Mommy Greenest.(a mother's move to live green in Hawaii)

When her mother left the family to live off the grid in Hawaii, Lori Campbell worked hard to achieve success in Manhattan. But who really has the better life?

Last year I visited the rain forest in Hawaii. I parked on an unpaved road, hiked a path made of hand-chopped lava rock, and made my way to a one-room cabin with no running water and no electricity. When I asked for the bathroom, I was handed a shovel and nudged out the back door, toward a swath of land teeming with so much vegetation it looked like a set from King Kong . Swinging my little shovel like a dull machete, I stumbled around, cursing the occasional fallen coconut that caught my sneaker. I missed New York, my three bathrooms, my light switches, all of which seemed much farther away than the 5,000 miles that separated me from them.

But it wasn't as if I could just jump on a plane. I'd come to this wild clump of Hawaii to stay with my mother, Didi. She and her boyfriend, David, had moved here 22 years ago with nothing but a pup tent and a Coleman stove.

Back inside the cabin I took in the sightsa sixteen-foot-by-sixteen-foot bare-bones structure with a corrugated-metal roof and a bathtub parked just outside the door. This was my mother's home. How, I wondered, did she ever wind up living here, completely off the grid on an island in the middle of the Pacific? And even more implausible, how did I end up where I am, with a four-bedroom apartment in a "white glove" doorman building in Manhattan, a country house, and two kids in private school?

If you'd told either of us in the seventies that these would be our respective lifestyles, we'd have said you were crazy. We hardly knew they existed. For most of my childhood, we lived firmly, dully, in middle-class Park Ridge, New Jersey, in a cookie-cutter ranch house painted burgundy, a color that's now extinct. On Saturday nights, while my parents whipped up pitchers of whiskey sours for the neighbors, the kids would head down to the basement with a box of Devil Dogs to watch The Love Boat on our vinyl couch. Park Ridge, like much of New Jersey, is the kind of place where people say, "I'm gettin' out of here!" and then move to the next town over. But for us, it was different. My parents divorced, and my mother and I did move. Far. It's as if someone shot a gun in the air, said, "Go!" and we ran in opposite directions as fast as we could for two decades. When I visited her in the rain forest, my husband and two children were with me, and while they were outside playing in the wild-pig trap, my mother and I helped ourselves to a few poha berries and sat down across from each other, me feeling ridiculous in a "this season" Burberry rain slicker and she quite comfortable in flip-flops circa 1992. With an awkward, unremitting silence between us, we attempted to come together, or maybe, at least for a while, stop running.

It was only the second time I had made the trip to Hawaii, and I looked around at the needlepoints and ornaments in my mother's home. We exchanged small talk, but the perennial elephant in the room loomed largeme feeling that her remote lifestyle was just a physical manifestation of the remoteness that had always been between us, and she, no doubt, thinking I was unwilling to respect her decision to choose this life. I looked at my mother, her long girlish hair now gray, with an orchid pinned above one ear, and I felt guilty. Guilty for all the exotic trips I'd taken with my family over the years, to every place, it seemed, but Hawaii. Guilty for having so much when she had so little, for gorging on life's luxuries as voraciously as she scrimped on its necessities. Guilty for not calling more, for not being warmer when she called me. And then I felt guilty for feeling guilty. Wasn't my mother the one who'd packed up those ornaments and needlepoints and left our family when I was fifteen?

As a child, I had never anticipated my mother would move out before I became an adult, but as I look back there were all kinds of clues. She'd married at eighteen and had three kids by the time she was 24. Growing up, I watched as she seemed to live inside her head, silently questioning why she'd so quickly become a mother and whether this was all her life would ever be. She was a fastidious worker, a constant whir of cooking and cleaning. Every day after school I'd be greeted by an olfactory salute of synthetic lemon and pine. Windex, Ty-D-Bol, Pledge: These were the products telling the world that things, at least on the surface, were not bad. Good, actually. Clean. I remember wishing she'd put down the vacuum and spend some time, one-on-one, with me. She started drifting away from the family, at first imperceptibly and then in increasingly obvious ways: a part-time job, a growing obsession with James A. Michener and Tom Robbins, a new look. One day in the late seventies, my mother, a slim, bottle-blonde beauty, came home sporting a small brown Afro and a pair of high-waisted, wide-leg jeans. I managed a "Looks good, Ma," but inside I knew it meant that the end of my parents' marriage was near. When I was fourteen, she announced she was no longer in the game, not with words but with piles of clothes and dust. She stopped cleaning for good. She decided to go to college, and there she met David, a man eight years her junior, a man with a beard and a Volkswagen bus. An opportunity presented itself to do something that in all of her 35 years she'd never been able to do: run.