dixon Entrance, a 50-mile-wide channel south of the island and north of Haida Gwali. The Strait is one of more than a dozen waterways of the Inside Passage, which extends from northwest Washington past British Columbia and the Alaska Panhandle to southern coastal Alaska. The circuitous routes of the Passage are used by cruise ships, commercial shipping, fishing vessels, ferries, and barges. Millions sail through each year.

Cruise ships depart Seattle and Vancouver to transit the Passage, offering glimpses of whales and mountain vistas. They drop passengers in Alaskan coastal places where they can buy souvenirs at shops owned by the cruise lines. The tours often include a train ride for one of dozens of see-Alaska-by-train packages.

Many long fervently to do this. The internet overflows with the deals. One of them, Road Scholar, has been created by Elderhostel which, as the name reveals, serves the white-haired community, providing “all-inclusive trips designed for ages 50+.” One of these is “Alaska Wildlife by Train.”

The pattern is cruise for four or five days to a coastal town like Seward then board a train for the 470-mile trek to Fairbanks in the center of the state, and go on to national parks.

The region seems a chaotic accident of creation, rugged chunks of wilderness broken from North America to float free into the Pacific. Thousands of islands of the Alexander Archipelago, some only spits of rock, lie along the Pacific Ring of Fire, the chain of jumbled and unbalanced tablets of the earth’s crust beneath the bottom of the Sea of Alaska that threaten a cataclysmic quake someday or any day.

Hydaberg, population about 400, is named for the Haida people. The island’s economy is built around tourism, logging, fishing, and mining. The other piece is the Tongass, which includes 19 designated wilderness areas extending north beyond Juneau and eastward to the British Columbia boundary.

Reggie talked about it with affection although apart from the woods it’s not much of a place. Hydaburg is the smallest of the Prince of Wales settlements, Klawock, Craig, and Hollis claim a couple thousand residents. The island is a bystander in the northbound race of the cruise ships and the 50-plus crowds. The vast reaches of Tongass don’t have the appeal of the whales and nature talks.

“If you go, rent a car and drive around,” Reggie said. “Make your own schedule to see things. In September you can see the northern lights. But don’t make it later than that.”

We have often driven around. Maybe we will. Hydaberg. Prince of Wales Island. Ketchikan. Revillagigedo, broad stretches of rocky Pacific shoreline and dense dark forest, barely touched by God. Trekking wild places enlivens and soothes the soul. Now is the right time, as it is, always.

January 22, 2024

The road from Honolulu to Haleiwa (Ha-le-EEVAH—pronounce all the vowels) on Oahu’s north shore is a short stretch of interstate, then two-lanes winding and straightaway, about 35 miles total. The route passes through Wahiawa, a tiny traffic-clogged burg like lots of others anywhere, then skirts Wheeler Army Airfield. The rest is lush, spectacular Hawaii, distant mountains ghostly in mist. Haleiwa shows up in under an hour.

The north shore, site of the famed “Banzai Pipeline,” is where the big waves crash. A quarter-mile off the steep Haleiwa beach young guys, just dots against the deep blue, rode the swells until they chose one, then paddled their boards into the rising slope of tons of water and stood and leaned into the thundering curl. We held our breath as they maneuvered the boards like virtuosos in a Sixties surfer movie. They slipped under the churning surf, disappeared as the wave buried them, then surfaced and climbed aboard again.

We didn’t get to this place on our own, a friend, Abigail, loaned us her car and said see what you can. She left us with some hints, get the full immersion in the place, feel the environment, appreciate it. Haleiwa is a spot on the road, cute in a touristy way, just off the Kamehameha Highway. The road then continues north along a narrow rocky beach where the giant waves break in gorgeous blue-green, tourists stop to snap pictures.

