Will Cain Country - A Tribute To Maui

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Today, Will pays a tribute Maui as the Hawaiian island reels from the devastating wildfires. Will shares that his family on the island are safe, but weighs in on the vast devastation and illustrates what the island means to the Cain family and surrounding community.   Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing [e-mail]   Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for $5.5 plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. A plea for help from West Maui. It's the Wilcane podcast on Fox News Podcast. What's up and welcome to Friday. As always, I hope you will download, rate, and review this podcast wherever you get your audio entertainment at Apple, Spotify, or at Fox News Podcasts.

You can watch the WillCame podcast on Rumble or on YouTube. Today is a bit different. Today is a bit different episode of the Will Kane podcast. The news out of Lahaina, West Maui, is devastating. And for many of you that have gotten to know me over the years or have listened to the Will Kane podcast even recently, you understand that Maui is a second home for my family. In the late 1970s, my mom and dad bought a place at Conopoli, just two miles north of Lahaina. I've spent every year of my life going to Maui in the summer. When I was a kid, we would be there for a month.

I am and always will be a Texan, and I will never be a Hawaiian. But Hawaii and Maui, Kanapali and Lahaina, are part of my story, part of my heart. So I hope you will indulge me today. And I hope you will help when I tell you about what's happened in Maui. Earlier this week, fires sparked up. No one yet knows the source of these fires. was it a downed power line? Hurricane Dora was traveling outside of the Hawaiian island, sending 80-mile-an-hour winds towards the island. Was it a downed power line that sparked into dry brush that quickly spread across the island? Was it arson? Some 85% of wildfires are, in fact, according to reports, man-made accident, or arson. whatever started that fire, it burned out of control, and it burned out of control quickly. With 80-mile-an-hour winds, fire in West Maui quickly, within a matter of hours, engulfed the town of Lahaina. Now, Lahaina is not just any tourist attraction. La Hina is a town of 12,000 people. It's the place that all of the locals live who work the resorts and work the tourist industry. It's also a place full of history. La Hina has been around since

the 1700s, in the mid-1800s, from about 1820 to 1845, Lahaina was the capital of the kingdom of Hawaii. Hawaii at one time was ruled by various tribes on islands like Maui, Hawaii, or Oahu, until the Hawaiian Islands were unified by King Kamehamea. But at one point, they centered their capital, not in Honolulu, but in the small town in West Maui of Lahaina. It's full of wood buildings. It's unfortunately a tenderbox, but it's full of history, two-story, balconied, almost New Orleans-style harbor town, boats in the harbor, deep-sea fishing charters, catamarans, snorkeling vessels, booze cruises, and all up and down the street that lines the harbor for the better part of 150 years, bars and restaurants. Lahaina in the 1800s was the whaling capital of the world, of course, before we figured out how to draw oil and gas from under the ground. Most of our fuel, which lit our homes and gave us warmth, was whale blubber. And if you visited in the winter, you would see that right there nestled between the islands of Molokai, Lanai, and Maui, right yards off the coast of Lahaina.

It's a place where all the whales come to give birth. It's magical in the winter. You'll see them breaching. You'll see little calves. You'll see their tails fly up into the air. It's more shallow between those three islands and the deep, deep, deep, deep Pacific all around, protected, comparatively, from the open ocean in a perfect place for those whales to winter. And it was a perfect place at that time as well to harvest, blubber, to harvest whales. Those sailors would pour into Lahaina, drinking, carousing, and what they met were some of the first white people ever to make their way to the Hawaiian Islands.

They were, like in most places, Christian missionaries. I would highly encourage you to read the book, Hawaii by James A. Missioner's books are absolutely incredible. Read any missionary book, Texas, Centennial, Alaska. It's stunning to see how he makes history narrative. a story. And he takes you, in the case of Hawaii, from literally the first volcanic explosion to the first birds flying across the Pacific, pooping onto lava rock. Inside that poop, little seeds of vegetation that one day grow into plants. And then eventually what emerges is what we know of as perhaps, at least in my humble estimation, the most beautiful place

on the planet. He takes you through that, through the various immigration waves in Hawaii that worked the pineapple plantations, from the Japanese to the Chinese to the Filipinos. He talks about how they would start on the plantations and in a completely American story, work their way up, the economic ladder, the Japanese largely moving into politics, the Chinese into entrepreneurship and business. And he talks to you about the Christian missionaries, the missionaries who had arrived largely from the East Coast.

of America, surviving what really was, not just an adventure, but a horrendous voyage halfway across the globe. All the diseases that sailors get sickness arriving to, in some cases, friendly, in some cases hostile environs there in Hawaii, but those missionaries spread the word of God, carried the gospel, and churches and missions to this day stand in towns like Lahaina, stood in towns like Lahaina, beautiful churches, dating back to the early 1800s. This place, and that part of Hawaii, have meant so much to me that when my oldest son asked this summer to be baptized, which is a story in and of itself, but a story that is a source of great pride,

that on his own volition my son said he wanted to be baptized, my wife came up with the wonderful, wonderful idea, we should do it in Hawaii. I've got a local preacher, local Hawaiian guy, and both of my sons elected to, right there at Canoe Beach between Kano Pali and Lahaina, be baptized in the Pacific Ocean. This place has meant so much to me, but it's not just to me, it's so much part of our American story. It is history, the buildings, the events. And the devastation to that story, to those buildings, to that history is unfathomable, is devastating, is all-encompassing.

When those fires hit Lahaina earlier this week, it burned, and it burned quickly, horrendous videos on the Internet of people driving through what looks like an absolute inferno. You can hear them. You can go to various accounts on Instagram, you can see this, panicking, breathing, feeling the heat from outside their car, smoke inhalation just at the car's edge. I've never been in a situation like that I can only imagine. There's a horrible video where some guys driving down Front Street, or in that area, close to Front Street, which I just described for you, that beautiful tourist attraction street in the heart of Lahaina. Drive past a woman's body. They say somebody's down, somebody's down. and they say, we can't do anything for her.

We have to go. And I saw in the comment section, so I'm saying, you have to help others saying, you've never been in that situation. Your lungs would instantly expand. Smoke would instantly fill. The car would be vacuumed out. The heat would be unsurvivable.

We'll be right back with more of the Will Kane podcast. Following Fox's initial donation to the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund, our generous viewers have answered the call to action across all Fox platforms and have helped raise seven million dollars visit go dot fox forward slash tx flood relief to support relief and rebuilding efforts hey i'm trade gowdy host of the trade gouty podcast i hope you will join me every tuesday and thursday as we navigate life together and hopefully find ourselves a little bit better on the other side listen and follow now at foxnewspodcast dot combeck listen to the all new brett bear podcast featuring common

ground in-depth talks with lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle along with all your brett bear favorites like his All-Star panel and much more. Available now at Fox News Podcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts. It just burned, and it burned so fast. There's nothing left. A friend of mine, Sands Dyer, he runs a charter business, the Gemini Charters, Snorkel, Sunset Cruises. Right now, as we spoke tonight,

Sands is running cruises from the west side of Maui over to Malaya Harbor supplies and shuttling people who don't have cars out of that area. As we speak as well, my mom and her husband are still in West Maui. They don't have power. They have spotty cell service. We've talked on the phone maybe four or five times. No real texting. It's really fascinating to find out how you can be so close to a disaster and also at the same time be so cut off from the

disaster. Because they don't have service, they're not getting the news. Their phones aren't reaching the internet. They're not on Instagram. They don't know how bad it is, right there two miles away in Lahaina. But they have no power. They have water for now. Again, my family is safe. This point isn't about my family. We hope we have a flight for them out on Saturday. that they will get out on Saturday and come back. But there are others. My friend Sands, like so many of us who have fallen in love with Hawaii, we all grew up going there.

I mean, I've been going there every summer since I was three. I've run up and down the streets of Lahaina. I have vivid memories of hanging out with my friend, a local guy named Kaimi, going surfing, not wearing my slippers, not wearing my shoes, and running up and down the black. tar streets of Lahaina, from shadow to shadow, from palm tree shadow to palm tree shadow. So I wouldn't burn my feet, going up to his house, talking to one of his relatives.

