I once took an evening flight from Maui to Honolulu. I was living on Maui then and commuting to Oʻahu for work, and I had the aisle seat next to a high school junior from Molokai, flying in to see family. We talked the way strangers do on short flights.
As the city lights came up under the wing he leaned to the window and said, “Concrete jungle.” Thirty seconds later he sighed. “They live like rats down there.”
He was not the first to feel it. The Romans suspected their towns of living off the countryside, and there was truth in it, since the town taxed the farmer and never the reverse. Thomas Jefferson wanted a republic of yeoman farmers, and the yeoman farmer has been the hero of the American story ever since, though almost nobody has met one. The myth has outlived the farmers.
Hawaiʻi is one city with a few outlying islands. The hurricanes made it plain. When Lala tore through Hawaiʻi Island and Lowell through Kauaʻi, the help came from Honolulu and from beyond Honolulu. Not much help could come from the next valley over.
The old ways are gone. The Neighbor Islands do not feed Honolulu, and they cannot feed themselves. Port, airport, university, the neurologist you fly to see — the dependence runs one direction.
Some people keep the illusion of independence going. The off-grid family has bins of rice and dry beans. The man with a full freezer and a diesel generator says he’ll be fine come the next storm.
The dependence of country on town shows on empty shelves after a disaster. But the countryside was running out before the storm. Rural Hawaiʻi has already lost its pharmacies, its specialists, its tradesmen. The roads crumble and nobody is left to fix them. Families leave for somewhere they can afford, and the ones who stay grow old. Every year these places become more dependent, not less, while insisting on the opposite.
Where was the diesel generator made? Not here; there is no manufacturing to speak of and no ore in the ground. Where did the diesel come from? Not here. And the money that bought the generator was earned in tourism, or the military, or from someone who works in one of them. The shirt on the man’s back, the rice in his bins, the power he is so proud of doing without: Imported, every bit. He is the most dependent man on the island, and he has arranged his dependence so carefully that he cannot see it.
Dependence is not a defect. It is how people were made. The gifts are scattered on purpose — one man can plumb and another can preach, one island grows coffee and another has a deep harbor — and they must work together to keep and work the earth.
Now, the young man next to me on the plane was not entirely wrong. A city can be a parasite on its countryside, and a ruling class a parasite on its people. Ancient Hawaiʻi knew this better than most. The chiefs roamed the islands, and wherever they went the commoners were called to hold feasts and bring hoʻokupu, offerings. The chiefs combined power with appetite, and the Hawaiians had a saying for it: “He manō holo ʻāina ke aliʻi.” The chief is a shark that travels on land.
And a city can rot from the inside. Scripture’s first city was built by Cain, and the great ones after it — Babel, Sodom, Nineveh, Babylon — are remembered for their pride and their vices. Honolulu has Hotel Street and Waikīkī after midnight and more than one former legislator convicted of taking bribes. Nobody is obliged to pretend otherwise.
The rural contempt has two old roots: The city that takes and the city that corrupts. Neither city is imaginary.
Nor has the danger gone anywhere. A city that takes without giving is exactly what the state government in Honolulu can become. The shark goes inland now by way of new surcharges, permit delays, and Neighbor Island budgets set by committees that have never spent a night in Hāna.
The cure for the countryside’s illusion of independence is honesty about what it needs. The cure for the city’s appetite is to earn what it is given. That means doing more in office than feasting and taxing.
Still, my young friend said all this from the seat of a Boeing 717 assembled in Long Beach from parts made in Italy, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, and I doubt the irony would have troubled him. Cities are where trade happens. Honolulu, for all its faults, is a great one.
He was wrong. A city may be made of concrete, but it is not a jungle. Rats live in cities, but cities are made for humans — fallen yet redeemable humans, which explains both their sin and glory. When the people of Hawaiʻi are in trouble, it is to Honolulu that they turn.
The story that began in a garden does not end in one. It ends with a city coming down out of heaven, “its radiance like a most rare jewel.”
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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