Chicken, anyone?

I have some news. I felt the first earthquake tremors of my life this morning! Well, once in Mexico, Jack and I were both woken up in the middle of the night. But it was very subtle and we never knew for sure if it was a small tremor or some other third world shake.

This morning was most unsubtle. I was sleeping at Robin's and at about 7:15, I first heard a loud rumbling like a train coming through the doggie door. The tourist sugercane train is narrow gauge and on the 'other side'. Then the bed started shaking and the mirrored closet door rattled. I looked outside and decided it was some weird wind event. It wasn't. I lay back down and a few minutes later it happened again. Okay, okay! I'll get up! I did.

The power was out at Robin's. I fed the dogs and wandered around the house, deciding it must have been earthquake tremors. I tried to call the wife. Not working. We can make local calls but some tower or whatever must have been damaged. I couldn't leave in our decided upon fashion, which was to go in and out through the garage, using the garage door opener as my locking mechanism. Door wouldn't open. So I left through the front door locking myself out on my way.

The neighborhood looked normal. There were not any screeching sirens or any plumes of billowing acrid blackness roiling back against the slate sky. I drove into Kehei. No stop lights working. Cops acting as traffic directors. Remember this is all in the Corvette. I feel like they should pull me over for no reason in that car. No power in Kehei. Drove by Starbucks 'cause if any one would . . .

They didn't.

People sat around the outside tables at Starbucks and all the other little restaurants as if it were just another busy Sunday morning breakfast party. But there were no lights, no wait people scurrying, never with empty hands, hoping to fill empty pockets. There were no coffee cups and of all the sidewalk wanderers, none sipped 'go-cups'. Okay, I'll go back to Lahaina.

Between the two towns, you can see a vertical row of about 15 of those giant windmills like in California. They stretch away up this mountain ridge. They were all static. No power on the whole island. You know, the whole time I've been here, it hasn't felt especially like an island. Not sure what that's supposed to feel like. But once the power was out and my lines of communication to home were severed, I suddenly realized how I am on a tiny archipelago speckling a miniscule percentage of the Pacific Ocean. It doesn't bother me or freak me out. It still feels like I could get in the 'vette if I wanted to and drive to Cisco, Utah!

I got to Lahaina and Livewire was open and the computers were up and running. But the street lights were still dead as I got here. On the way over, there were lines of people out the door to an ABC Store. There was a long line across a parking lot in Kehei leading to a smoking, hissing portable spit with chickens roasting away. It already looked like some kind of big disaster.

It's a different deal here on Maui. It's much too real for me. Aspen is my/our real world but I guess there is some merit grudgingly admitted by me to the people who say Aspen is not the real world. Here, you have the whole bad-ass, tough-guy thing going on in your face. Reverse prejudice doesn't care if I'm not prejudiced. My arms and hands get cut up at work and my legs and feet get cut up at play (trying to surf). The cops are gnarly and they are always hiring. They even advertise on T.V. in infomercial fashion and reveal the pay. Let's just say it's less than I'm making.

Homelessness is year-round and prevalent. Crazies and old burn-outs from the sixties do their unchoreographed solitaire waltzes and tangos in the mangos. Graffiti lives at the boarded up former home on Front Street that was the coffeeshop I went to last time I was here. There is a lot of broken glass along the bike path. I've gotten two flats so far.

The landlubber cruise ship hoards wander quick in packs like schools of blind fish. They love it and take pictures of signs and seascapes. Even when they look at the photos, they won't notice the disreputable characters lounging menacingly on the benches. Corners of parking lots are overgrown with vegetation and provide shape for shady doings.

On the other hand, it is staggeringly beautiful. Mountains into oceans will always do that. The ocean is warm! If you did do the tourist trail, you would see exactly what you would expect to see and love it.

I like to live somewhere considered not to be the real world. But when I travel, I seek out the grit behind the skit. I wonder about the angry brother of a handsome Hawaiian man who works the hotels and juggles flame, wearing grass. I talk to the crippled skinny black man, wheelchair parked daily somewhere on Front Street. He never once asks me for money. He just gently suggests reading the bible.

I read the letters to the editor, not the dining guide. I look for something to bring home that is not for sale in the trinket kiosks. Experience, understanding, cultural awareness, respect and maybe a dash-board hula dancer or two is what I want.

"And the palm trees are waving goodbye in the breeze." I wrote that line years ago in Mexico. The difference between Lahaina and Aspen? In Aspen, it says 'caution, falling ice!' In Lahaina, it says 'caution, falling coconuts!' And they mean it.

It should be one hell of a transition sea to ski. Twelve minutes left out of this six dollar hour. It's overcast and windy. There was nobody in the ocean this morning and the waves were churning away like a big hand scooping sand.

Annie called me to make sure we were alright. So the news of these tremors made it to the mainland.

I saw pictures of Buffalo's 'perfect storm' on the T.V. last night. Pretty distant and foreign looking to me, whereas once I grew up in that landscape and didn't even think about it 'cause it was so normal.

The idea of actually surfing was abstract even a couple years ago. I remember wanting to buy a surf-board anyway 'cause they look so cool. I got up four times yesterday. If the power's out, you can still surf. I'm going this afternoon, unless I get there and there are waves but nobody out. I may be a beginner surfer but I'm not a beginner observer and thinker. I know that if there is a bunch of untracked snow on one part of a run and lots of skiers have already been skiing around there, that there is probably a good reason that they are not going there.

If we need to pick between the wife and daughter coming over here or us sending Rachel to Europe, I would pick the latter. Everytime, though, I think about having a house on the beach and car available, I'm torn. I want to have some savings after all this. Also, there is a very good possibility that this opportunity will be available to us in the future.

Gotta go, I'm about out of time.