Circumscription

In Hawai‘i the highways turn in on themselves, following coastlines like cattle follow fences, carving narrow grooves in the grass they eat, the thin paths of dirt demarcating their world, more real to them than the barbed metal that encapsulates their world. Hawaiian highways make slow spirals along the sea, running into and out of each other and occasionally breaking into a hard turn and cutting uphill, only to find that when they come back down they are already there, already circling the shore.

I was born in Hawai‘i, on the island of Hawai‘i. We call it the Big Island to avoid confusion. I have lived all but the last eighteen months of my life in one of the most geographically isolated places on Earth, but only recently have I begun to understand how big is the difference between island and continent, between neighborhood and city, between path and highway.

In Hawai‘i I would drive in long circles, mountains on one side and ocean on the other. In Hawai‘i I sometimes hated the surrounding ocean, the limits it placed on the land and on my ability to explore it. In Hawai‘i I dreamed of taking trips on roads that wouldn’t turn me back around towards home, of hiking to mountaintops from which I wouldn’t be able to see the ocean. In Hawai‘i I was rarely lost, and in Hawai‘i I always knew how to get home, even when I’d managed, somehow, to lose track of my destination.

When I first bought a car on the mainland – what people in Hawai‘i call the rest of the country – I had a moment of panic. Maybe it was more than a moment. I remember sitting in my new-to-me car in an empty furniture store parking lot, long after the lady to whom I had given $1,200 had left in her daughter’s truck. I sat and I stared as far down the straightness of Shaw Avenue as Fresno’s smog would allow, transfixed by the thought that the road ahead of me, the straight and wide and still-foreign street, could take me to Highway 99, which could take me to other highways that could take me Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York, Florida, Mexico, Canada.

The term agoraphobia means fear of open spaces, fear of the unknown. I first learned about it in a high school psychology class. But whenever I thought about this fear before buying my first Californian car, I pictured pale women and squinting, potbellied men skittering from their doorsteps to the mailbox and then back to the womblike security of their homes. I’d smiled at the image. I’m a hiker, a driver, an explorer, and when I don’t have to be indoors I’m usually not, so I’d never understood the fear of openness, of freedom. I’d never had anything but contempt for people who give in to their angst, who fear or hate the world because it’s too big for them to control, who like to pretend that their little, chosen islands are all they need to think about. I sneered at the closeness of the agoraphobic’s world, and I pitied the skittering, shyly ducking people of my imagination.

But as I sat in my little, dark, womblike car I clenched the steering wheel tightly even though the keys were in my lap, and I stared at the terrible straightness of the street beyond the parking lot, frozen by the awful, unimaginable hugeness of the land beneath me. For the first time in my life I longed for the enclosing security of an ocean. I longed for the familiar island roads that I knew would never have let me get this far from home. I longed, then, for a road that would end before I do.

In Hawai‘i I couldn’t understand what it would be like not to live near the sea. I’ve lived in places where I couldn’t always see the ocean, but I’d always known where it was; I’d always been able to point the way to the nearest shoreline without much thought. But the idea of a piece of land so big you could never see it all in one lifetime, the idea of a horizon with 360 degrees of land meeting sky, the idea of a world whose limits are not defined by an ocean – these are what kept me up at night, when I first decided to leave my island. Because when I lived on an island so did everyone else, and I still grapple, occasionally, with the idea that the roads outside my door don’t have to curve if they don’t want to.

In Hawai‘i I navigated using as reference two ever-present horizons – the mountain and the ocean. The cardinal directions do not rule in Hawai‘i. There, we use mauka as noun and adjective for mountain, uphill, towards the mountains – and we use makai for ocean, downhill, towards the ocean. Just as the ancient Hawaiians, ocean-crossing navigators of still unacknowledged and misunderstood skill, a people who were crisscrossing the largest body of water on the planet using only stars and their understanding of the ocean centuries before Europeans – Spaniards or Vikings – would cross the Atlantic, just as they once used sea conditions and the constancy of stars to understand their place in the world, so too did I learn to use mauka and makai to give confused tourists directions to the nearest gas station.

