More places from Rico's childhood

Lawrence Downes,an editorial writer for The New York Times, has an article in The Times about Kailua, Hawai'i:

Walking to the beach with my family on a hot Kailua afternoon, let’s say 1972. My toy foam surfboard clip-clopping against my knees, a towel scratching my neck, rubber slippers squeaking on steamy blacktop. Around the corner of Kuuala Street, across Kalaheo Avenue, then down the skinny beach path, hugging a cinderblock wall under a thick, shady row of octopus trees and bougainvillea. Footfalls echoing on packed dirt. Coming out onto Kailua Bay. A field of impossible blue, sky down to water. Squinting in the brilliance of the broad, white crescent beach.
My father swimming, in long, lazy lines parallel to shore. My mother sitting on the sand. Me, pondering the choices: sand castles or sand balls— wet double handfuls smooth-coated with dry sand into hard, sugar-dusted spheres; such a pity to have to whip one at your brother.
Kailua. The guidebooks say it’s basically a beach. But there’s a town wrapped around the beach, and, around that, a whole other side of the 600-square-mile island of Oahu— the windward side, a world away from Honolulu. Kailua is barely half an hour from downtown and Waikiki, but separated by a soaring ribbon of razorback mountains, the Koolau Range. The green lava wall is pierced near its summit by two sets of highway tunnels, like airlocks in time and space. The Honolulu side is dry and sunny, its postcard loveliness folded among high-rises, offices, airport and freeways. The Kailua side, where I grew up, is greener, quieter, lower, and slower, with marshes and palms and that perfect bay.
The windward Oahu I know best is three communities: Kailua, Lanikai, and their next-door country cousin, Waimanalo. They’re beachy but not snooty. Kailua has a downtown but no night life to speak of. It’s less a spot for touristic stimulation than a place you nestle into, as Hawai'ian royalty once did, escaping dusty Honolulu since long before King Kamehameha’s day.
Two Beatles, John and George, mobbed in Waikiki, fled there once, in 1964. They were discovered, and so, eventually, was Kailua, although it and the rest of windward Oahu have managed to keep a reasonably low profile on Hawai'i’s well-worn tourist map.
That may be changing, especially now that President Obama has claimed Kailua as his. He grew up in Honolulu, but Kailua is where he returns. This is his place called Hope, his San Clemente, his Texas hill country. Every winter the Obamas stay at the same rented house at one end of the crescent bay, whose waters he knows from boyhood, as he wrote in his memoir, Dreams From My Father:

“I still remember how, one early morning, hours before the sun rose, a Portuguese man to whom my grandfather had given a good deal on a sofa set took us out to spear fish off Kailua Bay. A gas lantern hung from the cabin on the small fishing boat as I watched men dive into inky-black waters, the beams of their flashlights glowing beneath the surface until they emerged with a large fish, iridescent and flopping at the end of one pole. Gramps told me its Hawai'ian name, humu-humu-nuku-nuku-apua'a, which we repeated to each other the entire way home.”

In this story, either Gramps or young Barack was mistaken, since the humuhumu is a little reef fish, barely six inches long. But let’s give Gramps a break on his fish names, and allow Barack his childhood lens of magnified wonderment: Hawai'ians do still fish here with spears and nets, often in darkness, and are done by dawn.
Kailua is the kind of little town that makes for good memories. It has the best Fourth of July parade in the state, where Uncle Sam in his long white beard salutes the crowd with the wrist-flicking, thumb-and-pinky shaka gesture, and, at night, there are fireworks over the beach. It has farmers’ markets, with local tomatoes, papaya, torch-ginger blossoms, and bananas. The windward side has local fishermen, dancers, musicians, artists: native Hawaiian families rooted there for generations, with names like Mahoe, Aluli, and Pahinui. Like anywhere else in Hawai'i, it has the all-American children of immigrants, descendants of the last century’s plantation era.
Kailua gives people who know it a deep sense of belonging, of roots in the sand. I moved away thirty years ago, but get back every chance I get. My own rituals of return, habits of haunting an old beloved home, could just as easily be yours.
