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HERE NOW
ACCORDING TO THE guidebook, Maui is shaped like a head. Our cab ride will take us
across the neck, along the jawline, over the chin, mouth, nose, and up to the wide
forehead. I’ve booked us into a hotel in Ka’anapali, which is in the skull just beyond the
hairline, geographically speaking.
We turn a corner and suddenly the ocean is just there, running alongside the road to
the left of us. It can’t be more than thirty feet away.
The vast endlessness of it is shocking. It falls off the end of the world.
“I can’t believe I’ve missed all this,” I say. “I’ve missed the whole wide world.”
Olly shakes his head. “One thing at a time, Maddy. We’re here now.”
I look back at Olly’s ocean eyes and I’m drowning, surrounded on all sides by water.
There’s so much to see that it’s hard to know what to pay attention to. The world is too
big and there’s not enough time for me to see it.
Again he reads my mind. “Do you want to stop and look?”
“Yes, please.”
He asks the driver if it’s OK for us to pull over, and he says it’s no problem at all. He
knows a good place coming up, a park and picnic area.
I’m out of the car before the engine’s off. The water is just a short walk downhill and
then across the sand.
Olly trails a distance behind me.
The ocean.
It’s bluer, bigger, more turbulent than I’d imagined. Wind lifts my hair, scrubs sand and
salt against my skin, invades my nose. I wait until I’m down the hill to take off my shoes.
I roll my jeans up as far as they’ll go. The sand is hot and dry and loose. It waterfalls over
my feet and slips through my toes.
As I get closer to the water, the sand changes. Now it sticks to my feet, coating them
like a second skin. At the water’s edge, it changes again and becomes a liquid velvet. My
feet leave impressions in this softer mix.
Finally, my feet are in the surging water, and then my ankles are, and then my calves. I
don’t stop moving until the water is up to my knees and soaks my jeans.
“Be careful,” Olly calls out from somewhere behind me.
I’m not sure what that means in this context. Be careful because I may drown? Be
careful because I may get sick? Be careful because once you become a part of the world it
becomes a part of you, too?
Because there’s no denying it now. I’m in the world.