I just spent 10 days in Hawaii…
I didn‘t blog… I generally blog a lot when traveling, but this was different… It was a weird trip in a good way… It wasn’t a vacation… It was a job… a side job… I was there to write a preservation plan for a railroad car… a really special railroad car.
The weirdness came from being in a tourist place, a really nice tourist place, but not as a tourist.
I was working… each morning I rose early, worked on the project, then I packed the computer, and went off to the museum site… Each evening I returned to my hotel on Waikiki, more often than not after dark… Again, I wrote… the report... not the blog...
Waikiki is Hawaii, but it is not reality, it is tourist… overrun with tourists… at night, there are flaming torches everywhere you look… it cannot be mistaken for any other place… tourist hotels, primal torches, tourists… and a beach… Worst, while I was there, the Pro Bowl and the accompanying circus was in town…
The project went well… I was there to create a plan to rebuild a 110 year old wooden railroad car… it was sagging in various places… It was working, moving in all kinds of ways it wasn’t supposed to when they operated it… I was the consultant; there to speak to how to rebuild the car… instead, by the end of the second day, the car was fixed… Instead of talking about rebuilding the car, we were talking about how to improve it, to interpret it (to “talk story”)… We talked about the organization, about other cars held in the collection…
Wooden cars are all about wood held in compression by steel or iron rods in tension… the best use of each material… at a time when wood was cheap, iron expensive… The car is built like a wooden bridge, with trusses… the trusses all adjustable…
I worked with the museum’s volunteers to adjust the tension rods… we pulled a 2” sag out of one corner… a 1” sag out of a platform… we tightened various vertical rods, tightening up the car body… We made a shim to help space a corner post that had rusted… They now know how to care for the car… maintain the car…
The other weird part, was that since I wasn’t a tourist, on some level I was part of the community… Hawaii is a complicated community… Hawaiians, Haoles (derogative term for anglos, meaning “without breath” meaning without the knowledge that makes one a Hawaiian) Chinese, Japanese and Pilipino, (the last three brought as cheap labor) as well as a sizable community of both active duty and retired military… All with their own rules, all co-existing on 7 small islands…
I was working for a member of the royal family… working mostly with former military and Haoles… Somehow it seemed that I belonged and was accepted. Several Hawaiians referred to me a “local”, the highest compliment…
I visited the royal palace, the Io lani Palace, with a member of the royal family… Followed by a visit to the Mission Houses… two house museums, a block or so apart… with very different views of the same events… I visited the Bishop Museum, but not the galleries, the archives… I walked on the beach, but didn’t go swimming… I regret that. I visited Bailey's Antiques and Aloha Shirts and bought a couple of Hawaiian shirts… One a replica of the very expensive vintage shirt Tony Bordain bought when he visited… So maybe I was a tourist… at least occasionally…
It was an intense trip… not a vacation… I want to do it again.
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