LAHAINA >> Peyton Chesson returned Friday to the burned-out shell of the Kaniau Road home that he and his wife, Zoe Chesson, had rented for the past six years in a community that they loved and where they had hoped one day to buy a forever home to raise their family.

The 42-year-old, who relocated with his family to Kona for work about a month ago, flew into Lahaina early last week to be among the first Lahaina evacuees with passes to reenter the burn zone. However, in the stress of the moment, Chesson postponed his visit to Friday. The new plan was to return with his wife and leave their children, Bishop, 4, and Vivienne, 1, with their grandfather Gary Fortey.

Upon pulling up to the razed home, Zoe Chesson, 30, found it too daunting to stay. It didn’t look anything like the place where they first brought their children home from the hospital or made happy memories strolling the streets and visiting the coastline at nearby Wahikuli Wayside Park.

But Peyton Chesson had plenty of support as he suited up in head-to-toe Tyvek coveralls, a respirator mask, goggles and gloves, hoping to find some closure as he combed through shattered pieces of his life. A large group of volunteers from Samaritan’s Purse, a nonprofit that responds immediately to natural disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, floods and wildfires at home and abroad, were at the home to greet him and cover him with love and prayer. They also provided practical support by showing him how to sift through the toxic debris to discover what finds were important to keep close, and those he could let go.

The Chessons, like so many Lahaina families in the fire’s aftermath, are in short supply of nearly everything except hard decisions. Amid the overwhelming vastness of uncertainty, one of the most important choices to make is, “Do I stay or go?”

One aspect of staying is the difficulty of trying to heal while facing trauma that is still active nearly two months after the incident. Another is dealing with an expensive housing market made tighter by the fire, and a rebuilding process that could take years. Thousands have filed unemployment claims on Maui since the Lahaina wildfires, so the decision is often about replacing lost jobs or getting full hours.

Some Maui residents are opting to leave these challenges. While some will return as the Chessons hope to do, others will never come back as the fire potentially fuels a cycle that was potentially in play before the devastation.

Paul Brewbaker, principal of TZ Economics, said that even before the Lahaina wildfires, “Population on Maui was not growing as fast as it was a decade ago” and that it has been decelerating coming out of COVID-19 shock.

Brewbaker said the state’s newly posted 2020-2022 estimates show Maui’s population rising only slightly from 200,712 in 2020 to 203,792 in 2021 to 206,315 in 2022, as of July 1 of each year.

“That’s a deceleration from 1.5% growth in 2021 from 2020 (partly boosted by the vagabond worker phenomenon) to 1.2% growth in 2022,” he said.

Carl Bonham, executive director of the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization, said the overall Maui population is forecast to decline by close to 2,000 from 2022 to 2024 and to remain about 2,000 below UHERO’s second-quarter forecast for the rest of this decade.

He said the forecast envisions a smaller loss of population statewide as about 25% of those departing Maui are expected to relocate to other islands. However, Bonham added that “the state overall will continue to face a very tight labor market. Businesses will continue to report that they can’t find workers.”

“That’s kind of a good place to be initially for Maui. They went into this with a shortage of workers, but the places where there were shortages of workers now have no customers,” he said. “If they had the customers back then, people who lost their jobs directly because of destruction of a business in Lahaina would be able to find work. The problem is getting visitor spending back to the rest of the island.”

The Chessons lost work because their employer UFO Parasail & Adventures has not operated on Maui since the severe fire-related tourism downturn. When Peyton Chesson was offered work at the company’s Kona operation, the family transferred, albeit somewhat reluctantly.

“Nothing feels right,” Chesson told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser during one of many breaks during the roughly five-hour search at the site of his former home Friday. Samaritan’s Purse advises searchers not to spend more than 20 minutes at a time in the thick of the toxic debris and heat.

“There’s always something more. I can’t nail it down. Your home is gone. Perhaps that’s all it is.”

On Saturday he told the Star-Advertiser during a phone call that he has a history in Kona, where he started his career with UFO Parasail & Adventures and where his 20-year-old son, Christian Chesson, lives. But he added, “I don’t feel settled there, to be honest, because I don’t think my wife is settled there.”

Zoe Chesson, who was born and raised on Maui and attended King Kamehameha III School and Lahainaluna High School, said she understands that working is an important part of healing for her husband. But she said that she still misses Maui a month after the move, and so do the children.

“In Kona some days I ask them what do you want to do, and they say, ‘Go to Grandpa’s house.’ Being away from him is tough,” she said.

