I think the first time I ever heard of Lahaina was in the early 1970s when Loggins & Messina came out with their best album.
“Full Sail” was wonderful, and “Lahaina” was one of the quirkier songs, a ditty about life being slow on Maui with centipedes crawling all over the place.
I saw them in concert in the summer of 1975, and I remember it being one of the most wonderful concerts I saw back when I was young. “Watching the River Run” off that same album was deep in my heart for a long time.
I don’t recall ever reading or hearing anything more about Lahaina until the Eagles’ “Hotel California” album and its wonderful song, “The Last Resort.”
It spoke of the destruction of paradise with the overdevelopment of California, and one of the last verses was very poignant:
“You can leave it all behind
“Sail to Lahaina
“Just like the missionaries did
“So many years ago”
“They even brought a neon sign
“‘Jesus is coming’
“Brought the white man’s burden down
“Brought the white man’s reign”
I learned about those missionaries and what they did to Lahaina and the rest of Hawaii when I read James Michener’s “Hawaii” in the 1990s, and I finally got to see it when Pauline and Virgile, Nicole and I, spent 12 days in the Islands in 1998. We spent three days on Kauai, three more on the Kona side of the Big Island and the rest of the time in Maui.
In Lahaina.
It was a truly wonderful week. Pauline had just finished high school and was weeks away from starting college at UCLA. Virgile was enjoying his summer between seventh and eighth grade, and I was 48. It was the last family vacation we took together.
That’s not as sad as it sounds. We only took a few vacations as a family because the kids spent seven weeks every summer in France with their birth father.
I have few specific memories of Lahaina, except that I always wanted to go back someday.
Except I never did, and last week it practically broke my heart when I heard about the Maui wildfires practically wiping out lovely Lahaina. At last count, there were 96 dead and hundreds still missing. It’s the most deadly American fire in more than a hundred years.
Talk about awful.
Two hundred years ago, Lahaina was the capital of the Hawaiian Islands. Honolulu was a more important city, but King Kamehameha III preferred the less populated Maui. Lahaina was the capital till 1845, when the government was shifted to Oahu.
I loved our time on Maui and even though I knew it would never happen, I thought it might be wonderful to retire there someday. Instead, I feel sad about what happened.
But of the wonderful photos we had from the trip, one seems particularly appropriate.
“They call it paradise
“I don’t know why
“You call someplace paradise
“Kiss it goodbye”