A road less taken on Maui

Maui’s tiny Coral Miracle Church, built in 1860. All photos by Sydni Sterling

I’m not much for “bucket lists.”

Nor those other terms like “lifestyle,” “monetize,” or “personal brand” that downgrade human beings to units of consumption; to tourists, in fact, rather than pilgrims, on earth.

Maui’s famous road to Hana is one of those “bucket list” places. The twisting route of fifty-plus miles to the island’s windward side, through lush rainforests, over some forty-six one-way bridges, passing dramatic coastal views and shining waterfalls, is one of the most famous Hawaiian road adventures.

The drive can take up to three hours, traffic depending. The guidebooks advise: go early in the morning to avoid the crowds. So, pretty much everyone goes early in the morning, including the tour vans.

My wife and I visit Maui every September. We’ve made the long trek to Hana several times. Hana is a charming, old sugar mill town, a modest settlement of some 1,500 people with classic Hawaiian cottages, a few art galleries, lush gardens, old churches, a spirited surfing culture, and the iconic, fourth-generation Hasegawa General Store.

The drive, however beautiful, feels longer than it really is. After an hour or so of twisting road, Hana, the legendary destination, might loom in the impatient imagination with all the romance of William Blake’s resplendent Jerusalem.

And so, arrival in Hana risks being anti-climactic. After one arduous, near bumper-to-bumper drive, the old Peggy Lee song popped into my head: “Is That All There Is?” Or, perhaps, I thought, I’m just hauling in another of St. Peter’s empty nets (Luke 5). None of this is Hana’s fault, of course; it’s only the projection of a mainlander’s mind falling prey to the bucket list mentality.

And then, of course, there’s the long drive back.

My wife and I don’t drive all the way to Hana anymore. Instead, just past mile marker eighteen, a little after Uncle Harry’s Fruit stand, we turn left to the slender Wailua Road and continue a few hundred yards seaward, or makai, and park our car on the grassy shoulder near the modest Our Lady of Fatima shrine.

Beyond the shrine, a green clearing, surrounded by colorful foliage, reveals a tiny, white-stucco church with red and blue piping and a rare gambrel, barn-like roof. This is the Coracle Miracle Church, built in 1860. A few steps below the church is the churchyard. Some tombstones are time-worn. Others are more freshly placed.

The church door will likely be open. An open church door in Hawaii is not as common as it used to be, but the beatific gesture happens often enough. The Coral Miracle Church has never disappointed us.

This September, as my wife entered the church, I hesitated, and took a long look at a nearby red ginger plant, which grows wild in the hedges and forests on the windward side of the island, and let my eyes trace the jeweled, lipstick-red fluorescence rising above the oblong leaves. Overhead, a baroque-white cloud drifted west across the immaculate blue. Meanwhile, on the road above, the steeplechase to Hana pulsed by.

A glimpse of the churchyard from the covered entryway

As I write this, it has been more than three months since the August 8 wildfire, driven by hurricane-force winds, reduced the historic town of Lahaina to ashes and left some one-hundred people dead.

Hawaiian culture has undergone a renaissance since the 1970s, but the wounds of colonization, over-development, and bouts of heedless tourism still cut deep. The Lahaina fire, fueled by non-native grasses, wiped out, among other things, affordable housing units, historical and cultural treasures, and a beautiful, seaside town generations of locals called home. Lahaina had once been the royal capital of Hawaii.

The fire was one more twist of the knife.

And yet, post-Covid, the Hawaiian tourist industry had already begun orienting itself towards more mindful tourism, with “respect” as the operative word. The partying, getaway crowds, along with the high-end resorts insulated as cruise ships, will always be with us, but institutional backing for a deeper appreciation for Hawaiian culture aims to tip the scales, however modestly.

Our Hawaiian airlines flight from Seattle in mid-September was about 25 percent full, despite half-price fares. In the days after the fire, amidst the shock and confusion, it took additional days for the official message to come through: West Maui is closed but the rest of Maui is open. Tourists are welcome, but please mind how you go.

My wife and I walked off the plane into the airport at Kahului to find the normally busy terminal almost empty. The sugarloaf mountain of Haleakala, and the dramatic, green peaks of the Iao Valley across the valley in the opposite direction, looked just the same.

Of course, we knew nothing was.

The next day, on our first run between Costco and the Maui Foodbank in Wailuku, I was struck by the steady eye contact and firm handshake of thanks from the young man who helped us unload our car.

