Part Four: The Chapter I Didn't Write Until Now

I told you, fourteen years ago, that I'd write Part Eight when I moved to Hawaii. Here's the truth I owe you: I never did.

Parts One through Seven were written in early 2012, on the ten-year anniversary of my first trip. Part Seven ended with a declaration — that I was packing up my life in central South Carolina and going home to Kauai. We set the move date for late 2012. I told everyone. Family. Friends. My boss. People stood up and clapped when I told them. Others said, "John, as long as I've known you, there's been Hawaii — good for you."

Then late 2012 came, and we didn't move. The financial weight of it scared me. The insurance hurdle alone was one I couldn't clear. We made a one-month trip to Kauai in the fall to test the idea, and I came home more convinced. I wrote a checklist for moving to Hawaii. I wrote post after post about it. I declared I'd move again. I meant it every time.

And every time, I didn't go.

The hard chapter

Early 2013 was a hard year. Some of it was the weight of what I hadn't done — the dream I had publicly committed to and quietly walked away from. Some of it was a chapter of life that didn't have anything to do with Hawaii on the surface, but where Hawaii was the steady thing I kept coming back to. Whatever was pono, whatever felt true and right, I could find it again by remembering Waikamoi, by remembering Kamaole III at sunset, by remembering what those islands had told me when I was 21 and didn't know what to do with the message.

A few months after the move I never made, I got a diagnosis I should have gotten as a kid: I'm autistic. At 32 years old, late-diagnosed, suddenly a lot of things in my life made sense for the first time. Looking back, I think the stress of the move-that-wasn't probably surfaced what had been hiding under the surface my whole life. Hawaii had a hand in that too, in its way. The years of intense, deep, special-interest love I poured into one place. The relief of finally understanding why a 21-year-old kid from South Carolina would build his entire identity around a chain of volcanic islands he'd never even seen before.

I'm not telling you this for sympathy. I'm telling you because the next chapter only makes sense if you know this part.

What I actually wanted

It took me years — honestly, the rest of my thirties — to understand what I'd been chasing. I thought what I wanted from Hawaii was to live there. I thought the relationship couldn't be real until I had a Hawaii address and Hawaii license plates and a Hawaii grocery store I went to every week.

It turns out that's not what I wanted at all.

What I wanted was for the relationship to last. I wanted to keep arriving. I wanted that breath I take when I step off the plane and smell the plumeria and hear a Myna bird and feel the trade winds. I wanted to keep being changed by a place that had already changed me once, all the way through. The longing was the gift. Not the prison.

If I'd moved in 2012, I'd have made Hawaii into something it wasn't supposed to be for me. I'd have made it ordinary. The trade winds would have become Tuesday. The plumeria would have become my neighbor's tree. The arrival would have stopped happening because I would have stopped leaving.

I needed to keep going home from Hawaii so that going to Hawaii would never lose its weight.

The Oak Grove and the Hawaii garden

Today I have two sacred places at home, and they're both a kind of answer to that 21-year-old kid on the bench at Waikamoi.

One is an Oak Grove. A stand of trees behind my house in central South Carolina, where I go when I need quiet, when I need to remember what's real, when I need the kind of stillness that only a forest can give you. It's not Waikamoi, but it talks to me the same way. I've come to believe that the bench at Waikamoi taught me how to recognize a place like this — not how to need a particular one.

The other is the Hawaii garden I started building in 2002 with that ti plant from my mother's greenhouse. It's grown into something I can't fully count anymore. Plumerias I've propagated for years. Heliconias and gingers and palms. Plants I collected on trip after trip. Every one of them a piece of an island I love. When I'm tending the garden, I'm somewhere else, even though I'm exactly where I am.

That, plus the trips. So many trips. With Victoria, who got it from the moment we met. The kind of marriage I almost didn't believe was possible — built on a shared love of one place across an ocean that neither of us is from and both of us belong to in a way that has nothing to do with where we sleep at night.

The specific moment I knew Tori got it was October 2, 2012 — about a week before I hiked into Waiʻaleʻale — on the Maha'ulepu Heritage Trail on Kauai's south shore. We were sitting on a bench above the bay, just below the golf course. I felt the same jolt I'd felt at Waikamoi ten years earlier. I looked at her before I'd finished the thought. "Did you, uh, feel that?" "Yes," she said. Hawaii does that. If you're open to it.

And the site. The thing you're reading right now. It started as mauipictures.net in late 2002, became MauiGuide.net in 2003, and became Hawaii-Guide.com when I realized one island wasn't enough. Twenty-four years later it has helped more travelers plan their first trip than I could ever count. Some of them have written me to say their first trip changed them, too. Some of them moved to Hawaii. Some of them, like me, kept going back instead. All of them got something from the place they didn't know they needed.

That's the work I was put here to do. From 7,000 miles away. With my Oak Grove out back and my Hawaii garden in the yard.

For you

If you're reading this and Hawaii is calling you the way it called me on a website written in German in 2002 — go. Don't wait for the moment to be perfect. Don't wait for the financial picture to make perfect sense. Don't wait until you've read every guide and watched every video and made a checklist that covers every possible thing.

You don't have to move there to let it change you. You just have to go.

And whenever you're ready, this whole site — every page, every tool, every trip planner, every twenty-four years of me figuring it out the hard way — exists to make your first trip easier than mine was, and your tenth one even better.

Hawaii changed my life. I hope Hawaii-Guide, in some small way, helps it change yours too.

I'll see you there.

Aloha y'all,
John