Leaving Lahaina
my wife and kids view the sunset from Front Street in Lahaina
In my family, we have grown accustomed to scheduling our summer vacations to occur in late July and early August in order to escape the cruelest part of the Texas summer. Last year, for example, we ventured north to climb the mountains of Colorado where, depending on the elevation, temperatures were 60 degrees cooler than those we left behind. This year, we decided to head west to explore the volcanoes of Hawaii.
Although this decision would drain our vacation savings account and consume every last one of our accumulated frequent flyer miles, my wife and I always wanted to share with our girls the beauty we encountered when we attended my brother’s wedding on the Hawaiian island of Maui back in 2005. And so after months of careful consideration and planning, we made reservations both to visit the “Big Island” of Hawai’i and to revisit the neighboring “Valley Island” of Maui.
I am generally not an anxious traveler, but it hadn’t escaped my notice that this vacation posed risks not present on earlier family outings. For starters, we would be flying some 2,500 miles over open water. Assuming our particular plane safely made it to the Kona International Airport, we would be landing on the remnants of a lava flow from the (relatively) recent eruption of one of the five volcanoes on the island. We would tempt fate further by purposely visiting the most active of these volcanos after spending the night in a town devastated by tsunamis in both 1946 and 1960.
during our visit, a rainbow was the only thing that spewed from the caldera of the Kīlauea volcano
Despite all these risks, the first week of our vacation was as full of enjoyment as it was free of disaster. On our short, twenty-minute flight to Maui, I thought about how things felt “balanced” on the Big Island. There were surely economic and social challenges we missed during our brief stay (and of course the story of how Hawaii came to be a part of the United States is, in a word, “unfortunate”), but there was at least the appearance of a sustainable equilibrium between the locals and visitors, the natural and the man-made. None of the places we visited were overrun with tourists and all the people with whom we interacted were uniformly friendly. We genuinely felt the “spirit of Aloha” Hawaii is known for. As a middle-aged white male from the mainland, I’m not going to pretend to fully understand the rich and complex meanings of that particular term, but my family and I all felt something special during the first week of our trip.
This was not the case in Maui.
we had the black sand beach of Waiʻanapanapa State Park to ourselves when we visited in 2005, but not in 2023
Back in 2005, we had the privilege of staying at a resort in Kāʻanapali, part of what is now a continuous eight-mile stretch of hotels and condominiums on the west side of Maui. Development here started in the early 1960s on part of one of the vast plantations that then dominated the island. Catering to middle-class tourists who could now travel to Hawaii domestically (statehood was granted in 1959) on commercial jet airliners (the Boeing 707 entered service in 1958), the area continued to grow so that by the time of our first visit, tourism had supplanted agriculture as the island’s primary economic driver. By the time of our second visit, close to three million people were visiting Maui every year.
The island of Maui is shaped like an asymmetrical dumbbell. The larger eastern half is dominated by the towering mass of a dormant volcano while the smaller western part features the eroded mass of a second, now extinct volcano. The Kahului Airport sits to the north on the flat isthmus in between. The drive from there to the area around Kāʻanapali where we would again be staying was just as spectacular as we remembered. As it rounds the West Maui Mountains to the south, Hawaii Route 30 is pushed up against the shimmering blue waters of Ma’alaea Bay. The road hugs the coastline for the next ten miles as surfers appear in the foreground and as Lānaʻi, Maui’s island neighbor located ten miles to the west, appears on the horizon. At times only a short concrete barrier separates the cars from crashing waves spraying seawater over the roadway.
the thin line of Hawaii Route 30 hugs the coastline of the southwest coast of Maui as seen from our late afternoon flight from the Big Island
As we continued north up the western shore, our memory from 2005 began to divert from our experience in 2023. The only real way to drive to that part of the island is the two-lane Route 30, and so when the ever-growing number of tourists flocking to the resorts around Kāʻanapali began to exceed the capacity of that two-lane road, a four-lane bypass was built around the historic town of Lahaina.
