On the fiftieth anniversary of our fiftieth state, Hanya Yanagihara returns to the islands of her youth and finds them (largely) unchanged by time or the spotlight—Hawaii's ravishing landscapes, egalitarian ethos, and singular way of life are just as she remembers

The speed limit on most of Maui's highways is forty miles per hour, but my mother never went above thirty. This is partly because (her words, though I'm not arguing) she is a bad driver—every few hundred yards, she would fumble off the road and we would wait on the shoulder as a caravan of ten or twelve cars zipped past us—but also because she was too busy looking around. Although both of us were raised on Oahu, in Honolulu, my mother has always had fond memories of Maui; this was, after all, where she and my father, then penniless yet oddly optimistic newlyweds, honeymooned in 1969. She was a ceramics major at the University of Hawaii; he had just graduated with a degree in German literature.

"Ooh, look!" said my mother as we crawled past a series of broken-down wooden bungalows about ten minutes past Kihei. "That's where we spent our honeymoon!"

"My God," she continued, slowing down further to better appreciate the dense, wasp nest-like clots of spiderwebs hanging from one distressed eave—I could hear honking behind us—"it hasn't changed a bit."

"I'm not sure that's something to be happy about," I told her. But in truth, I knew what she meant: One of the best compliments you can give something in Hawaii—a place sustained by a sense of collective nostalgia among locals and tourists alike—is that it looks, or feels, exactly as it did several decades ago. Here, change is not always something to believe in.

"Hurry," I told my mother. "We need to be at Lahaina and then back to the hotel before sundown." Lahaina was an easy drive north, but we hadn't made much progress so far, and as my mother kept warning me, driving in the dark made her nervous. Being with her, in this car, in the place where I grew up, was proving to be a regressive experience, so familiar were the landscapes we were passing—a highway edged in coconut palms and wind-torn red torch ginger, the air smelling of exhaust fumes and bruised gardenias.

"Fine," she snapped, and edged back onto the highway, her face pointed straight ahead but her eyes darting left and right, looking for another landmark she might recognize and claim as her own.

Any frequent visitor to Hawaii is fixated on mapping how the islands have changed since their last visit. This is certainly true of my parents, now living in California, who spent my high school years bemoaning the things that had vanished in the intervening years between their post-college departure and their return as middle-aged adults—such as the unobstructed view, straight down to the beaches of Waikiki, that you used to have from the top of Manoa Valley, the residential neighborhood in southern Honolulu where I grew up. This trip with my mother—which we began on Oahu before hopping to Maui and the Big Island—was my first to the islands in three years, and I found myself relaxing with each familiar monument we passed, no matter how unexceptional. At the same time, each new building felt like an assault, a reminder that another once-barren piece of land had been gobbled up before I was even able to appreciate it. Indeed, to be a visitor in Hawaii is to feel the same sense of loss that must afflict longtime lovers of Provence or Tuscany (fellow once-humble farming regions that have also been colonized by pleasure seekers and fantasy chasers), to feel the same unshakable suspicion that once upon a time, Hawaii was something better: less spoiled, wilder, greener. It is difficult, sometimes, not to spend a trip there mourning what has been lost rather than marveling at what surrounds you: the tiers of lemongrass-colored hills, round and perfect as scoops of ice cream, that cup the road leading to upcountry Maui; or, in central Honolulu, on the drive up Mount Tantalus, a jungle canopy so richly verdant that it blots out any glimpse of the sun above.