Maui Dawgs

Whenever my husband and I are on Maui, we wrestle with the temptation to go naive and disappear into the wild rather than get on a plane and head back to Boston. It's not just the thought of twelve or sixteen hours in transit--at the mercy of the airlines--that makes us quail; and it's not just that the snow and cold of the northeast will greet us on arrival. It's also that we have to forsake the gorgeous light of the islands--and, worse, leave our Hawaiian home, Makena Beach. Who in his right mind would do such a thing?

We entertain fantasies about simply never going back. It's an easy fantasy to indulge, and it's grown more complicated and colorful over the years. "We'll send a note. It'll arrive via strippergram. Singing strippergram, in fact. The note will repeat that famous letter in the movie Apocalypse Now: 'Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids!' We'll live in a tent--or maybe a rusted van. We'll build outrigger canoes. We'll make friends with the island's legions of feral cats. We'll be feral ourselves! We'll be Maui Dawgs!"

Maui Dawgs is our shorthand for the people who appear to have done what we only dream about doing. They're skinny (because they can't afford the luxury of body fat). They work in surf shops or do odd jobs. They seem aimless, at loose ends; and why would they seem any other way? Where do they have to be? This is Maui, after all. Local magazines say that it's the best island in the world. It's paradise. We could be happy, grubby, carefree Maui Dawgs... sure we could!

But cruel reality has a way of seeping in around the edges. A horde of 20-something Maui Dawgs appears on the beach one Monday morning: an informal cleanup crew setting Makena's Little Beach back to rights after the previous evening's revels. We marvel at their smiling selflessness, their civic responsibility; they are led by a young blond man who laughs as he greets us, but then we notice how he's shaking. Is it the DTs? Is he coming down off something? Is he cold, after having slept rough on the sand? Or is it simply hunger that has left him so pale?

His companions don't seem as bad off; they are as friendly and gregarious as the one with the shakes, and seem to be in perfect health, though one of them, a young woman, makes a point of mentioning how hungry she is. We're touched by their efforts to make Makena Beach presentable, and troubled by their hunger, so we give them some food we've brought along and twenty bucks. Their smiles remain cheerful, unforced... but now they seem tinged with relief, with the extra joy of not having to starve for another day, for at least one day. Where will they go next? They shrug. Lahaina town. Or some sandy stretch someplace, where they can set up a tent.

Throughout the week, my husband and I play a game of spot the Maui Dawgs. There's one, riding a clapped-out bicycle: he's got to be about sixty, with a long white beard, his shirtless torso indelibly tanned, his skin loose and weathered by the sun, kind of hanging off him because, as we keep marveling, Maui Dawgs have no body fat. And look at that guy in the parking lot before Long's Drugs: his Ford Mustang is a classic car streaked with rust, but it's got a good sound system at least. He's blasting rock and roll, his door open, one foot on the tarmac and the other slung up on the dashboard. He too is shirtless, his muscles lean and his skin burnt, his red hair in salty disarray, but he has a pissed-off look about him--like he's had enough now, and he'd ready to go home to Michigan...

We see one kid around fairly frequently. He pops up at the beach, but we also see him at Safeway or at Starbuck's. We don't know his name, so we just call him Joe, in honor of that old Sinead O'Connor song. Joe is about 20; he lives at home, and bums around picking up cash in whatever way he can. He's vague about that point--though when he asks us for a dollar, we get the idea. (We give him six dollars. That'll at least buy him a cup of coffee and a roll.) Joe's story hardly changes from day to day: he got into a nasty scrap with someone who owed him money. Two guys jumped him and stole what little cash he had. Someone else is looking for him--not because Joe did anything, but just because this big mean guy is, well, big and mean. Joe bends our ears with affectless, slightly slurred way of speaking--his stoner accent--and then trots off. We see him later heading out toward the sea with another kid; they both have a furtive look, staring at the huge red sun as it sinks, ears pricking up at the onset of night.

And us, in our sunscreen-stained jams and tattered T-shirts? We're not Maui Dawgs, we realize with a sad little shock. We're a couple of middle aged guys who pay $10 every morning for our Jamba Juice. We're tourists who will gripe about having to leave, but there's no doubt that at the appointed time we will dutifully take our assigned seats in coach and head back home, leaving paradise to its sweet, lost lotus eaters, a place to dream of and miss, except for two weeks every year or so when we're here, in this illusion and light with the green surf, the gold sands, the whales and turtles.

Ah, but underneath the pleasure of our tropical escape is the bittersweet knowledge that even if we lived here, we wouldn't be home now.