My wife and I have returned from a longer respite than either of us has enjoyed since we were decades younger.

Seeing a significant 65th birthday ahead, we set sights on this trip more than a year ago.

Our long travels allowed me to reunite with my longtime literary companion, Leo Tolstoy. We reconnected with three former Astorians who live in Hawaii: Dr. Richard and Ingrid Natzke and Cindy Orlando. And we’ve met lots of people from across America who have been to Astoria.

When our cruise ship called in Maui, the Natzkes met us at the pier. Formerly of Astoria, Richard and Ingrid moved to Hawaii two years ago. He had been an internist and he was medical director for Lower Columbia Hospice while my wife was its manager. Ingrid was a dental hygienist. Having never been to Maui, it was a delight to be shown the island by two residents. The Natzkes live on a hill overlooking Kahului Bay.

The World Series was one theme of this trip. With Richard, I watched the first innings of the tumultuous sixth game. Who would contest that this was one of the most memorable series of the postwar era.

On the so-called big island, we drove to the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, where Cindy Orlando is superintendent. Cindy was superintendent of the Fort Clatsop National Memorial during the run-up to the Lewis and Clark bicentennial. As the park’s first female superintendent, Cindy took plenty of guff from some big strong men who didn’t want the park’s boundaries to expand.

The volcanoes park is a far leap from Fort Clatsop in every way. It is centered on a natural phenomenon. The enormity of the volcano’s gas plume and the immense breadth of lava flows cause the jaw to drop. Near the ocean, we saw petroglyphs that date to the island’s earliest population. Just as Indian tribes rediscovered their identity in the 1970s, native Hawaiians have reasserted their culture in the past few decades. That is an element of Cindy’s portfolio.

Dropping back into Tolstoy’s War and Peace after a year’s disengagement was like re-entering a movie theater where an epic is in its middle. I began reading the book some five years ago on a sea voyage like this. I’ve been at it long enough to jump from one translation to a superior translation that was brought out in 2005.

Tolstoy’s literary power to set a scene in a few sentences and his power of observation are endlessly illuminating. He nails human character. One of his longer passages describes Nikolay Rostov’s preference for a rather dull military life, because he does not have to make choices. “Rostov was pleased and relieved to submit once again to the clear-cut conditions of regimental life; he felt like a weary man lying down to rest.” When the 16-year-old Natasha Rostova goes out into society for the first time, she experiences what we would call being visually undressed by spectators.

Speaking of war, our being in the South Pacific on Veterans Day carried special meaning. The sea lanes of this part of the globe in the 1940s were crisscrossed by ships of the U.S. Navy. Virtually every island we visited was marked by the American presence during World War II. At Pearl Harbor, we visited the sunken tomb that is the USS Arizona. Looking at the mountains through which Japanese planes appeared on Dec. 7, 1941, the visitor understands that moment much more clearly. There were tears in eyes of the visitors in our group.

S.A.F.

FRIDAY: Robert Louis Stevenson’s tomb atop a mountain The Tahitian bay where the HMS Bounty anchored.