THE PRICE OF PARADISE.

When I was two years old, I travelled across the country by train from New York to Oakland with my mother and my seven-year-old sister. In the observation car on the first morning, we fell into company with an older gentleman who was journeying slowly home to Honolulu, and who had just suffered a considerable misfortune: he had lost his glasses, only a few hours into the first day of a long trip that he had intended to spend reading. While my mother commiserated with him, I thrust an investigating hand into the crevice between the seat cushions and, to everyone's astonishment, pulled out the glasses. I remember the episode--the bristly prickle of velour on my soft fingers; the stunned delight of the grownups--in the vivid, dreamlike manner of most invented memories. But for years afterward I was in possession of the two gifts the man sent me in thanks: a six-inch-tall hula girl and a plastic charm bracelet with a dangling pineapple and palm tree.

The hula girl became the queen of the souvenir shelf, a location littered with trinkets acquired on my family's edifying vacations, and to me she represented a different kind of holiday altogether: one that was undertaken on purely hedonistic impulses, responding only to the deep human need for sand and sea and tropical fruit punches. I was the daughter of an academic whose field was Irish history, and while I had known the thrill of jet travel (that is what it was called in those days, and the very words suggested money and comfort), our airplane trips had always dumped me at the same unromantic port of call: the Dublin airport, where sheep grazed beside the runway and international travellers were sometimes herded into a drafty immigration hall and sprayed down with pesticide to prevent the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease.

On the other hand--aloha. The very notion of a lei greeting--beautiful girls with lush flowers on a balmy tarmac--drove me wild with longing and frustration. My sense that Hawaii was a destination of singular allure was reinforced by a childhood heavily invested in watching television. The C & H Sugar Company had a riveting advertisement that featured a little girl running through a field of sugarcane, a hibiscus blossom tucked behind one ear. Oahu was the destination of an unprecedented three-part "Brady Bunch," a kind of extended advertisement for United Airlines and the Sheraton Waikiki. When I was a bit older, I began reading Joan Didion's famous essays on the islands, with their mesmerizing descriptions of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, a palace in Honolulu where wealthy Californians sat on a roped-off beach and took the sun together. It was "an enclave of apparent strangers ever on the verge of discovering that their nieces roomed in Lagunita at Stanford the same year, or that their best friends lunched together during the last Crosby. The fact that anyone behind the rope would understand the word 'Crosby' to signify a golf tournament at Pebble Beach suggests the extent to which the Royal Hawaiian is not merely a hotel but a social idea." This was a degree of glamour that threatened to overwhelm me; my experience of sunbathing had been at the community pool, an enclave of housewives ever on the verge of discovering that pork chops were on special at Safeway. The honeymoon following my first wedding was to have consisted of two weeks in Hawaii (at last!) but was then downgraded to a more financially prudent week at an all-in resort in St. Martin, intensifying my fierce, indignant resolve to visit those sun-kissed islands.

And so, inevitably, my first trip to Hawaii (undertaken at the advanced age of thirty-four, with husband No. 2 and my aged parents in tow) was disappointing. I had by then ventured far beyond what had once been the twin poles of my existence, California and Ireland. But Hawaii, I unhappily discovered, wasn't so different from California (palm trees, blue water, Tony Roma's). Worse, because of the intense green and the sheer, mist-shrouded mountains, much of it looked an awful lot like Ireland. I was eager to feel far-flung; the islands of the Hawaiian archipelago are, after all, some of the most remote in the world. Among the many captivating details in Didion's essays from the seventies was a description of the mainland newspapers arriving a day or two ...