A few days after that, I stood on the sidewalk on normally busy South Kihei road, ready to cross the middle of the empty street thirty yards from the nearest crosswalk, when a white Toyota pick-up bearing down slowed and stopped. The driver, clearly a Maui local with a ladder and paint supplies in back, a blue scarf-tied around his head, motioned me across. I waved back in acknowledgement. He lifted a forefinger off the wheel in a return gesture. To risk understatement, that’s not how these encounters usually work.

During our two-week stay, I saw drivers wave other drivers into a line of traffic along South Kihei Road when the road turned busy at the end of the day. I found myself doing the same. And I passed quieter conversations among tourists in the grocery stores and on the beach.

The Hawaiians have marvelous words, miracles of compression, for expressing facets of the better angels of human nature. Laulima means "many hands," where everyone is willing to do what it takes because we're in it together. Kokua is the desire to help without expecting anything in return. Malama means to take care, protect, nurture and preserve, especially the life of the land, which is sacred. To be pono is to walk the earth in harmony with oneself, with others, and with the universe. And, of course, aloha: respect, harmony with one another, to walk honorably and with love.

It was clear, in September, the ancient, cultural prescriptions had not lost their meaning.

From Lahaina, out of sight and a thirty-minute drive away from Kihei, the shock waves radiated across the island. One day, in a Kihei grocery store, I saw a woman in a floral muumuu, in her seventies, her gray hair braided down her back, embracing an athletic-looking young woman who wept on her shoulder.

Our lives are fleeting. Gorgeous sunsets tinctured by intimations of mortality put visitors on their best behavior: a kind gesture, a softer word, a passing smile, and no dream-vacation hi-jinks or paradisal projections of entitlement. The slow, rolling rhythm of the ocean breakers seemed to keep time to some unheard adagio or long-forgotten prayer.

"But where the danger is, also grows the rescuing power," wrote Hölderlin. Trade "danger" for "tragedy" and that is how Maui felt.

I said to my wife, an artist who misses nothing: “Am I imagining this?”

“No,” she said quietly.

I have no illusions about my place in the Hawaiian universe: I am a mainland haole. My perspective was as restricted as someone who looks through the slats of a fence and constructs a world from what can be seen on the other side. Previous visits, though, gave me a basis for comparison. This September was different. And properly humbling. Even more than in past years, I felt the need to visit the Coral Miracle Church.

Inside, with Hawaiian touches, including a flowered lei around the neck of Our Lady of Fatima

Odds are strong, if you visit the church, you will have it to yourself.

On the day we were there, September 17, just three visitors had signed the guest book for the month: September 3, a sojourner from Myanmar; September 9, a “Rev. Doctor” from Washington D.C.; earlier on the day of our visit, a woman from Lahaina.

How the church got its name is the stuff of legend: The church’s construction required coral as a bonding agent for the lava frame, a difficult thing to harvest from the sea. A storm washed up coral for the taking. The day after the church was finished, another storm washed the leftover coral back into the sea.

The church is about fifteen feet wide and, from the back wall behind the altar to the front door about thirty feet long. There are six wooden pews; arched windows frame the sunlit world outside. A wooden crucifix stands above and behind Our Lady of Fatima at the altar. On the day of our visit a flowered lei hung around her neck.

Immediately to the right of the entry is a painting perched on an easel — a portrait of St. Damien, one of the presiding lights in the Hawaiian firmament. The Belgian priest, who died in 1889, sacrificed his life to serve the outcasts on Molokai’s Kalaupapa Peninsula suffering what was then called leprosy; the non-pejorative term is Hansen’s disease. Throughout the Hawaiian Islands, St. Damien is a beloved exemplar of kokua.

I thought of Pope Francis’s admonition: “Go to the margins.”

Saint Damien went to the margins, not just to the isolation of Molokai, but existentially, where he found his center. The diminutive Coral Miracle Church stands at the spatial margins of Maui’s tourist universe. The nave is too tiny for anything but candid prayer. Its horizons are inexhaustible.

Even in the ravishingly beautiful Hawaiian cosmos, this is a spot of rare beauty in the way only a small, wayside place can be.

In the churchyard below, a Hawaiian who died in her seventies, left us with this chiseled advice: "No Fly Feathers — Be Humble."

Getting here simply means a left turn off the busy road to Hana.