Charity’s Column: The Big Island and Shelter Island

In June I traveled from the little island of Shelter to the Big Island of Hawai’i for a 10-day vacation with my sisters; our first vacation together since 1965, when my parents dropped us off at our grandparents’ tobacco farm in Simpson County, Ky. I remember that long-ago vacation fondly. We ate ice cream, and saw cows, chickens and a very large black snake.

In Hawai’i we saw goats, pigs, turkeys, dolphins and fish, and ate some of them. No snakes. On the first day of vacation on the Big Island, a text came to me from the small one. It was early in Hawai’i, but I was wide awake, enjoying a double rainbow that was forming over the Pacific Ocean as the sun rose.

The news from my husband, “Positive for COVID …” was a bummer. He was holding down the fort while I spent time with my sisters in Paradise, but now the fort was under quarantine and he had a fever.

Hawai’i is very far away from Shelter Island, but the two places have a lot in common. Both are frequently referred to as Paradise. Like people on Hawai’i, we eat a lot of fish, and the best places to get it are within a few feet of the road, preferably from a cooler.

Like us, they try to control a population boom of animals by hunting. In our case it’s deer and in Hawai’i, feral pigs. And their wild turkeys are everywhere, just like ours, only theirs are a little more colorful. 

Drinking water on both islands is in short supply thanks to an aquifer that is dependent on rain water and susceptible to contamination. Many homes on Hawai’i rely on “catchment water” which basically means a tank in the backyard that the rain falls into.  

Throwing things away is as tricky on Hawai’i as it is on Shelter Island. The people of Hawai’i take their trash to a transfer station, and we take ours to the Recycling Center. They say on an island, you can’t throw things away because there is no away.

One thing that’s different about the Hawai’i transfer stations is the view. Most of them are set on the slopes of a mountain facing the sea, with a prospect so vast that you can see Maui. From ours, I can only see the mulch pile.

When word came of my husband’s COVID status, I was so far away there was no question of returning home to take his temperature, or check his oxygen levels. He said he was considering taking an antiviral and might need to figure out how to get it from the pharmacy.

As a volunteer for the Senior Center I had picked up prescriptions for seniors from time to time so I called Laurie Fanelli from a black sand beach near Kona, and she assured me they would make sure he got what he needed, no matter where I was whooping it up.

At some point, after a consultation with his doctor, my husband decided not to take an antiviral after all.  Finding that there was no prescription for him at the pharmacy, Marissa from the senior center began to follow up, calling our landline repeatedly, with no answer.

Since he doesn’t answer the phone when he’s well, it was no surprise to me that he didn’t answer it when he was feeling subpar.

And that’s how two Shelter Island Police vehicles came to be parked in front of my house on Shelter Island one Friday while I was snorkeling with my sisters in Honaunau. On Shelter Island we don’t allow a quarantined person who may need a prescription filled to languish, whether he answers the phone or not.

These brave officers were prepared to risk interacting with an active COVID infection and unfriendly dog to check on someone’s well-being. They were met with resistance, but my husband managed to collar Mabel, and assure the officers that he was going to be O.K. And by the time I got home from spending a very special time with my sisters, he was.

There are other islands in the world, but there is no place like home.