Living in Hawai’i, Part 2 – Mililani

It’s hard to find a roommate quickly when you limit your search to a group of only about 30 people (my work division) but as it turned out there was someone who was looking to move into a new place about the time I needed a roommate. PO2 Dan was a harmless enough fellow who I was reasonably certain would leave me and my stuff alone if we lived in the same place, and as far as I could tell during the six months we were roomies, I was right.

PO2 Dan was thrilled to get a female roommate. He loved to comment that it was “so nineties” (this was spring 1995). He was an extrovert who LOVED to talk and did so almost incessantly at work when he wasn’t wearing headphones, so I think a lot of people heard the “so nineties” comment, and that we were going to be roommates many, many times. He liked social attention and he wasn’t all that particular about what kind. About the time that we were looking for an apartment, he was keeping the whole division informed about his latest personal drama, a paternity claim against him by a former girlfriend. He had dated her briefly while he was at Goodfellow a few years previously. He let everyone know that yes, he did have sex with her (it was really important to communicate that point) but at the time she was already pregnant by another man – a Navy SEAL who had loved and left her. So Dan was jumping through all the hoops to get a paternity test done, and he made sure we knew all about that too. I am grateful that I don’t remember too many more details about him than that. We worked different schedules so we rarely saw each other, and he was perceptive enough to leave me alone when we were there together.

Kunia is located near the center of O’ahu, so a lot of people who worked there rented apartments in Mililani, which was less than a fifteen minute drive away. Mililani was a pleasant bedroom community of about 25,000 people at the time. Its primary claim to fame was that it had the only Wal-Mart on O’ahu. (It was the best place on the island to buy cheap souvenirs to send home to family.) We quickly found a small, affordable three bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a large apartment tower in the Waikalani Valley area of Mililani. Waikalani Valley had a lot of apartment buildings; the apartment and building Dan and I lived in was just like the one in this video here. It wasn’t a very quiet area – there were a lot of people who lived there, all the apartments had jalousie windows that were usually open (so you could hear other people’s ordinary household noises pretty easily), and the H2 highway was suspended overhead nearby, so there was usually traffic noise.

It was, however, a deliciously cool and pleasant area compared to the arid bareness of West Loch. There were a lot of tall trees in the valley, mostly eucalyptus from the smell of things, which I really enjoyed. The valley always seemed so fresh and green and relaxing with that slight hint of eucalyptus in the air and the tall trees providing lots of shade. A creek ran through the valley too, and it always had water running in it, although it was small enough I couldn’t hear it up on the fifth floor. Waikalani Valley was adjacent to another developed area called Launani Valley, which was more extensively landscaped and was prettier to walk through than Waikalani, so that’s where I took my walks, when I wanted to get out of the apartment.

The main thing I remember about living in that apartment tower is that our apartment was on the very end of the rather long building, as far as possible from the elevator. The path from the parking garage led right to the end with my apartment, and I had a choice – walk up five flights of stairs, or walk clear to the other end of the building, wait for the slow elevator, then walk all the way back to the other end of the building. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I chose to dash up the stairs. I hated those stairs, but I hated even more needing an extra 3-4 minutes to get home. When I was coming home from a night shift and dead tired, the sooner I got home, the sooner I was in bed – I was tired enough that running up those stairs (and I did run, because it was even more tiring to walk them!) didn’t keep me from falling asleep. Dan, on the other hand, almost always took the elevator. He was certainly a more patient person than I was.

The building and the apartment were pretty typical of low- to mid-priced apartments in Hawai’i – poured concrete walls, lots of jalousie windows, no heating or air conditioning ducts, and very limited parking. Buildings couldn’t get much cheaper and low maintenance! The expensive price of real estate in Hawai’i is due primarily to demand and the land being horribly expensive, not construction or maintenance costs.

The only really interesting thing I remember about the Waikalani Valley area was a story I heard a few years later from my real estate agent (a wonderful woman who took excellent care of my real-estate-ignorant, sleep-deprived self) when I was shopping for a condo to buy. I was interested in looking at places in Launani Valley, and she felt obliged to inform me that some people didn’t want to live there because of sightings of ghost armies of Hawai’ian warriors in that valley, and for some people there was just a sense of bad energy there; some people felt that the area was kapu (forbidden). I never saw any ghosts there, nor did I feel any bad energy, although I did read an account similar to the one above in a book of Hawai’ian ghost stories, I believe in one of the excellent “Chicken Skin” or “Obake” books by Glen Grant. Something I learned after buying one of those books is that reading one before bedtime is a really bad idea. For some reason I thought Hawai’ian ghost stories wouldn’t be scary!

