My own experience with trying to weed Kauai of the ivy gourd left me feeling that no matter how ma.s.sive our efforts, they would probably only succeed in small pockets. Yet the silversword projects demonstrate how dedicated individuals and inst.i.tutions can s.n.a.t.c.h a few species from extinction. Sherwin Carlquist, the author of Hawaii"s evolutionary history, offered a fair-minded and plausible challenge: If there are reasonable, simple, practical measures to conserve the earth"s most fragile inhabitants, why not take them?
PART THREE.
Light After Darkness.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
Hearts in the Snow.
THAT JANUARY AFTERNOON the pueo swooped in circles, staking her territory around Garden headquarters. Small and gray, this Hawaiian owl flies in daylight. I watched through the window in Dr. Klein"s office as a group of us met to review the year"s final budget numbers. As always, Dr. Klein commanded the head of the conference table, surrounded by easels holding architectural drawings of his expansionist plans for all of the Garden properties. Many donors liked to wait until December to review their tax bills before deciding how much to give away in charitable deductions. We sweated in the final days of the year as we opened envelopes that contained checks from board members of $5,000, $20,000, $50,000, and more.
Two or three times a day, Doug Kinney, the Garden"s chairman of the board, telephoned from his Florida golf retreat, always growling, asking for the latest figures. A businessman, he wanted to report that the Garden had ended the year in the black. "How much do we need?" Doug demanded. If we hadn"t received an expected gift, he called the reluctant trustee to remind him or her to step up to the plate.
"And so we balanced the budget," Dr. Klein announced to the gathered staff. "But I submit," he said, his pasty complexion turning the telltale pink that signaled high pique, "that balancing the budget is not the mission of the Garden. Education and research and conservation are the mission of the Garden." Right on, Dr. Klein!
My attention faded from the staff meeting. As always during times of sorrow, my work sustained me, giving me a focus. The last two months blurred together in a river of grief as I recovered from my father"s death. At age eighty he was still working two days a week, though he had grown frail from a series of small strokes. We had expected it when the ma.s.sive, killing attack came. Still, I had not antic.i.p.ated the penetrating sadness, the sudden engulfment in memories that brought sharp pain and the realization that he was gone forever.
Dr. Klein"s secretary interrupted the staff meeting to ask, "Lucinda, are you taking a call from June in Minneapolis?"
"Oooh. That call I"ll take," I told the group and got up from my chair to go to my office, happy to escape for a few minutes. I knew that my mother expected a visit from my nephew, Will. But my sister-in-law was on the phone to report that Will had been waiting at the Connecticut airport for three hours and Mom hadn"t arrived to pick him up.
It was already 9 p.m. in Connecticut. I called Chuck, the young lawyer who lived across the street from my parents" house. "The house is dark," he reported. "I"ll go over. Weird. I didn"t see her get the Sunday paper yesterday. There was an ice storm here, and I don"t think she"s been out of the house for three days."
I put down the phone and went back into Dr. Klein"s office. Forty-five minutes later came the second telephone call. "I better take that," I told Bill and the others at the meeting, laughing. "My mother seems to have gone off somewhere, so there"s a family alert."
"Lucy, your mother is dead," Chuck said.
RITUAL TELLS US what to do. Call relatives. Plan another funeral. Go home to Connecticut again. I closed the door of my office and started telephoning. When I heard a knock on the door, I opened it to see Janet Klein. Bill had become so worried about me that he had called her in.
Later that night, Bill and Janet arrived at my cottage door, expressions of concern on their faces. I had turned down their dinner invitation, as I needed to pack for another emergency red-eye flight to Connecticut.
They carried twin Styrofoam takeout containers from their favorite Italian restaurant. "We couldn"t decide whether you"d like spumoni or chocolate mousse, so we brought you both," Bill explained. Food, particularly chocolate, at a time of grief and crisis is never a mistake. I made tea and we sat in the living room as Sam the cat entertained us by walking from lap to lap in an oddly companionable evening. Instead of talking about the looming funeral, they decided to distract me with Garden and island gossip.
