This story is part of The Disaster Economy, a Grist series exploring the often chaotic, lucrative world of disaster response and recovery. It was produced by Grist, co-published with Honolulu Civil Beat, and made possible thanks to support from the CO2 Foundation.
As a Native Hawaiian teenager growing up in West Maui, Mikey Burke couldn’t wait to leave. “All my life, I thought I was bigger than this town, bigger than the village, and I was going to go somewhere and make something of myself,” she said.
Then she went to college in Los Angeles, where she was just one person among millions navigating the city’s crowded freeways and squinting through its smog. She would go entire days without anyone looking her in the eye, even if she held a door open for them or perused fruit next to them at the grocery store. Burke began to dream of returning home to Maui, where relationships felt authentic and she didn’t feel pressure to impress anyone. “Everything that I thought that I wanted, I had already had at home,” Burke realized.
The summer after she graduated from college, in 2006, Burke flew home to visit before starting a new job in public accounting in L.A. On the flight, she noticed the man sitting next to her with salt-and-pepper hair was preoccupied with a videogame device. She had just finished her free mai tai and was feeling chatty and emboldened. “Are you going to put that thing away and talk to me?” she asked brazenly. He met her gaze with piercing blue eyes and set the device down.
