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The North Shore

10 things worth sharing this week

Aug 16

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Aloha y’all,

I just returned to Texas after an amazing trip to Oahu with my family. This must be a little what it felt like to land on Arrakis after the flight from Caladan.

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing from the trip:

I’m adding the Windward Coast and North Shore of Oahu to my list of magical happy-making drives along the Pacific Ocean. Green mountains, palm trees, sunny beaches, swimming with sea turtles and dolphins, poke bowls, plate lunches, cold coconuts, shaved ice, McDonald’s drive-thrus that still do fried pies, lizards, mongooses, peacocks, horses, feral chickens, Banyan trees, ukulele shops, and watching every sunrise and every sunset. It was the best vacation we’ve ever been on.
“Large and unfamiliar fishes will come from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes . . . they will eat them up.” You can’t be a decent haole on a Hawaiian island without knowing the tumultuous history of our 50th state. I turned to Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes for a crash course, and while I learned a lot, her voice got to be a little much for me. (In this review, Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of The Descendants, recommends Gavan Daws’ Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands, a book I plan on reading before making my inevitable return trip.)
I found Dan Kois’ book about Israel ‘Iz’ Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future after reading his critical review of Unfamiliar Fishes. It’s a worthy entry in the 33 1/3 series. Kois uses “the complex afterlife of Iz as a means to explore timeless questions about art, commerce, and colonialism.” (You know Iz’s work even if you’ve never heard his name — he sang the ukulele cover of “Over The Rainbow” that’s been used in countless TV shows and commercials. Recorded during a 3 a.m. demo session in 1988, the song didn’t become a hit until years later. Dig this video of Iz singing Koi Lee’s “I’ll Remember You” with The Mākaha Sons.)
“Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else.” I re-read the opening Oahu chapter of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life and had to stop before I got sucked back into re-reading the whole thing. What a great book!
Mark Twain on Hawaii in 1889: “No alien land in all the world has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloudrack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes; I can hear the plash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.” A book I didn’t re-read: Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, which I remember being very funny. You can read all 25 letters online. (He also writes about Hawaii in Roughing It.)
Those are all books I read before getting on the plane to Honolulu. I read barely anything while I was actually on vacation, except for most of Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel’s Dayswork, a fragmentary novel about a woman during the pandemic writing facts about Herman Melville on sticky notes. What does Melville have to do with Hawaii? After deserting his whaling ship, he worked as a pinsetter in a bowling alley in Honolulu.
“In America there are two classes of travel — first class, and with children.” So wrote Robert Benchley in Pluck and Luck. My kids are either old enough or well-behaved enough (maybe both) that this was the first trip we took that actually felt like a vacation. Owen played a bunch of World of Goo 2 on the plane. Jules taught me some “brainrot” lingo. We made a bunch of sand castles, which got me thinking about Andy Goldsworthy and the sand castle artists Ian Adelman and Calvin Seibert who I read about in The Work of Art. We watched a lot of Big City Greens and old episodes of SpongeBob Squarepants in the hotel room. (I previously wrote about the art of the Gross-Up.) To try to extend the vacation magic, I pulled our copies of The Spongebob Squarepants Experience and SpongeBob Comics: Treasure Chest off the shelf and put them on the kitchen table for a little dinnertime reading. (Always have a book with you!)
Ear candy: I made this playlist for driving around Oahu. The tracks are in no order, so play it on shuffle. (I’ll eventually trim it into one of my mixtapes.) A hit on this trip was Paul McCartney’s “Ram On,” which the 9-year-old requested in the car after hearing me play it on the new ukulele I purchased at The Ukulele Site in Haleiwa. (I now own four ukuleles?!?) McCartney used to carry one with him in the back of NYC taxis, “Just to always have music with me. They thought I was freak, those taxi drivers.”
Some travel gear that helped make our trip easier: a flat-bottomed weekender bag that somehow fits under an airplane seat, these handy pill boxes, waterproof pouches and phone cases for hitting the beach, and — some of you knew this was coming — my travel bidet. (I’m never leaving home without it! 💦)
A case for vacation: “A lot of writing consists of waiting around for the aquarium to settle so you can see the fish. Walking around muttering seems to hasten the process. Taking public transportation nowhere helps. Looking out the bus window lets the back of your mind move forward. Don’t listen to anything but natural sound. Don’t look at anything you have to turn on. This is about the pleasure of silence. This is not meditating; this is reacquainting yourself with yourself. Something interesting might enter your head if you let it alone.” (That’s writer Abigail Thomas in Thinking About Memoir on cultivating the habit of listening to yourself.)

Mahalo! Thank you for reading. This is a hand-rolled, ad-free, anti-algorithm, completely reader-supported publication. You can help keep it going by becoming a paid subscriber:

This is a great time to go paid, because we’re going to start our book club back up in the fall! (What will we read? More books like this.)

xoxo,

Austin

PS. This is what I look like on vacation, captured by our long-suffering editor: