CHAPTER NINE.
My Plantation Cottage
"I LIKE THIS HOUSE," Mike Faye said as he walked from room to room on one of his late afternoon inspection visits at the cottage. "There"s an almost j.a.panese quality to it, an openness. Out the kitchen windows you can see Mount Haupu." He gestured at the far-off mountain. "And on the other side," he pointed to the back door, "you see the valley."
The main room could be easily fixed up with a new coat of paint and a few patches of trim to replace termite damage. But sagging kitchen cabinets needed to be torn out, repaired, and reattached. Faye said he could rehab the cabinet doors with raised molding and paint them in white lacquer to give them an English-country look. We"d add a microwave, cover the counters in gray-granite Formica, and install stainless steel double sinks. I stopped worrying about James"s warnings of burglaries. "He was just trying to scare you," Scott Sloan, a.s.sistant director in charge of the grounds crew, told me. "He liked having the house empty."
A stickler for historical detail, Faye insisted we install traditional Canec for the bathroom ceiling: a spongy, fibrous board made from sugarcane fibers. We argued over light switches for two weeks. Old-style plantation cottages like mine had single-wall construction, which meant just that: a single wall of heavy lumber served as both exterior and interior wall, allowing no hidden s.p.a.ces for electrical wiring. Traditionally, builders enclosed wires in ugly squared tubing with raised boxes for switches, all in dark brown. I hated them. Faye stubbornly countered, "It"s historical." He finally gave in, and found me modern, paddlestyle toggle switches. In white.
I brought in a second telephone line for a fax. Connected cable TV. Installed a dishwasher. Wired the closets, as storing clothes in humid Hawaii could lead to disaster. The Kleins told me that their wool jackets broke out in green mold after a couple of months. At Ace Hardware I found electric heat tubes for the closet baseboards to keep the closets dry. I salvaged a chest and two coffee tables from the old cottage furnishings. Everything else, I told John Rapozo, the Garden foreman a.s.signed to oversee renovations, I never want to see again.
The plastic lavender tub had to go. We worked out a plan for an open j.a.panese-style shower on one side of the ten-by-twelve-foot bathroom. Faye presented me with an antique showerhead the size of a plate that looked like it had come from a 1930s Malaysian rubber plantation. He designed a long vanity and mirror to stretch along the entire opposite wall. His carpenter built the cabinet of fir, then stained it a deep, glossy cherry so it looked like fine library furniture. Dr. Klein approved the plan without a murmur over costs. "Lucinda, I want you to be happy here," he said. "I want you to feel that every issue has been resolved, so you can put it to rest and just concentrate on your work." Wow.
Mike Faye had researched the plantation cottage style, and one day I got him to tell me about it. In the early 1900s, sugar plantation owners faced more and more criticism over labor conditions for their workers, imported from j.a.pan, China, the Philippines, and Korea. Foreign emba.s.sies protested housing conditions, which often consisted of rough campsites or dormitories. As Hawaii was seeking statehood, the planters felt the pressure. They began building what was called "sanitary housing."
"For the first time," said Faye, "families had their own houses and privacy. Lo and behold, it led to a baby boom." When all the baby boys grew up, they went off to become soldiers in World War II, and fought in the famous 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team of j.a.panese-American soldiers. They were given the most dangerous a.s.signments, and more than half of them were killed. But those who survived came back to Hawaii as war heroes, got involved in politics, and changed the whole political and economic landscape in Hawaii. Democratic landslide elections overwhelmed the Republican stronghold of Hawaii. The state earned the reputation as so Democratic as to verge on socialism. "And all because of these houses," said Faye with a smile.
He showed me his collection of old pattern books used as construction plans by the all-powerful Hawaiian Sugar Planters" a.s.sociation for its "sanitary" worker villages. They included common bathhouses, baseball diamonds, incinerators, and small stores. "The lighter your skin, the better your house," Faye explained. "It wasn"t right, but that"s the way it was." Supervisors, called lunas, were mostly haoles and claimed the largest houses in the center of the village. j.a.panese workers received higher wages and better houses close to the center, while the Filipinos on the bottom of the caste system got lower wages and houses on the village outskirts.
Plantation owners imported j.a.panese temple builders to erect Buddhist temples. When the carpenters finished those jobs, they went to work on the managers" grand Victorian chalets, then later, smaller residences. Each temple builder had his own signature marks, like the crude exterior window frames on my house that extended slightly over the window tops, like ears. Faye and his carpenters became connoisseurs of the nameless temple builders. Someone might tell them that this house or that was built by the j.a.panese temple builder in Waimea, but they"ll look at it and say, "No way. Maybe the Ha.n.a.lei builder."
When Faye"s crew crawled under my cottage, they discovered paint on the underside of the living room floor. He pointed out a seam in the flooring between the living room and dining areas where the two rooms had been joined together. After the war, he said, builders recycled many houses because of a scarcity of lumber. Faye concluded that the cottage living room must have originally been used elsewhere, perhaps as a second-story porch.
It explained why the house had such an open-air feel.
EARLY MORNINGS I adopted the habit of stopping by the cottage to see how renovations were going. Often Faye"s workers had already arrived, telltale surfboards extending out the backs of their pickup trucks, as the guys liked to catch some waves before work. But today I had the place to myself. I stood on the front porch and surveyed the empty landscape. I was falling in love with the place.
I heard a vehicle and saw a brown truck hurtle up the drive. Garden superintendent John Rapozo frequently dropped by to check on progress. I always liked to see him, and thought of him as the Man in Black, like country singer Johnny Cash. Rapozo had a craggy, rawhide face and always wore the same uniform of neatly pressed black pants, big black cowboy boots, buckskin hat, and a black T-shirt imprinted with the Garden"s breadfruit logo. Now he only picked up the guitar to sing for family gatherings, but in his younger days he and his two brothers, Mannie and Georgie, played regularly at the Coconut Palms Hotel. John said he used to bring the house down when he strummed "Try a Little Tenderness."
From a west-side Portuguese ranching family, he spoke pidgin staccato in a rough, smoker"s voice. His dialect was so thick that even his wife sometimes didn"t understand him. I missed about every fourth word. Haoles often mistake anyone speaking pidgin as a dumb hick. Rapozo was a simple man, but I sensed intelligence and an inner toughness that gave him unquestioned authority. He had worked for the botanical garden since its beginning, first as a contractor, later as foreman. He personally had bulldozed most of the roadbeds.
His favorite activity was to move earth with big machinery.
"Is this house ever going to be finished?" I asked laughingly when he got out of the truck.
"Lucinda. I call them this morning," his finger jabbed the air emphatically. "I told them: By the end of next week. Finished."
I sighed happily. This was vastly different from renovation projects at my Philadelphia house. I had been looking for someone like John all my life. I didn"t need a husband. I needed an enforcer.
Faye warned me that the gra.s.s walk to the cottage would turn into a sea of mud during the winter rains. John hauled in rock to form a stepping-stone path from the front porch to where I parked the car. One night I returned home to find a fresh layer of cinders and gravel spread over the dirt drive. John, of course, I knew in an instant.
When he learned that my family called me Lucy, he did, too. Sometimes he popped his head into my Garden office to report on construction at the cottage. When I started hearing mysterious chewing sounds at my cottage, John dispatched one of his sons, Chad the exterminator, to investigate. Chad immediately diagnosed the problem as roof rats that climb trees and sneak into attics. "Lady, you"ve got to realize you"re in the middle of a jungle," Chad told me. He returned with traps that caught a cat-sized rat, and stuffed up holes and cracks in the attic walls with copper Brillo pads.
One late afternoon at my office I turned from the computer and saw John standing in the doorway. Everybody followed the no-shoes rule at headquarters, so he stood in his stocking feet, his hands tucked behind his back, hiding something. "Lucy," he called softly. "I"ve got something for you." He brought out his two hands. Each held a softball-sized green gla.s.s ball. My eyes widened. These hollow gla.s.s fishing net floats, lost from j.a.panese ships, were becoming increasingly rare. I coveted one. Nowadays fishing fleets mostly used plastic buoys.
"I found these in the tall gra.s.s down on Lawai-Kai," John said. "By the Hawaiian graveyard. Would you like them?"
"Oh, John, would I ever! Are you sure you want to give them up?"
John smiled in satisfaction. When he left, I placed the b.a.l.l.s on my desk, positioning them so they would catch the light. The c.o.ke bottlegreen globes seemed to hold the ocean, with frozen bubbles of spray. So fragile, but strong enough to be tossed on waves and thrown ash.o.r.e. Later, Dr. Klein came into my office, papers in hand. "Look what John gave me," I showed him.
Dr. Klein beamed. "You"ve found a friend!"
CHAPTER TEN.
Sow a Seed, Reap a Life"s Work
WEEKS Pa.s.sED WHEN it seemed like I never left the office. Like a hamster in a wheel, I churned out reports, brochures, grant proposals, campaign materials, and thank-you letters to donors. Lost was an earlier vow to go down to the Garden grounds every day, if only for ten minutes. I felt guilty that I wasn"t riding Bo enough. But one morning I impulsively shut off the computer and walked out the door, hurrying down the lanai along the front of the office before anyone could stop me with a phone call or question. Only Henry, the rooster who stalked the office entrance looking for handouts, saw me.
Shifting the car into low gear to drive down the steep grade and sharp curves into the Lawai Valley, I swooped past a grove of young Pritchardia, native Hawaiian palms, then curved around a bend to fly past the water lily pond. A gray gallinule, or Hawaiian coot, darted in and out of the pink flowers and lily pads.
The road followed the Lawai Stream under overhanging red rock cliffs to an old plantation railroad bridge that obscured the view of any oncoming cars. I honked my horn to warn approaching vehicles, then splashed through six inches of water. The Garden hadn"t yet solved the problem of a stream running across its sole access road. I parked at Pump Six, the former irrigation station that housed the Garden"s carpentry shop, offices for the grounds foremen, and whatever else could be crammed under its termite-ravaged rafters. Behind its red barn, three tents of green cloth formed the nursery.
As I entered the shade, I knew that this was what I had missed - a connection to plants, the feel of the humid, languid air that conspired with hot tropical sun, daily rain showers, and rich soil to produce the vivid tropical flora of Hawaii. Dr. Klein called the nursery "the Emergency Room," site of the Garden"s most significant plant-rescue work. Rows of waist-high tables held hundreds of seed flats and pots, all color-coded: yellow tags for common plants. Blue for rare. Red for federally listed endangered species. Most of the tags were red.
"Hi, Simon," I called to the shy black-and-white cat that snoozed between two pots on a far table. He roused himself to quickly escape under the table. Rats used to sneak in at night and gorge themselves on all the rare seeds before they sprouted, until Simon arrived. Now we honored him as an important staff member.
The nursery manager, a tall woman with carrot-colored hair named Kerin Lilleeng-Rosenberger, rose to greet me from a rain-stained wooden desk in the back. Her steady, frank eyes could shoot sparks if provoked. I felt a kinship with her and we smiled easily. We were both loners of a sort, and outsiders at the Garden. Kerin worked by herself, without benefit of mentor or instructor, perennially battling the rest of the staff. The Garden"s glamorous plant hunters Steve Perlman and Ken Wood returned from field trips around Hawaii or other Pacific isles and dumped bags of seeds on her desk, booty from their explorations. "Always the seeds are given to me with no instructions," she"d rail. "Here"s a bag of seeds, Kerin, go at it," they"d say. Sometimes she"d plead, "Give me at least a hint. Did they grow in mesic forest or rain forest?"
We walked to the front of the nursery to inspect two high wooden planters. Each container cradled a low-growing shrub, with crooked branches and tiny, parsimonious leaves. Like most native Hawaiian plant species, it didn"t look like much. Yet this was one of the Garden"s big success stories. Perlman and Wood had discovered the last two known specimens of this scraggly bush on the small, degraded Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe, used over the last fifty years by the U.S. military as a practice bombing target. By chance, the two collectors climbed over to a stone column that did not look as if it had ever been botanized. Perlman lowered Wood by rope down to a small ledge, where he found two skeletal plants. When they brought a sample back to the botanical garden for identification, it initially mystified the staff botanists. They p.r.o.nounced it to belong to a new genus never before seen in Hawaii, and named it Ka.n.a.loa kahoolawensis. Ken and Steve collected a few seeds and brought them to Kerin.
