I drove out of Makena at 8 am, heading north to Paia and the beginning of the road to Hana.  Though it is actually a huge loop, everyone does it in a clockwise direction, and it’s colloquially called the Road to Hana, no matter where you are on the loop.

Hana anchors the far east side of Maui, in the middle of the rain forest.  It is the most remote area on Maui, and the Road to Hana switches from 2 lane road to single lane bridges constantly, with steep drops down the wet forest-covered cliffs.  Waterfalls seem to splash against the road around every other switch back, especially when it has rained recently.  When the pools are deep enough, many of the waterfalls, like Twin Falls have cliff jumpers climbing and jumping off.  I feel fine when I see a local nearby, but when I see Scandinavian tourists negotiating the slippery rock walls, I can see the reason for the relatively frequent headlines of people getting hurt or dying by jumping into the pools when they are too low, or by slipping on the wet rocks.

The road on the way to Hana Town is beautiful, and what you would expect if you’ve driven the small jungle roads of Kauai or the Big Island – fruit shacks along the side of the road, small turn offs for cars to park at look out points.

The fruit shacks are mostly the same, but the banana bread at the Halfway to Hana stand is the best I’ve ever had.  Buy twice as much as you think you want.

It’s when you get past Hana and get out of the rainforest into the upcountry terrain that the Road loses its mind.  Because the width of the road is usually the width of one and a half cars, there is a lot of negotiating road ways to squeak by cars coming in the opposite direction.  Then the road becomes almost a dirt road, probably from constant washing out by floods.   At one point, I wondered if my sad little rental Honda was going to make it.

The jungles open up onto wide vistas, towering cliffs over crashing waves, and cloud-shrouded Mount Haleakala rises gradually from wide vistas of grain and grasses.  Cattle dot the landscape like freckles, not in huge herds but in alone or in small groups,  languorously grazing by the sides of the road and on the gentle hillsides.  This is remote Maui, where a small wind farm is the only sign of human habitation for 20 miles of backcountry, besides the cattle guards in the road and low cattle fences.

Driving the road to Hana was a good test of my ability to quiet my monkey mind.  Though the road does calm me to an extent, I still found my mind wandering from the here and now, even though I was surrounded by epic landscapes, the smell of the rainforest and the playlist I had created for the drive.  My back ached from the surf lesson and I kvetched in my head about that.  I periodically slipped backwards into thoughts of  what was waiting when I returned to LA.  I questioned whether spending the whole day in the car was a waste of my vacation day.

But then I passed the halfway point and went through Hana, and into my fourth hour of the drive.  The road got worse (alternately:  more interesting, exciting, treacherous) and the landscape got even wilder.  There were far less cars, and I my monkey mind calmed down.  It was enough to be there, seeing what I was seeing.  To pull over if I wanted, next to a pair of cows by the side of the road.  I actually turned off my playlist, so that I didn’t think about the songs instead of my physical here and now

And it was beautiful.  And still. My back still hurt from surfing, my mind wandered once in a while, but I acknowledged those things, and for a few minutes/hours, they didn’t have any power over my presence in my moment.

My reset button wasn’t something that I pushed.  It was a stillness that I found.  I looked at the horizon, instead of down at the details of my life.  My reset button was staring into that distance, gently and with acceptance.

I will lose that stillness.  Then, I will have to look for it again, over and over, when I return home.  And I accept that.  But the more that I drive that Road, the easier it is to find again.