THE BEST VACATION

     When my younger sister Hopi was born in Mt. Shasta in the summer of 1991, it began a series of events that led to my favorite vacation ever! She was born one week before my mom's birthday in July and one week after my mom told me about a most amazing dream she had. (She and I have always had very vivid dreams, sometimes more real than real life. She dreamt about meeting Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead. He said, "I have to meet you!" In the dream, she couldn't tell if he was talking to her or the baby who was soon to be born. As things seem to happen in our lives that have a deeper meaning, it was a series of "coincidences" that led to my whole family taking a pickup load of friends and our old 1959 Mallard trailer to "Jerry on the Eel." It turned out that Jerry Garcia had been in detox when my mom had that dream and the concert had been postponed a month, so we were able to attend. We had a friend who had a booth there, so we all got in free. It was not the Grateful Dead who were playing, but the Jerry Garcia Band. As we walked into the outdoor concert, we met a little baby who looked like Hopi's twin sister. She had also been born at home, two weeks before my sister. They gazed lovingly and knowingly into each other’s eyes.

It was a great concert, a hot day on the Eel river, and a huge tarp or white tent had been set up for everyone to have shade.

When the band started to play, a beautiful Holy spirit wind began to blow from behind the band toward the audience.

What a Blessed Event!

      After the concert, we went back home to Mt. Shasta, where we had a beautiful big house four miles out of town on a Forest Service Rd. The nearest neighbor was a quarter of a mile away, and the deer and bear walked nearby. We were at 4800 feet elevation and, in the winter, that last quarter mile went unplowed. We had a caretaker who had several vehicles that could make it in and out and we left our truck parked down on the paved highway that was plowed most of the time. So our caretaker got a free place to live in his step van motor home conversion. His dad died and left him a small inheritance. Unable to find anything he could afford to buy for 10K, he approached my mom and asked her if she would sell him our house with his word that we would never lose our home. Since he had lived there a year with no trouble, she agreed. All of a sudden, we had enough money to take a dream vacation!

      There was a place in Mt. Shasta then called "The Bagelry." It was a popular spot where we were likely to run into all our friends. One day, a new musician came to town and played his original music there. He began staying at the house of our good friend who had delivered my sister. We started to gather there more often, playing music together and having a great time! He was traveling with another friend named Matthew, who was like a young Buddha. Then they went south together.

       It just so happened that Terra Lake, a little lady with a big heart, who was the nurse/midwife who helped bring Hopi into the world, wanted to go down to the Bay area to see some friends and attend a concert. She had a daughter who was born one year exactly before my sister Christy. They were both born C-section too. Riding with us down to the Bay area, we all wound up at the Halloween concert, where we saw lots of old friends who took us all in for free. There were the spinners, who liked to dance like the Sufis and there were Matt and Shaloma, our musician friends! Shaloma sat in our trailer in the parking lot and we played music together again. There he finished writing the song Liberation with my mom making suggestions for the lyrics. He would later record this album on cassette in Hawaii.

Terra Lake got a ride back up north with some other friends and we decided to go to Santa Cruz, where my brother Joshua had been born in 1978. My mom was happy to see all her best friends there. When we arrived at the Lighthouse Field, where we always went to run our dog, there were Matt and Shaloma again. With no plan to meet, we arrived only half an hour apart at the same parking lot! The coincidences were mounting up as high as a mountain. Soon, Shaloma decided he needed to return to Hawaii where he had a daughter who was about my age and where he was working on an album of his music called "Liberation." The next thing I knew, we had all decided to go together.

      There were ten of us who flew out of Oakland into the beautiful blue Pacific skies. I had been in Hawaii when I was three months old for several months but now I was five and able to remember and experience the incredible awe and magnificence of the islands! We had another Christy along, a young girl who came as our nanny. There was also another 20 year old who came with us who had a young son named Starbird. He wasn't quite two yet, but you should have seen him with the little guitar his mom had bought him. He carried it just like Shaloma and it looked like "a little child shall lead them." He and my sister Christy were immediately best friends.

