Glittering Minds

From here they had a clear view of Waikiki Beach, that famous strip of sand everyone’s seen somewhere, in movies or on television or postcards as ubiquitous as images of the Grand Canyon, so in person it seemed it fell far short of one’s expectations, seeming instead diminished and banal. There were surfers everywhere, boys and girls and old men and teens, both close in and out far, riding waves so long they seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, the water clotted with swimmers and boogie-boarders navigating between catamarans and large pleasure craft that barreled toward shore at breakneck speed while small planes flew overhead, the sheer density of the crowds like some time warp back to Coney Island of the forties, the black-and-white photos of that beach showing it to be so choked with people there was no sand to see, no reason even to come except perhaps to hate the proximity of your fellow man; it would be like riding the rush-hour subway for fun, he thought, and for the lifeguards glassing these masses from their towers, a drowning among so many bobbing heads and arms and legs must be impossible to catch. From this vantage, Diamond Head seemed nearly overwhelmed by all these people and towers on the beach, by this disease of development, so this majestic sight now could be a sculpture symbolizing America’s ugliness and failure. Terrible, he thought.