A few miles further on is Pupukea, where a few retirees have found their leafy Shangri-las along the water, defying or ignoring the “tsunami evacuation route” signs. Low-slung homes are partly visible through thick landscaping here and there up to Kawela Bay on the northernmost tip of the island. The Kamehameha road peters out and near-empty country begins. Within is the Pupukea Forest Preserve, which occupies most of the center of the island. Hawaii may seem like endless beach, but tropical forest dominates.

We got coffee and puttered through the tourist shops and looked at the pretty flowery dresses and shirts, the polished, probably fake Polynesian carvings, the earrings and necklaces mostly made in Southeast Asia. The shops and cafes were packed with folks just like us, wearing Ohio State and New York Yankees sweatshirts and teeshirts and their best flipflops. They mostly passed through indifferently, having seen it all before. Even the clerks looked Midwestern.

The beach made all the difference, it’s the draw in this remote place as it is all over Hawaii, the catalyst for the tourism. The sandy strips bracketing the island beckon at the mystery of the Pacific emptiness that draws the outsiders. It’s 4,600-something miles from Waikiki to our home town over the desolate ocean, but only (only?) 3,800 to Tokyo.

From Haleiwa the gorgeous aquamarine of the surf melds with the dark blue beyond the wave zone. The sparkling-clear colors enchant locals and visitors alike. The hypnotic crash of the breakers, fearsome riptides, and ferocious undercurrents warn of something strange that we don’t quite grasp. It suggests some fearful meaning, some elusive truth, that has to do with the vast depths and distances, to everywhere and nowhere, that haunted the American generals and admirals during the Pacific War, yet also finally helped defeat the enemy.

We get something of this in the Kon-Tiki voyage from Peru to the Polynesian island of Tuamoto in 1947. The Kon-Tiki expedition, led by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, tried to show that Polynesian peoples were related to Latin Americans who, Heyerdahl believed, sailed across the Pacific in balsa rafts around 500 A.D. Much of his research was rejected by anthropologists, who argue the South Seas peoples descended from Asian migrants.

 The Kon-Tiki story, told by Heyerdahl as The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas was a best-seller for a few years, then faded. Heyerdahl turned to other adventures, like the secrets of Easter Island. But the strange idea persisted, some scientists took him seriously.

Kon-Tiki is part scientific experiment and part mystery, maybe mystery is the larger part. Debate continues over where did the South Seas islanders come from; some of their vocabulary is the same or similar to that of Peruvians. The complicated confluence of theories underlines the questions: of the Pacific and the huge distances that isolated Hawaii and Hawaiians for centuries.

We drove north from Haleiwa along the Kamehameha road through the thickening jungle-forest accented by a few homesteads, occasionally a small pasture on the landward side. We never did make it to Kewala Bay. It became another item on a long list.

We explored Haleiwa for a while then joined the tourist gridlock back to Honolulu, past the wild jungle grass straining in the sea winds, below dark thunderheads gathering above the deep-green peaks to the south. The countryside fell away behind us. We departed a wild outpost, a remote dreamworld that calls visitors back, someday, when, if, somehow.

We slogged back into the suburban sprawl that envelopes Honolulu, then turned onto the H1 and H2 interstates, clogged with the evening rush hour. Soon we inched past the colorless jumble of no-zoning industrial sites, highrise office and condo towers, and two- and three-level apartment-type housing. It’s a city, after all, of 350,000 souls.

Come back anytime, Abigail said. We know the Kamehameha road leads into the foreignness of the place, through the vernal, vine-tangled jungle, past the rocky trails, the sunlight filtered through overhead canopy, offering intense, visceral beauty. The Hawaii of golf, sunbathing, pickleball, and luaus is another, far-distant planet.     

All those thousands of miles east, frigid temperatures and snow seized the country, schools and businesses closed from the midsection to the Atlantic, pipes froze and burst. The Iowa Republican caucus went off as scheduled. The country lunged closer to its bizarre future. Some Americans, those with uncomplicated lives, talk about emigrating.

