I walked through Lahaina without a particular plan. I looked every direction when I arrived at an intersection, and chose the one that seemed most interesting.

Before long I found myself by the Pacific, in a central square under an old and, apparently, famous banyan tree. Long limbs jutted out of a thick central trunk and sent roots into the ground twenty or thirty feet away, from which new trunks grew. What looked like a glade was actually a single tree, the canopy catching the early morning sun.

Calm, quiet, beautiful, otherworldly.

I sat by my laptop on a bench and tried to retain the moment. What would it be like to live in this place?

An older woman pulled up the legs on a plastic folding table lying upside-down on the gravel under the tree, and clicked the stays into place. With one graceful, athletic motion she flipped it over, then spread a crimson cloth over the grubby grey surface. Five gallon-sized Zip-Lock bags divulged a mess of stone-and-bead bracelets and trinkets which the woman organized with experienced efficiency.

A lean young man in a white tank-top bicycled by. A black work-shirt on a hanger, held by one finger over his shoulder, flapped behind him.

If they were in the moment, it was a very different moment from the one I was in.

Easy Escapes

My first memory relating to Hawaii comes from sometime in the late 1970's – a picture on an old calendar hanging in someone's father's wood-paneled basement workroom, retained for the photo after the dates had passed, of hyper-blue waves washing a beach. In retrospect, I think his dad was doing what lots of people do: he had bought something that allowed him to dream himself into a warmer place, and imagine himself a better - happier - person. If a cigarette could make you feel sexy and a car can make you cool, then, naturally, going to Hawaii could make you relaxed. There was, I think, something behind the calendar: the impression that a nicer life was out there.

People often spend money on things that tell their stories for them, leaving subtle hints suggesting that their bodies, their personalities, and maybe their entire lives, are better than they might otherwise appear. They are fetishized, in the anthropological sense – objects that seem to have personalities and power of their own that they lend to the people who possess them.

They are fantasies. You can't look at them too closely or for too long, or the mystique evaporates – and that's because it was never really there in the first place. A cigarette is just a cigarette. The coolness of smoking was a snippet of symbolism that you added to it yourself. It falls away as soon as you realize it exists in your own mind, and not in the cigarette itself.

And yet James Dean was cool. And my friend's dad could still dream of sandy beaches - escaping into the moment during the long, grey, Upstate New York winter.

Vacation spots usually promote themselves in one of two ways: as a place to go get in touch with a deep, rich culture and experience life in a new way, or a place where you can escape the humdrum exigencies of daily existence completely. The first approach has lead to new theories of travel, with the rise of voluntourism and eco-tourism. While raising awareness may not be as lucrative as orchestrating an escape, it's more sustainable. The world's problems aren't going anywhere.

Hawaii's promoters bend toward the escapist approach. The displays of local culture, at least the ones I saw, felt sanitized, rushed, and touched with a bit of theatrical misdirection. Look over here at the dancers, not the factory farms, the docks, the healthcare delivery system. Or, really, any the rest of the state's infrastructure.

Visitors aren't passive observers here. They have to play along. Pictures on a calendar capture a very small, carefully designed moment. To keep your eye on those pictures over time, to remain in the escape – to stay in paradise – grows increasingly difficult as the world continues to move.

Cheeseburgers in Paradise

Maui trades on a number of words. Aloha, of course, and the vague, ineffable relaxed exoticness the word implies in English. Timeshare is a second, so common that tour companies occasionally feel the need to post "no timeshare" signs so as not to scare off tourists who aren't interested in a sales pitch.

Paradise is another. There is a restaurant, built overlooking the ocean, named "Cheeseburgers in Paradise," as though visitors needed to be reminded of where, exactly, they were supposed to imagine they are.

Paradise, though, almost always refers to someplace else. It's a goal. If it exists at all, it exists in contrast to where you are now. The people who sell Hawaii are selling a paradox.

It works, for a little while, at least, because paradise is a state of mind, a way of looking at the world. (Maybe "filtering" would be a better word.) At least as it relates to travel, paradise is about the beautiful, the fascinatingly different, a world curated to fit into a calendar. At home, finding a coffee shop closed at 8 a. m. is annoying. In Maui it becomes local flavor, and a good reason to explore the neighborhood and find something even more unexpected.

The difference between a calendar and an island, of course, is that an island is more than an image, and sooner or later, in spite of the visitors' best efforts, the paradox will break down. As the exotic becomes ordinary, the esoteric becomes obvious, and after enough repetitions, the piquant just gets irritating. Eventually, you find yourself exactly where you are.

The waiter at a beach-front restaurant asked if we'd enjoyed the floor show. He was wearing what was supposed to pass unquestioned as traditional Polynesian garb. (Muscular and bare-chested, he could have been dancing the hula in the Hawaiian Reflections 1975 calendar.)

"The show out there was amazing," my friend Benton said, glancing out at the ocean. The waiter looked confused.

"The sunset," Benton explained.

"Oh," said the waiter. "I guess we just take that for granted around here." Maybe spectacular sunsets really were just a normal thing for him, or maybe he was too focused on moving plates and serving drinks as his job required to notice.

A Different Destination

My friends and I were in Hawaii for a specific reason. Dennis and Wallace had decided to get married.

They had been together for fifteen years. They were together when they came out to their families, when they faced the losses of people they loved, as they fought through serious illness. They had lived good lives before they met - this was the theme of the toasts the night before the ceremony - but their lives were better, their connects stronger, together.

Instead of New York or San Francisco, where their roots and many of their friends were, they decided to get married in paradise.

So a few hours after the boy with the bicycle put on his work shirt, probably about the time that the woman under the banyan tree was packing up her beads and the staff at Cheeseburgers in Paradise was prepping for the dinner rush, about twenty of us – more chosen family than biological – found ourselves on a quiet, grassy plateau, a mid-way point on a slope that curved up from the beach to the top of a mountain.

Although neither of the grooms was Hawaiian, the ceremony was performed by a native officient, barefoot, a conch shell hanging on his hip. After, the musician they had hired – a ukuleleist – played a few tunes from the popular Hawaiian song book.

Half a mile below, a cloud of dust trailed behind a farm truck trundling along a red dirt road.

A line of bicyclists glided along the shore.

A cargo ship sailed the other direction toward some port I couldn't see.

On the next island, not far across the water, clouds roiled around the peak of a mountain.

And up on our plateau, we quietly contemplated the slight reorganization in the family, the change in the bonds that held everyone together.

After two days in tourist paradise, I found it all refreshingly real. It wasn't all here just for our benefit. Everything felt connected beyond the frame of the picture.

I noticed that Benton was crying, and I realized how glad I was to be outside rather than starting at the blank back wall of some church somewhere – and high up, watching as the world continued to turn, life moving on.