GRAHAM EZZY - IN THE HANDS OF MAUI

Maui is a parardise with many sides. Graham Ezzy reflects on his childhood there and life on windsurfing’s most famous island.

Words Graham Ezzy // Photos John Carter & Graham Ezzy

‘’What is it like to grow up on Maui? What does the Maui child see?
Sometimes in your childhood on Maui, ash rained from the sky. Sugar cane covers most of the island, leftover from Hawaii’s colonial, plantation past. Before each biannual harvest, they burn the fields to remove leaves from the sugar cane plant, leaving a black pile of stocky sugar cane stems, full of sweet sucrose. Burning starts in the early hours of the morning— three or four— and finishes before the day begins to bustle, which means that you do not often see the big clouds of smoke billowing from the fields on fire. Instead, the ash falls throughout the day from the blue sky like a black snow. If you catch a piece of ash in your hand, it looks like an eyelash heavily caked in mascara, but if you press it with a finger, it dissolves into a carbon smear like a Catholic forehead on Ash Wednesday. These cane fields line the highways into Town. You say “going to town” when you need to go to a shop. You cannot walk to Town because it is too far. Nobody cycles. Everyone drives. Nobody walks in paradise. When you were a kid on Maui, the shoulders of the highways (max speed 55 mph) were covered with cigarette butts, like millions of white, dead locusts. Now, both smoking and littering are out of vogue.

The final frontier, Maui, is an island of misfits. The westbound traveller can travel no further than the Hawaiian archipelago before he has gone so far west he has now gone east. At 20, my father left the promises of a respectable life on the mainland (North America) to live a life of windsurfing on Maui. My best friend’s father went on vacation to Maui between college and law school and never went home. Growing up on Maui, you hear these stories from parents and strangers. Stories of rebels and misfits and players who do not follow the rules. The hippies moved to Maui too. Or, rather, the hippies are always moving to Maui. Go back some decades and visit the town of Paia, and you will only meet windsurfers or hippies. Now a corner of Paia gentrifies every day, and former pro windsurfers (Josh Stone, Rick Markham) play monopoly with the shops and houses.

“ Surfing in Hawaii, confidence is king. Waves smell fear. To be scared is to hesitate ”

But the hippies have not left. Look closely at the sign welcoming you to Paia as you drive in, and you will see a sticker which reads: “Don’t feed the hippies”. You will find the aforementioned hippies sitting in front of the Bank of Hawaii building up Baldwin Avenue. The hippies gentrified along with Paia. When you were a kid growing up on Maui, the hippies were all old men with grey beards and a certain proneness to looking homeless. The hippies of now are young. Maybe you heard them described as “trustafarian”, a bohemian with a big bank account. Maybe they hang out in front of the bank to stay close to their trust funds? Or maybe they gravitate to Mana Foods, the organic food store next door which is probably the best grocery store in the entire world for maximizing quality, variety, and price.

Growing up on Maui, random house parties are your only night life. The county of Maui (which includes the islands of Molokai and Lanai) forbids dancing in bars or restaurants. You cannot do any kind of rhythmic movement to music without a dancing license and an alcohol-free 100 square feet of designated dancing space. What are islanders to do but throw house parties? Huelo (the far east of Haiku) and Kaupo (the other side of Hana) both are popular places for big parties because of their isolation from neighbors and police. A local lawyer said that only two police officers are stationed in Kaupo. An officer cannot answer a call alone, and an officer must stay at the station at all times. Parties go unpoliced.

At one of these Kaupo ragers, a gun was pulled. The handgun was pointed at a tough-guy surfer from the other side of Ho’okipa, which we call “Pavil’s” and where no windsurfers are welcome. The surfer turned his back to the gun and walked to his lifted and tinted Toyota pickup (the pinnacle of Maui auto fashion) while the man holding the gun called him a coward and worse words. The surfer took a baseball bat from the truck and walked back to the man with the gun who now shouted insults, death threats, and profanities. The surfer swung the baseball bat at the man with the gun, knocking him down and out. Growing up on Maui, you hear of at least one murder at a High School party.