As they said good-bye, Sam slinked through Bill"s ankles in a last bid for more attention. "That is one friendly cat," he said.
"Yes, he is," I said. "At least I"m pretty sure he"s a he. Sometimes I"m not sure."
Bill picked up a willing Sam and laid him on his back and pointed out the genitalia. "And there"s something about his head that looks male," said the professor.
"Good night," called Janet. "I"ll pick you up around one o"clock to drive you to the airport."
HIGH PILES OF SNOW lined the streets. White buried all of Connecticut. My brother Breck unlocked the house and with apprehension we went into the foyer, icy cold because the heat had been turned way down. In the blue and white kitchen, we began to follow a trail of objects. Her eyegla.s.ses lay upside down in the usual place on the counter next to the phone. When Dad was alive, he grabbed them away from her and washed them in a daily devotion. But now fingerprints smeared the lenses and dust settled in the corners. We walked with heavy steps down the hall into the bedroom. The flowered bed covers in the kingsize bed lay at the foot in a tangle, as if turned back in a rush. Mom was const.i.tutionally incapable of leaving a bed unmade during the day, so she hadn"t been up very long. A small bowl on the bedside table cradled a half-eaten cracker.
We went back to the hall and looked into the small bathroom where she had died on the floor. The room reeked. Breck turned up the heat and went to get my bag from the car. After the overnight flight from Hawaii, I needed sleep. Most of the relatives would arrive tonight or tomorrow. But first I got down on my knees and scrubbed the bathroom floor.
The morning after the funeral service, a dozen relatives gathered to scatter the ashes in the quiet memorial garden next to the Universalist Church. No sun penetrated the flat, gray sky - just the kind of winter day that Mom hated. Eighteen inches of snow shrouded small trees and shrubbery in ghostly forms. Breck and our brother-in-law, Max, wielded shovels to break through a crust of ice to find a suitable place for the ashes. They shoveled away snow from under a scrawny, leafless j.a.panese maple, the same spot where only two months before we had sprinkled Dad"s remains. Dad loved j.a.panese maples so much that he used to drive around town in autumn to jot down locations of the trees with the brightest reds, then return in spring to pick up seeds to grow in coffee cans. When Breck and Max reached bare earth with their shovels, they revealed the pure white grains of Dad"s ashes, stark against black dirt. Then Breck turned the shovel around to use it as a sculptor"s tool. With a couple of decisive strokes, he carved the hole in the snow into the shape of a heart.
"Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death," intoned the minister. Each in turn, we dipped a hand into a cardboard box of nearly weightless ash. I scooped up a tablespoon or two of gritty powder and cast it back and forth, to form a layer of fine gray over the particles of white.
BACK ON KAUAI, the early winter darkness caught me by surprise. I hadn"t antic.i.p.ated that the sun would set early, even if the weather didn"t change much. For once home before dark, I took Sam for a walk down the long yard. The setting sun washed the plateau a varnished orange. Palms cast long black shadows, tinged with coolness, like a New England fall.
I strode up the small hill next to the cottage. Sam nibbled gra.s.s while I stopped in the green shadows to listen to the shama, a Hawaiian mockingbird, its cascading song lilting from branch to branch. Of course, the inevitable had happened. I had taken Sam for a checkup, and the moment the vet saw the brown, gray, and black fur, he said, "Oh, it"s a girl." Turns out that mutiple coloring is a s.e.x-linked female trait.
"Good thing you went into botany and not zoology," I ribbed Dr. Klein.
Now, as I reached the line of macadamia trees at the center of the yard, I turned back to call: "Sam, Sam, the jungle cat." Her head bobbed up, ears alert, one paw c.o.c.ked like a bird dog. Then she came trotting low to the ground.
