Herman Melville Goes to Maui

Ed. Note: When my grandparents moved to Maui in the 1930s, they settled in Lahaina. That’s where my grandfather was as he watched several Japanese bombers fly overhead on the morning of December 7, 1941 (he’d been raised in Japan, and recognized the insignia, but it was only later that day that he realized their target had been Pearl Harbor).

Lahaina holds a special place in family lore, and I visited a lot when I was a kid. Both sets of my grandparents lived on Maui — my mother had grown up on the island, and my father’s parents moved there when he was a teenager — and every few of summers we’d get to go for a month or two. Most of our time was spent either at the beach in Wailea, or upcountry in Makawao, but each visit involved at least one trip to Lahaina; in 1980s Maui, it felt like the big city — though, given all the whalery, it was really more like a New England fishing village, albeit with a much better climate.

That seemingly better climate took a turn this week. If you’ve been following the stories of the wildfires that have devastated Lahaina at all, you’ve probably read about the historic banyan tree in the center of town, which had been planted 150 years ago. As a kid I was obsessed with banyan trees — my dad’s folks had a big one in the back yard in Makawao, with vines seemingly engineered to encourage a 10-year-old to swing like Tarzan. When I first heard about the fires in Lahaina, my thoughts immediately went to the tree — which feels more and more like a case of misplaced priorities as the actual death toll grows. But it was — is — an amazing tree.