The Star-Bulletin has always been about connecting people and ideas. Through the power of the Internet, we are crossing oceans as a global newspaper, with 64 percent of our Web readership from outside Hawaii. This new, occasional feature will reflect voices of the community beyond our shores, making connections that resonate here.
Let it snow in
Detroit; I'll be
home for ChristmasBy Lavonne Leong PASSPORT, check. Ticket, check. Bag empty enough to fill with another year's supply of crack seed, check. I'm ready. Ten thousand miles looks so simple on the ticket: LHR-DTW-LAX-HNL -- but it's still not a small world.
Four airports in 24 hours means four different universes on the way home.
LHR. London-Heathrow is the most heavily trafficked airport on the planet. It's also so vast that anyone entering it spends most of their time trying to get from point A to point B. Heathrow's monolithic terminals and parking garages, lashed together by a snarl of bus and taxi lanes, seethe with a dull roar. It's the din of 100,000 pairs of shoes in transit, and 100,000 voices trying, politely, to make themselves understood.
Even the walk to the check-in desk is through a tide of German, Yoruba, Egyptian, Hebrew, Dutch, Hindi and Greek. Huge golden signs printed with the Eiffel Tower advertise, "It's About Comfort. It's About Getting Away. It's About Thirty Minutes to Paris."
It's about nine hours to Detroit.
The flight itself is a blank day of dozing punctuated by the stewardess's mealtime litany: "Beef or chicken? Beef or chicken?" Half the people on the plane are British. Nobody takes beef.
DTW. The moment I disembark in Detroit, I know I'm back on familiar ground. The permed girl at customs says, "Cool, England. There y'go," as she stamps and hands back my passport. Behind her, the wall-sized sign proudly proclaims: "Welcome to the United States of America."
Detroit is even colder than Heathrow. It's been snowing for six days straight, the sub-zero temperatures making the double-glazed windows a shock to touch. Everything looks washed-out in the fluorescent lights, which are on even though it's daylight.
The airport is uncrowded enough so that you can sit down and watch middle America go by. Airport employees zoom up and down the long corridors in humming go-carts, giving lifts to giggling members of the over-60s set. College kids in college sweatshirts and itchy new haircuts lean against the walls.
The seats at the gate are attached in back-to-back rows. There's a kid in back of me rocking the entire row by flinging his 6-year-old body back and forth. Suddenly he stops. "Mom," he shouts to a woman three rows away, "Can I have a hundred dollars?"
Detroit to LA: One long four-hour nap, stretched out across five seats.
LAX. The flat, metallic smell of smog seeps through even the airconditioning. The terminal looks like a giant hotel lobby: tinted glass, faux brass and salmon carpet. From somewhere, the heartbreaking scent of steak enchilada wafts. I need one. Now. Through 12 months of fish 'n' chips, curry and kidney pie, I have been fantasizing about a plate lunch, two scoops rice. And a steak enchilada is one step closer to Ono's.
The neon sign reads "MEXICAN GRILL" in multicolored letters. The smell makes me want to cry. At last, real food.
But a steak enchilada costs $6.95. I have $1.23, and I need to keep a quarter to call my parents when I get to Honolulu.
Mexican Grill doesn't take credit. I consider using the old finger-inside-the-coat-pocket trick to hold up the restaurant for a hot enchilada, and decide that I've been en route for too long. On the way to the gate, I try to buy something, anything, in dollars, just to be able to use nickels and dimes as legal tender. Nothing in the Los Angeles International Airport is cheaper than a dollar. Not even a small french fries.
At the airport gate, I recognize everybody. Grandmas with meticulously preserved shopping bags; tanned businessmen staying cool in aloha wear; surfers in tank-tops, hoping their boards aren't getting damaged in the cargo hold, a restless keiki halau in identically printed green T-shirts. Tourists in quiet bliss at the thought of flying to paradise.
A few people are like me: part of the Long-Distance Christmas Hawaii Club, trenchcoats and scarves draped over their arms, hot and tired, but happy to be going home. Someone takes out his guitar and begins to play slack-key.
After nearly 20 hours of chasing the day west, I watch the drab sky blaze red and gold in a vintage Los Angeles sunset.
Our DC-10 tops the smog level, and the sky turns from gray-orange to star-spangled black. You can't see the sea, but the stars stop at an invisible line. Below it is unbroken darkness.
On the side of the last airline meal tray I will have to see for three weeks sits an individually wrapped Maui Caramac. This is better than an enchilada. For the last 45 minutes of the flight, I nurse my Caramac and stare out the window at the Pacific night, half-hearing the tinny C&K they're beginning to pipe over the headsets.
All the sashimi I'm planning to eat, all the beaches I'm planning to drive to, all the trails I'm going to hike, are nothing to the thought of falling asleep in my old bed in my old room, with jalousies open and tradewinds blowing through.
A crescent of golden lights looms out of the 5-hour blackness. The most isolated city on the most isolated land mass in the world.
"There it is, you folks on the right side of the plane," announces the pilot over the PA system. "Honolulu. Aloooooha."
HNL. As the plane lurches to a stop, people gather their bags and hustle off just like in any other airport. We're welcomed with that nameless Hawaiian music designed for the tourists, who are lei'd at the gate by smiling hospitality staff and whisked away to their prepaid holidays.
The rest of us walk into the open. If you have ever returned to Hawaii from a freezing place, you know the exhilaration of that first lungful of island air, fresh off the mountains, gentle with recent rain.
Someone makes the inevitable joke about the "wikiwikitikitooki bus" we take to baggage claim, I put my quarter in the phone slot and, after a moment to remember my phone number without all the extra codes before it, the phone begins to ring.
Lavonne Leong grew up in Manoa Valley and attends
Oxford University, where she is working on a
doctorate in English Literature.
Journeys is an occasional Star-Bulletin feature
to reflect voices of the community beyond our
shores, making connections that resonate here.
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