By MARIAH RIGG
Fifty-eight years before Harrison’s granddaughter is born, the U.S. government drops a two-thousand-pound bomb on the island of Kaho‘olawe. It is 1948. On Maui, the shock from the bomb is so strong that it shatters the glass of the living room window, and Harrison, a baby still in his crib, starts wailing in time with the family mutt.
In the kitchen, Harrison’s mother is thrown against the gas stove. She puts her hands out to stop her fall, and the pan of frying Spam slips to the side, exposing the gas burner. Oil bubbles down the back of her left hand, and the ring of flame burns a hole in her right palm’s heel. When the shock stops, she peels her melted flesh from the stove. She dashes to the living room, where Harrison lies kicking under the broken window. The dog jumps to lick her face. It circles her knees, and she pushes it away to pick Harrison up.
Miraculously, he is not cut, though shards of window lie around him. She rubs his back, runs her fingers along his rib cage for comfort. Through the open frame of what was once a window, she sees Harrison’s father lying beneath their mango tree, unconscious after falling from its branches. She runs to him, Harrison’s head bouncing against her shoulder, and when Harrison’s father wakes—eyes bleary, the beginning of a concussion itching across his skull—she is there, round face hanging like fruit above him. Harrison reaches, grabbing for his father, and even as the movement cracks her burn, even as the brush of Harrison’s small fingers tender the bump already forming on his father’s head, both of his parents smile.
The flesh burnt from the heel of Harrison’s mother’s palm will never grow back, and though she and his father will tell the story of the two-thousand-pound bomb over and over—in the backyard of their Wailea home at Harrison’s fifth birthday lūʻau, in the parking lot of the pineapple plantation where Harrison’s father works, on the white sands of Yokohama after their family moves from Maui to O‘ahu—Harrison will not remember when the ground first shuddered beneath him. He will not remember the tickle of the dog’s nose like a cockroach or the warmth of his mother’s face against his. What he will remember, instead, is the bitter smell of his mother’s burnt flesh. And, nearly six decades later, on the day he harvests his last torpedo from Kaho‘olawe’s soil, this is the scent that will envelope him.
Fifty-one years before his granddaughter is born, Harrison finds his first missile washed up on the sands of Ke Ono O’ Polo. It is the day after a storm, and the beach has become the ocean’s junkyard, its sand covered in glass balls left over from Japanese fishermen’s floats, broken heads of coral and halved cowries hauled from the ocean floor.
Harrison is seven, and happy to be outside after a week cooped up in the house, watching rain flood the front yard and wind strip the tree of mangoes. He plays tag with the waves. He digs moats and drips lumpy towers for sandcastles, his hand massaging the wet grains like a farmer would the teat of a cow. He gathers shells and drags floats, piling both under the shade of kiawe trees at the edge of the sand, where his mother rests. She is tired from their mile walk to the beach and heavy with the weight of his brother, who grows inside her.
It is decades before the Fairmont or Four Seasons will occupy this land, long before blue umbrellas scallop the beach and paths of dead coral cut through the hedge of green naupaka. When Harrison’s tunneling collapses a ghost crab’s home, he holds the crustacean in his fist and walks it to the safety of the water. It is as Harrison kneels, releasing the crab into the foam, that he sees the missile’s casing floating outside the shorebreak.
When the missile rolls to where Harrison stands, sunk calf-high in sand, he thinks at first it must be a submarine for a very small person. Then he sees the hole in its side. He kneels, slips a hand inside the missile, then a wrist, then his whole arm up to his shoulder. His fingers press against the empty fuel tank walls. If he had pushed a little harder, he would have broken the thin sheet of metal and brushed against the clenched fist of the missile’s detonator, fired already in the ʻAlalākeiki Channel, between Maui and Kaho‘olawe. Instead, Harrison pulls his arm from the missile’s belly, and the rough edge of the algaed hole scratches the flesh of his inner elbow.
