On a breezy Sunday afternoon at the West Maui Bike Park, the kids are champing at the bit. They huddle around Ray Watson, their tufts of sun-bleached hair poking through the vents of their helmets.

“Uncle, uncle! Can we ride yet?”

Not yet. Watson sends them back into the park with five-gallon buckets and miniature McLeods.

They scatter toward the red-dirt jumps and pumptrack, eager to earn the right to ride—and to eat birthday cake afterward. It’s the first birthday of Watson’s son Louie.

Just beyond the park, on the seaward side of the highway that loops around West Maui, lies Napili, a tidy pocket of homes and low buildings pressed between road and reef. Beyond that, the islands of Lāna‘i and Moloka‘i rise from the water like the rounded spines of humpbacks. Beyond that, there’s nothing but open ocean.

In Hawaiʻi, water defines everything. The islands sit isolated in the middle of the Pacific, ringed by ocean in every direction, and culture has long oriented itself toward what happens seaward.

Hawaiʻi’s first inhabitants arrived by canoe, navigating open water by the stars and swell. Today, surfboards still outnumber bicycles by orders of magnitude. So do canoes, sailboats, and kite rigs. The shoreline remains the most obvious place to play.