Unfamiliar Fishes

A defining summer of my life was the summer I turned eleven, when my family rented a room in an “apartment hotel” on Oahu and toured around Kaui, Maui, and the big island of Hawaii. My parents each took a course at the University of Hawaii, where I found a copy of Harriet the Spy in the University bookstore and read it over and over the rest of the summer. We arrived on Kamehameha Day, a holiday that we had never heard of before we first saw his statue entirely draped in leis in front of the Aliiolani Hale in Honolulu.

All four of us—my parents and my brother and me—read books about Hawaii for the next thirty years, and planned another trip on the summer of my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary and my 25th. We were able to return to many of the places we’d frequented that summer so long ago, note the differences, and luxuriate in the things that had stayed the same (the Royal Hawaiian is still pink and easy to spot from the surf. Waikiki is still a great place to meet other people who like to build sand castles. The International Market place is still a fun place to walk around, as long as you have a good grip on your wallet.) Walker was eleven that summer, and now he longs to return as much as I always have; I hope it doesn’t take him as long to get back for a second visit.

I still read everything I can about Hawaii, so when Sarah Vowell came out with Unfamiliar Fishes, I knew I had to get my hands on it eventually. It wasn’t as funny as The Wordy Shipmates, which is my favorite of her books so far, but it was at least as amusing as Assassination Vacation. And she put some of the previous stories I’d read in context, like Michener’s severe missionaries, who had given me the horrors as a child:

“It’s tempting to reduce the initial encounters between Hawaiians and missionaries to some sort of clunky prequel to Footloose. After all, when Daniel Chamberlain witnessed his first hula, he wrote, ‘I scarcely ever saw anything look more Satanic.’ Yet a procreative hula honoring a high chief strikes me as emblematically Hawaiian because it is conservative. The cultural collision of the New Englanders and their new neighbors isn’t a quarrel between barefoot, freewheeling libertines and starchy, buttoned-up paragons of virtue (though that is how the missionaries see it). To me, it is the story of traditionalists squaring off.”

Vowell goes back and forth between New England and Hawaii, as historians must, but her trademark sense of humor makes the contrast seem a little less stark than usual:

“I sat in the pew where the young Melville once sat. It’s a nice little church, its walls lined with tributes to men lost at sea. But the place is marred by the phony, cartoonish ship-shaped pulpit the town put there after the John Huston movie of Moby-Dick came out in 1956 and tourists showed up expecting to see the stupid movie prop Orson Welles stood behind to deliver the sermon. I know sixteen-year-olds who have never heard of Bill Murray, much less John Huston; I think it’s safe to say visitors’ Huston-movie expectations have dwindled to the point where the real pulpit can be once again restored.”

I get the sense, reading Vowell, that she might be like Samuel Johnson, who wrote “I dogmatize and am refuted, and in this cycle find my delight.” Otherwise, how could she spend enough time indoors while on a Hawaiian island to dig up stories like the one about the schoolmaster Mr. Cooke who ran the Chiefs’ Children’s School and flogged the three Kamehameha brothers with a rawhide whip imported from Connecticut when they would not “give up their heathen, native ways”?

She does get out, though, touring a garden which “honors the architecture of Maui’s original inhabitants and immigrants, featuring a traditional Hawaiian grass house, a Portuguese oven, a Filipino hut, a Japanese teahouse, a Chinese pagoda, a Korean gate, and a New England missionary’s house….Amid the Buddhist silhouettes in the Kepaniwai Gardens, the puritanical Massachusetts saltbox looks as exotic—as ethnic—as the pagoda.”

Mostly, though, Vowell has done the indoor work of digging up such things as “an editorial in Planter’s Monthly” which “complained, “The so-called Coronation of the King [Kalakaua], with the attendant follies and extravagances, has been directly damaging to the property interests and welfare of the country.”

She concludes hopefully, saying that some of the old Hawaiian ways endure, despite the many efforts to change them on the part of 19th-century missionaries and other people who have been inexorably drawn by the extravagant beauty and friendliness of the Hawaiian islands.

Have you ever gotten to go? Do you long to go back?