Paradise Lost: Remembering Maui Before the Fires

The first time I set foot on the East End, I was staggered by the diversity of its natural beauty. There were white sand beaches of course, but then just a few miles away, 80-foot-tall cliffs, deep forests, giant sand dunes, rich farmland, swamps, ponds, bays, lakes, even small separate islands just off the mainland.

This was the world, it seemed, but in miniature. And enhancing this diversity were the villages, each very different from another. One had been built on fishing, another tourism, another farming and another for the wealthy summer people.

I was 16. And my dad had told the family we were moving here. It was amazing.

As a young adult, I often traveled abroad when things slowed down for Dan’s Papers in the wintertime. Nowhere did I find this extraordinary diversity. And then one winter, I went to Maui. And there, halfway around the world, I found a little miniature world that was a match to the East End. Deep woods, cliffs, desert, beaches, ponds, even a little island off the main island.

On Long Island’s East End, the little island was owned by a family, the Gardiners. In Maui, the little island was being bombarded by the U.S. Navy for target practice. Different yes, but also the same.

And so I fell in love with Maui, too. I published a Dan’s Papers on Maui for a while. And one year, I considered pulling up stakes and moving there. There’d have been no more Dan’s Papers here if I had done that. More about this later.

One particular similarity between Lahaina and Sag Harbor involved whaling, which sprang up in Sag Harbor in 1760 and in Lahaina in the 1820s.

Sag Harbor’s downtown is a national treasure. In 1849, its most prosperous year, 100 whaling ships tied up at Sag Harbor’s Long Wharf. On their year-long voyages around the world, they’d often return with new crew members hired in foreign lands. Thousands of these sailors roamed the streets here, speaking dozens of different exotic languages.

Thinking about Sag Harbor, I can picture it in my mind. And I can also see Lahaina in my mind. Indeed, Lahaina is also special because before whaling, it was the capital of the Hawaiian Islands, ruled by Queen Keopuolani.

Lahaina also has a special tree, as important to that place as Long Wharf is to Sag Harbor. It seems preposterous to compare a tree to Long Wharf. But on my first visit to Maui this tree, a banyan, stood more than 60 feet tall and filled an entire acre in downtown Lahaina, with not just a single massive trunk but dozens of them, all having dropped down from the limbs to seize the ground and make new roots far away from the tree’s center.

Bands played under the leafy shade of that tree. Lectures and picnics were held. The tree had been planted as an 8-foot-tall sapling in 1873, in Courthouse Square near the Lahaina Museum. How it grew!

And now, last week, in a sudden flash of fire, Lahaina burned to a smoldering ruin. But somehow, though badly singed, the tree still stands.

Some memories from our various trips to Maui: On the first trip, we lived for the winter in an oceanfront apartment in Kihei, half an hour from Lahaina.

One day, in our kitchen, the dishes on our shelves rattled. They rattled a few seconds, then stopped, then a minute later rattled again. On the radio we learned there was huge 30-foot surf in Honolua Bay, a few miles beyond Lahaina. We drove up. Watched the most astonishing acrobatic surfing imaginable.

I also wrote columns for The Maui Sun newspaper. A man named Grayson ran it. It competed against an old line hundred-year-old paper called the Maui Times. I got paid $40 an article. And got to like the guy.

Ten years later, back in Maui, we drove up a narrow switchback road at 4 a.m. to the top of a dormant volcano to watch dawn break over the opposite rim of the crater. Soon after our arrival, a bus with bicycles chained to the roof pulled up, a dozen tourists, all wearing T-shirts reading “Captain Bob’s Haleakala Downhill” piled out, climbed on the bikes and began pedaling furiously through the dawn down the 10,000 feet of switchback to sea level. I thought it one of the most dangerous things ever. But they’d all signed waivers, the captain told me.

A few winters after that, back on Maui, we didn’t see Grayson, but the paper was around. Afterwards, coming home from John F. Kennedy International Airport to East Hampton through a bitter cold late-night snowstorm, I insisted we stop at the Dan’s Papers office in Bridgehampton to pick up my company’s mail. It was 2 a.m. Couldn’t wait till morning. Further along, we came up our darkened driveway to find that the electric lines to the house were down.

To create heat, I put wood in the stone fireplace in our bedroom, lit a fire and, while my beloved snuggled under the cozy covers, I sat on the bed reading my mail in the glow of the flames. Soon there were two piles of mail on the bed, one of junk mail and the other of important letters. One was from Grayson. He was back in Oregon. Would I like to buy The Maui Sun? Another was from an investor in Manhattan. Would I care to sell him Dan’s Papers? I held the two up to the light. My ticket out. I’d think about it.

As the fire was burning low, I walked the junk mail pile across the room and threw it into the fire, then returned to the bed to discover the pile still on the bed was the junk mail. That act, I decided, made up my mind.

Ten years later, I returned to Maui to start a free Dan’s Papers there. Overseen by an editor, it published weekly that winter season and then the next. But it eventually shut down.

Of course, I can still see Lahaina in my mind. We walk down Front Street to the Pioneer Inn, buy a raw steak and cook it for dinner on the charcoal grill in the courtyard there.

Lahaina’s still there. I know it is.