A post which will live in infamy

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Must resist corny post title... must... resist... argh, can't resist. Sorry, y'all.

Today we visited the USS Arizona Memorial and the USS Missouri at Pearl Harbor. We left extra-early to avoid the scary crowds we had read about, but it's the off-season and we had nothing to worry about. (In fact we've had plenty of elbow room at all the tourist sites we've visited so far. This is a great time to be here!) I found the Visitor Center to be simple and understated, and I couldn't decide whether that was a good thing or an indictment of the Bush Administration's underfunding of the National Park Service or both. There were volunteers all over the place selling things and soliciting donations to support the memorial, and of course I supported them, but it isn't cool that they have to beg for it. Shame on us.

The movie was amazing. There's a lot of footage. The big "boom" of the USS Arizona's ammunition stores going up shook the whole theater. Which reminds me: keep your small babies and your cell phones outside for Chrissakes! Some tourist activities aren't suitable for brand-new parents or workaholics and that's a bummer for them, but it shouldn't have to be everybody else's bummer, too.

The USS Arizona itself is accessible via a cute little ferry across the harbor, piloted by cute Navy sailors. I wonder what you have to do to get that gig and whether it's considered a good thing. Each tour group has a fixed amount of time to stay, but it's a reasonably generous amount. The memorial is very nice and respectful, a little dated, but it's kind of cool how memorials represent both the time period the event occurred and the time period they were built. I found the oil drops rising up from the sunken ship to be just as moving as the guide said they would be.

The USS Arizona is free, but the USS Missouri is rather pricey, $16 apiece, and my folks decided their time would be better spent at the Punchbowl so we toured the battleship on our own. Going to Ford Island is weird because although there's a new(ish) bridge, the entire island is locked down. You take a typical Honolulu trolley through a Naval checkpoint and no photos are allowed after the checkpoint until you physically enter the gate at the Missouri visitor center. We got reminded a couple of times that this extra security is "necessary", of course, "because of 9/11". I guess most people just accept that these days without asking any questions. We saw a couple of residences, a kids' playground, and a vast empty runway, nothing that merited heightened security as far as I could tell. There's no way for civilians to get to or see the USS Utah site on the far side of the island, which I think is sad.

(In the same vein, I think the absolute no-bag, no-purse, no-nothing rule at the USS Arizona is absurd. My heart and mind cry out for "perspective!" and "reasonableness!" but I don't think America is listening.)

Exploring the USS Missouri was fun, but we may have focused too much on seeing (and photographing) all the parts of the ship rather than stopping to absorb the couple of interpretive exhibits. I came away with more of a sense of "ship-ness" than "history", and a ship is pretty much a ship so I feel like I kinda missed what makes the USS Missouri special. But LG's never seen a ship before, battle- or otherwise, so it's all special to her and that's cool.

By far the best part of this whole experience was explaining to LG, in first-grader terms, what a war is, what WWII is, what a memorial is, what the military is, and what internment is (her best friend at school is Japanese-American). I respect the military and I believe WWII was a "good war", so we focused on those simple things and didn't muddy it up with all the cynicism since then.

After Pearl Harbor, we set out to lighten things up with a drive and photographic expedition to the famous surf beaches of O'ahu's North Shore. On the way, we stopped by the Dole Plantation for some pineapple-based snacky goodness. I had a delicious prepackaged sushi hand roll (pineapple-free), cleverly packaged to keep the nori wrap separate from the rice until just before eating, so the nori stayed crisp instead of gummy. There was even an ingenious way to unpack and roll everything up without getting one's fingers sticky. Wonder if I can get these at home in the I.D.

We didn't want to deal with sand and wet and towels and extra clothes and such in our rental van for swimming at the North Shore; seemed like a foolish bunch of trouble considering that our house in Waimānalo is three houses from the beach. But the North Shore beaches are quite a bit different—more calm, less surf near the shore—and might have been fun to try out.

On the way back to Waimānalo, we realized we were getting close to the Turtle Bay Resort when we started seeing signs along the roadways protesting an apparent planned expansion of the hotel and golf complex. It made me think about how different our experience would have been if we had stayed there, which I considered doing. Instead, I found myself identifying with the sign-posters. I hope they're able to hold on to some of their small-town tranquility in the face of a tourist rampage. I wonder if sleepy little Waimānalo, which we love just the way it is, views us beach-house-renters as a few welcome guests or "those bloody tourists"?

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