In late June of 1995 a hiker disappeared in the dense tropical forest of Maunawili on the windward side of the Hawaiian island of O`ahu. His name was Tim Pantaleoni. He was traveling alone, staying in a small bed and breakfast owned and operated by the mother of my friend and colleague, the writer Robert Onopa. When the young man failed to return twenty-four hours after announcing his intention to hike the trail cut through the forest along the base of the curving jagged green cliffs of the Ko`olau Mountains, Bob and a number of other volunteers set out to look for him. The forest of Maunawili is the wettest, most densely foliated area on O`ahu. It is not to be trifled with. Do not leave the trail, the guidebooks warn. Do not set off on your own. When Tim Pantaleoni’s rusty 10-speed bike was found leaning against a chainlink fence surrounding a water tank near one of the trailheads, the Honolulu County Search and Rescue Team was contacted. Within an hour, a yellow helicopter began to spiral in an ever-widening circle above the deep green bowl of Maunawili.

My wife and our three boys watched the helicopter from the backyard of our comfortable four-bedroom house on a quiet street at the edge of the forest. I had just finished my semester as Visiting Writer at the state university on the other side of the mountains, and we were staying on through the summer before returning to Kansas. The chainlink fence behind our house appeared to restrain the wilderness, holding back the grasping branches of koa, monkeypod, Hawaiian mountain apple trees, and uluhe ferns. The opposite was actually true: The Maunawili subdivision advances further into the forest each year, giant earth-moving machines eating their way through the lush greenery toward the looming mountains. For the present, though, the forest remains large and dangerous. This was the fourth time in six months we had watched the same search copter circle the valley. The boys were used to it now.

"Why do those fools have to leave the trail?" David, our oldest, asked as we watched the copter make another slow loop toward the mountains.

"You know haoles," our middle son Michael, the cynical wit, replied. "You can’t teach ‘em anything."

Everyone laughed except our first grader, Daniel, whose attention remained fixed on the copter inching away from us across the blue ceiling of the valley, the nick-nick-nick of its rotating blades slowly fading. Beneath the nicking sound I could feel the forest breathing. "They’re not gonna find him," Daniel said, and the rest of us fell silent.

Three days later the copter was still circling overhead. Our neighbors advised me against joining the daily group of volunteer ground searchers. "You’ll just get in the way," the shopkeeper who lived across the street informed me. "He’s obviously not on the trail, and if you leave the trail to look for him, they’ll just have to come look for you." Nevertheless, shortly after sunrise that same morning I joined a small group at the trailhead at the top of Lopaka Street, where Tim Pantaleoni’s bike had been found. By the middle of the afternoon, I found myself trudging back down from the trailhead through the streets of Maunawili subdivision. The shopkeeper had been right: I was useless.

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By this time Tim Pantaleoni’s mother had arrived from the mainland, posting yellow flyers on every telephone pole and fence post I passed on the long, discouraging walk home. In large bold letters the flyers proclaimed: MISSING MAN. Beneath the letters was a xeroxed picture of a thin-faced, determined-looking young man in his early thirties. Something about the image immediately haunted me. It brought to mind something I couldn’t identify, until all at once it hit me: The missing man looked like my father. My father as I never actually saw him in the flesh, my father as I’ve seen him only in faded black and white pictures my mother keeps in a stack of thick yellowed envelopes in a desk in her apartment in Manhattan, Kansas. One image in particular came to mind: PFC Steve Heller, Sr., in his mustering-out uniform, just back from the Second World War, khaki tie tucked neatly into his uniform shirt. He is leaning against the driver’s side door of a 1938 Mercury convertible with white sidewalls, his left arm draped over the base of the open window, his right fist braced on his hip just below his regulation khaki belt. His body language is jaunty, cocky. Everything life has to offer is within his reach, and he will have everything he can grasp. Behind him stretches the dusty, unpaved path of Fairmont Street climbing Mulligan’s Bluff in Kansas City, Missouri. This is the street Father grew up on, but the truth is he would never travel this path again. A minute after Mother took this picture, they climbed back into the Mercury, and Father turned off Fairmont onto a side street and left Kansas City for good, choosing to seek their future by a new path. The paths Father chose weren’t really paths, but gambles. Whenever the trail became too familiar, he would leave it. In the almost half century that followed the photograph, Father would hold at least fifty different blue collar jobs, ranging from janitor to electrician. Twice, he would go into business for himself. He would win and lose a small fortune. He would attain, then lose his life’s dream of owning his own garage and autobody shop. Throughout his life, he would ignore advice that might have served him well, preferring always to go his own way. And he would always keep going, no matter what, through an amazing array of injuries and illnesses: a twice-broken back, broken arms and legs, ulcers, diabetes, heart disease, a series of devastating strokes, and, near the end, the beginnings of Parkinson’s Syndrome. Through all these things, he always worked to provide for my mother Elizabeth and me. Though his decisions were often quirky or hard-headed, they were never selfish. Mother and I always came first.

