Frank Smith sat patiently in his wheelchair outside the Haleʻiwa post office as his adult son, Brandon Delgado Dalumpinis, tried to figure out what to do next.

The pair had just taken a city bus there trying to get back to their senior living residence, Kupuna Home O Waialua, after spending the night on cots at the Leilehua High School cafeteria in Wahiawā. The Hawaiʻi National Guard had evacuated Smith, Delgado Dalumpinis and several of their neighbors Friday using a high-water military vehicle, with the photo of Smith and his dog in a wheelchair becoming one of the iconic images of the evacuation.

Now it was Saturday and they were eager to get home to get the son’s migraine medication. Those headaches sometimes get so severe, Delgado Dalumpinis said, that they cause him to black out. They had other motivations, too: Smith’s wife lives with them at Kupuna Home O Waialua and was about to get discharged from The Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu.

They expected to be able to transfer to another bus in Haleʻiwa to take them to Waialua. But the driver of that second route told them the bus couldn’t get past police cars parked across the road. Every route into their neighborhood was blocked off. They didn’t know when it would reopen. 

“I don’t know where the military went,” Delgado Dalumpinis said. “They disappeared once they got rid of us.”

Smith called TheHandi-Van, a city bus that transports people with mobility challenges. 

“They said no,” he said, “we’re not going over there.” 

So they sat, trying to come up with their next move. Smith stroked his dog, Bear, as Delgado Dalumpinis texted a friend to see if they could get picked up.

Worse comes to worst, they thought, Delgado Dalumpinis would walk the roughly two miles home, pushing his father in his wheelchair, with his service dog in his lap. That’s how they started, with Delgado Dalumpinis pushing his father for about 30 minutes toward Haleʻiwa’s eastern edge with Waialua, a crossing that local residents call Long Bridge.

The son felt a headache come on as they walked, he said, so he pushed slowly to keep it from getting worse. Near Long Bridge, a driver picked them up, putting his dad in the cab of his truck and delivering them to Kupuna Home O Waialua.

The trip home from Wahiawā, Delgado Dalumpinis said, took them nearly four hours. Despite the National Guard evacuation, he added, none of the senior residences there had gotten flooded — and his mother was expected to join them soon.