The early morning sun slides along the fronds of coconut palms in the manner of Rick’s fingers sliding along the strings of his guitar. A gust ruffles the leaves, which send sparks of silvery light through this compound. I have just moved into my tent home for the next week at the Aloha Music Camp, and to have, on my shared deck, a slack key guitar player is a definite amenity. I think about this: Playing slack key—a description of guitar music played by loosening the strings into various traditional tunings—is somewhat like spinning a spider’s web that is as orderly and strong as steel, yet floats effortlessly in the breeze. Last night, at the camp’s opening ceremony in the fluid moonlight, Kaliko chanted as the staff draped kukui lei around our necks. It was a peculiarly touching moment.

This is the fifth annual Aloha Music Camp, which was started by slack key guitar guru Keola Beamer, his wife Moanalani, his mom, Nona, his adopted brother, Kaliko, and his good friend, Mark Nelson. Look around: There are about 122 of us here at the Kaupoa Beach Village at the Moloka‘i Ranch. Everybody is here to study music and be immersed in Hawaiian culture. My fellow campers are from almost everywhere. There is a young lady disc jockey from Hamburg, with a biting sense of satire, and she stands near an earnest guitar student from Austria. I can see ladies from Alaska and families from the Pacific Northwest. Over there is a woman from New York, who has her own hula studio and is accompanied by seven adopted children. Then, there are a number of serious, long-term students of Keola’s, who are as close as family. Family, it seems, is what we all are in this early morning sun.

At breakfast this morning, Nona Beamer, a master and innovator of Hawaiian cultural studies, looked around at all of the people at the camp and said, “Just look at this. In my day I couldn’t give it away, and now we can’t keep up. My husband was Irish, but I never thought of learning about his culture.” After breakfast I sit under the kamani tree on the shoreline and talk with songwriter Millicent Cummings. She tells me that music is healing because it allows people to be together and join in one understanding. “Music for me,” she says, “is like God. I use music to lift my mind out of the mundane to the sublime.” Behind me I hear the plunking of ‘ukuleles, and then the slow, rhythmic picking and sliding on a guitar. It bathes the day in a peaceful and friendly glow.

Mark Nelson, who lives in Oregon, tells me how the camp got started. He was working on a book about slack key guitar and wrote to Keola, who he had never met. Keola invited Mark to his birthday party. This was a classical Beamer family party with Moanalani and her friends dancing hula, Nona telling old stories and Kaliko discoursing in Hawaiian. The two of them looked around to see everybody having fun. They thought: Why not do something like this in addition to writing the book? Mark had organized music camps on the Mainland, so the idea of another camp came naturally. Nona, who radiates true aloha everywhere she goes, added the idea that this feeling of aloha would be a living part of everything they did. Now there was an idea.

Mark is a musician in his own right, so he quoted a line in a song by Van Morrison that “music is the inarticulate speech of the heart.” He likens playing music to having a conversation, or dancing, or making love. “We can explain what chords are, what scales are, but for me it has opened doors. We may not be able to speak, but when we play we become real for each other.”

I think of a young pilot I know who once described flying a plane to me as a rather simple act. “You just follow the dials,” he said. Here at the camp it seems that music is simple, too. You just put your fingers here and there and move them, yet what comes out of that simple mechanical action is transforming. The teaching itself is sometimes cumbersome and plodding. Byron Yasui stands before a big white board demonstrating how to transpose ‘ukulele chords. The students in his class, mostly women from the Mainland, take notes as studiously as if they were still in college.