Hawaii, with its year-round breeding temperatures, fostered bounties of fleas, so for curative measures I bathed Sam. First I"d fill a bucket with tepid water, dip her, lather her up, then rinse her in the bucket again before holding her under the shower faucet for a final rinse. I can"t say she ever liked it, but she loved her fresh-smelling coat. Steve Perlman said he shampooed his cat every weekend and the cat loved it so much that he"d jump into the outdoor sink.
I continued to walk farther down the long lawn until I stood under the giant mango tree where the tip of the plateau opened to a view over two valleys to the sea. As I headed back to the cottage, my faraway bra.s.s student lamps cast comforting orbs of golden light through the windows like beacons.
Night descended so thickly, so completely, that once inside, I rarely left again until morning. I would have given anything to be able to call a friend and talk. But because of the six-hour time difference between Hawaii and the East Coast, all my friends and family had long gone to bed by the time I left the office. I climbed the steps to the front porch and opened the cottage door. I smiled at the transformation that had been wrought. The cottage had changed from a place where no one would want to live to a comforting retreat, a lady"s colonial plantation camp, full of light and air. The outdoors seemed to spill inside.
Bits and pieces of my previous life melded with the new surroundings. The blue and white Chinese rug created a frame for the white canvas-covered sofa and chaise. I had upholstered two chairs in a faint white and blue plaid and covered pillows in blue and white toile print. Here on Kauai I picked up more blue and white pillows, quilted silk with Hawaiian themes of coconut palms and pineapples, swimming sea turtles and leaping dolphins. Deep red and blue antique Oriental carpets glowed like stained gla.s.s against the painted slate-colored floors. A dark wood Chinese armoire and two coffee tables with a Far Eastern motif salvaged from the cottage"s original furnishings helped create a South Seas theme.
The ma.s.sive purging of possessions I had undergone in Philadelphia had simplified life. No fancy dishes or fussy furniture. I had brought only a few remnants of elegance to contrast with my primitive surroundings. Crystal and silver perfume bottles and embroidered sheets added some glamour. I propped on top of the armoire a gold-framed oil painting of a Connecticut autumn scene that I had bought cheap at auction and didn"t care if the tropical climate ruined it. Some doubts crept in about the degree to which this scheme bespoke of New England. Those misgivings vanished when I visited the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu. As I walked through the wood-frame house that had been shipped in pieces from Boston around Cape Horn in 1820, I recognized New England dark furniture. Straight backs and hard seats emanated moral rect.i.tude against tropical indolence. I had laughed when I saw the toile curtains.
I could have left all my possessions behind. But like the first Connecticut missionaries who settled in Hawaii, I drew comfort from the power of a few familiar belongings. That"s why we call them belongings, because they give us a sense of belonging to something when we"ve left behind one life and have no compa.s.s to guide us through the next. I liked dining at my Queen Anne dining room table from my great aunt Elizabeth who had lived in the Connecticut countryside. I often touched the wood jewelry box my father had carved for me.
As darkness fell, the banks of windows turned into black mirrors, entombing the cottage. I hustled into flannel pajamas, socks, and a robe. Although winter brings sunny mornings and usually a perfect eighty degrees by 11 a.m., nights grow chilly up here in the hills, with temperatures falling occasionally into the fifties. Like most houses in the islands, the cottage had neither heat nor air-conditioning, so I closed all the windows to keep warm. I slept with both blanket and comforter.
Evenings I crawled home exhausted. Too many foreign realms overwhelmed me: the strange flora of this hothouse climate; the mellifluous Hawaiian names in the almost consonant-less language; a new house; new routine. With so many conversations required in the office and so much work to be done, my days were very long. The sudden deaths of both parents left me in a state of gray funk. Every night I meant to write at least five thank-you notes to people who had made gifts to a scholarship for medical students in honor of Mom and Dad. Yet grief wearied me so heavily that I couldn"t write a one. I hadn"t enough energy to make dinner. That night I popped an envelope of popcorn in the microwave, poured a gla.s.s of milk, then carried the paper envelope to the couch and ate popcorn lying down while watching the old movie South Pacific - filmed entirely on Kauai.