Whether you start from the Honolulu airport or Waikiki, leave the freeway at the Pali Highway exit, and make the quick turn north for Nuuanu Valley, a steady climb, with the green, fluted mountain walls closing in, silvered with mist and plunging waterfalls when it rains. When highway builders, in the 1950s, reached the knife-edged Koolau summit, or pali, they punched tunnels through it and all but did away with the meandering mountain-goat path down the other side, with its treacherous winds and rock slides.
Go through the second tunnel and then, ladies and gentlemen: the windward side, lush terrain of old fishponds, streams, marshes, soft volcanic cinder cones, and the blue, isle-dotted bay, all laid at your feet. You’re looking down from a thousand-foot precipice, a view that dazzled Mark Twain. This is where, in 1795, King Kamehameha’s army, invaders from the Big Island, pushed the army of Chief Kalanikupule to the pali’s brink. The only way out was to plummet, which hundreds did. That victory gave Kamehameha dominion over all the Hawai'ian islands. There is a lookout point and plaque recounting the historic battle.
This is also the site of a strange moment in Obama family lore. His memoir retells a story his mother and grandparents often told him, of how his father once grabbed a friend and playfully dangled him over the edge, where the poor man had just accidentally dropped and lost the elder Obama’s pipe. The story was meant for Barack’s amusement: that dad of yours; what a nut. When you stand at the same railing and look over the terrifying, wind-whipped abyss, you might have a different thought. Mine was: I’d've pressed charges.
Not every trip back to Kailua takes me to the Pali Lookout, but each one begins and ends on the beach. The first morning I’m up before dawn, easily. East Coast jet lag puts you in prime shape for Pacific sunrise viewing. Kailua is a morning town; the bay looks east and first light brings out runners and ambling couples with dogs and cups of coffee.
The waves have shrunk since I was a boy: I wonder why. But the rest is the same, as I confirmed again in an April visit with my family. The sand is still cottony and cool by the naupaka shrubs at the top of the beach, sloping down to firm wet velvet under the foam. The beach still wears a light seaweed fringe, and is dotted with crab burrows every few feet, like a highly unimaginative mini-golf course.
Overhead, great frigatebirds, ’iwa in Hawai'ian, still hover in the whipping trade winds. Past the gentle shorebreak, Flat Island lies off to the right, close-in, temptingly swimmable. Beyond them, the Mokulua islets, Moku Nui and Moku Iki: a mere kayak trip away. Girding the bay to the left, a humpbacked volcanic crater, the Mokapu Peninsula, looking like the snake that swallowed an elephant in The Little Prince. It’s a Marine base, off limits to most of us, and the president’s vacation gym.
Even at 6 a.m. the water is bathtub warm; I lie on my back with my feet pointing at the Mokuluas, and the sun rises behind my toes. I met a fisherman, Randal Akiona, just after sunrise that morning at Kailua Beach Park. He was camping with his family by the park’s boat ramp. His wife, Tracey, read a book in the back of their truck while their girls played in the sand. Tourists were beginning to arrive for a day of kayaking, kite surfing, and paddleboarding. We talked about fishing, and of unemployment and homelessness, twin scourges of today’s native Hawai'ians. He told me where I could buy the green, red,and yellow flag of the Hawai'ian sovereignty movement, like the ones decorating his truck. He told me that the homeless man I had seen wading under a nearby canal bridge, his belongings lashed to two surfboards, was a guy he knew.
Later I got breakfast, papaya with lime, at my mom’s; you can go to old Kalapawai Market, by the park entrance, for Kona coffee, bagels, and the morning paper, The Star-Advertiser. Or you can take the short walk into downtown Kailua, which hasn’t changed much in fifty years, though it’s beginning to. Last year they closed Don Quijote, an odd Japanese department store and supermarket where you could get groceries, the seasoned raw fish dish known as poke, Okinawan liquor, rubber slippers, bamboo fishing poles, rice cookers, and macadamia nuts. Now it’s going to be a Target.
Still, there’s plenty of local flavor in the farmers’ markets, a little independent bookstore, homegrown places for art and antiques. The library, the Chinese and Vietnamese and pizza restaurants, the thrift shop with old muumuus, the public park, with swimming pool and ballfields, all say: this is a real town. Gentrification and tourists are creeping in. Go while you can.
