The North Shore bike path takes us past some world famous big wave beaches like Sunset and the Pipeline. Path side growth make it a tunnel of green yielding random flashes of blue water and pure sand. Sometimes we ride through a cloud of perfume, richer than White Shoulders warming on the wrist of a beautiful woman. We move under arcs of flowers, some, red with orange accents imitating votive flames that drop to be crushed under bike tires. We are always crushing beautiful flowers on the bike trails of Oahu. 

Before the heat of each day of this Oahu visit, I take an early morning ride around Ewa Beach. Today, after clearing the thick belt of cookie cutter housing developments I’m riding a bike path running between mangrove swamps and a golf course. Occasional bursts of perfumed scent rises from late blooming plants. A man, in ball cap and tee shirt, skin darken by sun, passes on a bike from the opposite direction. He holds a fishing pole across his handlebars, riding slow to conserve energy. We exchange alohas then move in opposite directions-me towards a bay side park, he toward a hard-to-find fishing hole.

Early morning sun bounces off the waters of an arm of Pearl Harbor at the park.  I leave the bike and walk out onto a short dock located between two others. On one, an old Asian man stands with a throwing net in his hands. Nothing stirs in the waters around him. Bait fish rile the water around me, driven into tight balls by larger fish. I see the wakes produced by their fins running just beneath the surface. The fisherman sees this too but doesn’t move to my dock. Maybe he knows the fish will move to him or maybe he is put off by a guy in bright spandex standing in the morning sun. Figuring it’s the later I hop back on the bike and ride on.

After the docks, the path runs along a small point. On the opposite side I stop to ask another fishermen for the names of the fish hunting the dock waters. Showing great interest, he only wants confirmation that they were, “on the other side.” I owe an apology to the net fishermen for sending him competition then ride through a small flock of the ever present egrets. 

Today Honolulu’s Bishop Museum lets everyone in for free. It’s a celebration of their recent renovations. It’s also a celebration of the people of the Pacific, some of whom are performing traditional dances on the museum grounds while others offer traditional island foods. Later I’ll eat curry poured into folded fry bread by the women tending the Fuji food tent shelter and watch well done Tahitian dances. Now I’m inside the museum, sketching a wooden Hawaiian god and half listening to two women on the next bench telling story. Perhaps inspired by the Bishop’s collection of royal Hawaiian regalia and other physical evidence of their history on the island, these Aunties tell each other the important things—who did the things that changed their world, how to fish near shore, a job always for the women, anything about their grandchildren.

As in most places on this island, I feel welcome here, perhaps the only person at this celebration incapable of turning brown under the sun.

Aki didn’t make this trip to Oahu, which is just as well. Her thick curly coat would make her uncomfortable in Hawaii’s hot weather.  Making an early morning start we ride bikes to the Ewa Beach Zippy’s for coffee and banana andagi (Okinawan style donuts). Next door a pioneer’s cemetery occupies some rolling ground along the busy Fort Weaver Road.  Car and truck robs the dead of the quiet they deserve. Seed pods, roughly shaped like fava beans lay on parched ground between the grave markers.  Only the acacia trees that dropped them offer any shade.

This desert of severe beauty would provide little solace to the families left behind, so I pray for them and the souls of those buried beneath. Most died more than 80 years ago but some grave stones show signs of recent visitation—a weathered stuffed animal by the grave of a 9 year old who died in 1923, mason jars for holding flowers and water a few grave markers away. A field of drunken crosses spread across the Christian section of the graveyard. Native stone, lightly inscribed on a flat side with kanji, mark the Japanese graves, as if in recognition of how little impact one life can have on the hard rocky ground of Oahu’s dry leeward side.