by Eric Stinton
I watch the palm trees bend in the trade winds, as if they were riding in convertibles along the cliffs of the Kalanianaʻole Highway, their fronds like hair blowing back in the breeze. I yearn for their stillness, to let the world move around me, through me. I wish I belonged to the wind the way I want it to belong to me. But it comes and goes, belonging to nothing, while I remain.
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Before there was a Hawaiʻi, there was only wind and ocean. I imagine the wind going about its business over the water for thousands of years only to one day get interrupted by erupting volcanoes. Once lava breached open air, the wind and the water carried the plants and people that would transform jagged lifeless geology into Hawaiʻi. Eventually, indiscriminately, the wind and the waves also brought Everything Else: ukuleles and aircraft carriers; Bibles and bentos; plumerias and leprosy; mice, mongooses, mynas and me. Stay here long enough and you will see how the wind sculpts you, what it brings into your life, and what gusts away as it leaves.
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Wind is the movement of air molecules, consisting mostly of nitrogen, oxygen and water vapor. Those molecules move from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure, whipping across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean and whooshing down from the clouded peaks of the Koʻolau Mountains, converging and conspiring to blow loose papers off my desk and slam shut any open doors in my house, eliciting a chorus of bewildered barks from my dogs. They don’t appreciate the scientific majesty of the experience, the poetry of absence creating its own force.
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ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi has over 600 names for winds. The names delineate varying intensities and durations, different directions the winds blow, connections to specific places, or ways in which we experience them. Makani holo ʻūhā is “the wind that brushes the thighs,” a cold wind that chills the legs of fishermen. ʻAikoʻo is the “canoe-eating” gust from Kauaʻi; and malanai is the gentle trade wind of Kailua, where I’m from. Colette Leimomi Akana, who is compiling a book of Hawaiian wind names with her daughter, said “I believe Hawaiians named each wind and rain because they encountered them almost daily and felt a kinship with them.”
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Before we separated, my ex-wife took both of the dogs with her to work. I returned home to an empty house and became overwhelmed by its lifelessness. Silence was no longer suspicious, just garden variety lonely. No pitter-patter of paws on the floor, no sudden eruption of squeaky toys. And of course, no barking. We often joked that our dachshund barks at the wind. A slight breeze will rustle tree leaves outside and trigger him into defensive positioning, piercing the air with scatter-shots of shrill barks in all directions. I used to think it was simply the sound of movement that made him think something alive was just outside our windows, but now, as the wind exhales through my empty house, it feels less like an imitation of life and more like its shadow: a phantom passerby, a welcome intruder. I’d rather be haunted periodically than alone forever.
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I love watching clouds hurry by. Wind reminds me that clouds are objects, not texture, and that we’re a small piece of land in a very large ocean on an even larger planet in an incomprehensibly large ocean—and even the cosmos may not be where these echoes end. It’s calming, even liberating to know we’re part of an exhalation that began long before us, and will continue long after we’re gone.
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I taught a 2nd grade student who got upset easily: when his peers struggled, when he had to wait in line, when he had to stop coloring. One recess he was standing by the slide, holding his arms like he was grumpily hugging himself, screaming “The wind! It angers me!” Some things are inevitable: the incompetence of others; what life requires of us and prevents us from doing; feelings for which there seem to be neither genesis nor revelation; the wind.
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Blustery weather – and any attendant moisture – is about as much seasonality as we get in the Islands. Rainy season, dry season; wind, no wind. It’s important to experience the change of seasons, subtle as they might be, to remember that other things also change. Loneliness solidifies into peace; sadness sublimes into hope; molten anger cools into pacific acceptance; wilted love sprouts into friendship – another expression of itself, a different petal of the same flower. And I become more myself, a familiar breeze on a new day.
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Whenever the trades pick up I find myself, stopping in place and letting the breeze envelop me until I get chicken skin. In those moments it’s easy to forget that the last ten years have been the hottest ten years humanity has recorded, and that the 2010s were the hottest decade ever, breaking the record previously held by the 2000s, and the 90s before that and the 80s before that. A cool, easy breeze on a warming planet. It’s getting closer and closer to being not nearly enough, but it’s reassuring in the moment, a tingling embrace that whispers hints of a timeless serenity too ancient and everlasting to need or notice us.
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My ex used to ask me how the surf was, and when I said windy she asked if that was good or bad. It could be either, though it’s usually bad. Bad windy blows against or perpendicular to the sets, chopping up the surface water like gravel on pavement. You have to fight it from pushing you off balance. The good kind of windy steadily blows in alignment with whatever groundswell there is, helping the wave peaks break farther out from shore, adding size to the wave and length to the ride. There are innumerably more ways for windiness to work against you. To be good always seems to be more specific and demanding.
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It’s about a 20 minute bike ride to my school, and it often feels as if I’m pedaling against the wind in both directions. In the morning I see friends and students along the way; I wave, throw shakas, say good mornings. It’s not until I get off my bike that I start to sweat, and by then I’m already feeling happy, ready, present. The wind blowing in my face feels like a companion. But after work, when the day has crusted over me, biking back home is laborious. I feel slow, inhibited. My legs burn as I pedal. (Where’s makani holo ʻūhā when you need it?) The wind feels like an adversary. I start to wish I drove instead, relinquishing all the perks I benefited from in the morning in exchange for quickly cutting through the wind by myself. But with soft pink and orange pastels glowing beneath gold-trimmed rain clouds in the distance, maybe it’s better to go slowly.
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Years back, a friend and I hiked to the ridge of the Koʻolaus on a particularly gusty day. We got soaked on the climb up, but once we reached the top the rain ceased to pound us—and not because it stopped raining. When winds hit the mass of the mountain they surge upward, heaving rainfall over the summit and unleashing it on the other side. I remember looking up and seeing droplets suspended in the air above me, wanting to close my eyes to be a part of the moment, but refusing to out of fear I’d miss it. I wonder: if I closed my eyes, what would I have seen?
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Wind at night is moody and invigorating, especially on the shoreline where it whooshes past you, and the electric glow from houses and streetlights ceases to follow you. As if the wind is holding back light itself. Darkness is Hawaii’s least appreciated natural gift. Ancient Hawaiians used the same name, Unulau, for both a mischievous westerly trade wind known to pull leaves off of trees, and the last star that appears at dawn, when both the stars and horizon are visible. Dawn is a brief but vital time for celestial navigation. Darkness and light sharing the same breath, a reminder that there are no opposites, only continuums. The movement of air does not preclude stillness; you do not need to see everything to find where you are.
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I’m still watching the palm trees in the trade winds. Palms are able to withstand hurricanes and stay rooted in place, even if they are beaten into a backbend. There is a stubborn beauty in facing adversity head-on without allowing it to uproot us, to know that despite the enormity of the forces howling against us, we can remain firmly planted in the places beneath us and around us and within us. We can still let our hair blow back, watch the clouds pass us by, and feel, for a moment, what it means to be here.
Eric Stinton is a writer and a teacher from Kailua, Hawaiʻi. He is a columnist for Honolulu Civil Beat, and his work has been published in Bamboo Ridge, Dwell Magazine, FLUX Hawaiʻi, Hana Hou! Magazine, Harvard Review Online, Ka Wai Ola, Sport Literate and Vice Sports, among others. Follow him on https://ericstinton.substack.com
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