"The most difficult problems for me are these real rare plants," she said. "They won"t grow from cuttings or air-layering. Basically they kill themselves. It"s like hybrid fruits - they become so hybrid that they are as.e.xual or sterile and can"t reproduce." But she succeeded in growing Ka.n.a.loa kahoolawensis, and she was the only one who ever had. Seeds had also been sent to Lyon Arboretum on Oahu to be cloned and grown in test tubes. Yet despite Lyon"s state-of-the-art techniques that worked well on other species, those seedlings died. The roots just spiraled round and round, cramped in gla.s.s tubes.
Kerin studied seeds to divine their requirements. In the case of the Kahoolawe plant, she immediately recognized a legume (bean) seed and knew from experience that it needed scarification, a nick in the sh.e.l.l to allow the germ within to escape. She then figured out that the plant had adapted to long periods of drought by sending out unusually deep roots. She was surprised by its speedy growth. It germinated in a day and a half in a tiny seed flat. By the end of the week it needed a one-gallon pot, and after that, progressively deeper containers.
By successfully growing two of the seedlings into bushes, she doubled the world"s population, from two to four. Even so, they only survived here in captivity as museum pieces.
"Are the Hawaiian native species going to be saved at all?" I asked.
"Only in zoos, like the botanical garden. Not in the wild," she said. "The odds are against them. Totally. Goats, sheep, rats, deer, maile and mokihana hunters who plunder the forests for lei making, all are destroying the rarities. I"m like a Band-Aid. It"s unrealistic to think we"re going to bring them back to a preserve and they"ll be able to repopulate. But I accept the zoos."
Near the garden entrance, dozens of Brighamia plants, now the Garden"s unofficial mascot, flourished. Some towered above us, germinated by Kerin from tiny seeds, half the size of a sesame seed. I told her: "When I was up at Kilauea Lighthouse last weekend I saw that they have whole beds of Brighamias. Hundreds. Are they all yours?"
"They all started here. From the first, mother plant, I grew three or four hundred. I used to grow whole flats of Brighamia and give them away, and gave demonstrations on how to transplant them." Again, Kerin had succeeded because she tried to a.n.a.lyze conditions from the seed"s point of view. "I used to ask: Where are the seeds going?" she explained. "The Brighamia plants were growing on cliff crevices, so naturally the seeds were falling down the cliffs into the ocean. Where else could they go? But once we brought them back here for cultivation, they started flowering and producing." Kerin disputes Steve Perlman"s theory that Brighamia solely depends on the endangered sphinx moth for pollination. Here at the botanical garden, the Brighamia are engaging in all sorts of s.e.x, pressing an unknown number of pollinators into action - birds, bees, and perhaps other moths.
THE GARDEN OFFERED a respite for Kerin, an antidote to a brain-numbing bartending job at Brennecke"s upstairs bar on Poipu Beach. It wasn"t the first time I questioned whether we were saving the plants, or they were saving us. In her offhours, she had started volunteering at the Garden, first growing plants for a monthly giveaway program. She puzzled that she was asked to grow exclusively nonnatives such as ti or plumeria. When she arrived, the National Tropical Botanical Garden did not possess many native Hawaiian plants. Everything was imported from tropical regions around the Pacific, India, or Africa. Incredibly, the Garden had only six Pritchardia, the native Hawaiian palms. Kerin set out to change that. As her interest grew, she attended horticulture cla.s.ses at Kauai Community College. The more she learned, the more curious she became. Yet she couldn"t find a single text for growing native plants. She resolved to grow all one thousand native Hawaiian species.
