This is likely not the post-Hawaiian vacation newsletter you were expecting.
I’m writing this after hurricane Hilary rolled through (…ish) this past weekend. We got rain. Our road, the natural wash re-packed with dirt just a few months ago, is a natural wash again. I can confidently say I’d never seen fog in the desert until a few days ago. We drove down Alta Loma while listening to Bright Eyes’ Cassadaga album. Alta Loma is the street we use for everything; at 2am on early Sunday morning we couldn’t place where we were at all. A cloud came down to sit over the whole neighborhood. It felt protective, in a sense. “I’m going to just hang out here,” it seemed to say. “I’m going to keep things quiet for a little bit. I’m going to make sure we’ll all be ready to heal once this is all over.”
Now, post-Hilary, I patiently waited for a couple spots to dry out further so I could venture out and get more almond milk. This was where the extent of Hilary’s damage and inconvenience ended for me. This is the most disgustingly apt metaphor for the capital-F Feelings I’ve had over the past 2 weeks about privilege, my ability to skirt so seamlessly around pain associated with my own sense of place (because I don’t have one), and what I can maybe do about it, at this stage of my life.
It started with the Perseid meteor shower earlier in the month. We noticed more people around than we’d expect for late summer as we walked through the market and gear shop before connecting the dots that crowds were in town for the “once in a lifetime experience!!!1” of the meteor shower. The Joshua Tree National Park Service (JTNPS) advised folks to view the shower away from the park if possible - the crowds within the park were expected to get out of hand. We’re luckily to be able to view the stars from our backyard and laid on the hammock to watch a few of the meteors fly by like lone green fireworks. I glanced towards the park to see a trail of red taillights. “They must be pulling over to watch it from Park Boulevard,” I thought to myself. This ended up being the line to get into the park. People were still trying to enter at midnight, stalled 5 miles out from the entrance.
We left town the next morning but heard about the aftermath pretty quickly. People setting illegal fires (there is currently a ban on fires due to wildfire risk, the York Fire in the Mojave was gruesome and burned almost 100,000 acres). Trash everywhere. Cars going off-road due to lack of parking, destroying plants in their pursuit. I have yet to go into the park and see the damage myself. But I feel it, and I can only imagine what the water has also done with the trash.
National parks are seen as a public service. Where do we draw the line? And where do I draw my own line as a resident outside of a national park? Where do parks’ missions to safeguard environments and preserve both environmental and cultural resources promote too much visitation, and at what cost? JTNPS did not publicize the shower or encourage anyone to come, knowing the potential consequences on a place that is also designed for conservation. When looking at where infrastructure is placed in National Parks versus the size of parks as whole areas (particularly Joshua Tree, almost 800,000 acres and Yosemite, 750,000 acres), it’s easy to just be thankful they haven’t turned into full blown Disneyland and have roads and attractions covering more square footage. That maybe I should just be happy the destruction is contained, the same way I’m hesistant to build more on our property and just leave the built environment as is, doing no more further damage. What does it mean to have a responsibility for environment, whether it is protected by a national park, or protected as a place of reverence?
We were all set to visit the Big Island of Hawaiʻi on the 13th, the day after the meteor shower, and a few days after the fires broke out on both Maui and Hawaiʻi. This is not the first time we’ve had “should we stay or should we go” debates with ourselves - it felt most prevalent for COVID, hard decisions were made, but we’ve also faced this with wildfires in the past. We checked with friends on Hawaiʻi who said it was still safe, and our hotel was not refundable, so we went.
I felt conflicted leading up to the trip not just because of the fires, but also because of the public discourse around the potential misnomer of tourism as “essential” to Hawaiʻi. I’m not going to get deep into that debate in this newsletter as I am not Hawaiian and have no real authority to speak on the topic, but in my personal point of view, I’m certainly conflicted about returning again.
Upon arrival, I started to experience huge amounts of grief. “I should not be here,” I told Matt. Something felt incredibly wrong in my heart and my gut, something I didn’t feel when we had traveled to the islands a couple years prior. Was I just PMSing? Or was this something new and something to really listen to? This was a vacation we planned frivolously, a mad dash attempt to go somewhere beautiful, a reward for a couple of hard months. Somewhere to think less, feel more. But we got there and all I could feel was “this place is not for me.”
The move to Joshua Tree didn’t just illuminate things inside of myself that I didn’t have access to prior, but it’s illuminated ways in which I relate to my surroundings that I couldn’t access, or maybe didn’t feel like I needed to access, prior. I write about this (place) a lot, but I think the more I use the muscle of learning about the history and the community we’re trying to assimilate into, the more apparent I notice the impact of being in new places too. Alex shared this Substack (from the fascinating founder of Fort Lonesome) with me very shortly after I started this draft, which discusses how the idea of the solitary cowboy, while romantic, neglects the inherent need for community and necessary stops along the [his] way. I’m adding onto it: what does one do to the communities in [his] pursuit of the “unknown,” which was actually very much known before?
I don’t know what it’s like to have a distinct place my body yearns for. I’m a mutt. Sure, primarily Eastern European in our ancestry and familial traditions, and I connect deeply to these roots, but in general I am a product of capitalism and those with my same mutt-ness were conditioned to see place as somewhere to be, to use, and not as who and what we are. This past time in Hawaiʻi, I felt it so clearly it was unmistakable: this land is integral to a people that is not me. I felt that I was actively hurting land that is not, and should never be, mine.
