LOS ANGELES-

I was in Hawaii last month. My wife and I flew over to Kauai to celebrate our first anniversary. The idea was to relax, get away, rest, unplug. We did those things, more or less. Read a lot of books. Slept ten hours a night. Swam a lot. Hiked. Cityfolk escaping the smog.

There’s something sort of tragicomic about mainlanders heading over to Hawaii for a week of R&R. Walking through the airport, looking at all the pale tourists from LA, Phoenix, Dallas, Philadelphia. Sitting on the beach, watching an exasperated father scream at his belligerent offspring. The sunburns. The overt attempts at being unnaturally kind.

One can imagine how tiring this constant influx must be for many of the island locals.

Tourism in general is really sort of embarrassing.

On our second day in paradise, my wife and I went on a helicopter ride, a spectacular trip that I would recommend to anyone. Kauai in particular almost requires a view from the sky. Most of the island is inaccessible by car, and you can’t really get a feel for its grandeur unless you see it from altitude.

Onboard the chopper were five other people: our pilot, an older married couple from suburban New Jersey, and a sixty-something woman with her forty-something daughter.

Each passenger was an obvious tourist—my wife and I most certainly included—but the forty-something daughter was by far and away the most annoying of the bunch.

For the uninitiated: Helicopter rides in Hawaii almost always involve noise cancellation headphones, cheesy music, and sporadic narration from the pilot. Everyone is looped into the same P.A. system. If you have a question, you speak into your little headset microphone, and all of your fellow passengers can hear you.

This forty-something woman was from Seattle. Short hair. Crunchy. Competitively soulful.

She wouldn’t shut up the entire time.

The rest of us just wanted to enjoy the scenery, listen to the orchestral score from Jurassic Park, and make a safe landing back at Lihue. This woman, on the other hand, wanted to know about the trees, the birds, the billy goats, the sugar factory, Pierce Brosnan’s house outside of Hanalei…you name it.

Worst of all, she seemed to know the answers to all of her own questions. Nothing she offered up was an honest inquiry; instead it felt like she was trying to prove how carefully she had read her guidebook. There was something wretchedly pedagogic about her…a sort of superiority complex. It was almost as if she couldn’t stand the silence. The fact that no one else onboard was firing fifty questions at the pilot really rankled her. In her mind, it was proof-positive that we were nothing more than sentient heathens, that we weren’t really “present,” that we weren’t truly interested in understanding the magical island habitat down below.

It got to the point where my wife and I held hands and squeezed out our anger every time Ms. Know-It-All spoke up.

Afterwards, when we were back on the ground, I wondered aloud if I was only being uptight, if I “hadn’t fully unwound yet,” if I was still operating under the burden of city tension, et cetera.

“Is it wrong that I wanted to muzzle her?” I said. “Is it wrong that I wanted to throw her out of the helicopter and watch her plummet to an ugly death? I mean…I’m not being irrational, am I?”

My wife said no.

I imagine that this type of conversation is a common occurrence for tourists in Hawaii.

It is, I imagine, a common occurrence for tourists in many a vacation paradise.

In Hawaii, you tell yourself, you’re going to slow down. You’re going to be more relaxed. Less judgmental. A better you. More environmentally conscious. More aware of the wonders of nature.

In Hawaii, you tell yourself, there’s no need to be bothered by the little things in life. The trivial. The superficial. The peripheral. The static.

There’s no need to move fast. There’s no need to hurry.

In Hawaii, any sort of annoyance or upset has a tendency to be viewed as a dismal personal failure. And this, of course, only serves to amplify the effect of said disturbance.

If I’m edgy in Hawaii, I’m doing something wrong.

If I feel aggrieved in Hawaii, I’m doing something wrong.

If I feel critical in Hawaii, I’m doing something wrong.

There’s something terribly wrong with me.

It is a depressing personal failure.

Which brings me to The Aloha Spirit.

The island way of life.

You are told in guidebooks and by commercials to expect a more leisurely pace in Hawaii. Slower drivers. Less attention paid to punctuality. And so on.

Everybody knows this, pretty much.

And in many respects, this is precisely why we go to Hawaii. To escape the grind. To escape the breakneck pace of our everyday urban existence.

Then again, Hawaii is an expensive place to be. Hotels are expensive. Gas is expensive. Meals aren’t cheap.

You pay good money to stay at an overpriced resort, you expect a certain level of service in return. You pay good money to eat an overpriced meal at an overpriced restaurant, you expect a certain level of quality in return. This is not only normal, it’s appropriate.