In four months, Harrison’s brother will be born. In ten, his father will lose his hand to a pineapple harvester. The family will move from Maui to O‘ahu, where his mother will find work as a nurse at Queen’s Hospital. Harrison will enroll at Saint Louis, where he’ll get the private-school education his father always wanted. But on that cloudy summer day in 1955, wet sand sucking his feet, cut stinging his elbow, Harrison strains to push the hollow shell casing up the hump of shore. “Look what I found!” he yells to his mother. And as she turns, the wind snarls the kiawe branches above her into knots.
Forty-one years before his granddaughter is born, Harrison sees his first picture of Kaho‘olawe. He is sitting at the back of his high school history class. A breeze sweeps through the open door just as the picture comes up on the slide projector, and its cool is a relief after hours spent tugging at the neck of his collared shirt.
“This”—the haole teacher shouts over muttering boys—“is the most bombed island in the Pacific.”
It is the last period of the day. They are studying World War II. The shot is an aerial one, taken, the teacher tells them, by the U.S. Navy in 1943. Harrison can make out the white outline of Kaho‘olawe’s sandy shore, cliffs to the right, and, in the background, Maui, the island of his birth. He leans toward the rise of Haleakalā, toward the fleecy crown of clouds that encircled his childhood, but when his ribs press against the desk’s table, he gasps.
“You better not be jerking off,” someone calls from the front, to a chorus of laughter.
The teacher sighs and clicks to the next image. A battleship floats to the left of the frame, anchored a few hundred yards out to sea. It is dwarfed by the gray dome that stands, two men high, on the shore.
All day Harrison has been nursing a bruise he got from his father. They have been fighting for years now, ever since his father got the job at the airport, where he unloads tourists’ baggage from Hawaiian Airlines planes for half pay because he can only lift half as much with the use of one hand. Their fights are without end, beginning every evening when his father comes home with a half-finished six-pack. Harrison plays defense, distracting his father from unwashed dishes and dirty laundry, and in payment for this he often receives a backhand to the face, last night a fist to the side. Harrison takes these because it is better, in his mind, to bear the brunt of his father’s attention than have it focused on his mother or, worse, his younger brother. For at least Harrison has the memory of who their father was before his hand was lost to the pineapple harvester, before they sold their family home in Wailea and moved from the green of the Valley Isle to O‘ahu’s swiftly graying skies.
Harrison’s teacher lays out Kaho‘olawe’s history, tells the boys how the island was a penal colony in the 1800s, a site for farms and goat ranches. “Now, in 1965,” he says, “the island is where the U.S. military fine-tunes our weapons for war.”
The teacher clicks again. The room is flooded with the white of a photographed explosion.
On the projector screen, the coast of Kaho‘olawe is umbrellaed by a mushroom cloud, its tip reaching all the way to the battleship that sits parallel to shore. Harrison’s dress shoes squeak as he pushes himself backward. When he blinks, the explosion looks fake, too bright for the frame. Flames burn seven stories high. Smoke rolls across the water. The only part of the photo that Harrison can convince himself is real is the grass that grows over the lava at the bottom of the frame. The blades are white and dry, perfect for kindling, something Harrison knows from the many bonfires he has built for his friends on the west side of O‘ahu, on those Friday nights when they smoke pakololo and drink Hawaiian moonshine—fermented ti root brewed by men who work O‘ahu’s pineapple fields.
The teacher clears his throat. “A few months ago,” he says, “the U.S. Navy set off explosives on Kaho‘olawe as part of something called Operation Sailor Hat. Because of the Navy’s work, we now know what a nuclear explosion might look like on the ocean. It’s a huge step for weapon research. It’ll be instrumental in winning the Cold War.”
He clicks on to another picture, and then another, but Harrison does not pay attention. He thinks instead of the green cliffs that loomed across the channel of his childhood, imagines how they might have looked when they exploded, red clay of their centers thrown into the sky. If he had been standing across the channel from them, would he have felt it? His pencil slips in the sweat of his fist, and he remembers the cool of the missile’s metal after it washed up to shore.
When the bell rings, the room is filled with motion. Harrison’s classmates slide notebooks into bags and under arms, walk out the door to track and baseball practice. The teacher turns the projector off, and Harrison stands, the last to go. The room is dark, its silence punctuated only by the shuffling of papers that Harrison’s teacher stacks in the corner.
“See you next week,” Harrison says, and the teacher nods.