After the Garden hired her as a part-time nursery manager she formulated her own cla.s.sifications, dividing seeds into three types: pulpy, dry, or hard, which need to be stripped manually. Obviously, in nature, no humans perform this work, but a rat might do the job of gnawing away the hard seed coat, or it may be nicked by pebbles when rolling down a stream bed, or eaten by a bird or animal, digested, and excreted. Initially, Kerin divided hard seeds into test groups, soaking them for one, twelve, thirty-six, or seventy-two hours. After six years of experimentation, she discovered that a twenty-four-hour bath was ideal for most: the duration of a good, hard rain. In her experiments with mokihana, a native vine that grows in high, wet mountain areas, she found that the seeds needed to be soaked for five days and fermented for another three months. "n.o.body thinks about soaking for five days," she says. "If I weren"t a patient person I wouldn"t have succeeded." She plants seeds from each species in as many as twelve different soil mixes before she hits the right formula of soil, temperature, and water.
Eventually, Kerin deduced methods to grow 870 of the 1,000 native Hawaiian plant species - all except those so rare she couldn"t obtain seeds. "I grew them from the heart," she says. "I really, really wanted them to grow." After five years of hard work, Kerin inventoried the Garden"s new native plant section and found that only a quarter of what she had grown had survived. To her distress and volcanic rage, she discovered flats of her seedlings parked under bushes, never planted and dead. The groundsmen became used to her furies and shrugged them off. But she acknowledges that the biggest problem was not the ground crew"s lack of diligence. It was the hot, windless Lawai Valley. The Garden had no nurseries at higher elevations that could harbor mountain plants that needed cool breezes and nighttime conditions near freezing. No wet rain forests could be replicated at the Garden, either.
Only one person on Kauai, or for that matter, in all of Hawaii, knew how to transplant endangered species seedlings into the landscape and keep them alive: the hermit Keith Robinson. Keith acted as a one-man plant-rescue operation who tended his Outlaw Plant Preserve, a hidden garden of the rarest Hawaiian plants. According to rumors, it was a marvel, eleven miles from civilization, an evocation of how the island terrain looked one thousand years ago, filled with native palms, flowering hibiscus, and other trees and shrubs that have all but vanished elsewhere. He reportedly does all the work by hand, including carrying water in buckets from a stream.
In defiance of federal and state authorities, Robinson hikes into state forests and other government-protected land, s.n.a.t.c.hes seeds, and digs up plants. In the privacy of his preserve he fusses over them until they bloom into prize specimens. Unlike Susan Orlean"s now famous orchid thief John Laroche, who stole orchids for no apparent reason other than the obsession to possess, Robinson was the Robin Hood of the endangered species world. He stole to save them. Every once in a while Robinson emerges, on a radio show or at a public hearing, to rant against government interference, the "eco-n.a.z.is," the Endangered Species Act, the federal government, and especially the National Tropical Botanical Garden. In 1993, curiosity overcame Garden botanist Ken Wood, who trespa.s.sed onto Robinson land. Robinson men armed with rifles surprised Wood, marched him down to the Waimea Police Station, and filed a trespa.s.sing complaint.
Robinson himself carried a pistol or machete, and was convinced that a recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal to protect endangered species on Kauai was a plot to seize his preserve. He swore to shoot anyone who tried.
I had seen a disturbing copy of Robinson"s latest missive sent to Hawaii"s U.S. congressmen. He wrote that in order to foil the government"s planned "takeover," he would render his land useless by turning it into an enormous weed patch. He threatened to seed his family"s entire watershed "with highly aggressive nonnative wetland vines, to replace this dangerous native ecosystem with a more benign nonnative one that will not attract all sorts of spying, trespa.s.sing, meddling, environmentalist bullying, and government seizure attempts."
Stay away from my preserve, he warned, or he would let loose all the alien species that were already trampling Kauai: banana poka, j.a.panese honeysuckle, Australian acacia, blackberry, cat"s claw, kudzu, and the most dreaded of all, Miconia.
Although he sounded odd, even disturbing, I was intrigued and wanted to see what he had accomplished.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
Local Style
WAIST-DEEP IN the chill ocean, I pulled on my rubber fins, rubbed spit in my mask, rinsed it, strapped it on, and sank below the surface. Fish swam close, even in knee-high shallows. I paddled alongside a school of pale yellow- and black-striped convict tangs. A Pica.s.so triggerfish with baby blue nose and geometric markings bounced lazily along the rocky floor. In this silent realm, the fish seemed oblivious to anything but the possibility of food or danger. My slow stroke offered neither, so they were unconcerned. Once I was submerged, the initial cold shock mellowed to a comfortable coolness.