With familiarity, I watched as World War II Navy nurse Nellie Forbush wavered over the decision to marry the handsome island plantation owner Emile, so different from anyone she knew in Little Rock, Arkansas. She learns that Emile had killed a man in France before he fled to the South Pacific.
"What are you running away from, Emile?" she asks.
"Who is not running away from something?" he answers.
Nellie returns to the Navy base, where the handsome young lieutenant Joe Cable from Philadelphia agrees with her that life here is too strange, too different. He sings the nostalgic song: "Far, far away, Philadelphia, PA." I remembered my own forsaken Philadelphia. Armageddon had arrived at the Inquirer. Another downsizing buyout was offered, and more than twentyfive writers and editors, including several of the top bra.s.s, took it. Corporate headquarters demanded another increase in profits. I couldn"t go back even if I wanted to. Nor had I any reason to return to Connecticut anymore. Now I really was marooned.
Sam snuggled close to me on the couch, waking briefly and stretching out her front legs in a request for petting. I complied. With regular meals, Sam"s dusty gray coat had deepened into a deep gloss. I stroked her black-bottomed feet, one palominocolored paw, and tiger-striped face. Dr. Klein had hooted: "That cat moved in on you so fast you didn"t know what hit you." Turning serious, Dr. Klein added bluntly, "I"m worried that your social life revolves around your cat." Privately I felt that I could do worse. He and Janet constantly invited me along on their island activities. We drove up to Waimea Canyon - the gorge that ran from the high peak to ocean, its sides banded in shades of red mineral - or into Kokee State Park, Dr. Klein lecturing on tropical botany. They roped me into a benefit dinner at Wilc.o.x Memorial Hospital and concerts and plays at the Kauai Community College auditorium. On new-moon nights we drove out to the Navy base for the astronomy club stargazing events. Sometimes I hiked with Rick Hanna and his friends up into the misty rain forest on the Pihea Trail or through the fog drifts over the spongy Alakai Swamp, an incongruous marsh over the island"s high-elevation aquifer.
Mostly, though, I hadn"t the zest to start building a new life. As South Pacific concluded with its happy-ending sunset, I turned on a Beethoven CD and lay back on my chaise. Albert Schweitzer once said, "There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." How true, although Dr. Schweitzer obviously never had a garden. Sam climbed up and over me to her pillow roost, and settled against the back of my head. We closed our eyes.
THE ALARM RANG in the dead of night to wake me in time to watch the Leonid meteor showers. I climbed to the top of the ridge on my cottage property, then sat on a low beach chair, wrapped in a terry cloth robe and sipping coffee. The c.o.c.ks crow all night, not just at dawn. I can hear the deep lowing of cattle grazing on nearby farms. I live alone on five acres of darkness, on a small island in the middle of the Pacific. People ask me if I am afraid, but I"m not. The police blotter column in The Garden Island newspaper provided more entertainment than cause for alarm, with its accounts of loose horses, c.o.c.kfights, and often comical altercations. Crime seemed far away. I struck a match, surprised at the enormous sound in the deep silence. I pulled a smoky drag on a cigarette. I hadn"t smoked for a couple of years, but in times of upset it provided a quick fix. It made me feel close to Dad. We used to joke that his blood consisted of a brew of cigarette smoke, scotch, and black coffee. He liked the stars, too.
Sam ran up the lawn to join me and climbed on my lap, a.s.suming her favorite petting posture, forepaws hooked over my knees, back presented for stroking. The night skies offered some of the best stargazing on the planet. Far from lights of any major city, or even neighbors, galaxies swirled in brilliant profusion. The Southern Cross sank low in the sky. A moving point of light, like a plane, evaporated. Comet? Perhaps, but too slow. Then a streak of light fell vertically from the Big Dipper, like a drip. Definitely comet.