The Lahaina bypass was the first of many changes we noticed in the days that followed. Although we were able to share with our children the unique joy of snorkeling, the coral below us seemed less vibrant and the reefs seemed less crowded with fish. The ”Road to Hana” suffered from the opposite problem. The day-long drive around the east side of Maui was a fun adventure in 2005 but proved to be a grueling ordeal in 2023. The “secret” beaches we had “discovered” during our first visit were now uncomfortably crowded. The scenic pull-offs we casually stopped at to take in vistas of breathtaking beauty were now crammed with double-parked rental cars. The road itself was just as narrow and winding as we remembered, but this time we felt we were driving on it both too fast and too slow. Locals would tailgate us in frustration and, at one point, a tour bus driver jumped out to express his anger about our excessive speed.
On the Road to Hana, we felt we were in the way. We felt we were an annoyance. We felt like tourists… which of course we were.
A few months before we left for Hawaii, “The Case Against Travel” appeared in The New Yorker. Written by Agnes Callard, the essay posits that the act of visiting a place can devolve into a checklist of sights to be seen. It’s a valid criticism, but there’s a reason why the Road to Hana and other things make it onto lists of things not to be missed when visiting Maui. The issue isn’t that the drive isn’t worth experiencing, it’s that too many people are trying to experience it.
I’m certainly not the first one to make this sort of observation. Overtourism can certainly diminish the enjoyment of the visitor, but it has an even larger and more nefarious impact on the people who live in the place overrun by tourists. To be sure, Maui has benefited from the growth of the travel industry over the past sixty years. It has created jobs and brought investment and opportunities to the island that didn’t exist when it was dominated by pineapple and sugarcane plantations, but there have been tradeoffs as well. In addition to the traffic (and general annoyance) caused by three million visitors descending on the island every year, the cost of living has skyrocketed. Affordable housing is an issue in plenty of other places, but on Maui, the median price for a home has surpassed $1.2 million. Housing stock on the island’s west side is so dominated by vacation homes and short-term rentals that those working in the area’s hotels, restaurants, and shops often have to commute from the central part of the island, further contributing to the congestion on Route 30.
Maui, it seems, is being loved to death.
the beauty of ʻĪao Valley is compromised by the parking lot built to accommodate all the tourists wishing to experience that beauty for themselves
On our first full day on Maui, after we picked up our snorkel equipment from a local rental shop, we continued south and pulled off Route 30 onto Front Street and into Lahaina. We drove a mile or so past neighborhoods filled with an eclectic collection of modest homes still mostly occupied by locals. We continued into the town’s main commercial strip that faced west towards the ocean. These restaurants and souvenir shops clearly catered to tourists, but it was a pleasant urban experience all the same. Even more than the town’s landmarks, it was the fabric created by all its buildings that made Lahaina so compelling. It was the intimate scale of these tightly packed historic storefronts. It was their varied wood detailing. It was the level of care and craft that can only be created by the layering of history and time.
downtown Lahaina as seen from Front Street
During that first visit, we bought shaved ice from a local vendor and enjoyed it under the shady embrace of the town’s famous banyan tree. Later that week I would take my daughter to Baby Beach where she and I watched in wonder as a giant green sea turtle soared gracefully through the water. My wife and I bought “Maui Jim” sunglasses from a shop on Front Street whose polarized lenses made the sea and sky even more stunning (and allowed us to see even more sea turtles). She and I would watch from the harbor jetty as our daughters learned to surf in the waves off Lahaina Beach.
Our flight home was scheduled to depart Maui on the evening of Tuesday, August 8th. The plan had been to spend the day relaxing at our resort, but we awoke that morning to discover we were without power. Although the sky was perfectly clear, high winds from Hurricane Dora, spinning some 700 miles to the south, rattled the windows. With the pools closed and the beach too windy to enjoy, we decided to pack up the rental car and check out early.
Powerful gusts of wind rocked our car as we inched south on Route 30 in the heaviest traffic we’d seen so far. Our assumption was this congestion was due to the non-functioning traffic lights, but the lack of cell service prevented us from knowing for sure. With no real schedule to keep, we decided to pull off once more onto Front Street and drive into Lahaina. Because it was also without power, most of the shops were closed. Still, this last drive through town allowed us to see all the places we had visited in the previous week. There was the post office where we mailed our postcards. There was the railing where we watched the setting sun. There was the cool mid-century elementary school where classes were scheduled to start that week.