Further out, craniums of coral anch.o.r.ed on the ocean floor. Most mornings I jogged around the beach roads at first light, then cooled off with a swim. The underwater rock formations at Poipu Beach had become as familiar as the island"s terrestrial geography. In deeper water, big black and orange jacks darted in synchronization next to unicorn fish with their single horns and expressions of startled stupidity. Deeper still, a shower of bubbles sparkled around me, signaling the wave break above. A sudden shiver trilled down my spine, an uncontrollable reaction when the thought of a shark splashed into consciousness. None had surfaced near Poipu Beach in recent memory, but every year there were one or two shark attacks around the Hawaiian Islands. A surfer might lose a foot, or a swimmer, an arm. I sprinted for sh.o.r.e.
The hurricane had ruined the beach"s gra.s.sy expanse, turning the park into patches of weeds and red dirt. Nearby, the boarded-up wreckage of the Waiohai Resort remained an eyesore.
According to the morning radio surf report, south sh.o.r.e waves rose a mere two to three feet. Although it was only 7 a.m., already four or five surfers bobbed on boards a hundred yards offsh.o.r.e, waiting for a decent swell. One sprung to standing position and skimmed left ahead of a curl.
An outdoor shower at the edge of the sand beach consisted of a simple concrete post with four showerheads. Mothers doused their bare babies here next to locals with warrior tattoos. Cold water only, but sufficient for Hawaii"s preternatural, nearly continual perfect weather. I brought a small bottle of shampoo to lather up. Sometimes I went for days without an indoor, hot.w.a.ter shower. Rinsing the salt from my rubber mask, I hung it on the faucet, then tucked the fins into the narrow crevice behind the shower pipe to drain, local style. A surfer walked over to join me. I had seen him other mornings, startled by the intensity of his good looks. Strong, perfect white teeth. A mop of auburn, curly hair. Rivulets of water streamed through graying chest hair. He flashed a high-voltage smile that reduced me to a blush, which I tried to conceal.
"Morning," he said with a grin, sticking his head under the water. There was something intimate about showering with a stranger, even if we were outdoors and wearing swimsuits. "Fine way to start a day. Fine way," he said. I primly agreed and turned off the water.
"That"s a real antique you got there," he said, eyeing my black snorkel mask, bought for a Caribbean trip fifteen years ago.
"I know," I said. "But I have a small face, and it"s the only one I can find that doesn"t leak."
"You just keep on using it."
The islands attracted lots of these guys, who had come for the surfing and now drifted from job to job, woman to woman. Would an erotic plot twist be worth it? Kauai was the smallest of small towns. Kansas in the middle of the ocean. People noticed where your car had been parked and knew if you drove to Lihue, or stopped at Koloa Landing to snorkel the deep water. At the botanical garden, grounds workers learned about plans to renovate my little plantation cottage almost before I made them. The coconut wireless, they called it. How long would it take to get around that the Garden fund-raiser was having a fling with a surfer?
I could see in his eyes what he registered in an instant: mutual s.e.xual attraction. An animal behaviorist would see it as a scenting, an atavistic response to a receptive mating partner.
BACK IN THE CAR, I drove through the back streets of Old Koloa Town with its little wooden houses, remnants of a plantation camp. Jumbles of potted orchids and fountain-like red and green ti filled the cottage gardens with gaudy color. j.a.panese stone lanterns stood in many of the tiny yards. Other gardens pressed tires, buckets, even an old bathtub, into use as planters. Gardens on Kauai fell into two categories: the Polynesian Adventure landscapes at the big hotels, or these mixed-up plantation cottage gardens. I had come to prefer the hodgepodges that festooned the small cottages.
Down the road I pa.s.sed the Koloa Fire Station, which like all volunteer brigades on the island maintained cribs of small boxes for lost shearlings. At breeding times the night birds become disoriented by the electric lights on the island and land on lawns. People pick them up and deposit them in the fire station boxes, so forest rangers can return the birds to a beach, to head back into the wind.