I missed Mom and Dad, longed to see their faces, hear their voices, know them beyond the ident.i.ties I had a.s.signed them as parents. Bill Klein said he had experienced the same phenomenon after the death of his father. "It"s as if your parents have to die before you really understand who they are," he said. Memories tumbled together. Mom met Dad during World War II at the University of Minnesota Hospital, my father a psychiatric intern, my mother a student nurse.
My mother was a first-generation American, her mother and father German immigrants who arrived separately, met in Chicago, and married, probably unwisely in my grandfather"s case. His three daughters suffered his rages and would remark that he never should have had children.
My parents rarely spoke about their childhoods. Once my mother told me about the shame she felt about having to live at home while attending the University of Minnesota Nursing School. The poor students ate their homemade lunches on a bench where they hoped no one would notice them or their brown bags, a searing brand of poverty. My aunt showed us the location of one of the many cheap apartments she and my mother had lived in as children in south Minneapolis. Certainly Mom would not disclose that secret. But she had cla.s.s. An expert seamstress, she used Vogue patterns to conjure up a wardrobe. While Mom was getting dressed in her mustard tweed suit to chauffeur us to doctor or dentist appointments, she permitted us to forage through her blue earring box. All the wiles of womanhood were contained in that box along with tiny turquoise k.n.o.b earrings and a heavy set of faux pearls and rhinestones. Later, when I inherited the box after her death, I realized it was only a plastic case lined with rayon velvet. I kept it, all the same.
Dad had almost as humble beginnings. His father kept a dry goods store along the main street in Sterling, Kansas, a town whose locations were used for the film Picnic, a tale of escape from small-town restraints. Dad told how days would go by during the Depression without his father selling even a single handkerchief. Dad won a Summerfield scholarship to the University of Kansas, then advanced to Yale Medical School. His brother, Richard, ended up at Harvard Law. According to family legend, when Uncle d.i.c.k graduated from law school he announced he would travel west until no one had ever heard of the name Fleeson, a reference to my interfering great-aunt Doris. The joke was that he settled in Bellingham, Washington, as far west and north as one could go.
Aunt Doris Fleeson was the family celebrity, a famed journalist and World War II correspondent for the Woman"s Home Companion - the only publication she could find to hire a woman - and a longtime national political columnist. She was president of the Washington Press Club, the precursor to the National Press Club. Whenever in Washington, I"d visit her picture hanging outside the second-floor ladies" room of the Press Club. That was fitting, as she had forced the U.S. Capitol Press Galleries to install women"s bathrooms, unheard of when she first started covering Congress. Tart-tongued and bossy, she had tried to push Uncle d.i.c.k into running for Congress. My father just ignored her, so sadly I never met her.
My parents" ascendancy to professional rank and middle-cla.s.s comfort represented more accomplishments, over more serious obstacles, than any of their children would achieve. Careers, five children, fifty-two years of marriage.
In the 1950s, Mom and Dad enthusiastically settled into postwar prosperity in the small suburb of Hopkins, Minnesota. Dad was a neighborhood hero called to the scene when a kid broke his leg. At the school fair he manned the popcorn machine and escorted me on the cakewalk. In probably my father"s boldest moment, he bought a sleek racing sloop and dashed about Lake Minnetonka. In his second boldest move, he left the University of Minnesota to help build a new medical school at the University of Connecticut. I had just turned thirteen.
We desperately missed the Paradise Lost of Minnesota. My father wore gardening shorts to their first Connecticut neighborhood c.o.c.ktail party, a glaringly gauche move as the other men dressed in suit and ties. Worse, when invited to take a yacht club sailboat out for a spin on Long Island Sound, he turned the boat turtle, damaged the rigging, and slunk home embarra.s.sed, never to be invited again. Not many got close to him. He never talked about his disappointments, although we all knew about them, as he would withdraw into near silence, sometimes for months. More and more he descended to his bas.e.m.e.nt workshop, where he carved beautiful chess sets of cut and polished stone. The projects went on for decades, until he started keeping a scotch bottle down there, and my mother made him promise not to use power tools in the evening hours anymore. My mother dealt with Connecticut by becoming the executive director of a social agency - but like my father, at night her drinking hours grew longer, the brooding darker. I quit my own nightly martinis several years ago when I recognized that I was following the same pattern. I escaped that genetic Molotov c.o.c.ktail, but narrowly.
