Park Number: 31/63

First Visited: February 27, 2012

“The next island, Maui, started as the first: rental car; quick trip to a landmark; clockwise motion around the landmass. The prime destination was Haleakalā National Park, a federal property encompassing a 10,023-foot dormant volcano with a coastal section to boot. The coast came first.

I drove the Hāna Highway from Kahului, a rugged trek of sixty-eight miles, weaving in and out of tropical rainforest and back to the shore. Underdeveloped, the road consists of fifty-four one-lane bridges. I stopped in the town of Hāna before entering the national park: I needed supplies, particularly beer. The grocery store resembled a rural Montana shop where you’d buy fishing bait. Four women, likely college students, also occupied the store and their friendship made me second-guess my plan. I didn’t want to drink alone. Didn’t want to be alone.

I set up my tent restless, observing other campers through a lens of loneliness. An invitation to anyone’s company would have been nice, though not expected: we were, after all, strangers brought together in the same belief that escaping was best done on an island. I wanted and needed the thing I was fleeing, other people. To share stories. To decline pot. To sing campfire songs. Instead, I spread peanut butter across a once-sat-on loaf of bread, had my dinner, and constructed an amorphous pillow from sweat-stained laundry. Sleep hit hard.

I awoke to my first Maui sunrise—lush, fertile, and as lively as any fruit growing on the island. Basking in the early morning, I deconstructed my portable life, packed it back into the trunk, and trekked down a trail of thick, knee-high grass. I followed, undeterred as an occasional mongoose fled, as the breeze brought tales from the neighboring islands. Reaching a low tree canopy along the rising cliff face, I settled into the darkness which concealed the island’s imminent end. The ocean, as if requesting, Go home.

I later traveled into the heart of Haleakalā, a crater shrouded in clouds and swept barren by wind. This was the rumored depression where the god Māui captured the sun and hid it inside the earth to lengthen the days, just as I’d imagined when witnessing the Big Island’s glowing caldera. Looking back on the way I came, island mythology started making more sense: the tales of grief-stricken creation, jealous eruptions, understandable thievery. I took these tales home with me, a weightless luggage, a sojourner’s souvenir, a pilgrim’s payment. “

—excerpt from “Incandescent Earth”

Polynesians from the Marquesas Islands were the first to settle Hawaii.

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