From Maunakea Street, it was a short walk to the Hawaii State Art Museum, where works by local artists are housed in an elegant white colonial structure, formerly a YMCA for servicemen on leave. Honolulu has some of the best representations of these sorts of late-nineteenth-century buildings, constructed when the sugar industry was at its apex, and whose architectural cousins can probably be found in any plantation-dependent tropical country in the world: The floors are cool, buffed cement; the walls stucco; the ceilings high and vaulted. I was reminded that it is possible to visit Hawaii this way, to avoid the garish and the overcrowded, to seek refuge instead in places that have been carefully restored, that attempt to re-create—there's that nostalgia again!—a quieter era in the state's history when it was, simply, a sleepy colonial backwater.

Prettier, perhaps, than many colonial backwaters, but still unpopulated enough that it could feel like a secret among the chosen few.

But here's what else I'd forgotten about Hawaii: You can still feel like you're in on the secret. That afternoon, I went out with some friends from high school, who took me to a place they call Secret Beach. Every island in Hawaii has a Secret Beach, and although they are rarely secrets, they are all, to a certain extent, difficult to access. Jackie and Brian's Secret Beach was just beneath the lookout to the Halona Blowhole, on the southeastern side of the island. The Halona Blowhole is an ancient underwater lava tube that forces seawater out of its spout with such force that the air around it blurs with mist. As the tour buses emptied and people stepped out, cameras in hand, Brian helped Jackie and me hop the stone wall that edged the highway and make our way down the steep, crumbling hillside to the beach, which was really just a scoop of sand backed by sheer black rocks. There were only a few of us there, and we all exchanged smug looks—before us was the most beautiful stretch of sun-glittered water we'd seen, while above us, cars and people passed unaware of what lay just a few dozen yards beneath them. For the first time in a long time, I didn't have to conjure up a Hawaii to love—the one before me was enough.

The next Morning, my mother and I flew to Maui and spent the day driving from Wailea, on the south side of the island, which is all luxury resorts and wide plains of beaches, up through Lahaina, on the west side, looking for totems of her early marriage. The day after that, we left for Hana, on Maui's eastern side, a drive that takes you through the surfer town of Paia. Paia is the sort of place my father would hate (but that I rather like), filled as it is with arts-and-crafts stores selling sarongs and handmade jasmine soaps, and boutiques stocked with vintage gauzy cotton dresses. "Kitsch," my father would sniff.

But the real reason my father wouldn't like Paia is that it is populated with recent transplants to Hawaii, most of them shaggy-haired surfers who left their small towns in California and Germany and Australia and came to call Hawaii home, for the long or short term. It's easy to resent these newcomers, who sometimes seem to take advantage of everything Hawaii has to offer—its waves, its people's native generosity, its many resources—while offering nothing in return. But modern Hawaii has been built by a diversity of settlers, all of whom came to these islands so far from everything else in order to remake themselves: indigent plantation workers into middle-class home­owners, New England missionaries into land barons, dropouts into surf champions, small-time businessmen into sugar tycoons, Kansan schoolgirls into presidents' mothers. Two of the best things about Hawaii are that no one cares about your past and that, even with the limited amount of land, space can be found for almost anyone.