20 years and memory lane...Maui.
In all my time as a metalsmith, I’ve never been so good at big collections. Especially ones that felt important. But I’m getting there with this one. I’m trying my darndest to explore the ideas and the stories as best I can at length, with deep breathing and patience.
And for this one, a few trips down memory lane.
This watercolor painting I did in college and hung from my dorm room wall before I lived in a tent full time for a good chunk of 2004. It was a combination of burgeoning excitement for art as a vessel as much as it was just a doodle. But I still have it. I dug it out of my boxes of memories in our basement, mostly in search of the film photos I took while living in Maui. I found so much more than that, including a journal I kept, that had so much life of a 19 year old girl that I recognize now as just a baby woman. She sucked.
But don’t we all at that age.
It’s been over 20 years since I walked the Makana road up to my tarp-car-port-turned-bedroom, where I was bitten by a centipede on the throat in the middle of the night, where I was given an air-horn in case I couldn’t breathe and needed a helicopter ride out of the jungle. It’s where I found a first real boyfriend in a jack-mormon who drove the only car and was downright beautiful, and where I slept on a black sand beach by myself for 4 days, but first had to trespass some of Oprah’s ocean acreage without incident. It’s where I gained 15 pounds drinking canned cold lattes while also devouring over 15 literary classics on Hamoa beach (Bell Jar anyone?!) and where I weed-whacked my allowance into a college semester back home so I could live in more tents with more young people who desperately also needed to do laundry. It’s where I learned to hitchhike everywhere and smoke weed for breakfast and eat fish for breakfast too. It’s where searching for jungle food barefoot instead of standing in line at the grocery store became the normal day. It’s where I got my first tattoos and my first taste of life outside every box I ever thought I could fit in. I found new definitions at every turn. New reasons to try wild things. New questions to answers I thought I had already found. It’s where I learned that friends who call are the ones who stay.
20 years between that person and this one. What a crazy thing youth is, and really, it’s a miracle we survive it. I have never made such bad decisions as the ones I made when I was 19. And I also made some of my best decisions, hands down the ones who shaped me to be this me. And for that, I’m so glad 19 year old Erin had the balls to leave her safe little life and try something SO far out of her element, it was an island tent bedroom up a rainy jungle mountain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Hawaii changed me to my core, for the better. I just wish I could have shown up to thank her earlier.