I’ve never seen any ghosts in my life, in Hawai’i or anyplace else, and I don’t want to. I’ve sent very clear messages to the universe over the years, that I don’t want to see ghosts, and the universe has obliged me. I had a friend while I was in Hawai’i, though, who had been born and raised there, and she was a very sensitive psychic who said she saw ghosts frequently. I did feel a ghost once in Hawai’i, though – it sat down on the edge of the bed I happened to be lying on (I felt the mattress sink, and no one was there) – but my host (another friend) assured me that was his mom’s spirit, just saying hi when I spent the night (it was my first night there). Fortunately she did not say hi to me again. She probably doesn’t count as a Hawai’ian ghost, anyway, because she was from Louisiana.

Mililani is a pleasant place to live, but not terribly exciting to write about. I did enjoy living there enough that I ended up living there three more times, two of those times in other areas of Waikalani Valley. Those two other places were on the “bad” side of Waikalani Valley, and there was supposedly a lot of crime there, but I lived in that area for about two years total, and I never felt unsafe. Almost all my neighbors were kama’aina (long-term residents, mostly people who were born and raised there and of mixed Asian/Pacific Rim descent), and the impression I had, if anything, was that as a haole and as a military member, I wasn’t worth bothering with.

The scariest thing that happened to me in Waikalani Valley was when I went out to my car one day to go to work. I opened the door, got in, reached over to shut the door, and there hanging out on the inside of the door was a large cane spider, about 4 inches across. This is the kind of spider that can help you decide just how efficient your adrenaline response and reflexes are – and mine that day were outstanding. After the initial shock, I pulled a few brain cells together and found something to knock the spider off the door with. This was my second and last sighting of a cane spider in Hawaii. The first one was also in my car (I have no idea how either one got in!) a few months prior to this one; it was on the floor in front of the passenger seat. I found something longish and tried to nudge it out of the car, but the spider decided that it would rather hang out underneath the glove compartment – someplace I couldn’t reach it. I had to think long and hard about getting back in my car and driving after that, but I didn’t have much choice – it was my only car. I often had to park the car in the hot Hawai’ian sun, though, and I always had the windows rolled up and car locked when it was parked, so I could only hope that the spider got fried pretty quickly after that.

The fourth and final place I lived in Mililani was a small condo I bought during my second tour of duty, in a lovely older condo development called Nob Hill, just a couple of blocks from Wal-mart and Taco Bell. The development was built in the mid-1970s, and construction quality then was better than the newer construction I saw in Mililani Mauka (where the apartments looked like they were made from cardboard, and the area was immediately adjacent to a noisy Army training area, which was disclosed to buyers in the contract fine print but often not in any other way). The Nob Hill condos were cheaper too – a really good bargain. Every now and then I would get a funny reaction from people when I told them where I lived, and I eventually found out that there was some swanky neighborhood in San Francisco also named Nob Hill. I don’t know what the nob hill of Nob Hill in San Francisco looked like, but ours was a small grass-covered mound created by a bulldozer on the eastern edge of the development – a token nob, really.

I lived in that condo for five years, and it was a good home for me. The neighborhood was clean and quiet, with nice breezes always blowing through the jalousie windows, and I even had a tiny front and back yard to spend a lot of time and money on in several haphazard landscaping efforts. The apartment in this video is the same floor plan as mine, only this one is much more fashionably decorated, and it has a few extra windows where I just had a plain wall. My apartment, though, did have a view of Diamond Head, which I believe was about twenty miles away, straight line distance.

My actual view of Diamond Head

What I chose to see when I looked out the window

I joined the condo association board of directors after living there for a year, and spent the next four years on the board. The board was a typical Hawai’ian multi-cultural mix. The board president was a kama’aina of Japanese descent, married to a German wife; another member was a strong-willed and very opinionated German woman determined to protect her investment; another was a laid-back, mustachioed former military haole guy, and the last was a blonde lady married to a Filipino cop (these are the ones I remember, anyway). They were all really nice people who always made me feel welcome and part of the team. We all got along well, we took really good care of the development and kept association fees reasonable, and my membership helped me feel much more invested in my residency in Hawai’i.

When I was shopping for a condo in 1999, housing prices were really low (although still really high to my small town Midwestern sensibilities). One real estate agent I talked to insisted that I would double my money. I thought he was nuts, but he was right – when I sold my condo five years later, I sold it for a little over twice what I had paid for it. If I had been able to wait another six or so months (I was transferring to England and didn’t want the hassle of dealing with a real estate transaction while living in another country on the opposite side of the planet) I would have easily made another $40,000 – $50,000 – the market was that hot. Ah well – I got a good price, and so did the buyers. I mentioned earlier that land prices were expensive – the assessment for my property listed the value of the land and my condo, and they were roughly equal. The apartment was 800 square feet, and the land was probably about the same amount of square footage.

Divine Mind

musings by Angel