My friend Kaimi, who I met when I was a teenager, you know, he fell on hard times, mental health, substance abuse issues. He ended up homeless. I lost touch with Kaimi for years and years until last summer. Sands, my buddy Brett, Matt. Several elders of us said, let's go find him. We might have had a few drinks. We said, let's go find Kaimi.

It's been too long. Rumors of his homelessness and where he might be living. There's only so much you can do to help those that don't want help. We did. A year ago, we went searching for him. We went to a homeless encampment right there in Lahaina, walked in, started asking. They said, oh, yeah, Kaimi, no, he's moved down this way, down towards Oluwalu. Okay, we drove down, stopped that.

Oloalo said, oh yeah, he's under the bridge. So he went down to the river, looked under the bridge, wasn't there. Ran into somebody else said, oh, I think I know where Kaimi is. He's down the way, a little bit further up the road. Thousand peaks drove up. It was dark now. Boom, there he was. Standing right there with a group of other guys.

Kaimi, you know who I am? Will. Yes. It had been years. We hugged, we hung out, we talked. Whatever we can do, we're here for you. I think about Kaimi today because I think how do all those people that lived in those homeless encampments around Lahaina, how do they survive something like that, you know? You're living in dry brush.

There's talks today about all the non-native grasses and how dry it is. It is the dry side of the island for what it's worth. I think Lahaina itself means something like, you know, the cruel sun. From its inception, it's always been the dry, hot, sunny part of the island. Not the windward side where you get the lush, where the clouds get caught on the mountains and empty themselves of rain. How does somebody that doesn't have a home, not a car? How do they escape this kind of hell? I hope to find the coming days.

I suspect my friend Kaimi is okay. He wasn't directly in line, at least last time we saw him. But what about the other homeless? man my friend sans as I've mentioned more than once now is running his catamaran from one side of the island to the other and he'll stay because like so many of us who went in the summers every summer multiple families it's my second home but it was second home to so many and we'd all meet there in the summer we were all from different places Texas California Florida and we met and we were friends and these guys were in my weddings his brother Shane in my wedding you know friends for life and We all loved it. Well, I wanted to move there because it is literally paradise. I did for one summer, worked a boat out of Lahaina Harbor. I'm assuming that boat isn't the bottom of the sea.

They said most of those boats that were in the harbor, at least at the time, burned in their slips and sunk. I lived there for three months. I went to the wharf. Had drinks every night after work with my friends. Sometimes walked all the way back to Conopale. The wharf is gone. The old courthouse from the 1800s is gone. The banyan tree, the largest banyan tree in America,

planted by William Owen Smith in 1873 to mark the arrival of the Christian missionaries. At least on aerial footage, it looks to be a burnt crisp. Standing, but black, a burnt crisp. Man, how do you replace all of that? How do you replace that history? You can't just throw up turrets. boxes and traps and resorts. You can't just turn it into what we do so often in America, something perfect, because

what was great about it was its ramshackle evolution and growth throughout history that was so perfectly imperfect. My buddies and I would go into Lahaina every year. We'd pull our car up at this area called Shark Pit, get our surfboards out, walk out to the beach. It was lined with homes, not resorts. Homes right there on the sand and paddle out. out between a cut in the reef that they called, again, Shark Pit,

some of my favorite surfing, at least in the summertime, in Hawaii. It's an entire community wiped off the map, man. What do you do? And that's not even to count the number today that's up of 53 dead. I heard throughout the night there were supposedly sirens, police and ambulances over and over. My fears, that number is going to be higher. I heard they were still pulling bodies out through the night. I'm sharing with you this very personal story.

I know it doesn't apply to everybody. I know that everybody out there, many people have vacationed, you know, in Hawaii. You've been there, and if you have, it's probably touched your heart. The beauty is just unimaginable. I haven't been everywhere. I've been to Greece. I've been to Spain. I've been to Italy.