Oftentimes you don’t get what you pay for.

But in Hawaii, you rarely hear people complaining.

This fascinates me.

I credit much of the disproportionate tolerance to the whole “Aloha Spirit” thing. A brilliant bit of marketing. A brilliant Jedi mind trick.

Complaining?

You’re not “aloha” enough.

Unhappy?

Hang loose, bro.

Bitter?

Sucks to be you!

Let me give you a small example.

My wife and I get up one morning and drive to Tunnels Beach, a snorkeling mecca just north of Hanalei. After a few hours in the water, we climb back into our vehicle and head back into town. Along the way, we stop off at this little country store for a burrito. Our guidebook has mentioned the place. We read about it earlier in the week. A great local haunt. A little island hole in the wall. Takeout burritos. Delicious.

So I pull in. Park. My wife gets out of the car. She walks up to the little window. No one else is there. No other customers. None.

My wife orders.

There are two guys working in the kitchen. Surfer guys. Local guys. Friendly guys. Stoner guys.

Burritos are nine bucks apiece.

It takes thirty minutes to get them. Maybe thirty-five. Thirty-five minutes for these two guys to make two burritos.

About fifteen minutes into it, I get out of the rental car, quietly ask my wife what is taking so long. She shrugs. I pace a little bit. Walk over. Glance in through the little window. The surfer guys are just standing there, laughing and having a conversation. They ignore me, pretending to be oblivious. They aren’t making any burritos. They are taking their sweet fucking time.

I say nothing. Step away. Breathe deep. Begin a conversation with myself.

Soon enough I’m engaged in another bout of heated self-recrimination. Surely my impatience is evidence of some sort of deep-seated character flaw. Surely I just need to relax, unwind some more, and become “more aloha.” Thirty-five minutes, two young men, two burritos, no big deal. Surely I am simply too LA, too city, too mainland, too foolish, too spiritually underdeveloped. Surely to step up to that window and berate these brain-dead morons for their passive-aggressive bullshit behavior would be terribly inappropriate and unkind.

In the end, I keep my mouth shut.

I even thank the guys for their help, throw a few bucks in the tip jar, and walk away smiling.

We get back into the rental car, fire up the engine, and make our way down the road in the direction of Hanalei.

The episode continues to bother me.

“Am I being ridiculous?” I say to my wife. “I mean, those guys were totally fucking with us, and we did nothing to provoke them. All you did was order some food.”

“We’re here,” she says. “On their turf. And they’re probably really stoned.”

“Nine dollars a burrito, no one else is in line, and we stand there waiting for more than a half-an-hour.”

“Maybe I did something wrong.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. I just asked for two burritos.”

“See! It’s a conspiracy!”

We arrived back in Hanalei and pulled into a parking lot by the beach. We ate our burritos. Two or three ingredients were missing, including beans.

A burrito without beans.

We had ordered burritos with beans.

“Is there even such a thing as a burrito without beans?” I said.

“This place is remote,” my wife said. “Maybe they ran out.”

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. You ran out of beans. But at least do us the courtesy of saying so.”

“I think they just hate us,” said my wife. “I think we’re just naturally offensive.”

We sat there in the car and ate our “burritos.” A store-bought flour tortilla wrapped around a handful of rice, with a dash of hot salsa and some tasteless zucchini.

“I don’t even think this is really a burrito,” I said. “You can’t even really call this a burrito. A burrito has to have beans. It’s, like, the whole point of a burrito in the first place. Burritos are built around beans.”

“Not in Kauai.”

“No. Not in Kauai.”

Afterwards, we walked out to the beach. The sun was shining. A few puffy clouds. A light trade wind blowing in from the west.

We set up camp in the sand and went for a swim. The water was perfect, and the mountains surrounding Hanalei Bay were customarily spectacular. It made me forget about the burrito incident.

My wife waded in up to her waist. I swam out into the water about fifty yards and floated on my back. I looked up into the blueness of the sky and told myself that I was on vacation.

It was all very relaxing and spiritual.

Seriously,
BL

Brad Listi is the author of the bestselling novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder. He enjoys hula dancing and tequila. He is sort of obsessed with his dog.

Tags: Aloha, Brad Listi, Hanalei Bay, Hawaii, helicopters, Kauai, Lihue, Pierce Brosnan, travel reviews, travel stories, Tunnels Beach, vacations

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Assholes, Food & Wine, Guilt, Humor, Leisure, Literature, Loathing, Love, Nature, Travel, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.