About Kula and sunrise

We named our rental car “Blue Kula.”  It sounded sort of like “Blue Koolaid,” which tickled my 1980s pop culture fancy, but also combined elements of our vacation on Maui: the primary color of the island, the most peaceful location, and the rugged joy of driving a four-door Jeep hundreds of miles in a single week on this island shaped like the number eight.

Picture an island as a blip in the Pacific Ocean 2,471 miles off the California coast.  It’s Maui.  The figure-8 topography comes from two volcanoes, long extinct, forming cones of paradise.   Our vacation started not at the luxury resort beaches but partway up one of those volcanic cones in the Upcountry, in rainforest and orchids rather than on sand and shells.  

Blue Kula zipped into Kula Lodge’s parking lot, and we spilled into the reception area for a two-night stay.  We were: two parents who had fought over who got to drive Blue Kula first, two children who had fought over the merits of a Jeep versus Mustang convertible in the rental car lot, and one grandmother who had accumulated sufficient wisdom in life not to fight over anything, instead submitting gracefully (or at least quietly) to the indignation of the middle back seat.  We each carried a suitcase and backpack and personal carry-on item.  We were loud, jet-lagged ragged, luggaged up, and yet awed into some sort of selflessness by our lush surroundings.

The remoteness of Kula absorbed rush.  The lushness of the forest absorbed hurry.  Our whinings and bickerings were muted by the vacuum of Maui’s upcountry atmosphere.  

The Lodge concierge eventually showed up.  Words like “eventually,” “maybe,” “later,” and “-ish” applied frequently here.  The host’s graying hair was pulled back in a ponytail.  It seemed to have been growing since he transplanted to Maui in the 1970s.  He took our key, a real metal key, and escorted us to our lodge.  

Our room had a long balcony with table and chairs overlooking a panorama of mountains, ocean, and sunset.  We ordered a wood-fired pizza from the restaurant and ate on the balcony.  We licked cheesy, burned fingertips and breathed in the exhalations of lemon blossoms and orchids.  For dessert, we mangled a small loaf of banana bread into five equal-ish shares.  After sampling a number of other loaves during our island stay, we would eventually declare this banana bread our favorite.

We succumbed to East Coast jet lag by 8 pm.  We set alarms for 4 am, intent on experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime event: the sun rise over the crater of Haleakela Volcano.  

The sun did not rise that morning over the crater of Haleakala Volcano.

The sun, while apparently rising over some other part of the planet earth as expected, seeped through Martian mists and stinging rain on an alien terraform of tundra.  Moods plunged as the black night ceded to a charcoal morning.  Moods slunk further as one child raged tears because we refused to purchase a stuffed Nene goose from the souvenir gift shop.  Souvenir literally means “to see again.”  We refused to spend money on an object that we had not once spied through the taupe morning gloom.  The promised sights of a volcanic crater, Nene birds, and silversword plants were simply not ours to see, let alone “see again.”

Through the rainy sun-seep, we wound Blue Kula back down the mountain.  We pledged a future trip to upcountry Maui to attempt the once-in-a-lifetime feat a second time.  We made promises to a stuffed Nene goose to return and adopt it.

Partway home to Kula Lodge, Blue Kula swerved off the road and stopped.  I climbed from the driver’s seat and trotted 15 yards back to a family’s yard stand.  Shoddy boards and an “honor system” cash box next to a mailbox.  I loaded my arms with mangoes, avocados, tangerines, an unidentifiable fruit, and stems of birds-of-paradise flowers.  Deposited bills in the cash box.

Back at Kula Lodge, we sent the children outdoors to follow winding garden paths.  Our long-haired concierge had urged my girls to harvest fruit from the trees.  We begged for lemons, limes, oranges, kumquats, avocados.  They are good children.  Polite.  Used to shopping in grocery stores and exchanging money for goods.  They did not know how to range as feral tree-climbing beasts in the Maui mountains.  They returned home with muddy flip flops, victorious with four lemons, two oranges, and zero avocados.  The laden avocado tree spied from our balcony was too far off their path for comfortable foraging.

The upcoming days of our trip would be filled with ocean, sea turtles, snorkeling, shaved ice, macadamia nut pancakes, breaching whales, and more banana bread.  We’d find ourselves in the thick of vacation crowds in Lahaina and gaping at beachside tents rented for thousands of dollars a day along the Four Seasons Resort in Wailea.

I’m grateful for 48 hours in Kula before the days of vacation bustle.

Mary Oliver writes in her poem, “Messenger:” 
“My work is loving the world.”  

She pauses in her work, perhaps awed into selflessness, to observe: 

“The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
Which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
And these body-clothes,
A mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
Telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.”

Let me work at loving this upcountry Maui world:
The laden avocado tree.  The lemon.
The unseen Nene and the silversword.
The banana bread and the snail that progressed across the banana tree leaf.
Shouts of joy to the roadside stand mango, unripened, the bamboo grove, the dropped plumeria blossoms.
The cash box.
The Rip Van Winkle of a concierge.
The bird-of-paradise.  Blue Kula.

All the ingredients for joy were in upcountry Maui, and for two days, I worked hard at loving that world.  Now I open this mouth with shouts: remembering, recording, and letting these joys live over and over, forever.