The family hopes to return to Maui one day. After all, the Lahaina home was where Zoe Chesson proudly parked the first car that she purchased. The once white Hyundai Elantra, which was dubbed the “jelly bean,” now sits blackened in the driveway like a large glob of charcoal.

The bedroom of the house, now reduced to just ash and roof tile, was where she lovingly placed her rings nightly in a heart-shaped dish with the inscription “Mr. & Mrs.”

Samaritan’s Purse volunteers unearthed the dish, which had been purchased in Lahaina, unscathed. It is one of only a few handfuls of mementos belonging to the Chessons that survived the Lahaina wildfires, which killed as many as 98 people and destroyed about 2,200 buildings, most of them homes.

Volunteers also helped find a belt buckle from Peyton Chesson’s time as a middle schooler at Fork Union Military Academy and remnants of a Benchmade knife that had been given to him. They also discovered some coins and some of Zoe Chesson’s sewing supplies, as well as some pages from her childhood Calvin and Hobbes cartoon books.

Poignantly, a surviving page read, “Problems often look overwhelming at first. The secret is to break problems into small manageable chunks. If you deal with those, you’re done before you know it.”

The Chessons said they plan to take that advice and frame the page as a reminder of how to navigate the uncertain road ahead.

But returning to Maui is tough for the Chessons without adequate work, especially given the higher cost of housing in an even more constrained market than before the fire. In the meantime they are considering options such as Zoe Chesson moving back to Maui with the kids and Petyon Chesson flying back and forth.

Many of those affected by the West Maui fires are weighing similar dilemmas as some family members move to other nations, the mainland, a neighbor island or even just elsewhere on Maui.

Brewbaker said, “Some upfront losses — victims fleeing because it’s just easier to pick up and start life over somewhere else — are to be expected. They happened on Kauai after Hurricane Iniki and are quite common after hurricanes and massive fires, from which rebuilding can take years. I think Maui’s structural impediments to economic development are much more deterministic, the throttling thing, but the legacy of the wildfire could be to precipitate a larger population loss than might already have been forthcoming.”

Maui’s struggling economy is among the top reasons that Makaio Martin, 35, is moving to Olympia, Wash., on Sunday with his wife, Joanna Martin, and three kids — ages 3, 11, 13.

Martin said they plan to live in Olympia with his wife’s sister and his brother-in-law. He said the couple decided to move the family after their home in Lahaina where they lived with eight family members was destroyed. Martin also lost his handyman business in the fire.

“Instead of trying to restart here, which is one of the highest-cost places to live, we are moving to Washington to start a new life. It’s a little cheaper there rent-wise, and hopefully we can make something out of nothing,” he said.

It’s not the first time that Martin, who is part Hawaiian, has moved because of lack of jobs. He relocated to Maui from Hilo at 17 to find greater work opportunities. Martin said moving this time is harder because he feels pushed out of Hawaii and disenfranchised by the government’s disaster response.

“The Hawaiian plants are very strong, and they can grow in the soil that we have,” he said. “The government, they are the invasive plants, and they are coming in and they are wrapping their vines around the Hawaiian people and pushing us out. They are making us not have a voice; they are making us leave because they figure the more people that leave, the less noise that we can make.”

Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement (CNHA) CEO Kuhio Lewis said in a statement that the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 census’ detailed demographic and housing data confirms that even before the wildfire the Native Hawaiian population was moving away from its ancestral homeland.

“The report shows that less than half (46.7%) of those who identify as Native Hawaiian currently live in Hawaii, which is down from 55% in 2010,” Lewis said. “We are losing the soul of Hawaii with every Native Hawaiian that leaves the islands.”

Changing neighborhoods also is difficult, especially for the Hawaiian families who have lived in Lahaina for generations. Kauiolaakea Kaina explained the negative impacts of such displacements to the Maui County Council Government Relations, Ethics and Transparency Committee, which met Wednesday at the Westin Maui Resort & Spa.

Kaina, who is staying at the Westin Maui Resort & Spa, said she placed her children with family on the other side of the island so that they could go to school and get less exposure to the trauma in West Maui.

“It’s so hard to watch them in the hotel be surrounded by all the other families that are still grieving. My son, who is only 6, would walk around the hotel crying and apologizing to the people — almost like taking on the burden himself,” she said. “This past Saturday it was pretty windy. From our hotel room, my daughter, who is 3, looked out the window. She asked me, ‘Mommy, are we safe?’ She said, ‘It’s very windy.’ She asked next if the hotel was gonna burn down, because that’s what caused the last fire.”

Kaina urged Council members to keep the children in mind as they made decisions related to Lahaina’s rebuilding and resilience.

“They are going through this with us, and they are going to remember,” she said. “We need to give them a better future.”