We can promise ourselves to return to drive to the end of the Kamehameha, like all the others who wonder about this remote corner of paradise, to watch the young guys surf and listen to the breakers roll in. For now this place is a fleeting, beautiful moment existing on the fringes of our world.

January 15, 2024

We walked the length of Waikiki Beach, threading our way among the sunbathers. Diamond Head mountain loomed through a pale mist to the south. The surf was choppy, pushed around by a stiff breeze. Whitecaps broke on sandbars a half-mile out.

The water gleamed in the morning sun, lovely tropical blue-green close to shore, fading to deep blue at the horizon. We could see the silhouettes of surfers bobbing beyond the sandbars, waiting for their perfect wave. Four Navy fighter aircraft suddenly raced across the sky above the beach, the roar of their twin engines drowning the whisper of the wind through the palms.

The beach in late morning was a brilliant palette of tourists in trunks and bikinis sprawled under the Waikiki sun, children playing in the sand, proprietors of two giant catamarans talking up cruises offshore. The craft were hauled up on the sand awaiting passengers.

As we moved from the beach a young man waved a book at me. I stopped, he handed me a paperbound copy of his self-published memoir. He took my pause as an opportunity to talk about himself, a Texas native who three years ago shipped out to Hawaii. He wanted $20 for a signed copy. It’s available on Amazon, he said. I said I’d check.

I thought it a strange way to market a book, but you do find strange in this Pacific paradise along with the sunshine and mild breezes. The driver who took us to the hotel, a Hawaii native, said the already high cost of living skyrocketed after the pandemic, leading to an explosion of the homeless population. We saw their camps along Kapiolani Boulevard.

The island folks take full advantage of the lovely setting. Tourism is the main industry. The driver explained the chill and snow in the Midwest and Northeast would mean a surge in pale visitors. He was right, nearly everyone we passed wore a “Hawaii” souvenir teeshirt or a sweatshirt from Michigan, New York, or other cold place.

It is history that resonates. As those Navy F/A-18s roared overhead I leaned back on a bench, wondering what the place was like early on December 7, 1941, when the first wave of Japanese fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes suddenly appeared. Beach strollers might have seen aircraft of the second wave, which approached the island from the north then turned west.

The USS Arizona Memorial, dedicated in 1962, strips away the tourism hoopla to demand awe and reverence. The battleship exploded that morning when a 1,800-pound bomb, reconfigured to pierce armor, passed through the deck to the ship’s magazine to detonate more than a million pounds of black powder, instantly killing 1,177 of the 1,512 sailors and Marines aboard. The remains of some 900 are entombed within the hull.

At the Pearl Harbor Memorial we got aboard the Navy craft that carried us to the Arizona site. The 184-foot-long structure was designed by an Austrian, Alfred Preis, who had been detained when he entered the U.S. at the start of World War II. It extends across the midsection of the hull without touching it, providing a partial yet dignified view of a barnacle-encrusted hull section. The rusted base of number-three gun turret protrudes from the water. “Tears of the Arizona” rise to the surface as oil slowly leaks from tanks that still hold an estimated 500,000 gallons.

The Memorial is the majestic climax to the Pearl Harbor site, a series of museums that capture history as far back as Commodore Matthew Perry’s opening to Japan in 1853. The displays recall World War I; the Treaty of Versailles which, some historians argue, spurred the rise of Nazism; the Great Depression, which led to Japanese militarism and American isolationism; Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and China; Japan’s duplicitous diplomacy.

The museum offers a sobering closeup on Japanese pre-attack planning: the huge 67-ship, six-carrier force, the far-northern Pacific route, the unique design of torpedoes for Pearl Harbor’s shallow water, the command debate over sending a third wave. We learn of supreme commander Admiral Yamamoto’s private view that the attack was a mistake and that American power would ultimately crush Japan.

December 7 dawned quietly on Oahu. Hawaii duty, to many servicemen, was routine, even boring. Navy Admiral Husband Kimmel and Army Lieutenant General Walter Short, like other leaders, worried about a land invasion. Navy patrol aircraft were stretched thin over the vast Pacific range around Hawaii. No senior officer focused on air attack.

