People Leave

In the past couple of months seven people I know have moved away from Kauai “back to the mainland.” It kind of sucks. I suppose it a characteristic of our age of mobility for people to be coming and going, but the population on Kauai is especially transient. Local people have a reputation for not bothering to get to know anyone who hasn’t already been here a few years and it’s understandable. Why make friends with someone who lives on the island as a temporary experiment and may hop a plane back to “real life” at any moment?

I’m coming up on two years living here myself which makes me still malihini (newcomer) as far as the locals are concerned, but I’ve actually lived here longer than a lot of people I meet.

Living on this remote island sometimes seems like a fragile experiment that could be terminated at any time. Even Hawaiians can only trace their lineage back a few centuries. No place on earth is newer to human habitation. So when people leave it gives me a sense of uneasiness, as if the party is about to start winding down.

That feeling doesn’t accurately reflect reality, of course. Today, like every other day here, plane loads and plane loads of people arrived on Kauai, mostly tourists, some coming home, and some like me two years ago, just beginning a new chapter -and for them the party has just begun.