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Hanalei Sandcastle Festival with sculpture of the Washington, DC Capitol Building. (Photo: Sharon Snyder)

“You call someplace paradise / kiss it goodbye”

– Don Henley,
“The Last Resort”

A Merger of Mutating Embodiments

For the past few years, my partner and I have been spending a significant amount of time on the island of Kaua’i. My mother-in-law and her partner are 20-plus-year residents of the Hawaiian Islands and have lived on Kaua’i since 2009. Prior to our recent series of return visits, we spent much of our time travelling in Europe, Central America, Canada and Asia during semester breaks and summers. The point is that choosing a spot to re-frequent such as Kaua’i is a shift in our travel practices and this change suggests something powerfully alluring about the island itself.

The island of Kaua’i is the oldest formation in a Hawaiian chain of land formations that is composed of more than 135 islands. Most of us know the “big six”: Big Island (Hawaii), Oahu, Maui, Molokai, Lanai and Kaua’i, but the geography proves much more diversified than this group of more recognizable island names suggests. Kaua’i is a “red dirt” island due to the rich iron content of the volcanic soil formed from decomposed basalt. The island is the only one in the Hawaiian chain formed by the melding of two separate massive volcanic eruptions that merged together to make the island of Kaua’i today. It is also the oldest and northernmost island in a chain, which has been more than 60 million years in the making (relatively young in geologic time particularly given that Polynesian migrants didn’t discover and settle the islands until 300 to 800 CE).