Where the Earth
Is Still Being Made

The first thing that strikes you about Hawaii is the light. It lands differently here — softer, more golden, diffused by ocean humidity in a way that makes everything glow at the edges. I stepped off the plane in Kona on the Big Island and stood in the parking lot for five minutes just looking at the sky, which felt like an embarrassing thing to do and also entirely unavoidable.

Hawaii occupies a category of its own. It is technically American — Starbucks and Target exist here — but it doesn't feel American in any way that matters. It feels ancient, elemental, and genuinely other. The Big Island is still growing. Lava flows into the sea on its southern shore, adding new land to the world in real time. You can stand and watch this happen. I cannot think of another place on earth where that sentence is true.

The Big Island of Hawaii is the youngest and largest of the archipelago, and also the one that will most completely rearrange your understanding of what a landscape can be. In a single day you can drive from a black sand beach surrounded by lava fields to a rainforest receiving 300 inches of rain per year to the summit of Mauna Kea at 13,796 feet, where the air is thin and the stars are so thick and close that experienced astronomers have placed some of the world's most powerful telescopes here. The mountain is sacred to Native Hawaiians. The summit is another world entirely.

Volcanoes National Park

Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park is unlike any national park in the world and unlike anywhere else, full stop. The park encompasses two active volcanoes — Kīlauea and Mauna Loa — and a landscape that shifts constantly as lava flows reshape the terrain. The Kīlauea Iki trail descends into a crater that erupted in 1959, sending lava fountains 1,900 feet into the air. You walk across the solidified lava lake on the crater floor — an alien surface, black and buckled and still faintly steaming — and understand, in a way no photograph conveys, that you are standing on the skin of the earth.

The Big Island's southern shore — where new land meets the Pacific, and the earth is still being written.

Maui is Hawaii at its most beautiful and, in places, its most visited. It has earned both reputations. The island's geography is dramatic — two volcanic mountains connected by a flat isthmus, creating a landscape of extraordinary variety across a relatively small area. The Road to Hāna on the island's northeast coast is one of the great drives in the world: 64 miles of hairpin turns through dense rainforest, past waterfalls, over one-lane bridges, to a coastline of black and red sand beaches that feel like the edge of the earth.

I drove it in a day, starting before dawn to beat the traffic, and by midmorning was standing under a waterfall in a bamboo forest so dense the light barely reached the ground, with no other person in sight and the sound of the ocean just audible somewhere below. This is what Maui offers when you get the timing right — moments of complete, genuine solitude in a landscape of almost theatrical beauty.

If Maui is Hawaii at its most beautiful and the Big Island is Hawaii at its most elemental, Kauaʻi is Hawaii at its most profound. The oldest of the main islands, its mountains have had millions of years to erode into shapes of impossible drama — the Nā Pali Coast, a seventeen-mile stretch of fluted green cliffs rising 4,000 feet directly from the ocean, is one of the most astonishing landscapes on the planet. There are no roads along it. You access it by boat, by air, or on foot via the Kalalau Trail — eleven miles of one of the most challenging and rewarding hikes in the United States.

I took a boat. We rounded the first headland at dawn, the cliffs rose out of the mist ahead of us, and everyone on board went quiet simultaneously. There are places in the world that silence a crowd not through solemnity but through sheer overwhelm, when beauty exceeds language entirely. Nā Pali is one of them.

Hawaii in two registers — the invitation of the beach, and the drama of the cliffs beyond it.

The ocean is everything

What ties all the Hawaiian islands together — across their different landscapes, personalities, and scales — is the Pacific. It is always present. From the summit of Mauna Kea you can see its curvature. From the Nā Pali cliffs you feel its power. On every beach you hear it. The ocean here is not background — it is the main character, the reason the islands exist, the force that isolated them long enough to produce something unlike anywhere else on earth.

For those of us drawn to the mythology of the sea — to PONTUS, the primordial ocean of Greek tradition, the force that preceded all else — Hawaii resonates at a frequency that's hard to explain and easy to feel. The Pacific is the oldest, deepest, largest body of water on the planet. Standing at its edge here, 2,400 miles from the nearest continent, you understand in your body what you already knew in your mind: that the ocean is not something we are next to. It is something we are inside of, if we're paying attention.

I spent my last morning in Hawaii on a beach on the Big Island's north coast, alone before sunrise, watching the sky go from black to indigo to the first pale suggestion of orange on the horizon. A pod of spinner dolphins moved through the bay just beyond the reef, their dorsal fins cutting the still water in clean arcs. The only sound was the ocean. I had nowhere to be and nothing to do and everything to feel.

Hawaii gives you this, eventually, if you let it — a stripping away of whatever noise you arrived with, replaced by something older and quieter and entirely worth the journey to find.

Go once. Return differently.