You know, I've never been anywhere as beautiful. as the beaches of West Maui as the sun sets between Lanai and Molokai. Hey, if you feel so moved, the Dyer family, the Kane family, the Barnes family, and several other families who love West Maui have set up a GoFundMe. It's organized by the Wayne Dyer family. They're going to match donations up to $50,000. Wayne Dyer is, or was, a well-known self-help author. books like gift from Icus

I've known Wayne since I was a kid and his family and mine are very close they're going to donate money I'll be involved I've never done anything like this before didn't know the best way to do it worked on it most of the day and I think there will be some other exciting developments in this other people that were going to be able to get involved the promise is this to be transparent

to let you know where this money goes and to make sure all of it goes to local families who need to help whose lives have been impacted the most there in Lahaina, there in West Maui. The GoFundMe is help the people of Maui. GoFundMe.com, help the people of Lahaina and West Maui. I didn't set it up.

I might have used GiveSindgo, but I'm not the one who created this. I'm the one here today asking you to help okay there's all kinds of things in this world i don't have any right to ask for your help more than anything else that's going on in this world all i can tell you is this place was special it's certainly special to me certainly special to my family certainly special to an amazing number of families and i think special to many of you based upon what i've seen out there on social media so i feel compelled i feel compelled to help and i'll do my best to ensure that whatever

you find worthy of gift will not be wasted. I'll do everything in my power to help ensure that this goes to doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is, again, help those local families right there in West Maui. Again, I grew up surfing, hiking in West Maui Mountains this summer. I told you, I hiked Hali Akala, partying way too much and way too. early, right there, on Front Street to places like Maui Brews or Moose McGillicuddies. Places that are long gone, but the buildings that once housed them are now also gone. Probably had too many girlfriends, too many summer loves, but was awesome to one day bring back

my true love, my wife, who then also, like my mom and dad, fell in love with Maui. And now, for the past 15 years, I've been taking... my family to pass on that tradition generation after generation as my boys have gone and run around without their shirt on one of the most beautiful and wonderful places on earth and I don't know what will happen I don't know how you can devastate something the way this has been devastated but I know that we can participate in helping bring it back hopefully in a better way and we can help the people hopefully in a really good way My mind has been encompassed with this all day long,

so I don't have a lot to talk to you about today. No Biden, no cowboys, no equal pay, no culture war. Just one of those moments that I know we're so good at. I know we are. Americans. Just a moment where we come together and we do something. You know? I've done it a few times when I've been on Europe.

side of the media where I've donated. I've listened to a story. And you know what I've always realized afterwards? Man, that money went to a place that's better than being in my pocket. You know, I say here today and I think, what is my purpose? And if this isn't part of my purpose, at least in my life right here, to help in this moment my community, one of my communities, then I don't know what I'm doing. I can talk about politics far away. I can talk about war in geopolitics, half a global way. But if I can't help or talk about my communities, Sherman, Texas, Lahaina, Maui, Missoula, Montana. If I can't help my communities, and what am I doing?

Start local. Start close. And so that's what I'm asking for you and your help. Again, help the people of Maui. It's on GoFundMe. When this comes back, I will tell you, it's going to take a while. It could be weeks before they get power back, a generation before they rebuild that town. But whenever it may be, whatever it fits your life, if you take that trip, I promise you, you won't regret it.

It's a special, special place. West Maui, I have so many stories that I probably shouldn't tell you, can't tell you, can't think of to tell you. Because it's simply been my second home. It's simply been a part of my. my story, my life. And it's simply been an amazing place in our story, our lives, our history as Americans. All right, that's all I have for you today. Again, GoFumme, help the people of Lahaina and West Maui, help the people of Maui, the Wayne Dyer Foundation. You can find it on GoFumme. I really appreciate, I mean this, okay? I really appreciate all.

of you. I'll see you again next time on the Will Kane podcast. Listen to ad free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts and Amazon Prime members. You can listen to this show ad free on the Amazon Music app. It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes. We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do. Take the quiz every day at thequiz.com. Then come back here to see how you did. Thank you for taking the quiz. Thank you.