       When we flew into Honolulu Airport to wait for the plane to the Big Island, we met another young girl named Beth. She had also flown out of Oakland on the same plane. She told us that someone had sent her to the wrong end of the airport in CA and, if we had not delayed the plane by bringing our luggage to the gate to be loaded at boarding time, she would have missed the flight and been stuck in California because Suntrips charged an extra 100 dollars for missing the charter flight. Six months later on the Big Island, she wound up moving into our house and becoming “one of the family." This was another coincidence! She was also a great singer and guitar player.

     We all caught the next plane to the Big Island. Shaloma's friend Stephanie picked us up at the airport in Hilo and took us home to her house near the beach in one of the subdivisions near Pahoa. This is the side of the island referred to as the Puna side. Stephanie had three children. One young girl and two older boys meant plenty of playmates. When Shaloma had left the islands, he had a Chevy van he had stored at a friend's house with a broken head gasket. It had a popup roof with screened windows. Since my mom could afford to fix it and buy insurance, he gave it to her with the agreement that he could play his guitar in it when it rained, as it was likely to do at any time. This became our transportation.

      Stephanie let us live with her for a few weeks. Music was also her life and she loved to play music with Shaloma. Soon we found out that Christy's dad, who was also a musician, lived on a farm owned by a member of his band, "The All Right Family Band." It wasn't long before we moved in and had our own rooms there. A huge family lived there. They were instrumental in getting underwater birthing accepted in Hawaii and they also did past life regression and healing in the warm Pacific waters.

      I had learned to swim in an ice cold pool called Emerald Pools in Mt. Shasta on the river. The warm ocean waters soon became my favorite place to be. Every day we would load up the van and take everyone to Kahena Beach, just seven miles down the road from the farm, picking fruits like lilikoi, (passion fruit), mango, guava and coconuts on the way. As we played music and enjoyed the warm weather, the spinner dolphins appeared and showed off for everyone, jumping and spinning in the bay. This was one of the safest beaches to swim at in the islands because the pod of spinner dolphins used that bay to give birth and kept all sharks far away. Although they didn't let you touch them like the bottlenose dolphins sometimes do, they loved to play with us by swimming below and tickling us with bubbles. There were also natural little pools that were protected from the waves near the water's edge for the really little children to splash and play in.

I lost a little guatemalan hat with a Yin/Yang symbol in the center when I was swimming in the waves. I think the dolphin thought it was a gift from their human friends, and they had a lot of fun with that hat!

      My mom had a bamboo flute that she would take swimming with her. She could "talk" to the dolphins with the end of the flute in the water. She often imitated the dolphin calls. The first time we saw the dolphins, my mom was swimming with Matt. They saw no sign of them until suddenly a light rain brought a rainbow over the bay and three mother dolphins swam around her in a circle while two baby dolphins leaped into the air and did triple spins. She said she felt as if she had been waiting her whole life to meet the dolphins. Her heart leaped at their love and beauty!

     Dolphins grow quickly and, before we left the islands again, these two babies had grown to almost half the size of the adult dolphins and they became our favorite trick artists, doing the best jumps and spins. They always seemed to appreciate their captive audience on the beach and we never failed to give them a rousing applause and drum roll for their show. We called them Tina and Julie after two other dolphin lovers who swam with us. Julie had come from Quebec for a dolphin conference in Kona. She knew Shaloma somehow and asked him to meet her when she got off the plane. He sent my mom instead and was she surprised! They met at the Palace beach in Kailua, Kona. They were wearing the exact same bathing suit and had the same tie-dyed clothes on, the same colors and made by the same person and, although they had never met before, they were instantly best friends. Was this another coincidence, or was it fate? Who knows? The day my mom was supposed to meet her, she instead slept by herself on the lava coast and met the whales, who came near as if to welcome her. Then, after they met up the next day, and attended the dolphin conference together in Kona with friends from the Sirius Institute, who later had a human/dolphin crossover baby on the beach in Kahena, my Mom took her home and she got to swim with the dolphins in Kahena where Tina, another 19-year-old friend who swam every day with the dolphins, greeted her like they had also known each other forever. Perhaps we were all mermaids together in some long ago past life?

