On Maui

"Below ‘Ohe‘o Bridge" by Kit Gentry

Kit Gentry is an artist who arrived on Maui in 1993, two years after we got here. He painted on the island for 16 years before moving to the Smoky Mountains.

Kit often works in a photorealistic style, with spectacular results. His gauzy Wailea night sky over the Celestial Cinema screen was the signature image for Maui Film Festival in its early years. His panorama of the West Maui Mountains will take your breath away.

We bought one of Kit's works, a preliminary study for a painting of Hana's ‘Ohe‘o Gulch. The spot is often misidentified in tourist brochures as the Seven Sacred Pools. When it rains, the stream running through the gulch may form more than seven.

It is quite beautiful, especially from the bridge above the stream or from the path along its side. But it was also the scene of tragedy, when a rock fell from above, killing a little Hana girl on the path, who had been enjoying a picnic with her family.

"Nature is beautiful, but it's also powerful – even destructively, dangerously so," Kit wrote in his artist statement on maui.net.

Kit used to show his work in Village Galleries, cornerstone of the vibrant art scene in Lahaina, before it burned down.

From the apartment in Tucson where Karen and I have been temporarily residing, we made two trips back to Maui this summer. Karen stayed on the island after the last one, awaiting a jury summons and attending to long-neglected tasks around our home.

I was on the Mainland Aug. 8, the first day of the fires that would turn Lahaina's 300-year history with its deep cultural and spiritual legacy, into a graveyard and toxic no man's land. 

Wildfires elsewhere on the island came very close to the Kula neighborhood where we've lived for more than twenty years.

Karen packed the car with valuables and with her housemate watched approaching flames through the windows, awaiting an evacuation call that never came.

Two days later I was on one of the first flights back to Maui.

Everything is safe and sound at our place. Aside from the bulldozer clearing a firebreak on the ranch land bordering our property and the occasional sound of helicopters overhead, you might never know that it's not just another beautiful Kula morning.

You can see for miles from our deck. The north and south coasts of the island bookend the urban core of Kahului and Wailuku where stores are open, shelves are full. Business goes on. And to the southwest, under the windmills on the ridge line, you can see the Pali, the stretch of Honoapiilani Highway just above the ocean going around the bend to what used to be Lahaina.

I write these words reluctantly. My journalistic impulse to report on what's happening pales in comparison to the terror, trauma and unfathomable losses experienced by so many thousands on this island. Survivor's guilt tempers the desire to assure everyone that Karen and I are fine.

Because we're not fine. Physically, yes …well, maybe. But psychologically we share a sense of living in suspension, numb, felt by everyone on the island.

We watch the same national newscasts you see on the Mainland, but we get the local news, too. Tales of heroism abound, especially for those who escaped the fiery streets of Lahaina by jumping into the ocean where they struggled for hours to survive. Outpourings of goodness are everywhere you look, support coming in from everywhere, everyone wanting to help.

Where then, do these feelings of anger come from?

Tempers are short among Lahaina and west side residents, their patience worn thin by days of no sleep adding to the adrenalized shock of having looked death in the face. For everyone who survived, there's a loved one who didn't.

Earlier in the week, west side residents' efforts to return to homes that might or might not still be there were hampered as the one road into town was closed, then opened, then closed again. Despite state and federal promises of aid, the response on the ground was uncoordinated. Some local watermen and women took matters in their own hands, using jet skis or catamarans or dive-trip inflatables to deliver much needed supplies and medications to survivors on the beaches above Lahaina. Some referred to themselves as pirates, skirting official regulations to do the work that had to be done.

Part of the complex emotions gripping us all stems from knowing the term “wildfire” isn't quite accurate. Yes, hindsight is much clearer and second guessing much easier than trying to make life-and-death choices in the face of 80-mph winds, advancing walls of flames a mile a minute.

But infrastructure failures – downed live power lines that sparked dry tinder and knocked out cell service; the heat of the inferno that melted water lines and hydrants; and some some unconscionably poor decision-making cost lives, including elders and children, turned a catastrophe into a fiery apocalypse.

It was a perfect storm, a mix of nature's indifferent fury and human error. The hurricane winds on the first day grounded helicopters that could have fought the blazes. Choices were made not to cut the electrical power to lines arcing sparks on the ground. Or to divert water to West Maui reservoirs. Or to sound Lahaina's warning sirens, with the official in charge reasoning that they were for tsunamis, and would cause people to run away from the ocean toward the blaze. 

But the problem runs far deeper.

There's essentially only one road into – or out of – Lahaina. The back way in, through Kahakaloa, is a two-lane ribbon hugging the cliffs, full of blind corners and narrow stretches, barely safe under the best conditions.

On the island's south side, the neighborhood of Maui Meadows was evacuated, threatened by a blaze coming down the mountain from Upcountry. And while the homes and resorts of Wailea, Kihei and Makena on the island's south shore were ultimately spared this time, there's essentially only one road to them, either.

Maui's head of emergency services resigned Thursday. It provided no solace for those grieving the loss of loved ones, or homes and possessions, or livelihoods.

For the thousands of stories of heroism, the Herculean rescue efforts, the selflessness of those who lost their own homes and businesses but are now serving the needs of others, there are also the conspiracy theories. There's something base in our human makeup that wants to assign blame for what we can't understand. It may prove our undoing as a society.

But on Maui it just adds to the nightmare, the numbness, the coming PTSD.

When I got off the plane last week there was a message on my phone. It was from Clifford Naeole, cultural adviser to the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua. Clifford is my kumu – teacher –in all things Hawaiian, and a cherished friend. Assuming I was still on the Mainland, he had called to tell me what was happening on the ground. His resort had closed to guests after it got them all out, and was instead housing a thousand of its workers who had lost everything.

Maui was in no way ready for a natural disaster, he said. At one time, realizing the possibility that a disaster could cut the west side off from the rest of the island, there had been a plan to convert a ball field above Fleming Beach into an emergency staging area with helicopter landing pads to bring in supplies and evacuate victims.

It had been long forgotten when the actual emergency arrived.

On the PBS NewsHour August 16, Maui political activist Noelani Ahia alluded to the losses in cultural and spiritual terms, especially to the indigenous inhabitants, the Kanaka Maoli. She also addressed the calls from real estate developers already contacting fire victims with offers to buy their land.

“The Maui that people know today is not the Maui of days of old. Kanaka Maoli have already been displaced by the plantations, with land theft and resource extraction taking our water away, and then the whaling industry, and then overtourism and hyperdevelopment for wealthy outsiders who come in and buy large swaths of land and bank water for that. For Kanaka Maoli we are very well aware of the threat of outside moneyed influences coming in … and continuing a system of settler colonialism where the design is to destroy the indigineity and replace it in the settlers' image.”

The writer in me can't escape the metaphor of the travel poster of paradise transformed  in a few short hours into a fiery vision of hell. 

The reality is that the working people of Maui – many of them descendants of the Polynesians who first arrived in these islands, sailing across thousands of miles of open ocean navigating by the stars a thousand years before the Europeans would realize the Earth wasn't flat – are once again paying the price.

The dilemma is that most of them work in the resorts or elsewhere in the tourism industry. The economy is built on it.

But there's only one road into Lahaina.

The infrastructure cannot guarantee the safety of this island, which may no longer be able to afford the myth of paradise.

To donate support, visit https://www.hawaiicommunityfoundation.org/maui-strong

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