I am leaving for a nine day vacation on the Big Island, Hawaii, early Sunday morning. I will post it before we go. I won't be writing a Substack until I retrn.
Some of my readers may thinkI was hatched fully formed as a monomanical Substacker who writes about politics and often how it relates to psychology. This wasn’t always who I was. There was a juncture in my life where I had I taken another fork in the road I could have ended up as a surfer dude living in Hawaii, catching early waves, and giving lessons to tourists.
I grew up in a residential suburb of New York City in Westchester County. Every summer while all of my well-off friends went to summer camp, we went to Oakland Pool which, being of very modest means (my father was a self-employed upholsterer), what we could afford. It was private pool club in Rye, New York located on Long Island Sound. It had a giant salt water pool (below). You could also swim in Long Island Sound (behind me in the photo above) You had to walk down one of two stairways cut into a sloping concrete wall to reach the water. There was no beach. There was an always crowded public beach next door but we never went there. Next to that beach was a Playland, which was a large amusement park that also had an outdoor pool and a beach. We went to playland a couple of times each summer for the rides.
They had fireworks which were fired above the water Friday nights so on the few times when we stayed late enough we could watch them. Playland is still in operation (see website)
When I was 15 I was lucky enough to spend the entire summer in Honolulu with my Aunt Grace who had moved there when I was 13.
Above is her photo. You can barely make out the ocean in the background.
She had lived with us all my life but took the daring step of moving there without a job after a bad breakup with a boyfriend. It wasn't even a state yet. When she was younger she had a pilot license and during the war helped ferry military aircraft around the country and then worked as an air traffic controller and sold costume jewelry in some kind of enterprise I never understood.
In Hawaii she had some unusual jobs including drive a jeep that picked up the balls at a golf driving range and typing book manuscripts. She typed at least one for James Michener. She finally got a regular job at the public library which she kept until she retired.
She was a fantastic distance swimmer. In fact if you do a deep dive (no pun intended) looking for her online you will discover this NOAA article. It is about a sea turtle breeding area she discovered. It was named “Grace’s Ledge” in her honor. She’s on the bottom of page 12.
I’d never flown on an airplane when I went there. It was a long flight on a propeller DC6-B plane. I sat near the wing and was alarmed when I saw flames cming out of the back of an engine. “Nothing to worry about, it’s just backfiring” I was reassured.
As we were approaching Oahu I took a photo of Diamond Head and didn’t realize at the time that I’d taken a picture of my aunt’s house (arrow below) and other spots I would come to know well.
I learned to surf. I wasn’t at all homesick. Had my life gone a different way I could have ended up living there.
Living in a one room apartment with my aunt wasn’t ideal, but it was doable. She had a few annoying quirks but she didn’t really drive me crazy. She was, to be colloquial, really a great lady and unlike anyone. Like my mother, her sister, she was kind and empathetic.
I made a few friends over the summer. I can easily see me having decided to stay there. Honolulu wasn’t nearly the tourist mecca that it has become. Here’s what Waikikki Beach looked like when I was there when there were only a few hotels:
The Outrigger Canoe Club is in the foreground and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel behind it. I had a kinda-not-really girlfriend named Star. B eing a shy 15 perhaps had I been a bit older that would have developed into a romance and it might have been what kept me there.
Living an entire summer in Hawaii, long enough to be really tan and have my feet so calloused I could walk anywhere barefoot, I felt that I almost fit it in. In the picture below I’m in a World War Two observation bunker on a beach not far from where we lived on the other side of Diamond Head.
This was the view from our apartment:
There was a condo across from our apartment but fortunately it didn’t block our vew of Diamond Head.
This is what it looks like today (from their website here)
A neighbor friend and I used to walk to the top of it on weekends going up the no-railing stairs when construction workers weren’t there.
I took these photos of our place and of my aunt in her yard from there.
My aunt had a great Studebaker convertibe. If I’d been old enough to drive I strongly suspect I’d have stayed there. (The station wagon belonged to the people who own the attached house.)
Below is me on Waikikki Beach:
Here I am on the steps to my aunt’s one room over the garage apartment at the base of Diamond Head. Since then the house was torn down and replaced. It was on the corner of the main Waikakki Beach drag, Kalākaua Avenue where it ends at Coconut Street. This is what I looks like today:
I heard from my aunt after she moved to a care facility that James McArthur, who played Danno in Hawaii Five-O, lived there.
Above: That’s me on the stairs to my aunt’s apartment.
I was a fairly good surfer on waves as tall as I was, but you’ll have to take my word for it since I don’t have any photos. I could never hang ten, but I could catch waves from first break quite a distance from shore and ride them until they no longer were breaking.
I had a surfboard locker at Waikikki Beach and usually surfed several times a week.
Sometimes I brought it home to surf in the ocean just a few steps from our place. This was somewhat dangerous because the waves broke over a reef which was less than a foot under the surface. Wiping out (how about that surfer term?) over the reef, called a reef break, could have caused a serious injury.
All the photos of me on a board which I have are the ones below. My aunt took them from a seawall near her place. They show me trying unsuccessfully to stand up. You have to take my word for it that I actually could ride a wave. In fact early one morning when hardly anybody was on the beach or surfing the movie star David Niven was trying to surf with another man. They were not far from me and were watching me to see how I managed to catch waves. He’d starred in the Best Picture Academy Award winning “Around the World in 80 Days” three years before and was a mega-star. By coincidence, Aunt Grace took my sister and me to see the movie in New York City on the huge screen when it opened. Now I wish I’d paddled over to talk to him.
I’ve always loved the ocean.
One of the worst things about living in mid-Michigan, where I went to attend Michigan State and stayed for 20 years, was that the nearest big body of water was Lake Michigan and even that was a long drive. When we moved to Massachusetts, a lovely beach on Buzzards Bay was nearby. There were no waves to enjoy, which I would have liked, but the water was warm enough to swim in.
Off season, when it wasn’t crowded, we’d sometimes go to Cape Cod where the beaches with their dunes are beautiful, but the water was too cold to for me to go in and enjoy the waves, though some people did.
Below: Cape Cod beach in winter:
Moving to Oregon, the Pacific was also a long drive, 90 minutes on winding roads. The water there is way too cold to swim in.
Today we are leaving for an oceanside vacation on the Kona Coast of Hawaii (the Big Island).
As I write this on Saturday, I am seriously leaving my laptop at home. That way if I even want to write a Substack I won’t be able to. Of course, I can read and send emails on my iPhone and also look at the internet.
I know it is is psychologically the best if I just enjoyed the ocean and being with family and, plain and simple, getting the fear and loathing out of my head for nine or so days.
As I wrote yesterday, having the Secret Service investigate me won’t get the media attention Kathy Griffin got when she posted the image of the decapitated Trump head, but it could lead to more people reading this Substack.
If you don’t see a new Substack for awhile you can assume that either I succeeded in taking my mental health break or was arrested by federal agents for posting what I did (here) yesterday….. or both.
As I sit here at 3:00 AM (we call for an Uber to the airport at 5:15 but I couldn't sleep) I'm about to jolt my brain awake with my first gulp of morning coffee, I ask myself “how bad will things have gotten when I return to writing my Substack?”