Surfing in Hawaii is a lot like that fight in Kaupo: confidence is king. Waves smell fear. To be scared is to hesitate. To hesitate on a big wave is to die. The violence probably surprises your friends who did not grow up on Maui. Drugs drive violence, and parts of Maui smoke everything from Marijuana (“pakalolo” in native Hawaiian) to Crystal Meth (“ice” in the vernacular). But the violence runs deeper than narcotics. Spend enough time on the island and you will see a T-Shirt that reads: “My heroes killed Captain Cook.” Captain Cook was the first European to reach the islands, which he called “Owhyee”

To completely offend Hawaiian tradition and history by error of simplification, you could say that the native Hawaiians had two seasons: war and peace. On his first visit, Cook came in Makahiki, the 4 months of peace and fertility celebration, which lasts from roughly November to March (also the season of big waves). The Hawaiians received Cook as a god. He next visited in the season of the god of war (Ku), and the locals killed and mutilated him in the shallow waters after an argument. The subsequent European immigrants created laws forbidding Hawaiian practices (like hula dancing) and “bought” almost
all the land for nothing. The Hawaiian flag contains the union jack because England owned the islands. Growing up on Maui, you see many Hawaiian flags flying upside down in a statement of the distress caused by colonization, land grabbing, and the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. Growing up in Hawaii, you become aware about the movement for a Reinstated Hawaiian Nation.

To be white skinned in Hawaii is to feel the anger of an entire nation robbed of its wealth by people who look like you. “Haole” is the pejorative term for whites. “Kill Haole Day” is the day that white kids do not go to school. Growing up on Maui, you do not know the real origin of the word “haole” but the folk-etymology claims that it means “soulless” or “without breath”. The native Hawaiians greeted each other by pressing foreheads together and exhaling so that the souls in the breath could touch. “Ole” is “without” and “ha” is “soul” or “breath”. The whites shook hands: soulless.

“ All that matters is whether there are waves and wind ”

“Haole” though always pejorative, can be said endearingly and directed at oneself. The term is both a noun (you are a haole) and an adjective (I went to a haole school). To be born haole in Hawaii is to be homeless. The antonym to Haole is “Local”. “Local” is an ethnicity in Hawaii. Born haole on Maui, you are not Local. Growing up on Maui, you learn the Hawaiian language in school, but you can barely remember any of the words or grammar because nobody you know speaks it in daily life. Traditionally, the Hawaiian language is only oral, but the missionary haoles created a latin based alphabet for the language. This alphabet has only 13 letters: 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and 8 consonants (h, k, l, m, n, p, w, and a glottal stop called an ‘okina and denoted in print with the single open quote mark: ‘). Since the language is almost half vowels, it sounds like song. Inescapable, this history surrounds you on Maui. Growing up on Maui, if you drive for five hours, you drive a circle around the volcano Haleakala (means: house of the sun) and are back where you started.

Travel to anywhere from Hawaii is far, expensive, and difficult, so when you grow up on Maui you spend your school vacations going to the beach. Windsurfing is not as cool as surfing, but if your parents windsurf, they teach you at Kanaha Beach next to the airport. At Kanaha, you can only windsurf after 11:00 am because the local fishermen wanted to ban windsurfing on Maui’s north shore in the 1980’s and the compromise was the 11 o’clock rule. Growing up on Maui, you do not care about the 11 o’clock rule because the trade winds (15-20 knots, NE) start to really blow around noon.

Growing up on Maui, you like to windsurf in waves at Ho’okipa (means: hospitality). Driving in on the one-way road, you first pass “Pavil’s” with its drugs, surfers, and angry locals with legitimate grievances. During the Makahiki time of year, you windsurf in waves the size of hills at the “The Point.”

Maybe part of you sees that there are no good parts or bad parts of Maui, but that these things all together are Maui— the hippies, the house parties, the drugs, the violence, the waves. A place with so many positives shining brightly must have dark shadows. But, when you are a kid driving to the beach next to your father in his rust-bucket pickup, all that matters is whether there are waves and wind.’’ Graham Ezzy.