The Great Crawfish Boil in the Sky
My grandfather survived four war patrols so I could sip cocktails in Waikiki.
A pink palace fit for technicolor royalty. Beach views excavated through Hawaiian jungles. The faint scents of coconut and rum served generously on Pacific winds. And a giant, high-def orange chicken image advertising the Panda Express next door.
These were the glorious island scenes my grandfather and I were treated to when we each arrived at Waikiki’s Royal Hawaiian Resort.
OK, I admit it. The Panda Express probably wasn’t there when Pop Pop Wesner visited, 80 years before me. But, aside from that, the Royal Hawaiian looked the same for me in 2023 as it did for him, circa 1941.
Same salty air, same warm breeze. Same spectacular Pepto-Bismol hues.
When my grandfather stayed at the Royal Hawaiian, he was preparing for deployment to the Pacific Theater of World War II. When I visited this month, I was eager for deployment to the beach bar. While he was praying to live long enough to see his 22nd birthday, I was celebrating my 27th. And, unlike me, he was actually staying at the 5-star hotel, as part of the U.S. Navy’s special “if you die in your submarine fighting Japan, at least you died after staying here” travel package.
With every step toward the teal blue Pacific — waters in which he survived four war patrols — my skin crawled with cinematic sensation, as though I was about to teleport back to 1941 with some cheesy Back to the Future magic.
I’ve felt this sensation once before — a decade ago to the month.
During a pilgrimage to my grandfather’s native New Orleans in 2013, I encountered for the first time the distant tribe of toothless, bullshitless Southern Wesners that stayed behind when he moved to Philadelphia after the war.
It was in cramped bars and dusty brick houses that I fell in love with jazz, cajun seafood, and creole storytelling. But it was in a small kitchen in Chalmette, 8 miles down the Mississippi from the French Quarter, that I learned what a goddam stud my grandfather was.
My 98-year-old Great-Aunt Elsie smacked a pile of photo albums down onto her kitchen table. Between bowls of piping shrimp gumbo and nests of weathered Mardi Gras beads, she guided me through a black-and-white tour of the past. Family members long-since departed, donning vintage one-piece bathing suits, smiled up at me from their 1940s beach vacations. Crawfish steam floated above the colorless palm trees, casting a cloud above the warm, gray waters of Lake Pontchartrain.
It was a sepia seafood boil straight from the Irish Catholic afterlife.
Their photos embodied the beautiful, complicated southern heritage that I would come to affiliate with despite my northeast roots. Like the faint kick of Old Bay, lurking deep inside the crab fries served at Sixers games.
Turning the page, Elsie revealed war-era photos of my grandfather and his navy buddies out on the Pacific, a group of characters whose stories I’d heard but whose faces I’d never seen in such vivid detail. Their mission was a wartime horror movie script: mapping Japanese mines with an antique sonar device ahead of any possible invasions.
22% of U.S. submarines on war patrol in the Pacific never returned.
My grandfather and his shipmates made four patrols.
They dropped into the dim, frigid deep, floating aimlessly between hidden car-sized explosives in the hopes of finding, but not triggering them. One errant bump, one incorrect ping of the detector, and the gentlemen smiling in these photos would become fish food in an instant.
What they didn’t know, of course, was a terrible military secret, declassified 50 years after their service.
Their mine detector was extremely flawed. It was borderline unreliable.
My grandfather, younger then than I am today, stared up at me with an innocent, death-defying smile. There he was, years before starting the family that would culminate in my birth, before marrying the nurse stationed in Philly who would become my grandmother.
Before surviving four deep-sea, government-sanctioned suicide missions.
Ten years after my pilgrimage to Elsie’s, in August 2023, I celebrated my 27th birthday back in his footsteps, on the island from which he deployed to test his fate.
I drank deeply from my piña colada, enjoying the anniversary of my life, beside the very ocean whose depths could have ended his.
A single wrong turn beneath those ornery waves, and I wouldn’t have been celebrating at all.
There’s a quote from a book I read while in Hawai’i, by the author Shehan Karunatilaka, whose fiction broaches war, the fragility of life, and the ambivalence of death, all through the lens of humor.
The quote summarized my feelings, enjoying a cocktail on the beach where my grandfather celebrated his last steps stateside before an uncertain fate:
“I lift my glass to the being of what will be.”
Shehan Karunatilaka
In 2013, on my trip to Elsie’s, I picked up a silver fleur-de-lis necklace at New Orleans’ fabled open-air French Market. For 10 years now, I’ve worn it around my neck to honor my grandfather and my family, my love of music, of history, of stories, of seafood, and of life itself.
The pendant remains on my neck despite several broken chains and torn strings. It’s traveled with me from New Orleans to Philly, to St. Pete, to London, to L.A., and now Hawai’i. It’s survived several of my best attempts at losing it, including a rain-drenched hike, moving a drum-kit between buildings in high school, and an all-day, all-night foray on Eckerd College’s Kappa Field, after, uhhh, studying too hard.
Every time my necklace goes AWOL, it always somehow finds its way back to me.
Though Elsie has since joined my grandfather and his war buddies in that great crawfish boil in the clouds, the pendant serves as a reminder of that trip.
A reminder to be curious, to be humble. To enjoy the crawfish while it’s hot.
Despite being a writer, sometimes words leave me for lost — like a palm tree without a warm breeze, or a piña colada without its silly little umbrella.
In those instances, when I can’t properly express my gratitude, I give my fleur-de-lis a little squeeze. For the being of what will be.
Shouts out to…
Maddee’s host mom, Dawn, who let me stay with her in O’ahu.