After pa.s.sing the New Englandwhite steeple of the Union Church, I entered Koloa Town proper - three blocks of ramshackle, one-story wooden buildings on dusty streets. After one unsatisfactory experiment in high-rise resorts that allowed a six-story hotel, now the Marriott, to be built in Lihue back in the 1960s, the people of Kauai insisted that no building could rise higher than a coconut tree. Thus, the Koloa tree tunnel of eucalyptus trees and the lines of Norfolk pines trimmed by the hurricane into tall bottle brushes gave the lowland coastal landscape its only high points.
Spreading monkeypod trees shaded a dozen Koloa Town tourist boutiques, two surf shops, Fathom Five Divers, Kauai Fish Market, a handful of restaurants, and two grocery stores. At the corner under a purple jacaranda tree stood an almost naked man, bare gut hanging over baggy shorts. He wore "rubba slippas," as the locals call their ubiquitous flip-flops. People walking around nearly unclothed had startled me at first. Now I joined them, wrapping only a sarong over my wet suit to go into the grocery store.
To pick up some milk for breakfast, I parked in front of the Big Save, the catch-all grocery that devoted an entire aisle to fishing gear and suntan lotion. I nodded to the clerk at the cash register, gestured to another acquaintance. We locals hardly noticed the tourists. It was as if we put on special sungla.s.ses that screened them out and made their rental convertibles disappear.
That initial, alarming encounter with local food at Sueoka"s market on my first weekend turned out to have been a good introduction to island food, with its mixture of six great culinary traditions: j.a.panese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Polynesian, and Filipino. Most meals, either in highbrow restaurants or at private parties, featured samples from several cuisines. Luckily, dishes bore no resemblance to what I tasted as a teenager in West Hartford Center"s South Seas Village, with its pupu platter and deep-fried chicken in sweet-sour glop studded with pineapple and maraschino cherries.
Even so, I mournfully pa.s.sed the produce sections of the large grocery stores those first months. Fresh fruits and vegetables were mostly shipped in from the mainland and were extraordinarily expensive and often poor quality: peaches like sawdust; red bell peppers with astronomical prices; pallid tomatoes. While the islands may be the extinction capital of the world for the plant and animal kingdoms, it"s a fruit fly"s paradise. Scientists have identified more than one thousand species of fruit flies proliferating in Hawaii, ready to attack fresh produce before it can be harvested. Only truck farmers fussing over small quant.i.ties of fruits and vegetables can keep the flies at bay.
Though the produce section disappointed, I exulted over the fish counter with its ahi, mahimahi, and occasional opakapaka, all flakily fresh. I tried them all. Next door, the Kauai Fish Market"s gla.s.s cases offered an even more dazzling array, including its daily lunch plate specials with choice of fish, rice, macaroni salad, and greens. Per capita fish consumption in Hawaii is twice that of mainlanders; the consumption of tuna ranks second only to j.a.pan. Hawaii"s unique contribution to raw fish cuisine is poke, small chunks of rough-cut raw fish mixed with Hawaiian salt, chopped seaweed, and roasted, ground kukui nut. Fish stores offer a half dozen or so styles, perhaps tuna, marlin, or swordfish with seasonings that might include scallion, shoyu (soy sauce), onion, sesame oil, and chili peppers.
At Garden headquarters, Clarissa and Evelyn in the finance department brought in more strange and exotic foods: dried plums dusted with a hot j.a.panese spice; pickled green mango slices; squishy mountain apples with their creamlike white flesh; manapua, white buns stuffed with pork; and the Hawaiian snack Musubi - a mini-meal that can be bought at convenience stores for a dollar. Of j.a.panese origin, its rectangular bar of sticky rice is wrapped in nori seaweed and contains a slice of SPAM or egg.
SPAM continues to hold an unfathomable but revered place in Hawaii"s diet. A condensation of the words "spiced ham," so named in a 1937 contest sponsored by the Hormel Company, it reigns as a holdover from pre-refrigerator days when canned meat was prized as a sign of wealth. Grocery stores sell out of SPAM. People h.o.a.rd cans during wartimes. Locals mix it with Chinese fish cake, make SPAM wontons and SPAM tempura, or fry it with rice or eggs. All this means that Hawaii"s population eats three times more SPAM than any other state of the union - and suffers a high rate of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease to go along with it.