At 6:45 AM the Navy destroyer USS Ward fired on a Japanese submarine outside Pearl, the first American shots of World War II. The ship sent a message to Navy headquarters, but decoding delayed delivery. At 7:40 the first wave of 183 fighters and bombers arrived over Oahu. The attack began at 7:55, the fighters attacking American aircraft on the ground at Hickam and Wheeler fields and the Ford Island naval air station to prevent them from taking off.

The Japanese achieved complete surprise. At 8:54 the second wave of 167 aircraft arrived and met greater resistance. The Americans shot down 29 enemy aircraft and destroyed five small submarines that lay outside the harbor to attack any ships that got underway

Of eight Navy battleships at Pearl, all were damaged, four were sunk. Three cruisers and three destroyers were sunk or damaged. Some 180 aircraft were destroyed. All told, 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 wounded. Kimmel and Short were relieved of command within days.

We read chilling and poignant anecdotes. A spy, Japanese Navy ensign Takeo Yoshikawa, reported on Pearl ship movements. He sometimes disguised himself as a laborer, unshaven, in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt to get close to the harbor, and once was nearly shot by a sentry.

The Arizona band was set for a “battle of music” competition with the USS Pennsylvania band on December 20. The entire band was lost in the attack, the Pennsylvania band awarded them the trophy. Ten-year-old Patricia Campbell danced the jitterbug with 17-year-old sailor Jack Evans on the evening of December 6. Fifty years later she found him in California, they danced again at the Arizona’s 60th anniversary.

The Navy permits veterans who survived the attack to request their remains be interred within the ship. The ashes of dozens of veterans have been placed in the hull. As private groups raised funds for the memorial, Elvis Presley held a benefit concert in 1961 that contributed $95,000.

The battleship Missouri, aboard which Gen. Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, rides at anchor nearby, as if standing watch over the graves of Arizona’s crew.

We walked slowly to the bus stop and rode for an hour through rush hour, past the commercial shipyard, industrial neighborhoods, the slightly grubby downtown, back to Waikiki, the nexus of Hawaii’s dream world. History doesn’t intrude much at the beach. But history, a history of tragedy, courage, and reverence, is the story of this place.

January 8, 2024

We saw some photos of Alta, Wyoming, where our daughter, Kathleen, and Steve have rented a house. Snow-covered fields extend out to woodland into the foothills of Grand Teton National Park, also snow-covered. Yellowstone is just to the north. Kathleen told us that on Christmas morning the temperature was 0 Fahrenheit. Later it rose to 20 F. It does get colder. On average, the area gets 120 inches of snow every winter.

They live the outdoors life, skiing, snowboarding, hiking, camping, fishing. Not far from Alta are ski slopes and country for Nordic, or cross-country skiing. The entire Teton region is a camper’s, hiker’s, and photographer’s paradise. Steve says that just a turn or two from their front gate, you’re staring close-up at the mountains.

Steve works in the IT field, he only needs his computer and an internet hookup, which is provided by Starlink, the Elon Musk system also used by the Ukrainians since Russia invaded.

The house has three bedrooms, they haven’t signed on to the “tiny house”/minimalist philosophy that’s making the rounds with some serious folks. The place has three heat sources, propane, a wood stove, electric floor heat. They’ve arranged to get the wood delivered. Someone comes in to plow the long driveway in from the road. The property is two fenced acres, plenty of room for their big dog, Charlie (mix of Grand Pyrenees, Labrador, Plotthound), to enjoy. There is a library in Alta, they say.

Alta is an unincorporated place, where a few hundred people live. It’s about six miles east of the Wyoming-Idaho border from Driggs, Idaho, the nearest town, population about 1,600. Eight miles south of Driggs on ID-33 is Victor. As of the last census, some 2,000 folks live there.

