It’s easy to characterize Lahaina as a tourist town, though it was much more.

What. For the fire.

“What Lahaina was, is no longer Lahaina,” Carmen “Hulu” Lindsey told me Thursday.

She is the president of the

O

Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and her

What

evacuated from a mountain enclave during the recent fires and awakened at 3am by the roar of a mobile phone. She grabbed her two golden retrievers and headed for her daughter’s house through a wind so strong it felt like a hurricane, with flames visible on the brown hills.

All there is to say about Lahaina, the physical place, if not the soul, is now a thing of the past, she said. In a community of 13,000, 53 deaths have been confirmed and the search continues on Thursday. More than 270 structures have disappeared and hundreds of people remain missing.

other

although

the trauma is still too fresh to fully understand, we know there are thousands displaced at this time. At the very least, hundreds will not have a home to return to if authorities open the roads and allow people to return.

“This is like climate change welcoming the rest of our lives,” Camilo Mora told me Thursday from Colombia, where he is visiting from his adopted home on Oahu. He is a professor of geography and environment at the University of Hawaii, specializing in how our planet is changing.

For Mora, who has made it his personal mission to help Hawaii become more resilient to the rising global thermometer, the Lahaina catastrophe was “not at all surprising.”

The era of climate change has exploded into the era of climate migration, although we have yet to collectively acknowledge this and have an urgent need to be realistic about what’s to come and how we adapt. We can no longer claim that ingenuity and perseverance will overcome the dangers of our warming planet.

Islands have long been the benchmark of climate change, with rising sea levels, rising temperatures, vulnerability to drought (it’s hard to carry water in when it runs out) and, increasingly, extreme weather events from

forest fires

to floods.

They are also expensive places to live, not least because tourism economies are a double-edged sword that can drive up costs.

Islands like Maui make it clear that global warming is just as much an economic and justice issue as it is an environmental one, because only the wealthy can recover quickly. Only the lucky and resourceful will be able to recover at all.

Too many people will simply find themselves on a downward trajectory of instability and poverty

makes

rebuilding a house or a life in the same place is impossible as we have seen in other fire-ravaged cities like Paradise

California

Government support has yet to find a way to provide adequate protection against this ugly and unpopular fact. But we are increasingly seeing something that felt before

if although

It

only

happens

only

in distant places: natural disasters drive out entire populations.

“This goes from worrying to terrifying when you see this happening in your backyard,” Mora said.

Just a few days ago, Front Street, Lahaina’s main tourist hot spot, was full of shops and restaurants catering to day-drinking vacationers, many of them from California.

I was there with my family last week, an annual outing we have graced with regular stops at this picturesque place with its 150-year-old banyan tree that takes up an entire block, reportedly now charred and leafless, and a boardwalk with beautiful views of the port.

Sushi, gelato, bikini shopping for teenagers, we had turned it into an art.

Outside the historic Baldwin House, we stopped to watch a family of feral chickens, which roam free pretty much all over Maui, then queued for a ferry to Lanai to visit the cat sanctuary on an island owned by a billionaire.

In between, my eldest b

right

should have a shot glass souvenir to add to a collection.

Pure tourists, like the thousands of people around us,

goods

hanging out in Lahaina on a break from the beach, fueling its economy and image as a place for mai tais in oversized glasses.

But Lahaina is different from other vacation destinations on Maui

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Kapalua in the north or Wailea in the south where the community is made for outsiders. There you will find the Ritz-Carltons and Fairmonts, the 18-hole golf courses and the gated second or third homes of the wealthy.

Lahaina residents, on the other hand, “are a community that depends on each other,” Lindsey said. “They’re almost like a very big family.”

The bottom of all that tourism is the high prices, especially for real estate. Maui is considered Hawaii’s least affordable county, with a median home price of over $1 million. It would take an annual salary of $200,000 to buy the average single-family home, and it would take nearly 100% of the average annual wage to pay for it.

In Lahaina, the median household income is about $80,000, but the median price for a home is over $700,000, already prohibitive before this devastation.

A program in Maui that offers $30,000 in down payment assistance has struggled to find takers because applicants simply don’t have enough financial stability to meet loan requirements, even with the assistance.

Renting is no better. Some affordable housing communities in Maui of which there aren’t enough have waiting lists

twelve

for 12 years. Clearing that backlog was a major issue in the last mayoral race, but even with a new administration that has prioritized construction, more units are years away.

Lahaina was once the residence of King Kamehameha III, who conquered the chiefs of all the other islands to unite Hawaii. Later, Lahaina became the capital of that kingdom until 1845, when it was moved to Honolulu. Throughout different eras of the island’s history, it has been a center for whaling, for the shipment of sugar cane and pineapple, and even for spiritual life, from the traditions of the indigenous people that honor the ocean and the land to the missionaries who the gods of the west.

“There is so much history that will be lost forever, a history that binds us all, young and old, not just to the ina [respect for the land]but for ourselves and for each other,” Lindsey wrote in a statement Wednesday.

Despite all that history, Lahaina has remained a city for the locals, a place where people went to school, worked and lived in the humble

,

single-storey houses that seem both weathered and idyllic to this outsider.

There was a Catholic church where the bell rang regularly and the doors were always wide open. A nearby home sold a litter of golden retriever puppies while we were there. Down the street, workers on their lunch break at Spam musubi.

I’ve covered my fair share of wildfires and I can tell you what they’ll find when they come back: knee-deep ashes made from their belongings; car rims melted into puddles from the impossible heat; bits and pieces that somehow survived a ring, a book, a sung picture.

And then the realization that not only have they lost everything they have, but everything they have known. They are alive, but without the life that seemed stable, albeit imperfect, only a few days ago.

They have become climate migrants who will be forced to live elsewhere, maybe for weeks, probably for months or years, if not forever. The family ethos that was the heart of Lahaina will be stretched and frayed as people focus on survival. Keeping that intact, the “most important thing,” as Lindsey puts it, will be even more difficult than rebuilding the physical structures.

She points out that the indigenous traditions and love of the land keep people here more than most people. She thinks people will stay in Maui and in Lahaina. But she also saw Maui residents arrive at the airport in Oahu when she traveled there for a meeting on Thursday.

“I was just so shocked,” she told me. “And then I thought, ‘Well, I can understand.'”

Because climate disasters don’t just disrupt people, they break communities and the ethereal ties that bind in ways that don’t show until they’re gone.

other

There are no blueprints to rebuild it.

This is what Mother Nature screams at us as we try to ignore her. There are things we can never put back together

again

once they are gone.

The city of Lahaina will be rebuilt as something new,

probably

probably led by the tourism economy. There will be gelato and mai tais.

The soul of Lahaina is another matter. Now is a time of grief for so many lost loved ones, a time to offer help and respect. Healing comes later. Many will stay and rebuild. But what was no more, and the ties that tie climate change to personal chaos are growing at monstrous speed.