Not until I discovered the Monday Koloa Farmers" Market did I start to realize the full culinary possibilities in Hawaii. At precisely noon, the official and strictly enforced starting time, the market grand master drops a rope barrier and lets the crowds in. "Walking only," he calls to little avail, as shoppers rush to several dozen vendors hawking fresh-picked, foot-long beans, bouquets of local Manoa lettuce, yams, purple potatoes, radishes, Maui onions, bay leaf, pineapples (yellow and sweet or the pale white low-acid variety), grapefruit, cuc.u.mbers, even corn on the cob and beefy tomatoes.
I marveled at the dozens of foreign fruits such as bitter melons, which resemble pale green cuc.u.mbers with warts, giant papayas, and avocados the size of cantaloupe. One vendor whacked ice-cold coconuts in half with a machete and offered them to customers. Some locals prized the spoon meat, a thin, gelatinous layer of slippery flesh that lines immature coconuts. A bag of tangerines was so cheap that one could squeeze them for juice - nectar of G.o.ds!
On my first trip to the market, I purchased a nosegay of deep purple orchid sprays circled with maidenhair fern, then grabbed bunches of tall red heliconia stalks and periwinkle blue agapanthus blooms. A pickup truck displayed barrels of white calla lilies. I bought a dozen. The vendor presented me two for free. A full armload of tropical flowers for practically nothing!
On the mainland I had despised anthuriums for their glossy red elephant ears and dangling pistils. Here, I grew to love the lime-green varieties, or those of bubble-gum pink. Even the deep-red ones soon appealed to me, as their loud colors seemed at home in the tropics. Most of all, I adored the large, transparent blooms shaded from palest whisper pink to greenish white. Called obake, j.a.panese for ghosts, they grow so thin you can see light through them. Some extend to a foot long, and more. I became a connoisseur, searching out the largest and most transparent.
As I edged closer to local life, I experienced for the first time what it was like to be a minority, as Caucasians accounted for a mere 11 percent of the population in Hawaii. Most of the residents had a mixed ancestry of Chinese, j.a.panese, Korean, and maybe a dash of native Hawaiian or Portuguese. The state attorney general announced that she couldn"t comply with a federal order to track hate crimes because there was no standing majority. I had heard tales, mostly from the mean streets of Honolulu, that locals shunned white people. But on Kauai I never experienced any such discrimination except for the hazing at the office, which I attributed to general suspicion of outsiders and fear of compet.i.tion. The people of Kauai prided themselves on what they called "the Aloha spirit," of welcoming. One guidebook said that Kauai locals were so accommodating that they stood by the side of the road, waiting to yield.
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited frontier America in 1835, he observed that the national characteristic was the propensity to form a.s.sociations "of a thousand kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive." This trait endured on small-town Kauai in a way not often still evident in the continental United States. On any given weekend, Boy Scouts and soccer leagues, canoe clubs, high school bands, and an orchid society organized car washes, shaved-ice stands, hot dog sales, walkathons, and countless other activities.
MIKE FAYE AND HIS CREW had finally finished their work on the cottage, allowing me to move in. A huge container filled with my household goods and furniture from Philadelphia arrived. I had brought Sam the stray cat over from the Kleins" ohana, and, in record time, he took command of the large yard, wormed his way into the house, and now slept every night on my bed. As I dressed for work one morning, I heard the clanky sound of an approaching car chugging up the long bambootunneled drive. James the caretaker. Twice a week he showed up early in the morning to mow the lawn or tend the bromeliads and orchids. James and I had come to an accommodation - I didn"t ask him to change a thing, and he maintained a wary distance. "You not going to work today?" he called from outside.
"Yes, I"m going. I go in later," I answered through the bathroom window. If I hadn"t left by 8 a.m., James regarded me as appallingly late. Garden groundsmen observe plantation hours, reporting to work at seven.