Over in Tent No. 2, a white plastic canopy pitched under the kiawe trees, eight students are tuning up, each intent on his or her own instrument. It is cool and big leaves sway in the breeze. Kevin Brown is going to each us Holo Po Mahina, a slack key tune played by his grandfathers. Raised by his grandmother, all he ever heard while growing up was Hawaiian music. The seven kids in their family would sit in a row of folding chairs on stage behind their uncles and aunties as they entertained at places such as the Maui Palms and Hukilau. The children were the “gofers” and carried the instruments. By the time Kevin was ready to play in public, he knew all the songs and was used to being on stage. A heavy, dark, soft-spoken Hawaiian, with grey hair and a voice as soothing as chamomile tea with honey, he demonstrates the vamp, playing it over and over, and walks around checking everyone’s fingering. “It all starts in the garage or the backyard,” says Kevin, as he twangs a few rough chords on his guitar. “Then it moves to the pizza parlor and gets a little refined. But when you get to the hotel and sing “Beyond the Reef,” you have to play like this—and the lush, familiar sounds come rippling out of his fingers. In just two minutes he has given us a history of slack key guitar performances.

Last night it rained. Tent walls flapped and howled, sounding like large handfuls of gravel thrown on the roof. This morning, after three hours of hula with Moanalani and Hope Keawe, I know I have hips. Moanalani is teaching us a mele for Moloka‘i that honors its birth from Hina, and Hope is guiding a beginning class through a chant for King David Kalakaua. The lady dancing next to me is having trouble memorizing her oli, or chant. She asks, “Just what do these words mean?”

Now it has rained again and the ground smells damp and thick. John Keawe is teaching his class inside Tent No. 3, and the combined picking of 16 guitars is restful and sweet. It’s peaceful here, slow drops falling from the coconut fronds, sparrows chittering. Everyone is playing together, but nothing stands out from the flowing, watery, sliding strings. A phrase is repeated over and over. The man sitting next to me taps his foot so gently it does not disturb the grass at his feet. Beautiful guitars, gleaming koa, curly maple, spruce, rosewood, abalone and ebony inlay, gold and silver keys. John calls out: “Play loud.”

In the evening, the hotel staff lights tiki torches, which shed a soft blush on the sandy paths. From the bay I can hear the slush of the surf and see the flicker of starlight on the seas in the channel. Kaupoa Beach is just opposite the island of O‘ahu, and the loom of light from the big city glows in the sky. Kaupoa, which translates as “summer thief,” gets its name from an old fishing village that used to be here. When the fishermen went out to fish, leaving behind their unlocked houses, upland taro farmers would come down to take the drying fish hanging in the village. Later, the Cooke family, who owned the Moloka‘i Ranch, built a beach house at Kaupoa. When The Lodge at Moloka‘i was built, their old place was transformed into The Beach Village. This was an upscale tent camp overlooking a tiny protected bay, distinguished by a floury, white sand and offshore rocks that remind me of a school of basking seals.

The weather is changing. And changing. We are on the channel between Moloka‘i and O‘ahu, so we get the full force of channel weather. During the day, the sky is a clear, bright blue. Then it darkens with rushing clouds, and the rain comes roaring down. When the wet subsides, the air is shiny and new.

Standing behind 10-year-old Anthony in the dinner line, I ask if he has found something to do, thinking maybe he has found some little friends to play with. “Well,” he tells me, “I’m taking Byron’s intermediate ‘ukulele class, and Aunty Nona’s culture class, and intermediate slack key and will be doing oli with Liko.” He then adds: “I don’t want to be famous. I just want to play. When you play music, you can just sit. Other kids always want to run around. I love doing those things, but not every single minute of the day!”

During dinner I chat with Hugo, a tall, lanky guy from Austria, who wants to give up his job as a government lawyer and come live on Moloka‘i. “I don’t feel quite good in my job any more,” he says. “I want to be a musician.” This is his second camp; last year he played slack key in a guitar contest for an audience in Austria. Nobody knew what was happening; they had never heard slack key music. When he finished it was very quiet for a few seconds, and that’s how he knew the music had really touched the people.”

The next morning at his advanced class, Keola is softly singing and playing “Hi‘ilawe,” and his students pick it up and start playing along. He calls out the changes and they fluff it out and elaborate. He hands us a chart that has all of the tunings in every key and says, “This is a really valuable piece of paper, so take care of it. Don’t take a series of notes and bang them out. Think about it. What does the piece mean? What is the poetry?”

