Living in Hawai’i, Part 3 – North Shore

Lucky I lived Hawai’i

It’s a mystery to me that people will fly into Honolulu airport, take a courtesy shuttle straight to Waikiki, stay in a huge high-rise hotel in the midst of pavement and concrete and tens of thousands of other people (mostly tourists), maybe get down to the beach a few times and drink some frozen fruity concoctions, get drunk and probably get a bad sunburn too because the sun is so much stronger than they expected, all while surrounded by several hundred other crispy tipsy people, and then fly home, and think they’ve been to Hawai’i.  Technically, that’s true – but Waikiki compared to the North Shore is like comparing an ungarnished McDonald’s hamburger to a juicy, tender, well-aged and perfectly cooked rib eye steak; they’re both beef, but the similarity ends there.  The experiences of consuming those two foods, just as the experiences of visiting Waikiki and North Shore, are completely different.  North Shore wins hands down.  You should go there, and the sooner the better, because it’s that awesome.

Long before I ever had the opportunity to live on the North Shore of O’ahu, I fell in love with it, when I visited the Waimea Valley Hi’ipaka.  I was still living at West Loch at the time, and the contrast between there and the North Shore was dramatic; I had finally found the lush, green beautiful Hawai’i that I had originally anticipated when I got orders to Kunia.  The energy and sense of place on the North Shore is distinctly different from any other part of the island, in the best possible way.  After I had been there once or twice, I hoped I would have the opportunity to live up there, and I eventually did, for eighteen sweet months.  And not just anywhere – I lived in a condo in Waialua, right on the shoreline, falling asleep to the sound of the ocean surf rolling up the sandy beach.  If it hadn’t been for the mosquitoes, heat, humidity, rotating shift work, and certain financial constraints, I might have just stayed there forever.

When PO2 Dan and I moved into our apartment together, I knew it was a short term arrangement; he was transferring out in six months.  That at least gave me more time to find a roommate than when I had to rush out of the barracks.  I eventually found a roommate in Megan, a Navy Chinese linguist about my age who had been my roommate for awhile in Monterey.  She was a prickly-skinned introvert like myself with whom I had little else in common; for example, a beautiful abstract painting I brought home from the Monterey street market, that I thought looked like a blooming flower, she declared “looked like barf.”  Perhaps viewing this painting could be some sort of Rorschach test to assess for optimism or pessimism.  She was definitely a pessimist.  I had so little faith in my own aesthetic taste at that time that after she called the painting barf, I took it down and didn’t display it again for quite some time.  (That didn’t deter me from buying similar paintings from the same artist, however, and I now consider those paintings some of my best art purchases ever.  The artist, Cas Sea, wasn’t making much more money than I was as an E-3, so she was willing to sell them to me for dirt cheap.  I’ve displayed them everywhere I’ve lived since.)

One thing that Megan and I had in common was that we both liked to read, but where I read non-fiction and National Geographic (my tastes at that time), she read slasher novels.  (I made the mistake of reading one of those novels once, and if there is any one memory I wish I could have expunged from my data banks, that novel would be it.  Ugh.  Reading that book made me realize that finishing whatever you start is not always a virtue; life is too short to stuff crap like that in your head!)  Fortunately, Megan also recognized how little we had in common, and so we never attempted to become buddies, which worked out well for us as roommates.  It seemed natural, therefore, to become roommates again, especially since we would each have our own bedroom in an apartment, rather than about 150 square feet each in a shared barracks room.

I wanted to live up on North Shore, and Megan was cool with that, so we looked at available apartments in the Waialua area, in a stretch along the beach nicknamed “Cement City”.  Most of the apartments were tiny and overpriced, in drab cement or concrete block buildings with no real view.  The condos on the beach, however, were much nicer, and we found a beautiful reasonably priced apartment at the eastern edge of Cement City.  (Click on this link to see a condo from the same building; it’s much nicer than ours was, with more room and a tiny lanai (porch), but the kitchen, living room, and views are the same.)  The rent was reasonable because the unit was for sale; we lived on a month-to-month lease the whole time.  The management made the mistake, however, of relying on me to give at least one prospective buyer a tour of the apartment, and I made sure to point out every flaw, because I am just that honest (really).  He didn’t buy the condo, and we never did get it sold out from under us.  We were on the lowest floor, which wasn’t the most desirable floor anyway; the upper floors had regular sightings of whales and dolphins, but I don’t recall ever seeing any.

Rather than attempt to describe the view from our apartment, I have simply provided the pictures below, which show the view from our living room.  My bedroom was even better; it had floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall windows, but I can’t seem to find any pictures of that view.

And here’s one similar to the view from the beach in front of our building:

[Off-topic aside:  Do you know what I don’t miss?  Film cameras.  Nosirree, not one bit.  Going through all my film pictures that spanned a period of several years, rummaging around for pictures from the North Shore time frame, was an exercise in frustration.  For every one picture that was in focus and reasonably interesting, about 100 pictures were out of focus, and/or poorly lit, and/or poorly framed, etc.  My photography skills improved considerably once I got a digital camera and I could see in real time what the hell I was doing.  They got even better when I got a basic digital image processing program and I could correct brightness, contrast, and occasionally other elements so the pictures actually looked like what I had taken a picture of.  I am very, very grateful for digital cameras and computers!]

There were two bedrooms in the apartment, as I mentioned earlier.  One was in the back, with its own bathroom, but only one small window and no view.  The other faced the ocean and had a glass wall facing the ocean, looking north.  I really wanted the room with a view, and Megan really wanted the one with the bathroom – so that worked out really well.