All of us seemed to slink around in those years, as things started going wrong. One brother abandoned his wife and three small babies, leaving my parents to help with their raising. We lost another brother to mental illness. Great b.a.l.l.s of sadness descended, and the family solution was to pour alcohol over it all. Galactically dysfunctional, one brother called us. I remembered what Zorba the Greek said when asked if he was married: "Oh, yes. Wife. Children. Home. Everything. The full catastrophe."
For me, the move to Connecticut occurred just as I entered teen years, a time that magnified the need for social acceptance. It took years to recover from my disastrous first day at school, arriving at the bus stop decked out in new wool plaid vest, corduroy skirt, and uncool white ankle socks. I quickly learned that junior high girls wore light cotton summer clothes well into chilly October, until the day when the group, en ma.s.se, made the seasonal wardrobe change. And never ankle socks. Only penny loafers, barefoot.
Sartorial blunders aside, we were lonely.
Neither of my parents adopted pretensions or materialism. They valued education, common sense, fairness, fulfilling responsibilities, returning library books on time, hard work, and Democratic politics. My parents had aged without my paying attention. Just three years ago, we had all convened at an Arizona dude ranch to celebrate Mom and Dad"s fiftieth wedding anniversary. He smoked a cigarette astride a horse, looking like a prototypical Marlboro man. We all smoked. You could have more than two drinks at the Fleeson house and smoke all you wanted.
After Dad"s funeral, Mom insisted on driving me to the airport for my 6:30 a.m. flight to Hawaii. All of the relatives had already left. Snow crunched loudly under the tires in the freezing night air as we pa.s.sed snow-covered fields and dark farmhouses. "That was a nice send-off," she said. "We did him proud." The Universalist Church minister really revved up for the service. Two of Dad"s medical school colleagues delivered inspired eulogies. During that rushed week, I slept on the living room couch because relatives crowded into Mom and Dad"s small retirement house. Late one night, I shivered in my nightgown outside the closed bathroom door, waiting my turn. The door opened, and my sister Libby came out, also in her nightgown. Mom, in a long nightdress, opened her bedroom door. In the dark, Libby and I wrapped our arms around Mom. We each pressed a cheek against her cheeks. "My girls," she murmured. "My sweet girls."
I had told her, "Now, Mom. Come out to Hawaii in March, after the Garden"s board meeting,"
"I"d rather come in February when the weather"s bad here," she repeated.
We"ve already been over that. "I just can"t do it then. I"ll be running around getting ready for the board meeting. March is better," I said with a finality meant to close the discussion.
She and I usually reverted to patterns established in my rebellious teenager years. Mothers generally fall into two categories: those who abandon or those who smother. Oddly she was both. I resisted her intrusiveness, her supervision, and her constant inquisitiveness, countering by withdrawing into quiet secrecy. Her only career advice was so retro, so unliberated: Study nursing so I could marry a doctor. I felt an unspoken dialogue underneath most of my exchanges with Mom. You missed all the important things in life, she"d reproach me with her eyes. Had I? I would answer. Poor Mom. She wanted us all to be conventional, settled, with happy family lives. Instead, she had two daughters who were non-producers, her name for childless women.
"Romeo and Juliet" one of their friends had called them, in explanation of why their deaths came so closely together. We never knew exactly why Mom died, as we elected no autopsy - she was dead anyway, we figured. "Don"t you know? She died of a broken heart," said my brother. Some cruelly implied that she was better off this way. I resented the easy a.s.sumption that she simply gave up and died rather than face life alone. I wanted to shout: "Where do you think we are? India? We don"t throw the wife on the husband"s funeral pyre!"
