Reunited in a Strange World

It isn’t often you get the joy and horror of experiencing a Kafkaesque dream in real life. The walk down empty hallways with closed doors. The lingering-too-long silent glance of the one person you pass. Then one blink, and everything is back to normal. That was our brief existence arriving in Honolulu on Tuesday, in an attempt to come home to our boat and reunite with Tom.

The mere 40 of us on the plane were escorted off ten at a time. As we stepped off the jetway, men in army uniforms took our temperature and directed us down a makeshift aisle, where we went through checkpoints to confirm our quarantine locations, phone numbers, and compliance with the state mandated 14-day quarantine. But it went too fast. Five minutes only, and we were following signs to baggage claim. But everybody else had disappeared. Where did they go? We walked down empty hallways. Empty escalators. We stopped to admire a stuffed pineapple in a dark, closed tourist shop. We followed the signs outside and walked down an empty covered sidewalk. On lone soul, a uniformed pilot, walked toward us, face covered with a protective mask. His eyes followed the kids as they skipped down the sidewalk after a 6-hour motionless flight.

We arrived in an empty room with still, silver baggage carousels lined up one after the other. Thirty-one of them. All still, expect for carousel 26, where my bag rotated slowly around in a circle. The only bag. A little girl about six looked at us. She didn’t respond to my smile, because I had forgotten that my smile was covered up with a mask. But she looked at the kids with a clear yearning to want to come and talk, or play, or engage in some way. But she didn’t, paralyzed perhaps by the same fear that is keeping my kids from getting anywhere near people. I picked up our bag and headed out to the curb. One family waited on a bench and one guard stood watch, but otherwise it was empty and silent. There were no taxis, no shuttles, no traffic. Just the dark gray-brown of shaded cement. Only the occasional dark car driving by looking for their loved ones, ready to whisk them away to their designated place of quarantine.

Our expected car showed up, and Danny’s immediate smile and Aloha snapped us out of the Kafka scene. We piled into the car and drove into the bright sunlight. People ran through parks, walked their dogs, roller bladed on sidewalks. Surfers littered the waves to our right, and kids splashed in the calm waves of protected lagoons. Danny pulled up in front of Hawaii Yacht Club, where Tom was waiting for us. We kissed through our face-masks and hugged for a long time, while Danny patiently idled the car with the kids inside. We released our grip when we saw another car driving down the one-way aisle. We quickly grabbed our bags, helped the kids out of the car, said our farewells to Danny, and maneuvered ourselves and our bags onto Korvessa, our home.

Back to real life. Sort of. Except that real-life for us is to be observed from the deck of our boat for the next 14 days. We expected it. The biggest uncertainty is how long we can stay at our current location. We thought we’d be able to stay when I arranged this over three weeks ago, but then had been told 12 hours before Tom’s arrival that we would have to leave once the kids and I arrived. There have been one or two vocal club members who seem to think that our mere presence on the island has brought plague to them all; other club members took an informal poll and want to let us to stay. If we had received word from other marinas, we would have been happy to move to another dock or mooring ball (still are happy to do that), but nobody will return our calls or emails. And so, like it or not, Hawaii Yacht Club has us until we have another place to go.

Hawaii has just extended its quarantine and stay-at-home order until May 31. Alaska has recently extended its same orders until May 19. And British Columbia doesn’t look like it’s going to open its borders or its restrictions on recreational boating anytime soon. And so we wait.

We’ll be waiting with books and games and movies. We’ll be waiting with attempts to exercise on the bow of the boat. We’ll be waiting with plenty of tasks to do to get the boat ready for another long passage. And we’ll be waiting with an appreciation of being together again, of being home again, and of being reunited in a Kafka-esque world that we no longer know. But we know each other, and we’re waiting together now.