Kailua was a thriving population center before European contact, a playground for chiefs, and rich in farming and fish, thanks to its many freshwater streams and wetlands and placid bay. The huge fishponds and abundant banana, sweet potato and taro patches were mostly gone by the mid-nineteenth century, replaced by cattle grazing and commercial development, but relics remain.
For a plunge into antiquity, you can visit Ulupo Heiau, a massive temple built by old Hawai'ians, lava stone by stone, near the YMCA. Once it was neatly terraced with wooden altars and statues and sacrifices. The surviving platform, 150 feet by 140 feet with walls up to thirty feet high, is a staggering work of ancient hand-to-hand rock laying, perhaps four hundred years old.
Ho’omaluhia Botanic Garden, at the foot of the pali, is richly replanted in native species. A long walk along the levee traverses Kawainui Marsh, a good birders’ spot. BookEnds, a bookstore in Kailua Shopping Center, has an excellent section on Hawai'ian history and guidebooks for bird- and fish-spotting.
At some point, you take your books and spend all day at the beach. Kailua Beach Park is the main visitor magnet, where you can picnic, rent kayaks, and try kite surfing and paddleboards, long surfboards that you stand on, using a long-handled, wide-bladed paddle to push yourself calmly around the bay. The far right side ends in a rocky point, where children can chase skipping gobies and black crabs in the sharp-edged tidepools.
Obama’s house is way on the other side of the bay, at 57-A Kailuana Place; you can drive by and gawk if the guard booth is empty. If Kailua Beach Park feels too crowded, with boats and boards buzzing all around you, Kalama Beach Park, up Kalaheo Avenue closer to the Obama side, is far quieter and more secluded, and the waves are bigger.
We didn’t use much water-sports equipment when I was little. A day of swimming and body surfing was thrill enough, starting with slow edging into the water, all cold around the ankles and shins, down in the little wave-carved depression, up the other side, then up past the waist and then the choice: whether to let the prickly chill work slowly up to your neck or just plunge in. Usually a wave decides for you; you dive under and the snap-sweep of the breaker pulls you upright, and you bob, chilled but ready for the next wave.
I wish we’d had kayaks back then; I would have gone more often to Flat Island, a bird sanctuary, to watch out for the hatchlings and eggs. You can also swim the quarter-mile, or paddle on a surfboard. I wish even more that we’d had Island Snow. It’s the shave-ice store near Kailua Beach Park where the president takes his girls. His flavors are supposedly lime, guava-orange, and cherry, but I prefer coconut with sweetened azuki beans.
The park gets crowded on weekends, so it’s time to head out to Waimanalo, a short drive into a more Hawa'iian state of mind. Here you’ll see houses flying the Hawai'ian sovereignty flag, salving wounds unhealed since the overthrow of the kingdom in 1893. This is the rural town known to admirers of the late Gabby Pahinui, a master guitarist widely loved as the soul of Hawai'ian music. In April I made a drive-by pilgrimage to his family home, a tidy wooden house on Bell Street where the best musicians in Hawai'i once played backyard jams. Gabby’s sons Martin, Cyril, and James, known as Bla, carry on the music in their own ways, not usually together.
A Hawai'ian music festival dedicated to Gabby takes place in Waimanalo every August, and is one of the best places to hear and feel the Hawai'ian soul. Waimanalo Blues, a classic local song recorded many times, most memorably by Bla, is a lament for a lost and paved-over Hawai'i. I listen for it on the radio when I’m back; it never takes too long before it comes up. The real Hawai'i is there, if you look for it and listen; it lingers strongest where tourists don’t notice, all along the windward side.
The best way to get the lay of the land is with a short, mildly strenuous hike to a ridgeline along a smooth-sloped cinder cone just above Lanikai. We park on a dead-end road beside Mid-Pacific Country Club, where Obama golfs, walk along a short stretch of private driveway (is it trespassing if a sign points you to the trail?) and then clamber up the mountainside.
The red-dirt trail starts out crumbly and steep. My daughter, Sophie, and her brother, Zak, have cameras out. My wife, Pat, and I trade off on the backpack with the water bottles. We all step aside to let an extreme runner keep his heart rate up. “Excuse me,” he says, each time he comes and goes and comes again.
