The islands' accessibility and democracy—you can stay here whether you're able to pay seventy dollars a night for a hotel or seven hundred—is both intoxicating and, some would argue, the source of its ruin: In Hawaii, every tourist is welcome, but every one of those tourists also eats up his share of beachfront and resources, and leaves behind his share of litter. Last year, the islands saw 5.5 million visitors from the United States alone and another 2 million from abroad. Tourism is the single most important industry—it provides the state with $12.5 billion annually and twenty-one percent of its jobs. No one has yet figured out how to make Hawaii less dependent on mass tourism, even as mass tourism risks destroying the very things—the pristine landscapes, the clean air—that attract visitors in the first place.

At the end of Kalakaua, I sat in the long sliver of shade provided by a palm tree at Sans Souci, the last beach on the Waikiki strip before the road becomes tree-edged and quiet and winds its way up to Diamond Head. Sans Souci was, and is, a popular beach among locals, and in the summer, when the waves on this side of the island are gentle and small, I would come here as a teenager in the morning and watch as an ocean swim team of a dozen or so octogenarians stroked their way into the deep-navy waters, gliding over the colonies of coral and out into the open surf.

I have never understood people who visit Hawaii and don't get into the ocean. While everything else in the islands has changed, the ocean remains more or less the same, and its consistency is perhaps the most heartening, and moving, thing about Hawaii: No matter how much new development there is, the waters that surround the islands are ungovernable and unownable. The water you get to swim in is the same that Barack Obama did in the 1970s, or that Duke Kahanamoku, history's greatest surfer, did in the 1910s, or King Kamehameha I did after he united the islands in 1795. To be in the ocean is to be, truly, in an authentic Hawaii.

Later that day, when my mother arrived, we spent the afternoon doing the things we always did in Hawaii: vacationing in a place you know is about nothing if not rhythms. We went to Chinatown, Honolulu's loveliest and best-preserved neighborhood, a small web of late-nineteenth-century storefronts, some with saloon-style double doors, and to the lei stands on Maunakea Street. In May, when high school and college students are graduating, these stores seem never to close, and at day's end, their glass-fronted refrigerators are picked bare. In February, in the middle of the day, there were few customers, and my mother chatted with the proprietor of one, Lin's, while I opened the refrigerator doors and touched the ropes of orchid leis, with their scalloped purple petals, and the lengths of hairy lehua flowers, which grow on the Big Island and whose blossoms are great fluffs of silky scarlet strands. My mother bought me a Micronesian ginger lei, in which closed buds of white ginger are tied in loops around a flossy string. People give one another flowers here the way they hand out candy, or cupcakes, elsewhere: a little treat to break the monotony of the day. One of my favorite sights in downtown Honolulu is that of a middle-aged businessman in black wool pants, reading the paper and wearing a lei or two over his tucked-in aloha shirt. You know it means it's his birthday, or his retirement, or his promotion, or his wife's just had a baby, and his colleagues have draped him with leis to congratulate him. Only in Hawaii do men wear flowers so openly and naturally.