By 10 a.m., a little bit of everybody is shouldering in for a wash. There are local families with babies and senior citizens with foam flotation noodles and tourists with sun-scalded calves the color of Spam. Through modern advances in waterproofing, four young women have brought their telephones with them into the pool, fending off a potentially cloying surplus of timeless splendor. The bacteria deserve credit, too, for their silent encouragement against loitering. After an hour’s swim, still free of visible rashes, we make for dry land.

Out in the poolside park, Saturday things are happening. A mom wonders when the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting will clear out from the picnic shanty and make way for her 2-year-old’s birthday party. A guy is washing his dog in the foot bath, near a sign that says “no animals allowed.” Over in the parking lot, we are glad to find a man dealing coconuts from his beat-up S.U.V. Shirtless, veiny and tan beneath a blown-out wicker hat, he puts the nuts down on his tailgate and machetes them with great flair. This coconut man (the second in our mounting tally) seems a little offended when we ask what his coconuts cost. “I prefer donations,” he says. “I don’t think of myself as a business. I’m just out here trying to feed the people.” My wife worms it out of him that, really, he wants $5 per nut. I hand him a 20 for two. Clutching my money, he goes into a thing about how the green of the coconut is the same green as the dollar. Then he tells me how coconut water is chemically identical to human plasma and how World War II field hospitals would transfuse soldiers with coconuts when they ran out of blood. I have heard this fable before and know it to be hogwash, but I say, “Oh, wow,” and await my $10 change that does not appear to be forthcoming. After a weirdly long interval of communing with my bill, Coconut Man No.2 looks up at me and says in a put-out sort of way, “Oh, did you want some change?” I allow that I do, and he produces it.

I go away full of gratitude for this fellow, not only because his coconuts are very fine, but for nipping a budding and inconvenient fancy that I might like to live here on the Big Island. His brand of coconut palaver is, I suspect, common in these parts. Encountering it on any sort of regular basis, straight-world mainlander that I am, would drive me out of my mind.

Flouncing on Oahu’s beaches has given our boy a taste for sand, so we pile into the car in search of some. Motoring out, I feel my fondness for the Big Island deepening. Cataracts of blossoming vine pour from the roadside jungle. Tire-flattened mongooses make regular appearances on the double yellow line. Even the roadkill here astounds! Real estate in these parts would probably cost you a thumb, yet the houses are unfussy hip-roofed bungalows built in a kind of army-base vernacular. While some citizens keep spectacular gardens, this is also a place where if you want to leave some old mattresses or an engine hoist in your yard, you just go ahead and do it.