Other People's Journeys IV

His name was James. He lived in the little room at the back of the cabin. He came from Seattle and he had been on the North Shore of Oahu for three months.

There was always a warm after-the-rain smell on the North Shore, green and fresh and muddy, and a little sweet. We had arrived in the night and came up from the South Shore by taxi. It dropped us in the wrong place and we set out on foot, struggling along the Kam Highway in the sticky darkness, surfboards over our shoulders, overloaded packs on our backs. We could hear the sound of the waves slapping onto the sand. We were both just eighteen, Simon and I.

The North Shore was empty and deserted and there were no cars on the road and the windows of the houses in the palm trees were blank. We sweated, and staggered under the weight of our baggage, and didn’t really know where we were going. The air was thick and warm and damp, and scented.
There was a car parked in the sandy lot in front of Sunset, and a Californian woman sitting in the driver’s seat called us over. She had stringy blonde hair and a thin, lined face. She asked where we were going. We said we didn’t know. That same morning we had ridden across a grey January London on the Piccadilly Line. She gave us a lift to a hostel at the other end of the Shore.
Her car smelt of rust and old plastic and I sat on the back seat among our jumbled baggage while her pit-bull terrier growled at me.
“He’s friendly,” she said, as she swung the car back into the road, “when he gets to know you.”
I saw the half-empty whisky bottle in its brown paper bag wedged into the space between her seat and the handbrake, but not until we were already barrelling along the coast.
She had been on this hot, bright stretch of coast for ten years, she said; before that she had drifted.
“It takes a long time to find out where you belong.”
She dropped us outside the hostel. It was all shut up for the night and we slept in the garden under the bougainvillea in a thin, warm rain.

Later we moved into the cabin and James lived in the little room in the back. James came from Seattle. He had a thin, freckled face and cropped hair.
The cabin was small with graffiti on the back of the door and sand between the white tiles of the floor. The stove didn’t work properly but there were palm trees to shade it outside, and a little veranda, and from the doorway you could see the swell rolling onto the yellow rocks at Shark’s Cove.

James didn’t surf. He came from Seattle. Someone had given him an old board, but the North Shore was hardly the place to learn. People were always giving James things when they left. He had already seen a lot of surfers come and go. Most stayed for a few weeks, or for a month; most of them gave him something when they left.
“I like it here,” he said. James didn’t say very much, but you could see the marks on his thin, freckled arms where he had cut himself. There were many scars, but they were old now, healed over and shiny white.

The North Shore was a strange place, a long garden suburb without a town. The Kam Highway, just two lanes of cracked blue tarmac, ran the length of the coast, and the strip of yellow sand lay just beyond it, stretching two miles between Sunset and Waimea. I bought an old bicycle with flat tires and no brakes and road it along the flat strip of the coast between palm trees and banana plants.
From the beach you could look west and see the long, steep ridge of the Ko’olau Range, running out in a falling dragon’s back to where it dropped away to the ocean at Ka’ena Point. In the morning it looked clear and green, and you could see the ribbing on its flanks; in the evening it was a dark purple blank.

James had a job. He worked for a surf-shop owner, not in the shop, but in a warehouse where the stock arrived from the mainland. The warehouse was on the other coast, in Honolulu. James caught the bus every day from the North Shore, down through the pineapple fields, through the grubby grid of strip bars and pawn shops at Wahiawa where it was always cloudy, on through Pearl city, and past the airport where you could catch a glimpse of the stretch of white water at Pearl Harbour. It took an hour.
“Why don’t you find somewhere to live in Honolulu?” I asked; “It would be much cheaper down there.”
“I like it here,” James said.

On the days when the hot afternoon trade winds turned in on the island and spoilt the surf we would go body-surfing at Keiki or Waimea. James would come with us. It felt so good to swim through the warm, clear water, pushing yourself down against the sand as surging shorebreak waves broke over you and coming up in a blinding star of white light.
James was clumsy and uncertain in the surf, letting the waves slap him about, not knowing how to move with the water. But he never stopped smiling when we went body-surfing.
He was only seventeen. I was astonished when he told me; I thought he was older than I was. He had run away from home.
“Aren’t your parents worried about you?” I said.
“I don’t think my dad even knows,” he said. “I’ve told my mum now, though; she knows where I am.”

James ate nothing but instant noodles, because they were cheap. Then I told him that rice was cheaper than noodles; a big bag of rice would feed you for weeks. He went to the supermarket and bought rice the next day. He wrote terrible poems and drew beautiful sketches. He told me that if you drink a whole bottle of cough medicine you get wild hallucinations.

The North Shore was just a narrow plateau between the beach and the surf and the steep bank of the Waianae Range. One day I walked inland, up into the hills and got lost in the tangle of high forest. There were the footprints of wild pigs on the black mud of the trails, and the trees were full of birds.

We stayed for a month. Our flight home was in the morning. The surf was small the night before, but I stayed out at Log Cabins until I was the only one left in the water. The sun went down behind Ka’ena Point and it was pink and red and orange all along the horizon and the mountains were blue. I stayed in the water until I could barely see my hand in front of my face, and very suddenly I got scared of sharks and floundered ashore and jogged up the beach in the warm-soft dusk.

In the morning before we caught the bus I gave James my broken bicycle; Simon gave him a pair of swimming fins he could use when he went body-surfing.
A few days before we left a package had arrived for James. The address was written in clumsy, childish handwriting. It had a Seattle post mark.
There was no letter inside, just a sketchpad. His mother had sent it to him. She had written on the front: There must be so many beautiful things to draw out there. I am so glad that you’ve found happiness. I love you.

© Tim Hannigan 2008