The glass wall was a great idea for people who liked a great view, of course, and who also worked days and slept nights.  I remember one night, looking out the window and seeing the Big Dipper.  I fell asleep, and woke up a few hours later, and the Big Dipper had whirled around the North Star to a different position.  That was so cool. I could lay in my comfy bed in my mosquito-free room, and watch the stars.  A room with a glass wall was not a good idea, though, for people who often had to sleep during the day after being up all night.  I didn’t want to spend money replacing the thin curtains that covered the windows (because we had a month-to-month lease), so I had a year and a half of very poor sleep after night shifts because my room was so bright.

I also have a hard time sleeping well when it’s hot and humid, and the condo did not have air conditioning, so the temperature in the condo was consistently in the upper 80s.  It was just a given that if I was in the condo, I was sweating.  There was very little air circulation, either, due to the layout of the apartment; getting a cross breeze through there was virtually impossible.  Cleanliness in the apartment was not an option; dust very quickly turned to mold in these conditions, which could be hard on clothing too.  I had a leather bomber jacket turn from brown to green while stored in my closet; I had to throw it away.

Of course, it was a little cooler out on the beach, usually with pleasant trade winds blowing in from the northeast.  I preferred to go out on the beach in the evening around sunset when I didn’t have to worry about my blonde, green-eyed, pasty-skinned self being burnt to a crisp, but when the potential for sun damage stopped, the mosquitoes stepped in.  My first experience fighting the mosquitoes was so bad, I think I only ended up sitting out on the beach about a dozen times during that year and a half.  There was never a worse time and place to be mosquito bait (which I always have been, and I guess always will be).

The beach in front of the condo was pretty, but it wasn’t a swimming beach.  There was a lot of coral in that area that made swimming a potentially hazardous proposition.  The nearest area that was decent for swimming was a little park about a block west, Aweoweo Beach Park.

And on top of all this, we couldn’t get renters insurance for our household goods.  When I called the insurance company to get a quote, they asked me how far I lived from the beach; I said about fifty feet.  They said they didn’t insure any place closer than a thousand feet to the beach, due to the flooding risk from tsunamis and hurricanes.

In spite of all these problems, I loved living there.  I think there’s some sort of archetype in the collective human psyche of Hawai’i, and North Shore is the embodiment of it.  The warmth, gentleness, and generosity of the ocean, earth, and air contribute to a dreamy languor that can convince just about anyone that all is right with the world.  Just sit back, relax, and listen to the surf rolling in; maybe have a nice drink.  “Laid back” is a very poor descriptor of the energy there; peaceful, tranquil, and serene come closer, but honestly, there just aren’t enough words to adequately describe how good it feels.  The azure sky, white clouds, warm turquoise sea, frothy white-capped waves, gentle rain showers and their accompanying rainbows, green mountains and rich ocean air all seem to have the sole purpose of feeding your senses and spirit with beauty.  They certainly fed me, and I am a better person for it.

So it was with great reluctance that I moved away in early 1997.  Megan’s husband had finally gotten orders to Hawai’i (they had been geographically separated since leaving Goodfellow three years previously), and naturally she wanted to live with him, and not on North Shore, so far from all the action in Honolulu.  I didn’t want to move, because I was due to get out of the Navy in October anyway, but I couldn’t find a roommate, and I couldn’t afford to live there on my own.  Waialua is at least a 45 minute drive from Honolulu, which I considered a plus (being so far away), but that was not a selling point for a lot of people.  I bowed to reality and moved back to Mililani.  My new one bedroom apartment was in a noisy area in Waikalani Valley, but it was several degrees cooler and somewhat less humid, the area had a lot fewer mosquitoes, and I papered up the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall jalousie windows in my bedroom with black poster board so I could get some decent sleep during the day.  My 25 minute commute time was cut in half, too, and was a lot less dangerous than the drive down Kaukonahua Road, a long curvy stretch of which bordered a very steep cliff – not a good road to drive when you can hardly keep your eyes open after a night shift.

It was a privilege to live on North Shore.  Hawai’i residents have a saying, “Lucky you live Hawai’i” which has a few different levels of meaning; Mark Twain did an okay job of capturing that idea, but you really have to be there to feel the depth of it.  (He also wrote a great book about Hawai’i, which I highly recommend.)  I was very, very lucky that I lived North Shore; it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

If you take nothing else from any of my writings about Hawai’i, take this:  skip Waikiki and go to North Shore.  Drive the length and breadth of it, from Ka’ena Point to Kawela Bay.  Watch the surfers and waves roll in at Waimea Bay, chow down on some shrimp from Macky’s Shrimp Truck, then go take a stroll through Waimea Valley Hi’ipaka.  Grab a really great burger at Kua’Aina sandwich shop in Hale’iwa, then visit Pu’u o Mahuka Heiau State Historic Site.  Go to a 7-11 and snarf down some SPAM musubi, then go snorkeling at Shark’s Cove.  You won’t regret a single second of it, I promise – especially if you take me with you. 

Click on any of the pictures to see larger versions.

2 Comments

• 

  By Greg Tamblyn, October 4, 2011 @ 11:14 pm

  Almost drowned the first time I went to the north shore, 1980. I was young and dumb, and body surfing those big waves looked so easy. I was lucky to get out alive.

  It is beautiful, though. And so laid back.

• 

  By Angel, October 5, 2011 @ 8:40 am

  I’ve been to Waimea Bay when some of the huge waves were rolling in. I’d heard they were averaging about 30 feet, but they sure didn’t look that big from the safety of the shore. I can see how it would be easy to misjudge the dangers.

  The big waves only roll in during the winter, though. It’s a nice calm swimming bay in the summer. I liked going there.

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