Unfortunately, just as February began, I was forced to leave Chestertown, where there’s always something to do and everybody knows your name, and go away to a strange land where every day’s the same. I have landed on an island where the most interesting thing to do is watch whales have sex. It’s the end of their breeding season in Maui but the brutes are still at it. It’s just disgusting, as you would imagine. They roll and thrash all around, huffing and puffing huge sprays, flippers and flukes spanking the surface, rising their big heads way up to see if anybody’s looking (well of course they are). There’s so little else to do here that people pay $29 each to line the rails of ships and watch the shameless spectacle, or go by the hundreds to points of land where they stare at it through binoculars.
I really can’t blame folks for becoming voyeurs in a place where even the weather reports are boring. There’s a Maui weather channel, presented with no sense of irony at all, which gives a seven-day forecast, every week, that goes like this: Sunny and 80, Sunny and 80, Sunny and 80, Sunny and 80, Sunny and 81, Partly Sunny and 79, Sunny and 80. That day the temperature plummeted from 81 to 78, I saw people had bundled up in windbreakers. Nighttime lows also can be a trial for the unprepared, varying wildly from 63 to 60, when you have to sleep under a heavy sheet.
Occasionally Maui weathermen do shift to the mainland, and we learn that Hawaii is the only state in the Union that doesn’t have snow on the ground. So everybody here has been avidly focusing on the more interesting times in Kent and Queen Anne’s and whatever surrounds them. It’s either Weather Channel, or drag yourself to the beaches where it’s just horny whales, enormous turtles, colored fish and young women tanning in string bikinis, day after day.
Now, don’t for a minute think life’s without hardship here, so far from home. There’s mosquitoes, centipedes, snails and Hawaiian music. The very first day my nose pinked. Already it’s peeling. And today’s just like yesterday and tomorrow. Y’know, when theologians talk about a paradise, they never dwell on its possibility of everlasting sameness. I’m here to tell you, when you’ve seen one whale sporting or one hottie tanning, you’d best keep checking. For something to do.
When I get home, what am I going to talk about? Not only did I miss all the excitement there, I bet nobody’ll want to hear one word about the troubles I’ve known.
ford says
I think golf is fairly varied, even in HI.