Total Immersion One family's 18-month (and counting) Hawaiian Hiatus
By Mike Harrelson
Big Dippers: The author and his sons snorkeling the Big Island's Kohala Coast (Photo by Erik Aeder)
FOUR SNORKELS ABREAST, we flutter-kicked into the steely deep Pacific. A few
hundred yards off Hawaii's lava shoreline we had just seen a family of humpback
whales and hoped for a closer encounter. My wife, Cindy, our kids, Clyde, 11,
and Mason, eight, and I swam seaward, and as the reef dropped away, bubbly
giggles broke the underwater silence. Our boys pointed excitedly at a leviathan
silhouette in the depths, its cryptic singing echoing like a Moog synthesizer
from outer space. Giddy from our brush with megafauna, we all bristled with what
Hawaiians call "chicken skin."
You could say that collecting memories like this has become our family's quest,
and that's why 18 months ago we mothballed our perfectly good Montana lives and
headed to Hawaii for an extended vacation. Since no amount of time off seems to
satisfy our unquenchable thirst for travel and adventure, we took a one-year
sabbatical (which morphed into a second year), anticipating that each day could
hold the opportunity for a "vacation moment." Our swim with the largest animals
on earth, for instance, occurred on an otherwise normal weekday afternoon—after work, school, and homework were done.
Clyde and Mason on a backyard snorkeling expedition near Puako (Photo by Erik Aeder)
It was my parents who instilled this spirit in me some 34 years ago. I was nine
years old in 1967 when we deplaned in the islands to the aromatic seduction of
plumeria and yellow ginger blossoms and a two-year stint on Oahu. Captain Dad—a
doctor in the Army—and miniskirted Mom were also bold enough to cart me and my
two towheaded brothers to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island for a
week, and something about seeing a steaming volcano changed me forever.
Back on the Big Island again to focus on my own family before our kids become
distracted, omigod teenagers, Cindy and I are eager to mix the soup of our
cultural experience and to relive a little childhood ourselves. The kids have
embraced the tropics like Polynesian transplants, and I've been surfing my
middle-aged brains out.
