I.
I watch the palm trees across the street bend in the trade winds. There’s something dramatic and alluring about it, as if the trees were riding in convertibles along the cliffs of Kalanianaʻole Highway, hair blowing back in the breeze. I carry the chaos of the last few years with begrudging obligation, quietly yearning to stand still and let the world blow around me, through me. I wish the trees let me belong to them the way I want them to belong to me.
II.
Blustery weather – and any attendant moisture – is about as much seasonality as we get in the Islands. Wind, no wind; rainy season, dry season. It’s important to experience the seasons change, to help us remember that other things change, too, however slow and subtle those changes might be.
III.
Hawaiʻi is most comfortable when it’s windy. Whenever the trades pick up, I find myself stopping in place and letting the breeze wrap around me until I get chicken skin. In those moments, it’s easy to forget that the last seven years have been the hottest seven years humanity has recorded, and the 2010s were the hottest decade ever, breaking the record previously held by the 2000s—and the 90s before that and the 80s before that. A cool, easy breeze on a warming planet. But it feels nice in the moment, and that’s not nothing. I’ll take whatever solace I can get.
IV.
Wind is the movement of air molecules, consisting mostly of nitrogen, oxygen and water vapor. Those molecules move from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure, whipping across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean and whooshing down from the clouded peaks of the Koʻolau Mountains to blow loose papers off my desk and slam shut any open doors in my house, eliciting a chorus of bewildered barks from my dogs. They don’t appreciate the scientific majesty of the experience.
V.
ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi has over 600 names for winds. They delineate varying intensities and durations, different directions the winds blow, connections to specific places, or ways in which we experience them. Makani holo ʻūhā is “the wind that brushes the thighs,” a cold wind that chills the legs of fishermen. ʻAikoʻo is the “canoe-eating” wind from Kauaʻi, and malanai is the gentle trade wind from my hometown of Kailua. “I believe Hawaiians named each wind and rain because they encountered them almost daily and felt a kinship with them," said Colette Leimomi Akana, who is compiling a book of Hawaiian wind names with her daughter Kiele Gonzalez. That same kinship remains, if we are still enough and listen closely enough to recognize it.
VI.
When my wife asks me how the surf was and I say “windy,” she asks if that’s good or bad. It could be either. Good windy steadily blows in alignment with whatever groundswell there is, helping the peaks break farther out from shore, adding some size to the wave and distance to the ride. Bad windy is basically anything outside those specific parameters: wind that mushes up the surface water and chops up the ride, like throwing gravel onto pavement; wind that pushes you against the wave instead of into the drop. There are innumerably more ways for there to be bad winds than good winds, though the kitesurfer may take issue with my interpretations of which is which. (Though, also, strong winds generally convince people to stay at home or on the beach, so if you choose to paddle out, “windy” is never really all bad.)
VII.
When I ride my bike to work in the morning and back home in the afternoon, I get the distinct feeling that I’m riding into the wind in both directions. My legs burn as I pedal, one inch after the next. Where’s makani holo ʻūhā when you need it? But with soft pink and orange pastels glowing beneath moody rain clouds in the distance, maybe it’s best to go slowly.
VIII.
Years back, a friend and I hiked to the ridge of the Koʻolaus on a particularly gusty day. We got soaked on the climb up, but once we reached the top, the rain ceased to pound us, and not because it stopped raining. When winds hit the mass of the mountain, they surge upward, carrying whatever rainfall with them and dumping it with great ferocity on the other side. The technical term for this is orographic precipitation, an ugly, clunky term for something beautiful, like the word “pulchritude.” I still remember looking up and seeing droplets suspended in the air above me, wanting to close my eyes to be a part of the moment, but refusing to out of fear I’d miss it.
IX.
I love watching clouds hurry by. Wind reminds us that clouds are objects, not texture, and that we’re a small piece of land in a very large ocean on an even larger planet in an incomprehensibly larger ocean. With so much of our attention focused on ourselves and our tasks at hand, it’s calming and liberating to remember that we’re part of things that have been going on long before us, and will continue long after we’re gone.
X.
I’m still watching the palm trees in the trade winds, but a different image emerges this time. Palms are able to withstand tremendous winds and stay rooted in place, even if they are pummeled into a backbend. I can’t help but see the stubborn beauty in facing adversity head-on, without allowing it to uproot us; to know that we can remain firm in the places beneath us and around us and within us, despite the enormity of the forces howling against us. We can still let our hair blow back in the wind and watch the clouds pass us by.
Perhaps I should’ve closed my eyes when I was on top of the Koʻolaus. Who knows what I would have been able to see.
Reads from February
[The Veterinary] Business Is Killing by Andrew Bullis, Slate
The Defiance of Salman Rushdie by David Remnick, The New Yorker
Crushed by Nile Capello, The Atavist Magazine
Little Brother Looks Back on 20 Years of The Listening by Abe Beame, GQ
Nobody knows what the point of homework is by Jacob Sweet, VOX
CHATGPT Is A Blurry JPEG Of The Web by Ted Chiang, The New Yorker
Books from February
The Gift Of Underpants by Neal Milner
A slim volume of essays from the longtime University of Hawaiʻi professor and political commentator, though Hawaiʻi plays less of a role in the essays than I expected, and politics even less so. Through personal stories about his family and growing up Jewish in Milwaukee and starting a life in the Islands, Milner explores ideas about family and culture, connection and change; how stories bring people together and help us make sense of who we are.
Fantastic Numbers and Where To Find Them: A Cosmic Quest From Zero To Infinity by Antonio Padilla
A book about numbers that’s really more a book about physics. Padilla, a theoretical physicist, does an admirable job making math fascinating, particularly when he explains the history and development of mathematical and scientific ideas; I especially enjoyed learning about the history of zero, and how changes in numeric notation led to meaningful strides in technology and governance. There are some moments where analogies fell apart and I felt a step or two behind fully grasping the concept at hand, but overall there are far more moments of clarity and wonder.
Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray
I started reading this when I interviewed the author for a column, but I skipped around to the sections I thought would be most relevant to our situation in Hawaiʻi. I decided to go back and read it all the way through, and I’m glad I did. Gray, a former city planner in New York City, traces the origins of American zoning laws to now, explaining how they exacerbate housing shortages and make new developments more unaffordable. He makes a compelling case for not just significant zoning reform, but ultimately zoning abolition. It’s engaging and accessible, a must-read for anyone interested in issues connected to housing, urban planning and infrastructure, or racial and socioeconomic inequality.
Writing from February
I can’t remember the last time a month has gone by without any new writing out. A cursory glance at my Sherdog column archives tells me the last time that happened was December 2015, though I was still writing statistical analysis pieces then, so there’s a good chance it may have been before that (I’m not going to look). Here’s to not reading too much into it, and to more productivity ahead.
In the meantime, here are the three pieces I used to apply to grad school, because why not?
Basketball Taught Me How to Live (originally titled Joint Resolution)
Climate Change Is Sabotaging the World’s Most Dangerous Canoe Race (originally set to run on Deadspin, but had the poor timing of coming out the literal week the site went under)
The Weight of Departure (no notes, I just wanted to keep the parenthetical addendum consistent)
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