Keola grew up on the Big Island. His was a huge extended family and they partied a lot. There was always music, with his aunties and uncles dancing impromptu hula. When he was seven or eight, he remembers being at a big party and hearing an incredible, lovely sound coming from the back of the house. He snuck closer to hear it. Sitting under a big old mango tree was a Hawaiian man playing a slack key guitar. Says Keola, “He looked at me when I walked up. He looked really close, studying my face, and then he stopped the music and put down the guitar. I was not in his family and the music was family property. The tunings and the songs were for family only. I was stricken, left out of something I really wanted to be a part of.”

So Keola devoted himself to the preservation of the slack key guitar traditions. He wanted to be sure it did not take its place among the lost and irretrievable gifts of Hawaiian culture. Along the way, he mastered it, taught it to anyone who was interested. Now, years later, the music is here for everyone. No more sneaking around to listen. At the close of his class, he says, “It’s not the number of tunings you know, but how well you play them. It’s like going down the hall and you see a number of doors, and when you choose one and open it, something inside of you says, this is the one I want.”

A sign on the billboard at the beach house says, “The Big Dogs meet at the hula tent at 11:15.” We are practicing for our collective talent show. The Big Dogs are the advanced slack key students who will play for Moanalani’s hula class. This is the ultimate show-and-tell, where anyone who wants to can get up and do his or her thing. After we rehearse, Keola tells us, “Good luck tonight, and if you’re going to play, remember, no vomiting.” Everyone laughs, but everyone is very nervous.

A family of indolent wild turkeys is strolling along the beach. In the distance I see Annie picking up shells, her white dress blowing in the wind. I corral John Keawe and we walk along the shoreline. His eyes are a warm golden brown and he comes close as he talks. “Music is universal,” he says. “It touches everyone, especially Hawaiian music. Once people experience slack key and the aloha that goes with it, no matter where they’re from, you can see the stress melt away. It’s the aloha that goes with the music, not just the notes. It’s the spirit that the people have here in Hawai‘i. Other music makes you move, but Hawaiian music goes into your heart.” He continues, “In the old days we didn’t have TV, we sit around and play music. Your mom and dad sing and you watch. You grow up and the music stays in your head. It draws the family together, it’s a constant, it’s always there.” His sons play and his wife, Hope, plays ‘ukulele and dances hula. Watching him play for her as she dances is like watching an act of love.

This is our last morning. A misty rain is falling. Mark, Kevin and John sit in folding chairs in an informal circle of their students. They are playing so softly that the mynah birds’ calls seem a part of the song. The music sounds like the sea, like grass growing, like the gentle wind rustling in the palms. It is mesmerizing. This is the backyard. As they play “My Yellow Ginger Lei,” a look, a smile, passes between them and the song flows. The musicians are so much in tune that nothing else is required. Kevin glances at Mark, and Mark takes the lead. Behind them, a huge, branching kiawe tree frames the scene. Kevin says, “Thank you for being so kind to us and sitting here and listening. Take back whatever you’ve learned. Have a nice trip home, and until we cross back again, aloha.”

At the closing ceremony tears freely flow. In only a week, strangers have come together, and now Keola can hardly speak. “This is the hardest part,” he says. “You honor us by being here and sharing the pleasure of working together and playing together.” Mark adds, “This community is always here, you can always come back.” Now I glance at Hugo. He is wearing a brilliant pareu and rimless eyeglasses, with his flowing black hair tied in back. Moanalani tells us about the meaning of a lei, a gift given by someone who puts his or her heart into making it, and who loves you. “The lei is like a child that circles your neck, a small token of your aloha for your generosity, enthusiasm and all that you bring to us.” She and Nona chant, while our teachers pass among us and lay ti leaf lei around our necks. We all stand and sing “Hawai‘i Aloha,” and music camp is pau.                                                    


JOANA VARAWA is the editor of the Läna‘i Times, a happy newspaper with no bad news. She is the author of Mind in the Waters, The Delicate Art of Whale Watching, Changes in Latitude and many magazine and newspaper stories. Her new book, The Red Dirt Road, is an iconoclastic inquiry into Läna‘i’s history.