King Kamehameha III Elementary School in Lahaina
We had to drive around a number of downed palm fronds and we saw a handful of uprooted trees, but there was no looming sense of danger. A shop owner said high winds weren’t uncommon for this time of year and our only real worry was that they might delay our flight home later that evening. We were back on Route 30 by noon and both the wind and the traffic seemed to calm down as we rounded the West Maui Mountains. After grabbing a late lunch and spending some time at a couple of unremarkable shopping malls in the center of the island, we made our way to the airport.
As we charged our phones and waited to board our flight, the setting sun revealed the ominous glow of brushfires on the foothills of Haleakalā to the east. We had heard there were some brushfires on the island but understood they had been contained. Still, being able to see the fires was disconcerting. I mentioned as much in a flippant photo caption I uploaded to Instagram as we boarded our flight.
But the fires we saw from the airport weren’t the only ones burning on Maui. A satellite image taken around the same time our flight departed revealed two wildfires: the one we saw to the east of the airport and the one we couldn’t see on its west side. This was the one destroying everything we had seen in Lahaina only hours before.
my naïve Instagram post alongside a satellite Image (courtesy NASA/USGS) illustrating the fires we could see from the airport (to the right) and those we couldn’t (to the left)
Of all the potential disasters we had considered, never once had we thought about wildfires. We knew we were staying on the dry side of the island and the weather forecast had included a “red flag warning” on occasion, but deadly wildfires were the sort of thing that happened in the desert backcountry of California, not the idyllic shores of Maui.
We were wrong.
In what has come to be understood as a grotesque alignment of contributing factors, it appears the high winds that morning knocked down power lines that caused both the electrical outages we had experienced and ignited grass fires that we hadn’t. Those same high winds fanned what started out as small brushfires and caused them to grow large and uncontained. They leaped over the backed-up cars on Route 30. They spread through the tightly packed historic storefronts of downtown Lahaina. Some were trapped in their cars on Front Street where we had shopped. Some jumped into the waters off the harbor jetty where we had watched our children learn to surf. Some, it seems, died in the eclectic collection of modest wood-frame homes we had, as tourists, admired for their quaintness.
To state the obvious, we were incredibly lucky. Had we stayed at our resort a few hours longer (as originally planned) or had the fire started a few hours earlier (as it easily could have), we would have faced much more than the minor inconveniences we experienced that day. Instead, we started learning the awful truth of the disaster during our layover in Phoenix the following morning. As images of the unimaginable destruction began to appear in the news, we couldn’t help but compare them to photos we had taken in Lahaina. It was hard to comprehend how the entire town was simply gone.
But we were only tourists. We were haole who had only superficially passed through this place where others had lived and worked and raised their families for generations. Homes and heirlooms were lost forever. Lives were lost forever: well over a hundred at the time of this writing (surpassing the number killed in the tsunami that devastated Hilo in 1960). What became of the woman who patiently taught my daughters to surf? Is the family of the tour bus driver who yelled at me on the Road to Hana safe? And what about the countless other Lahaina residents we didn’t even notice as obliviously shopped for sunglasses and ate our shaved ice?
From the safety of the home we returned to at the end of our vacation, we are free to wonder about such things. As the scale of the tragedy came into focus in the days that followed, I struggled to identify the emotion I was feeling. The best word to describe it is guilt. I feel my family and I took something from this place that now no longer exists. It's not that the fires in Lahaina were the result of some careless action on our part, but I do feel in some way culpable. I feel this way because we, along with the millions of other people who have visited Maui, all changed it in small ways that may have been imperceptible at the moment, but eventually added up to a total bill that Lahaina was left to pay after we boarded our flights and went home.
Because so many of us came to visit over the years, we changed the economy of the island so that its once-irrigated agricultural fields were abandoned to become expanses of dry, non-native grasses. Because we wanted to stay at fancy resorts and eat at fine restaurants, we encouraged development to outstrip its supporting infrastructure. Because we flew thousands of miles to this dot of paradise in the middle of the Pacific, untold tons of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide were emitted into the atmosphere, raising its temperature and intensifying the winds of distant hurricanes such that a small grassfire could grow into a deadly inferno.
I hope no one ever has to go through what the people of Lahaina are going through now. I hope the dangers of wildfires on a warming planet become better understood. I hope lessons will be learned and actions will be taken. That, I hope, is one last gift Lahaina leaves us with.
That, I hope, is the last thing we take from Maui.
donations to the Hawai’i Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund can be made here
