Morning in the Pacific

I’ve been skipping out on a lot of the nightlife while I’m here in Waikiki. I am, unashamedly, a morning person and while I am not really anti-social, I do enjoy good company, I’m not much of a drinker anymore and I don’t particularly enjoy group events in loud places. I’d much rather share a table with you at dinner; that’s more my style. I may indeed be missing out on a Good Time, but I’m okay with that because I can get up early and go to the beach.

For the third time on this trip — not nearly often enough, true, but that’s how busy I’ve been — I found myself bobbing like a cork in the surf in the early morning as the sun warmed the sand. I swam out to where the waves were starting to break on the seawall and back to where the water was shallow enough to touch the the ground. I walked right into the surf with barely a moment’s hesitation, the water cool enough to be different than the warm air, but not so cold as to offer any kind of shock — I adjusted to the change of temperature almost immediately.

At Ko’Olina, I chatted with a local guy named John while we tread water in the lagoon. He told me about how the area was once all covered with sugar cane and now it’s all going to houses. He told me about how his mom used to bring them all down to this exact place to swim when they were kids. He remembered the fish ponds that had been destroyed to build this posh resort, but he wasn’t angry about the development, he liked that local people had access to the beach and that the resorts brought jobs. He lived in Virginia for a while where he worked at a resort and he told me how he loved the snow and the seasons and getting bundled up to go out in the cold. I told him he was insane and he laughed. The whole time the tide picked us up slightly, put us down, picked us up, put us down, and I looked through the clear turquoise water at my feet and the clean clean sand. John told me that when his mom died, she was cremated and they spread her ashes into the surf off the seawall. I thought about the ocean and how much I love it and then, out loud, I said that spending the afterlife out there with the sea turtles and seals and beautiful fish seemed like a really wonderful thing. He agreed.

This morning, I followed an old Chinese man in flip flops, a towel tucked under his arm, down to the beach at Waikiki. I lost him when I stepped on to the sand. I dropped my things next to a family with a stroller, then again walked right into the ocean. The surf was a little higher here than at Ko’Olina, but this was still a protected swimming area behind a sea wall and I felt safe and secure.I swam out to the breakwater and back, out and back, letting the low waves pick me up and set me down. My nose and mouth were full of salt. I floated on my back and looked up at the blue blue sky. Little bits of seaweed swirled in the water, I knocked up against the stones of the seawall and turned around again. I got out of the water after about half an hour and the same egg shaped Soviet granny was still standing on the sand, hands on her hips, impossibly comic in her neon green bikini. The same Indian man was still pacing along the beach, looking as though he could not decide if he should get in the water.

I walked back to my hotel barefoot, with my towel wrapped around my waist. What is wrong with my life, I thought, that I do not start each day swimming in the beautiful blue waters of the tropical Pacific? If I lived here, I said to myself, I would come to the beach every morning to swim before I did anything else. Or perhaps every afternoon, at the end of my day.

I realize that this is probably not true. I would unlikely be able to afford to live so close to the water, I would probably have a job and responsibilities and places to be. I know that my imagined life in Hawaii is just that, an imagined life. But I still like to imagine it as exactly perfect, in a way that allows for an ocean swim before breakfast and a barefoot walk back to wherever it is I live.

Over the past few days many people have asked me if I live here. I give them the same answer every time. Not yet, I say. Not yet. Not yet.

Disclaimer: Travel and accomodation portions of my trip were sponsored by the Oahu Visitor’s Beaureau in exchange for my blogging about my experiences in Hawaii.