A Merciless Sun

Just over a year ago, Kekoa Lansford watched from a hilltop as the Maui wildfires incinerated his hometown.

- ERIKA HAYASAKI

While others fled to safety, he ran into the flames to save as many lives as he could. Today, the scars from that blaze-one of the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a centuryremain. Where do Kekoa and the rest of the survivors go from here?

THE PUNGENT STAIN of a stranger's burnt flesh seeped into the passenger seat of his Toyota Tundra as Kekoa Lansford drove toward his girlfriend's apartment on the dark early morning of August 9, 2023. He parked and stumbled into her living room, wearing shorts, a Hawaiian Special Forces tank top, and melted flipflops. She lived in a safe zone, six miles north of the inferno that only hours earlier had turned his hometown of Lahaina, on the northwest coast of Maui, into a living hell.

His girlfriend, Dani Fravega, a painter and tattoo artist, put her hand on his chest. At six feet three inches tall, he stood nearly as high as the flammable guinea grass brought to the island by European cattle ranchers in the 19th century. It crawled between slopes and roads around Lahaina, swiftly bursting into flames in what would become one of the deadliest wildfires in the U.S. in more than a century. Kekoa, 36, was built like a barrel of bourbon, and his bald head shined with sweat. Particles of ash stuck to his skin. His beard smelled of smoke. He had always exuded an air of invincibility, but now he looked completely sapped. He would not be okay after this. No one from Lahaina would.

Kekoa's heart hammered. "I can't fucking think or breathe right now," he told Dani. In the coming days, his heart would race so abnormally fast that doctors would have to performa cardioversion, using medicine and electric shocks to restore it to normal. Dani could not comprehend what Kekoa had seen over the past ten hours. And he could not yet begin to describe it.