Harrison walks out of the classroom and through Saint Louis High School, nestled within the campus of Chaminade University, thinking of the mossy forests of Oregon, where his teacher told Harrison that he grew up. Someday, Harrison thinks, he would like to live on the mainland. It would be nice to get lost there—in the millions of people, in the billions of acres—nobody knowing who he is or where he’s from.
Harrison spends the next three hours on the corner of Waialae Avenue, waiting for his mother. To pass the time before her shift’s end, he does homework—spreading books over the grass, writing math equations on lined paper that, over time, stains green with crushed blades. He does his best to focus, hands over his ears to block the roar of cars that drive down Waialae, but he cannot help but think of the photographs on the projector. And every time he blinks, the shock of the bomb goes off again behind his eyes.
Thirty years before his granddaughter is born, Harrison takes his first boat to Kaho‘olawe. He does not plan to—does not plan, in fact, to even be in Hawai‘i.
Harrison has lived on the mainland for nine years now. He is married and has a son. With his wife, Harrison owns a two-bedroom house in Palo Alto. He is a PhD candidate in geology at Stanford, where his focus is soil science—studying long-term soil formation, vegetation growth, and hydrology, all of which are affected after a bomb is dropped.
One afternoon, the landline rings with a call from Harrison’s mother. He takes it, leaning against the kitchen’s stucco wall, free hand pointing his three-year-old son to the sparrow perched on the blooming prickly pear that grows beside the driveway. Harrison has not returned to O‘ahu since his father’s funeral a year ago, has not set foot on Maui in two decades. Over the phone, his mother tells him they’ve been invited to his grandma’s eightieth birthday party on Maui. His mother can’t leave O‘ahu, busy working to pay off the mortgage and the loans from his father’s failed chemotherapy. Harrison’s brother, who is there too, says, “We never moving back, so why bother?”
And Harrison wants to answer him with the memory of their uncles tossing him back and forth in the backyard, the mango their grandma mashed with the back of her fork so he could taste its sweetness, yellow rivers dribbling down his chin as he swallowed. But he knows his brother does not remember these things. He saves them for his son, who he’ll recount them to later—that day in the bath of their Palo Alto house, a decade from now on the beach after they’ve moved back to Honolulu, as they ride down into the bowl of Kalaupapa, the sweat of their legs itching against the ribs of their saddled donkeys.
When Harrison hangs up the phone, he floats the possibility of Maui to his wife, but she has already planned to go to Denver to see her family. He boards the plane alone and pretzels his six-foot-four body next to a family of mainlanders for the five-hour flight to Honolulu, deboards and switches to a smaller aircraft for another half-hour flight to Maui.
At the Kahului Airport, his uncle—his mother’s brother, who, when Harrison was a child, pushed him into the shorebreak at Ke Ono O’ Polo—waits for him in a lifted Chevy. It is only as Harrison pulls himself up by the truck’s grab handle that he realizes the presumption of his coming. Silence prickles the cab for the first five, ten minutes of the car ride—the vinyl seat going slick against his legs—and just as he has decided to book the first flight back to Honolulu, he gets a glimpse of Kaho‘olawe.
“What, you never see the ocean before?” his uncle says, as they make a turn onto the coastal highway. “So pale you look like one ghost.” He laughs. “You marry one haole and turn into one haole yoself!”
And though part of Harrison is defensive of his wife—in love with the blond hair that curls over her ears, with the triangle of freckles on her left breast and her blue eyes that hold his reflection—even though Harrison is embarrassed of his own skin, which has paled in the fog of San Francisco Bay, he laughs too, and for the next twenty minutes the two men talk story.
Harrison spends the next days eating and drinking. He plays bocce in his grandma’s backyard. He bounces a cousin on his thigh while eating kālua pork smoked in an imu dug beneath his uncle’s banana trees. He honis more people than he can remember the names of, and every time a relative steps back to say, “You look just like your faddah!” he takes a long swig of beer to keep the shaking from his hands.
When they ask about his mother, he tells the truth: She is working. When they ask why she didn’t take off, why his brother didn’t come—“Isn’t he in high school?” they say. “He still get spring break!”—Harrison lies and says they’ll come next time, not knowing that in three years his mother will die from a heart attack, that his brother will move north to coastal Washington and run an auto shop, spending his days drunk under the bodies of cars.