      Some people may believe that dolphins and whales can't "talk" or are less intelligent than humans. You will never convince my family of that! Anyone who has ever heard of dolphins rescuing humans at sea would probably say they agree with me too. My mom likes to tell the story of why she thinks dolphins are more intelligent than we are. She was leaving the beach, climbing up the lava rock trail to the road and the parking lot, when she heard the dolphin pod say to her, "See you on the other side." It was a single voice in her head that sounded like her own thoughts. Thinking she was imagining it, she told us about it and laughed it off.     Then, a couple of days later, on the spur of the moment, she and Matt and Shaloma decided to drive to the other side of the island to go on a fruit picking expedition. The other side was about 125 miles away by road. This was the Kona or South side of the island. (Hawaii is the name of the state and also the name of the biggest island.) We went out to breakfast near dawn in Kealekekua and headed down to the beach at Naapoopoo right away. The bottlenose dolphins live on this side of the island and are protected by Hawaiian law from interference by locals and tourists. What should confront our disbelieving eyes when we got to the beach but another dolphin show! The spinner dolphin pod was at Naapoopoo waiting for us to arrive. The bottlenose didn't seem to mind that the spinners had decided to swim around the island to "see us on the other side." Now my mom began to believe and listened quite closely from then on to what our friends the dolphins had to say! Not only could they speak but they obviously seemed to be able to predict or control the future. We didn't even know we were going to be on the other side of the islands that day and the dolphin pod had to have taken two days to swim halfway around the island to get there the same time we did. Now that they had her undivided attention, they asked her "What are we going to do about our friends at the Hyatt?"

     We didn't know what that meant either but we soon found out that the Hyatt hotel was north of Kona. There were "captive" dolphins there who were very unhappy. They were forced to swim with the tourists who paid for the privilege. When we arrived, the dolphins came to Hopi as she began to hum. The next time we went there, we saw one of the dolphins blushing like a rosy sunset. They had brought more dolphins and she was in love! The next year, we heard from our friends with the Sirius Institute that new dolphin babies were born there and the dolphins were happy again and no longer had to swim with the tourists. These were North Atlantic bottlenose dolphins who had no connection to the ocean. Our dolphin friends had to be telepathic!

      Shaloma's daughter, Sophie, came to the dolphin beach at Kahena with her mom and, being only a little older than me, she soon became my best friend. We were bodysurfing along with everyone else before long. When Sophie and her mom moved to Maui a few months later, we even moved over there with Shaloma for a while so we could still see each other. My mom had lived on Maui when she was pregnant with my older brother and she had a lot of friends there too. We went to Seven Sacred Pools, ten miles out of Hana.

      On the way back to Paia, we happened to stop at the very first place my mom had ever been on the islands when she had first gone there in 1975. There was a big stone Congregational church and a social hall and we happened to arrive for a huge luau. We were entertained by a band from New York who were all local Hawaiians home for a quick visit before returning to their many gigs on the East Coast. I was usually quite shy about meeting other people I didn't know, so was my mom surprised when I got up and led the band in one of my favorite songs "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!" With the microphone, I was able to carry the tune and everyone happily sang along. It was my first time on stage but my stage fright was nil as everyone danced and sang together in the beautiful tradition of true Aloha. Although I was not born in the islands but in Mt. Shasta, my mom had given me an Hawaiian name that she had been given when she lived there before. Olalani means "heavenly life, health and protection." I guess we were "kamaaina" (meaning friends of the land), instead of "haolis", meaning those who have no breath or spirit. We lived in the islands for almost a year and I will never forget the best vacation I ever had!