But in Fresno the mountains are too big and numerous and the ocean is too far away for them to be useful references, and the Central Valley is too big, too wide and long and flat for me to tell, without the help of Google Maps, which way the ocean is. And even without the smog, the too-gentle sloping of this great, landlocked valley didn’t give me enough elevation to look down, as I was used to, on the Pacific. So in Fresno, I learned to drive the grid. North or South or East or West, I drove in half-mile segments with red light to measure my progress. In Fresno, where there the steepest hills lead up to railroad crossings, where people in battered minivans and lifted trucks and refurbished police cars with spotlights and radio mounts still attached have all been trained to drive below the speed limit and run red lights, I had to relearn navigation.

In Hawai‘i I couldn’t understand what it would be like not to live near the sea. I’ve lived in places where I couldn’t always see the ocean, but I’d always known where it was; I’d always been able to point the way to the nearest shoreline without much thought. But the idea of a piece of land so big you could never see it all in one lifetime, the idea of a horizon with 360 degrees of land meeting sky, the idea of a world whose limits are not defined by an ocean – these are what kept me up at night, when I first decided to leave my island. Because when I lived on an island so did everyone else, and I still grapple, occasionally, with the idea that the roads outside my door don’t have to curve if they don’t want to.

My ancestors were travelers too, coming to almost the exact opposite side of the world in just a few generations, to bring my last name to Hawaii. From Ireland to New England and Arkansas and Kansas, my family has crossed this country only to pause in Hawai‘i, where, despite what Texans and Floridians may think, can be found America’s southernmost point. Long before I left my island I stood at this point and leaned over the rough cliffs, and I knew there was nothing but water and wind for hundreds of miles. I pictured the curvature of the Earth hiding Tahiti and Samoa and Easter Island and wondered what it would be to cross this massive a barrier,this no man’s land, as my ancestors did.

The first car I ever drove was an old, beat-up ranch truck. Since I was just tall enough to reach the clutch, my friend Teddy’s dad let me guide his truck down the gravel road leading from the corral to his house. I couldn’t manage, then, the subtle coordination of clutch and gas pedals, and I didn’t yet understand the physics of engine and gears and tires, or how to make the whole system cooperate with itself. With the help of a steady downhill grade I managed, eventually, to guide the old truck onto the patch of flattened grass that served as a parking lot without hitting anything. After I killed the truck’s rumbling engine close enough to where Teddy’s dad had wanted to leave it he took the keys from me. But the power, the freedom that is a car stayed. I sat for an extra second on the dirty bench seat and thought about how, if he hadn’t taken the keys, and if I could figure out how to get it in reverse, Teddy’s dad’s truck could take me home, or to my grandparents’ house in Hilo, to the beach in Kona. My island shrunk that day.

Before then, I’d never understood Teddy’s obsession with cars. I liked his dad’s horses and trees and guns too much to care about what year was the red Mustang hanging laminated on his bedroom wall, or how quickly the yellow Lambo next to it could get to sixty miles an hour. I wouldn’t even learn that Lambo and Lamborghini were the same thing until years later. I only knew that cars were things that adults used to take me places. But that day I also knew that I, with only a little help, had managed to make a car go. I think it’s then that I first began to understand what the bike and car movies my uncles and cousins and friends always seemed to be making me watch – Vanishing Point and Easy Rider among them – were trying to get me to care about. And even though I’d like to believe that there was, and is, more to my fascination with these movies about escape from society than a childish, angst-driven desire to be different, I cannot deny the exotic draw of the images of Barry Newman or Peter Fonda cruising down straight desert highways or southern backcountry roads, nothing like the island streets I was used to. And even though I was still a couple decades away from having a panic attack in a Fresno parking lot, I like to think that, even then, the freedom I was beginning to long for also scared me, a little.

Roads connect the houses of our childhoods to the rest of the world, and to the future as we’ll eventually know it. And even though we adults tell our children that we are the masters of the road, that we decide where and how and when our worlds will expand, we know that’s a lie. Roads are freedom, we say. We believe that roads tell us of all the places we are free to go, of all the ways we are not caged. But roads don’t go everywhere. We can take road trips, we can drive with no destination, we can wander down any lonely highway we choose, but if we try to leave the road, what then, we would be forced to ask ourselves? So we don’t. On the roads, we may find something like adventure in a place that’s new to us, but we don’t find anything that hasn’t already been found. The road was put there so we could find it. And besides, we’ve got to come back eventually.

Maps might disagree, but I know that I still live on an island. The difference is that this new island is of my own creation. Sometimes I think this is why Vanishing Point and Easy Rider both ended in fireballs. There was nowhere new the roads could lead.