It’s a dry, hot hike, with cactus flowers and pili grass and butterflies. All the water is below you: Kaelepulu Stream, leading to the bay. Kawainui Marsh, the island’s largest. The cobalt blue beyond the reef. We watch a tour group in yellow banana-shaped kayaks begin their assault on the Mokuluas, slow and calm. In winter you can sometimes see whales; these tourists are probably looking out for honu: green sea turtles.
We reach the summit, and the hulks of two concrete pillboxes, built in World War Two as coastal lookouts. They’re a good place to rest, drink, soak it all in. People climb here in darkness to see the sunrise, but we’re a little late for that. A last stop at the beach before the airport, a last gathering of those sensations of surf and warmth, of sun squinting and salt smell, to take home to the mainland with you. Obama’s memoir says that, when tourists used to watch him playing on the beach, staring rudely at the dark-skinned boy with the white mother and grandpa, Gramps would play a joke at their expense. He would whisper to them that the boy with the sand bucket was the great-grandson of King Kamehameha, conqueror of all the islands. The tourists would gawk and snap, and Gramps told little Barack that there were probably photos of him in scrapbooks all over the country.
I suspect some of those moments must have happened at Kailua Beach. In the Obama childhood snapshots I’ve seen, the waves look just right, Kailua-ish, frothier than at any of the ripply Honolulu beaches his mother and Gramps could have taken him to. Someday I hope to ask him.

If You Go
Kailua has no hotels, but it has bed-and-breakfasts, many of them illegal. (A law banning unlicensed short-term rentals is widely flouted.) Try Pat’s Kailua Beach Properties (808-262-4128; patskailua.com), for clean, legal lodgings close to Kailua Beach Park and Lanikai, from $100 to $600 a night.
The turnoff to Nuuanu Pali Lookout is well-marked by signs on the Pali Highway on Route 61 north from Honolulu. Enter Kailua Beach Park at the corner of Kailua Road and South Kalaheo Avenue. You’ll see Kalapawai Market at 306 South Kalaheo Avenue, good for snacks and souvenirs, and, across the street, Island Snow at 130 Kailua Road, where President Obama takes his daughters for shave ice, and also Kailua Sailboards and Kayaks (888-457-5737; kailuasailboards.com) for rentals and lessons.
Kalama Beach Park at 248 North Kalaheo Avenue is on the same bay. The Lanikai Pillbox Trail starts just beyond the entrance to Mid Pacific Country Club at 266 Kaelepulu Drive. Park on Kaelepulu and walk up the road; the trailhead signs are on the left. Ulupo Heiau is a short walk from the YMCA at 1200 Kailua Road. There’s good bird-watching and bicycling along the levee of Kawainui Marsh (enter from Kawainui Neighborhood Park, at the end of Kaha Street). Hoomaluhia Botanical Garden at 45-680 Luluku Road in Kaneohe is rich with native plants at the foot of the Koolau Mountains.
Downtown Kailua is highly walkable; you can get your bearings and take a break at BookEnds at 600 Kailua Road, a bookstore with a good selection of Hawai'ian titles. For flowers and produce, the People’s Open Market is open on Thursdays from 7:15 to 8:15 a.m. at Waimanalo Beach Park at 41-741 Kalanianaole Highway, and from 9 to 10 a.m. at Kailua District Park at 21 South Kainalu Drive.
For breakfast, my mom likes Cinnamon’s at 315 Uluniu Street; 808-261-8724, but Crepes No Ka Oi at 131 Hekili Street; 808-263-4088, and Moke’s Bread and Breakfast at 27 Hoolai Place; 808-261-5565 are good, too. For lunch, try Kalapawai Cafe at 750 Kailua Road), Ohana Bar-BQ at 16 Kainehe Street or Keneke’s in Waimanalo at 41-685 Kalanianaole Highway; 808-259-9811. Agnes’ Portuguese Bake Shop at 46 Hoolai Street has the best malasadas (Portuguese doughnuts). For dinner, try Buzz’s Original Steak House at 413 Kawailoa Road; 808-261-4661 or Saeng’s Thai Cuisine at 315 Hahani Street; 808-263-9727.

Rico says he was privileged to visit Kailua during a Hawai'ian SCUBA-diving vacation with his father back in the late Sixties; when he went back for a sabbatical from Apple in the early Nineties, he went to Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island. But the closest thing, in this part of the world, to shave-ice is Rita's...