On Kamehameha Day, a couple of weeks before Tim Pantaleoni disappeared, Mother had called from Kansas with the news that Dad had died in his room in the health care wing of Meadow Lark Hills Retirement Community. "He was in no pain," Mother explained. "His body just gave out."

No pain. That sounded like a path Father would have never chosen willingly. The one supposedly pain-free path he always claimed he wanted to take before he died would have brought him right here, to Hawai`i, which he had never seen except through my eyes. He and Mother intended to fly out and visit us in Maunawili at the end of the summer, just in time for their 50th wedding anniversary. Now he would make the trip one day ahead of Mother, in a plastic bag sealed inside a vinyl box the size of a small purse.

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Prior to Mother’s arrival, I loaded Mary and the boys into our rented Nissan and drove down to the golden beach that encloses Kailua Bay, into which the heavy rains of Maunawili drain. On the edge of the sea, I gathered my family around me and constructed a ceremony that mimicked the ritual my mother and I would later enact–just the two of us–for in her grief that is how she preferred it, on this same beach on a windswept morning exactly one week later, as the sun spackled the eastern sky gold and green above the azure blue bay.

I scooped up a handful of dry sand, then instructed Mary and the boys to do the same.

"These grains of sand in our palms represent the spirit of your grandpa Heller," I told David, Michael, and Daniel. "Grandpa loved life, but life was never easy for him. He wanted everything life had to offer, but he didn’t really want it for himself. He wanted it for your grandma, for me, and finally for you. He worked hard and made many sacrifices. If he hadn’t done these things, I never would have gone to college. And your mother and I probably never could have made the life for us that we’ve all enjoyed so far."

"That’s right," Mary said.

We joined our free hands, and I led everyone into the gently lapping water, up to my knees.

"Grandpa always went his own way in life. Now we’re going to lower our palms into the sea and release Grandpa’s spirit, so it can go wherever it wants to go."

Without another word, we lowered our palms into the undulating blue water and watched the grains darken, disperse, disappear.

I never met Tim Pantaleoni and don’t know what kind of man he was. Nevertheless, through the images of my father that I carry in my head, I can’t help but imagine the life he might have lived. At the time of his disappearance he was thirty-three, the age my father was when I was born, when the future was a bewildering maze of choices, a labyrinth of possible paths. Tim Pantaleoni was never found. I like to think his spirit endures in the green depths of Maunawili, wandering through the tangled web of the living, breathing forest, occasionally crossing the trail where an alert hiker might catch a glimpse of him, if the light is just right. And on hot, sultry days, when the blazing tropical sun lifts moisture from Kailua Bay and the tradewinds carry it inland to the mountains, filling the vast green bowl of the valley with a steamy mist, I picture the spirit of my father moving simultaneously through the same dense forest, never following the established trail, hiking ever deeper into the green unknown, examining each leaf and stone with the seasoned vision of the experienced searcher, missing nothing.

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