So what now? We’ve arrived to an island, we’re here for 6 more days, and I’m in conflict. This was my thought process:
Have gratitude and appreciation that the island will hold me during my time here. Honor the land and the people and do no further harm where possible
Respect and compensate those that are helping us on our stay. While tourism is contributing to rising housing costs and other economic turmoil, those working in the hotel while we’re here don’t deserve a boycott
Educate myself. I chose to use podcasts and local friends to learn more about the island and impacts of tourism and the fight for Mauna Kea specifically (I highly suggest this entire podcast, but especially the 3 part series on Hawaiian resistance)
Do better next time. I have the privilege to put thought and resources into most all of my actions and how I live my life. I have the time to be thoughtful around where I go and what I do whilst there
We soaked in the water and thanked Hawaiʻi for welcoming us, despite absolutely everything. I asked Hawaiʻi what she wanted from me, and she said nothing. We also had reverence for sacred sites and we didn’t set foot on Mauna Kea, the place that started it all for Hawaiians in a way I will never understand.
If you don’t listen to the podcast, there are a couple things that stood out to me that allowed me to further connect to how Hawaiians, according to the guests on this podcast, think about interacting with the environment:
“Aina, Land, is an inseparable part of our identity as Hawaiians. And along with the land comes spirituality because these things, these inanimate things that cannot be produced by a human, are what we call the gods. So, we revere the very rocks we walk on, the very rocks that you’re standing. And there is no sense of I or me in the Hawaiian culture. You know, our smallest unit is the ‘ohana, or the family. And we are just part of that whole. And that family is defined however the family is defined, it’s not necessarily a western nuclear family concept. Land is inseparable from us.” Auntie Noe Noe Wong-Wilson, one of the elders of the Mauna Kea movement
“It’s for me first and foremost an environmental movement. It’s the health of our natural environment that is crucial to our cultural rights and our rights as Indigenous peoples. It’s not quite our rights for us to take care of the land; we got to take care of the land because without the land we have no culture. Our culture cannot exist without these places… For many of us it is our goal to see this project stopped. No more further development on the mountain, that’s really where we are putting our foot down.” Lanakila Mangauil, an educator and advocate for the movement
When the pandemic hit, and visitors to the Hawaiian islands halted, within the first month the fish populations returned to the water in populations they couldn’t anticipate. The land started to heal itself
I don’t know what it’s like to have a distinct place my body yearns for. But Joshua Tree might be the closest I get. It has its own history that’s not too different from any other one of exploitation. So my yearning for a place like Joshua Tree is not for the deeper sense of belonging as some have to their ancestral places. But for me, and for the time we’re in right now, I have the chance to understand more firsthand than ever before what it means to watch something be hammered down and what it means to want to protect it.
We returned to LA the night that Hilary was supposed to start hitting and drove home through the aforementioned fog. We tried to decipher between the storm clouds and the dark night sky, unable to tell which was which. When we turned onto highway 62, the whole world started to smell like creosote. While getting rain in the desert is good, to an extent (see: what creates a superbloom), rapid rain creates flooding and mudslides. The ground is not able to absorb water at a fast rate. It is not meant for the onslaught.
I’ve never considered myself truly separate from my environment, and even while being “outsiders” here, I have a desire to assimilate in respect for the environment, to understand its innerworkings while treading lightly. This is engrained in me from my own ancestral past (my various relatives that foraged from the land, that admired and treated wildlife with the utmost respect, that lived with minimal impact), my upbringing as a girl scout, my environmental education that showed me so much of the systemic issues, yet less about the individual power. This chapter of my life is where I get to must put it all into practice on a daily basis. It’s inescapable. I’m watching Alone as I write this and one of the contestants just mentioned that modern hunters are “escaping” their daily lives to get connected to the land. Maybe my past soliloquy/over-dramatization of “escaping” in the negative isn’t as found as I thought, and an escape to the land, to place, is necessary to realize its importance. Place is not the punctuation, but the spaces, in the stories of our lives.
I am the animals I interact with outside every day. I am the sunlight. I am Olive’s puppy, that we learned didn’t make it even 24 hours after surviving the coyote attack in the spring. I am the century plant, fallen over in our front yard, now dried up and becoming one with the dirt. I am the baby quails developing their head plumes, growing into themselves every day.
On Monday, we woke up to photos of Palm Springs and some local roads totally demolished. We feel for our neighbors down the hill and hope everyone stays safe and the damage is repaired swiftly. We feel for the land and the animals. The park stayed closed for day-visitors only until Tuesday. And upon reading this, all I could say to myself is “we need more time to let this land heal, please, let it heal.”
Yesterday, I finally ventured out to the post office to pick up a package Anna had sent - it was close to being returned to sender, I didn’t know what it was. She had sent me the Cassadaga record. We listened to it while driving throughout the southwest US on a roadtrip back when I was 18, she was 21. We went to the Petrified Forest in Arizona. And we looked and we never touched.
Last night, I was walking into the bathroom to brush my teeth and had one of the album’s songs stuck in my head.
Love,
Lily
i loved this one, thank you. i’ll listen to the podcast also. watched the meteors (and blue moon) from sush’s garden ☄️