Local transplants pack Island customs along with their luggage as they make new homes in some of the most far-flung corners of the globe. In some spots, people from Hawaii congregate by the hundreds to keep the aloha spirit burning.

Nearly 5,000 miles away from the Islands, in Maryland, for instance, 250 to 300 ethnic Hawaiians, former Island residents and friends swarm to a lively kanikapila and luau that Ralph and Susan Vicens of Bishopville host every spring.

Ralph, a former “Waimanalo boy,” roasts pigs in an imu he’s dug in his yard, cooks up Island delicacies like poke and chicken long rice, and imports fresh Hawaii flowers. East Coast halau perform, and guests tote guitars, ukuleles, voices and hula hands along with their potluck dishes to a pavilion the Vicenses rent about 20 miles from their farmhouse.

“I got a cousin on the Big Island who ships all our taro over. Last year, he sent me the taro whole and said, ‘Brah, you pound ’em yourself.’ I boiled everything and sent them through these big meat grinders. Came out cherry, man! Everybody was going, ‘Wow, good poi!,” Ralph says.

Friends pitch tents in the Vicenses’ farmland starting a week before the event. Some drive from as far as Erie, Pa. “We go all out!” says Ralph, 38. “It’s to bring the love together, the aloha. That’s all I look for.”

Luaus bring former Island residents together

Hundreds of Hawaii expatriates similarly have crowded into Bert and Linda Kekauoha’s Baltimore neighborhood every May for the last 13 years for a potluck luau. “The party brings together Hawaiians and those Hawaiian at heart,” says Bert, a former Oahu resident.

Scores of kamaaina have picnicked in the “sheep meadow” of New York’s Central Park every summer for nearly 12 years. Harvard University’s Hawaii club in Massachusetts attracts hundreds from across the East Coast with its Hawaii-themed conferences.

And those aren’t even the biggest showings of aloha spirit outside the Islands.

On the West Coast, the expatriate community is even stronger. Nearly 35,000 people a day stream into the annual summer ho‘olaule‘a at Alondra Park, Calif. — one of the biggest Hawaii-themed events anywhere.

Hula halau, Hawaii clubs, and Hawaii-themed restaurants and businesses are popping up across Oregon and Washington state, and are especially numerous in California. The San Francisco Examiner reports a dozen outrigger canoe clubs and 30 halau in the Bay Area alone.

Former Island residents are congregating in many states across the nation and even in foreign countries.

Expatriates spread Hawaii's culture overseas

One of the most distant tales came from Guernsey, an island off the coast of France measuring 25 square miles — not even half the size of Kahoolawe.

Jeanne Dickinson, 32, a Hawaii transplant turned drama teacher living there with her husband, says she titled her school’s yuletide production “‘Mele Kalikimaka — Have a Happy Hawaiian Christmas.’ Our backdrop featured Santa on a surfboard, tinkling dancers and palm trees.”

Dickinson taught her pupils to fold 1,001 origami cranes and hang them on a tree. She says she’s trying to foster “a tradition of celebrating cultural diversity and open-mindedness amongst the students and staff” on the island, a protectorate of Great Britain.

Dickinson also holds “Hawaiian evenings,” often with two other former Hawaii residents now living on Guernsey. “We wear muumuus and eat Island-style food,” she said. She also adds her ipu to the British sounds of a community folk band.

Meanwhile, in Taipei, former Hawaii entertainer Richie Walker is operating a coffee shop called Kona Connection. Decorated with tapa cloth and koa, the store serves up Kona coffee, Hawaii-bottled water and other goodies imported from the Islands.

Walker, who socializes with a hui of a half-dozen other former Hawaii residents living in Taiwan, is also a disc jockey at a leading English-language rock radio station. Off the air after a programming break to identify ICRT-FM, Walker confided wistfully, “Ho, I feel like saying, ‘This is KCCN!’”

Taking care of each other

Why do they do it? Why do people from Hawaii seem determined to seek each other out and carry on the customs, culture and culinary traditions of their home state wherever they go?

Some say Hawaii people are drawn to each other even in far-off places because they were brought up to depend on and help each other. “Local style is, you don’t just go off on your own and do your own thing. You never forget to malama (care for) each other,” said Keoni Bargas, who eats dinner monthly with other kamaaina living in his San Diego neighborhood.

Many expatriates who wrote to Our House said their longing for Hawaii lessens dramatically when they can find others who share a love for Hawaii’s unusual foods, customs, music and spirit.

When Joyce Larson (formerly Igarashi, from Kaneohe) and others who once lived in Hawaii attended a golf tournament in California recently, “I bet we were the only people on the golf course eating Spam musubi, mochiko chicken and kim chi — with chopsticks! Eating local food makes us feel less homesick,” she said.

Some former residents stubbornly cling to Hawaii ways even when it might seem irrational.

“I try to defy the winter by wearing my T-shirts, shorts and slippers for as long as I can — sometimes through mid-December,” says former Honolulu resident Michael Miyamoto, who lives in Boston.

During one heavy snowfall two years ago, he instructed his Maine-bred wife to run the camcorder while he dashed outdoors in his Hawaii-style garb, jumping around in the snowdrifts until he was “satisfied that the event had been adequately recorded, and Old Man Winter had taken notice of my little protest.”

His wife said, “I can’t believe you did that.”

“People in Hawaii are tough,” he said. “People from Maine wouldn’t do something like that.”

“That’s because people from Maine aren’t that stupid,” she retorted.

Two days later, suffering in bed with a cold, he began to see her point.

Felt need to maintain the spirit

For some removed residents, keeping Hawaii ways is not simply fun, but a need, a matter of feeding the soul.

Miyamoto says popping Sistah Robi and Keali‘i Reichel tapes into his car deck warms his heart during icy, lonely, dead-of-night drives to the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he’s a doctor.

San Francisco resident Myles Ibara, 35, formerly of Kaneohe, said that longing in his gut for the Islands was the reason he opened The Hawaii Store in 1995. The shelves are stocked with Hawaii art, music, clothing, and munchies ranging from li hing mui to laulau.

“I was missing home so much and knew that there were many others who felt the same way,” Ibara said. “I envisioned a place where people could get the things they missed from home, where locals could bust out the pidgin and talk story . . . where transplants could bring their guitars and ukuleles, sing Hawaiian songs and reminisce about the Islands.”

Whitman College student Jennifer Kimura, 20, said she almost melted into tears the first time she realized the McDonald’s near campus didn’t carry saimin and fruit punch.

But fellow homesick kamaaina wandering the Walla Walla, Wash., campus were easy to spot, she said; they “wore their rubbah slippahs and surf shorts well into fall, carried HIC backpacks and occasionally used the words ‘pau’ and ‘da kine’ in speech to others, who gave them a confused look.”

The expatriates joined the campus Hawaii club and consoled themselves with “loco moco nights” and “Hawaiian craft study breaks” where they made paper leis and raffia bracelets. They organized forums on multiculturalism and took hula from Kamehameha Schools graduates. “We’d gather in the dorm lounge for midnight kanikapila, hoard the pineapple rings at food service, and make shave ice out of snow and Malolo syrup together,” Kimura said.

Though the club was poor and small, members mustered the labor and funds to sponsor the annual luau. The climax was watching 200 people, many clothed in Hawaiian dress, show up to talk story and kau kau. Kimura cried when they joined hands at the close to sing “Hawaii Aloha.”

“The aloha spirit, I realized, is not limited to the Aloha State,” she said, “but has wings to fly anywhere in the world — even small-town Walla Walla."