We’ve passed through Victor and Driggs a couple of times, first when we visited Yellowstone in 2006, and then when we drove from Breckenridge, Colo., to Ennis, Mont., in 2015. In ’06 we stopped for a nice dinner. I recalled I had visited in 1965 on my way to the Philmont, N.M., Scout Ranch, a roundabout itinerary that included Yellowstone. We had to go to Victor to get on an all-night train to Salt Lake City. The train doesn’t run through Victor any more.

As you might guess, travel to Alta from almost anywhere means flying a couple of legs to either Jackson, Wy., or Idaho Falls, then driving about an hour. The drive from Jackson means transiting the Teton Pass south of 10,000-foot Mount Glory, a scary trip even in summer.

A friend of ours here in South Carolina is from Sydney, Mont., on the eastern side of the state, which is ranching and farming country. To travel there he may fly into Williston, N.D., about 30 minutes east. Not far from Sydney is Baker, Mont., which boomed when the oil-drilling business boomed, then lost population when the industry declined. Most of the oil activity in the region is over in North Dakota, where it’s also been boom-n’-bust in recent years.

These are skeletal anecdotes about small places with names, of which there are thousands in America. We’ve got lots of one- or two-line stories about a few, like our stop at a yard sale in Craig, Colo., on the drive to Ennis that summer. Two years earlier we visited Neihart, Mont., a down-and-out copper mining town, population 33, in the Lewis and Clark National Forest.

After a quick tour of Neihart I took a photo of nearby Belt Creek, which flows through the Little Belt Mountains, and later tried to replicate it on canvas.  We pressed on, through White Sulphur Springs and a few more isolated places before getting lunch in a bar in Lavine, then arriving in Billings. We visited the Little Bighorn National Monument, site of Custer’s Last Stand, on the Crow Reservation, then went on to Sheridan, Wy.

All this is a collection of snapshots. You may pass through foreign places, even recall the names and features, but you’re still just passing through. Kathleen, from Virginia, and Steve, from Ohio, know that the habit of being of any place is elusive. To learn the place, appreciate it, understand it, means accepting it. Republican Nikki Haley was blasted for tapdancing around the question about the cause of the Civil War. But she may have felt cornered. She knows Southerners know she’s not really one of them.

Most of us are tourists most of our lives, whether just swooping into a place taking photos and leaving, or swooping in and staying for years. Our homes are where we think they should be, even if we transplanted decades ago for perfectly good reasons. Then too, you can escape and adapt. Kathleen was born in New Jersey, no snow-covered mountains there. Our other three were born in Nashville. They all got out before it became part of their lives.

Lots of Yankees move to Florida, they don’t pretend to be natives, the locals would laugh. We’re planted in South Carolina. Sandy, who lived into her thirties in Tennessee, can claim to be a Southerner. I’m a tourist. My family were New Yorkers. My siblings and I left long ago. Yet in a strange way we still are New Yorkers.  

Homestead values and attitudes are entangled with culture, but culture may propagate myth and prejudice. East, West, North, South will always be spiritual and emotional benchmarks, as they always have been, and further subdivided, Mainers, Tennesseans, Texans, Californians, and so on, including some who fall in love with and live their lives in entirely different places.

We can take all that too seriously. We have family members who have never crossed state lines to visit us. The regional differences are complicated because we make them complicated. Rather than figure out what we have in common we start taking sides, sometimes in a good-humored way, sometimes not.

For sure, Nikki Haley knew the answer about the Civil War was slavery. Too bad she didn’t just say so. She wrestles with the demons unleashed by the Southern myth that insists the cause was “states’ rights” or similar propaganda that politicians still use here. Culture may be authentic, but it may not be truth.  

With that monster digression—Kathleen and Steve have a one-year lease on the Alta house, so they’ll be there that long at least, maybe long enough to learn the place and maybe to love it. They’ve lived in out-of-the-way places before. They’re good at making friends in small towns and big cities. If they don’t like it they’ll do what we all would do: pack up, move on.