Trouble in paradise

It was the one with a cover story about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and a recipe for oysters in tomato butter, but what really caught my eye were the time-lapse photographs showing how far some glaciers have receded over the last 80 years.

I closed my eyes, wondering whether the prodigious carbon output of our 12-hour flight would be offset by the all-electric car my brother- and sister-in-law use to zip around their island home. Next thing I knew, a ruby sunset was dripping over Hawai’i.

By day, I lolled in a hammock on the screened lanai, reading Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, attorney Bryan Stevenson’s account of how racism skews the system we like to call “criminal justice.”

By night — ribbons of glistening ahi tuna; eggplant sautéed with black vinegar — I recited grim facts to my in-laws, my partner, and our teen daughter. Did you know that one out of three black male babies born today will likely end up in jail? Did you know that the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world?

No cookie for you

When I finished Just Mercy, tears of outrage clouding my eyes, I plunged into Americanah, by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a whip-smart novel about a Nigerian immigrant who discovers “blackness” only upon moving to the United States. The character writes an acerbic blog that includes lines like, “Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.”

This was supposed to be a vacation; how about some less volatile reading? One morning, I paged through a tome titled The World of Bananas in Hawai’i: Then and Now. But alas, even the story of bananas (then and now) is less than sunny.

Why do you think mainland grocery stores are stocked with identical fat fingers, Crayola-yellow and blandly sweet, when the true “world of bananas” is a riot of 1,000 different varieties, sizes, and tastes? It’s cheaper, of course, for industrial mega-growers to cultivate and ship just one type of very reliable banana. It’s also riskier: A virulent fungus, like the one spreading now through banana plantations in Asia and Australia, could wipe out the worldwide crop.

Vines and beer bottles

I closed the banana book and went outside. On Christmas Day, we splashed in the surf and didn’t even complain (okay, just a little) when the Obamas’ entourage snarled traffic for more than three hours. We climbed a 500-foot rock face to see whorls of ocean from high above. A hike took us down a path wild with vines (and strewn with crushed beer bottles) in search of ancient petroglyphs.

We wandered the Royal Mausoleum, where Charles Bishop, the businessman/philanthropist who married into the Hawai’ian royal family, has his very own engraved monument (even though his bones bunk with members of the Kamehameha dynasty in the tomb next door). And we gleaned a little local history:

After the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, President Grover Cleveland concluded that “substantial wrong” had been done to the Hawai’ian people and that the U.S. should “endeavor to repair the monarchy.” (A Congressional commission later overruled that idea.)

Bet you never learned that in social studies class.

You can run — way out to the mid-Pacific, if you like — but you cannot hide from the legacy of what we have done to one another, to the fruit and the fish, to the planet. What we are doing, still. I’m imagining a volume called The Story of Human Beings in the World: Then and Now. It could be a very short book. One word, in fact: Greed.

A dance of joy

And then, on one of our final days on Oahu, we hiked to see the albatrosses. These seabirds mate for life, and after they’ve been apart, even for a short time, they’re so tickled to reunite that they perform a spontaneous little jig. Maybe they don’t realize they’re threatened with extinction: from pollution, overfishing, the introduction of rats and feral cats to the islands where they make their homes.

“Hey, remember that poem about the albatross?” one of us said on the way back. Within seconds, Sweetheart had summoned Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lengthy ballad from the Internet’s vast trove. “Water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink,” she recited in iambic tetrameter.

Thirty years since my English degree, and it all came tumbling back: After the mariner kills the albatross, he’s haunted by the impact of his deed: The ship founders on a windless sea, and the sailors nearly die of thirst. It’s a cautionary fable for our time: yank a link from nature’s chain, and set off a torrent of environmental woe.

There we were, reading an 18th-century poem on a smartphone while driving an electric car past lava tubes that, two million years ago, bubbled with volcano guts. Suddenly, time felt not like a continuum, but more like a pleated fabric, the long-ago pressed hotly against the now.

Contemplating legacy

Have we changed, even one tiny bit? A hundred years after the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, Congress passed (and Bill Clinton signed) a resolution of apology. But who will apologize to the albatross?

Meanwhile, the glaciers are melting, the birds are doing their heartbreaking happy-dance, we win the prize for jailing the greatest proportion of our people, and Waikiki looks like SoHo, but with palm trees.

Where to start making amends? How about wherever you are: center of a city or plunk in the middle of paradise. Scratch below the surface of what you read, what you see. Learn what really happened. We can try to smudge history, but it will erase us first: Fire. Mudslide. Climate change, the oil-sick bird slung around all our necks.

Here, vacationing on this fragile crust of land afloat in the impossibly cerulean sea, it’s clearer than ever. We’re here for such a tiny flash, and we’re so desperate to leave a sign. What will it be? A berg of shrinking ice, the salt-white watermark of a rising sea, a tomb etched with a conqueror’s name in big block letters? Or something else: petroglyph, poem, a gesture of responsibility and repair?

There’s no blank slate, only this scrawled-on, screwed-up sphere, holding its breath to see what on Earth we humans will do next.