On Harrison’s fifth night on Maui, he learns of the protest taking place the next morning. Over beer and kūlolo, his uncle tells him about the flotilla to Kaho‘olawe, of the proposed occupation, organized to stop the island’s bombing. “I don’t know if it going change anything,” his uncle shrugs, “but at least they try.”
It is nearly midnight, and Harrison is drunk. He asks his uncle about the morning the bomb shattered his parents’ windows. He tells him of the missile he dragged up the beach as a child, tries to show him the scarred valley of his elbow, but there is nothing there.
“We don’t have to camp,” Harrison says. “But maybe we could escort them?” And his uncle looks at Harrison, who is somehow a man, though he remembers him as a boy. He agrees to drive to Ma‘alaea Harbor, where, with the other protestors, they load tents and crates of food into boats.
On the morning of January 4, 1976, Harrison stands at the front of his uncle’s Whaler. The wind is high with winter, and he is tired and nauseous from last night’s drinking. Behind him, his uncle sits and drives. They are at the very middle of the flotilla that, over decades, will become a historic part of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. As they round the uneven point of the lava rock jetty, Harrison turns back to look at the harbor. The docks that were once full of grandpas smoking in rusted metal folding chairs, with boys like Harrison who stood at the edge of the jetty, casting makeshift poles and hoping for a harbor fish to bite, are now full of yachts and tour boats, fishing charters like the one his uncle operates. In the half-light of dawn, Harrison can just make out the haoles buckling their life jackets behind metal railings. Their pale faces watch the Hawaiian flotilla motor out, wide-eyed.
Wrapping his hands around the boat’s railing, Harrison feels the boat skip over chop as his uncle accelerates into the black of deeper water. Someone starts bumping reggae, and Harrison’s heart buoys.
The boats only make it halfway across the seven-mile channel before the Coast Guard helicopter appears. It hovers over the water, sending an icy spray that coats Harrison’s arms and itches as it dries. “If you continue,” the man in the helo blares over the megaphone, “we will confiscate your vessels. You are trespassing on government property.”
Harrison retreats to stand beside his uncle. For a moment, the flotilla presses on. Then the helicopter turns and angles its blades. Harrison pushes the throttle forward, but his uncle has spun the wheel, and the boat turns about-face. Harrison yells at his uncle, who is crying. He is sure that all is lost, until he turns to Kaho‘olawe and sees that the smallest of the flotilla’s boats has snuck away.
The nine people on that boat are the ones who make history. They are the ones known for reclaiming Kaho‘olawe. Try as he might, Harrison will always be jealous of this, of what he calls their luck but what he knows is bravery. He will spend the rest of his life trying to make up for the fact that he was not among them. From the waves, Harrison sees their feet sink into the sand of the shore that he will not touch for another fifteen years. And, as he reads the military signs on the shore that say, Bombs in Land & Water—Keep Away, Harrison will wonder how it is that an island can be owned. That an archipelago can be stolen. He will ask these questions until cancer takes him away.
When Harrison finally sets foot on Kaho‘olawe, it is not as he hoped. He is forty-four years old and a contractor for the U.S. Navy.
The morning is cold, early enough for mist to hang over the water. Harrison steps off the boat and into the ocean, mistaking it for sand. As the water seeps through the cracked toes of his work boots, soaking his socks, he takes in the island. Missiles and shell casings the width of two men litter the shore, and, as he looks up the hill, he finds an arrow made of painted white rocks.
“What’s that?” he asks his Navy handler.
“Target arrow,” the man says, pointing to Kaho‘olawe’s cliffs.
Harrison thinks of the game—Operation Desert Storm—that his eighteen-year-old son plays on the computer in their living room on O‘ahu. It has pixelated sand and gray walls, which his son builds to protect imaginary bases from enemy bombers. Harrison has spent many hours watching his son drive the digital tank through the imaginary courses he makes.
