The ocean crashed hypnotically as the Venus of Hana yoga gently gave her commands. "Let the sun rise over the crater," she said, her arm arching into an ethereal halo over her head. She read a poem by Mary Oliver, sang awhile and instructed us to extend our buttocks toward Hana. We closed our eyes, dimly aware of the wind rustling through banana leaves.
Then our yogi, Erin Lindbergh, summed up how it feels to spend a slow Sunday morning on the edge of the earth in a tropical nirvana where all of nature seems to be on Viagra. "There is a bowl of flowers in your heart," she said.
Nearly 40 years ago, her grandfather - Charles Lindbergh - became one of a multitude of seekers to be smitten by Hana, on the east coast of Maui. He is buried in a swamp mahogany coffin at the Hoomau Congregational Church in Kipahulu, not far from his granddaughter's yoga studio, his now-mossy grave rimmed by beach rock. Like the manic hordes who form a human chain in rented Mustangs and PT Cruisers on the Hana Highway, fleeing chain-hotel sterility on the "other side" of Maui, the legendary pilgrim of the skies was restlessly searching for serenity, a sacred sense of apartness.
To his granddaughter, who recently moved from Montana, and bears an uncanny resemblance to her grandmother Anne Lindbergh, this remote fleck of paradise some 84km, 617 hairpin curves and 56 one-lane bridges away from the nearest city possesses mana, "a life energy," an unseen spiritual force.
"Hana appeals to the calmer side of one's being," Sunni Kaikala Hueu, a Hana native, has written. "Some say that Hana is almost medicinal in nature - a quiet vibration that is felt."
The vibes can be profound, all right. Where else but in Hana - its fabled highway the approximate width of a suburban driveway - is it possible to encounter traffic jams beside hidden waterfalls as tourists pose for "Coming of Age in Samoa" shots with cellphones? Where perma-culturally inclined off-the gridders live in New Age treehouses and make bike-powered smoothies, while across the street in a community kitchen, a tiny 80-something kapuna in pink pedal-pushers peels boiled taro the old-fashioned way: with an opihi, or limpet, shell.
In these jungled thickets, hot enough to make lipstick melt, the escapist Garden of Eden fantasies of to-do haole, as rich Caucasians are called, converge and occasionally collide with native truths. The seductive mix of aloha and pristine beauty - the happy product of Hana's geographic isolation - has long drawn moneyed sophisticates, from Samuel Pryor, a Pan Am vice president, who shares his eternal rest with his crony Lindbergh as well as his pet gibbons, whom he dressed as children, to more recent emigres like Woody Harrelson, Kris Kristofferson and George Harrison. Most recently there is Oprah the Divine, who has bought some 40 hectares of Hana coastline, including a venerated cinder cone said to contain the bones of the volcano goddess Pele.
For some 750,000 visitors a year, Hana is a way station en route to the Seven Sacred Pools - a series of pools and waterfalls of Tarzan-like perfection that, thanks to sheer numbers, have sadly become the Jersey Shore of Hana. The day-trippers may avoid Hana Highway robbery (US$16-a-kilogram coffee), but on an island more commonly associated with strip malls, golf and swimming pools with fake shipwrecks for the kiddies, they may also miss Hana's essence: a fragile oasis of Hawaiian culture not unlike trees that miraculously survive the onslaught of burning lava.
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