“When your father dies and you are only sixteen, many things change.”

That’s the opening line in Richard Ford’s short story, “Displaced.”

Displaced. Hawaii’s recent hurricane scare got most of us to thinking about those many things that could change if we got displaced.

These thoughts about storms usually involve loss and the desire to rebuild and return.

For me, Lane worked the opposite way. I hardly thought of being displaced in Hawaii, which is something that normally I think about all the time.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

My wife and I were not in Hawaii as the hurricane approached. We were 4,000 miles away in Milwaukee and Chicago visiting family and friends, scheduled to return the day that Lane was supposed to hit Oahu.

So, while so many of you worried about losing your homes, I took a brief sabbatical from my usual displacement obsessions, though it took me a bit of time to figure out that that was what I was doing.

Hawaii has become a very frustrating place for me. On the one hand, I am firmly anchored here and have an active, productive life. And I am deeply attached to this place. I feel proud and privileged.

On the other hand, it’s not a place where my wife and I are likely to remain even after living here for over 40 years, because this attachment comes at a cost.

Hawaii is a very expensive and restrictive place to grow old.

My wife and I spend more time talking about leaving than staying. So do many of our friends. I haven’t talked about where I will end up this much since grad school.

People in their pau hana years pay a tariff for staying, as do young families who give up good jobs on the mainland to return to their Hawaii roots.

There is also a psychic cost: Hawaii’s isolation. That never really bothered me until our children and granddaughter settled on the mainland.

My wife and I spend more time talking about leaving than staying. So do many of our friends. I haven’t talked about where I will end up this much since grad school.

These are necessary but totally crappy conversations. Necessary because Hawaii offers so little. Crappy because Hawaii offers so much.

Leaving Hawaii makes me feel a little like the way the teenager in “Displaced” described the loss of his father: “But now an opening’s been cut, which feels frightening, yet not so frightening.”

It depends on the day.

Look, I know I have it pretty good. I have enough resources to make choices, which is more than most elderly (or for that matter, nonelderly) people have in Hawaii. Chosen versus forced displacement.

The 16-year-old boy in “Displaced” suffered a great tragedy, but he had a whole life to rebuild and to learn from his mistakes (as he in fact begins to do in the story.)

I’m 77, still interested in and capable of a lot of good stuff, but none of which includes either rebuilding or retreating.

Hurricane-wise, if our home was destroyed, we would probably rebuild for real estate purposes but then sell and get the heck out.

Blech!

So I am totally sick of displacement being part of my life. And that brings me back to our trip to the Midwest.

I really did not feel a strong urge to be back in Hawaii during the storm or even to go back once the storm passed and the Chicago-Honolulu flights were running on schedule.

In fact we stalled going back. First, we decided not to take advantage of the airline’s offer to move our reservations a day earlier at (really!) no extra cost.

Then the day before we rescheduled to leave, we delayed our return to Honolulu two more days.

On the surface there were solid reasons for this. Our next-door neighbors, bless them, did what was necessary to protect our home. Neither of us is a great flier, so delay meant avoiding the possibility of the kind of turbulence that makes my legs go up and down uncontrollably as I bravely search my Kindle for a distraction.

But for me there was something less obvious going on. I began to get a sense of this when I realized how excited and relieved I was to have a couple of more days’ vacation in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee was an oasis. Not that I want to live there anymore. I am still very attached to my birthplace but could never live there again.

Rather, it was an emotional hiatus, a stop in time where I did not have to have those relentless Hawaii leave-or-stay conversations. My Milwaukee friends and family spend, by Hawaii senior standards, mere nanoseconds of time talking about where they will end up.

Our last morning in Milwaukee I was having a cup of coffee in an outdoor cafe. It was a beautiful quiet Sunday morning. I’d just finished a long walk where I watched the sun top a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.

I was feeling mellow and not thinking about you-know-what until I overheard two women at a nearby table talking about Lane.

I told them I was from Hawaii and waiting to go back.

“Another false alarm,” one of the women said with a disdainful tone, suggesting the state had gotten a little too panicky.

That made me defensive. “No,” I said to her. “You have to understand how isolated Hawaii is and how vulnerable we are if a storm hits.”

The day after we left, sudden torrential rains fell on parts of the Milwaukee area. The Milwaukee River reached a record level, flooding the street alongside the place we stayed. People there lost power for 20 hours.

Had I still been there, maybe this would have blown up my emotional oasis. You know, like discovering change and displacement can happen suddenly anywhere.

I doubt it. Hawaii is special.

And that, of course, is the problem.

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