After repeated protests, the U.S. has agreed to fund a cleanup of Kaho‘olawe, shelling out four hundred million of taxpayers’ dollars to private contractors, whose job it will be to remove all bombs from the water and land. Harrison and ten other geologists have been hired by the U.S. Navy to survey Kaho‘olawe before the cleanup begins.
Since his wife left him for the mainland three years ago, tired of the claustrophobia of Hawai‘i, Harrison has been taking more jobs like these—work that requires him to spend a couple days, or more, on the outer islands. He knows he shouldn’t leave his son alone, worries that the boy will think Harrison blames him for his mother’s absence, but it is better to mourn her this way than in a lawn chair with a bottle, as his father did his hand. On the nights when Harrison does return home, his son ignores him, sitting in front of the computer with his headphones on or, worse, shuts his bedroom door when Harrison pokes his head in to offer a slice of pizza or a videotape to watch on the VCR.
Harrison spends his first day on Kaho‘olawe collecting samples of soil and rock to take back to the lab at AECOM, where he works. His boss didn’t want to give him this assignment, preferring to send Harrison to the Big Island to oversee the grading of coastal land for a resort. But Harrison fought for this job, promised that it would provide more contracts for the company in the future.
“Who,” he asked, “occupies more land than the military?”
“No one,” his boss had admitted.
Now, Harrison stands on the island he has dreamed of for forty-three years. Beside the navyman, he walks and, every quarter mile, takes his hand trowel to dig half a foot into Kaho‘olawe’s soil. Each time he takes the steel auger from his pack, twisting it into the dirty dirt, he wonders if he’ll set off a bomb. The two men walk past ditches filled with rubber tires and shell casings, step carefully through target zones littered with unexploded ordnance and fallen kiawe branches, thick with thorns. Harrison scrambles up and down the northwestern shore of the island, from the rocky beach—where he finds a fresh he‘e drying over lava rocks—to the hill where he and the navyman camp at the end of the day, eating their turkey sandwiches from a cooler as feral cats look on.
The next morning, Harrison wakes up before the navyman does. Though it is against his contract’s rules, he walks alone to the cliffs above Kanapou Bay, where he looks across the channel to Maui. He remembers the last trip his family went on before his wife left. They’d snorkeled the crescent reef of Molokini Crater. By then, his grandma and uncle had passed, his cousins moved to the mainland or busy working for the resorts. Harrison and his wife rented a car and drove to Ma‘alaea Harbor, where, with their son, they’d taken a double-decker tourist boat out to the atoll. Harrison had pointed out Kaho‘olawe to tell his son about the navigators who trained on its summit, and his wife had rolled her eyes. While he and his son had snorkeled, she’d spent her day on the boat, drinking white wine. He’d known then that she’d leave him, just not when or if she’d take the boy with her.
When Harrison gets back to the tents, the navyman is up and making coffee over a portable propane stove. He hands Harrison a cup, and they continue the work of the previous day with no mention of Harrison being gone. It is four in the afternoon when they make it to Sailor Hat, and Harrison is tired from two days of walking and sun. He does not recognize the hole in the land.
“We blew that up,” the navyman tells him, as they look down.
Standing at Sailor Hat’s gravel rim, Harrison remembers the hill of TNT from his high school class, the photographed explosion he first saw twenty-six years ago. He steps back to stare at the scooped-out earth, to try and find the exact spot where the photo was taken. He remembers his mother’s hand, wonders if the pit of her palm could have gathered water when held face-up in a storm. He should have asked her before she was gone.
“Boss wants you to take a sample,” the navyman says, still at the edge.
Harrison does as he’s told, slipping down the rocky side. He sniffs the air for char, but there is none. No sign of the ash from the photograph, or the smoke that filled his high school classroom. There is only green water, which has seeped through the bomb-cracked aquifer. Harrison’s face is reflected on its surface, blocking the blue of the sky. He locks eyes with himself and, for a moment, sees himself as his father was forty-three years ago—dazed after falling from the mango tree.
In fifteen years, Harrison’s granddaughter, Lila, will be born. When he holds her in the hospital, still purple from her mother, he will search for himself in her eyes. But her irises will be blue, will lack color even as they are exposed to the light. Weeks, months, years will pass, and he will see her nearly every day, will watch her hair grow in blond curls to her shoulders, her limbs lengthen as he pushes her on swings and chases her around fields. He will always be expecting some blemish, will—as they walk hand in hand through his neighborhood gathering blossoms, as they lie side by side on a blanket watching the stars from his backyard—always be tracing the pits of her palm, the soft crook of her elbow in search of a scar.
But back on that spring day on Kaho‘olawe in 1991, a wind from the Northeast blows, breaking the surface of Sailor’s Hat. Harrison lets gravity take him down the last foot, stopping at the pool’s edge. When he dips the vial to get a sample, the water is so salty it bites.
Three days after his granddaughter, Lila, is born, Harrison pulls his last missile from the ground while volunteering on Kaho‘olawe. It is a clear, blustery day, winter’s trade winds blowing the brim of his straw fisherman hat up and pulling the strap tight against his skin. Red dust swirls at his feet, any chance of rain stolen by Maui’s mountains. Taking off the hat, Harrison puts down his metal detector and allows his face a moment of sunlight.
From the summit where he stands, Harrison can see the mass of Maui. He can see Lāna‘i to the left and the haze of Moloka‘i looming behind. Though he has stood on this same hill dozens, if not hundreds, of times in the past fifteen years, the view still gets him, still hammers his heart and sets him wondering how the Islands might have looked thousands of years ago, when the navigators first sailed to Hawai‘i from Marquesas and Tahiti. If he squints, he can see it—cliffs green before they were razed for resorts and Army Reserve homes, the land soft and rolling before pineapple and sugarcane cut the valleys into grids, before even lo‘i and fishponds were built into the streams.
Harrison wipes the sweat from his face and pulls his hat back down. Takes the sunscreen from his back pocket and swipes on another layer of zinc. He knows this act is useless—pretending he can fight the melanoma that killed his father and that, over the phone, his brother says has come for him too—but it is habit now, something he’s been doing for over a decade.
Harrison does not yet know that the cancer is in more than just his skin. It is in his lungs, maybe his bones, is spreading down into his pancreas and up to his brain. Within the next five years, it will take him, and when it does, Lila will be just old enough to remember the sharp scent of Singapore plumerias they gathered from the neighbor’s tree, the part of his hair and vague hazel of his eyes, which she will swear, at fifteen, were more brown than green.
Harrison has volunteered on Kaho‘olawe since his retirement in 2002. Even though the Navy has officially ended the cleanup, they still let locals access the land, people like Harrison who once worked there and nonprofits that have organized to make the island bomb-free. Harrison knows this is more to save face than anything, but he is too tired to do more than take a boat to Kaho‘olawe once a month and dig. He tells himself that it is enough to clear bombs from the earth, to bag plastic on the shore and water surrounding the island.
But sometimes, Harrison thinks about the Kaho‘olawe nine, about George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, who, while protesting, were lost at sea. He wonders how his life might be different if he’d made it onto the island that day in 1976, if he’d somehow be a better man, if he could have built a marriage his wife would not have left. Someday, Harrison hopes to bring Lila to this island, to climb to the summit and point out all the places he has been. He hopes that, after he is gone, she will bring her own children to this place, will point at the bomb-free earth and say, “Your great-grandpa did this.”
Harrison picks up his metal detector and swings it over the ground, walking a few yards until the sensor beeps. The metal of a propeller peeks out of the red soil, and he takes the hand trowel from his fraying work belt. He kneels to clear dirt from the torpedo’s side, listening all the while for the tick of the detonator as it locks into place—waiting, as he always does, for the bomb to go off.
Harrison picks the hunk of metal off the ground, and a bitter smell from fifty-eight years ago fills his nose. For a moment, he hears the window shatter, sees light falling in shards around him. He feels the round of a shell casing under his palms, the blast of air from a helicopter’s rotors, that first shock of ocean water creeping in. He hears Lila’s throaty scream from three days ago, as she took her very first breath. When Harrison blinks, he cradles the torpedo. It is heavier than he expected.
Mariah Rigg is the author of Extinction Capital of the World, which is forthcoming from Ecco. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Oregon Literary Arts, VCCA, and Lambda Literary, among others.