And yet, guiltily, I realized that without parents I could do whatever I wanted. My own father had quoted Freud to me: "No man is free until his father is dead." Adulthood had finally arrived, and I had no excuses. I had protested their vision of conventionality for me but now realized that I had adopted and internalized those constraints as my own. I could peel off cultural expectations, parental approval, and outdated ident.i.ty struggles, yet I still needed to discover what remained at the core. The task of man is consciousness, Jung said. Looking up into the vast night sky, I felt immeasurably small, as if I were at the bottom of an immense gla.s.sed snowflake dome, shaken until every particle whirls.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
A Walk on Mahaulepu - Deconstructing Extinction
WHENEVER IN NEED of a restoration of the spirit, I drove to Mahaulepu, the stretch of deserted white sand I deemed the best beach on earth. My purpose was often simply to be on the beach, to see it, feel the warmth of the sand or let the infinity of the waves wash over me while I made my amateur naturalist"s observations.
As sundown approached, I lurched from side to side along the rutted road trying to miss the deepest potholes. More than once I"d gotten stuck in a big mud hole. But willing young locals who"d been diving for tako - octopus - came along and cheerfully pushed me out. On either side of the dirt track, tall silver ta.s.sels of sour gra.s.s, Digitaria insularis, rippled elegantly in the breeze across gentle hills. Both it and a shorter, more purple finger gra.s.s, Chloris radiata, are native to the Pacific tropics, which means they are growing, more or less, in a place close to their origin.
That couldn"t be said of most of what I saw. As I neared the beach, light blue and violet morning glory blooms gaily lined the roadside. It"s become a pest plant. A ring-neck pheasant burst into the air with a soft thudding. Before such introductions were tightly controlled, modern hunters imported pheasants and other game birds to the islands. At the end of an even more deeply rutted, muddy road lay a small cove, gloriously empty at the end of the day.
Walking along the sh.o.r.eline, I stopped at a small tidal pool to watch tiny fish zip away from my intruder"s eyes. The endless stretch of turquoise Pacific, the meeting ground of sand and surf and the glow of the sun, put me in a state of serene coexistence with the island elements. The sea reminded me of its infinite power to break mountains into grains of sand, to wash away entire islands, to rise and fall in waves for vast, endless eons. I saw our human world as subject to its rhythms and pace, as it undulates and roars without acknowledgment of our presence.
After every big storm I searched for the petroglyphs, although I never expected to find them. Even Nelson Abreu, the Grove Farm security guard who locks and unlocks the Mahaulepu gate in mornings and evenings, had never seen them. One lucky morning after a storm, a sandstone ledge at water"s edge had surfaced, revealing the carved outline of a turtle about the size of my hand. Nearby, a primitive one-armed man with a spear was scratched in the soft stone. Later that day I rushed back with my friend Fran to share the sighting. By then the tide had started to surge in, settling sand over the rock ledge, and we could not find the carvings.
At the end of the beach, the brown muddy water of Waiopili Stream empties into the ocean. I bent aside dusty milo trees to head upstream, then veered toward a sheer limestone bluff. In the corner, a triangular cave entrance beckoned. I often crouched down to hop through a low tunnel, damp and clammy. The dark entrance widened almost immediately, leading to a dappled-sunlit open sinkhole.
David A. Burney, a scrawny paleontologist from Fordham University, had begun drilling thirty-foot-deep samples into this unusual limestone cave system. When he first popped up on Kauai, Dr. Klein immediately befriended him. Bill encouraged Burney to put together an ambitious project proposal and lent him living quarters in a Garden cottage. The sinkhole began to yield an extraordinary diversity of plant and animal remains, remarkably preserved.
Long gone are the King Tut glory days of archeology when diggers exhumed treasure chambers of ancient rulers. Nowadays, archeologists detect the presence of humans from microscopic particles of charcoal. They reconstruct diet and agricultural economies from the tiniest of fossilized seeds and whole plant ecologies from spores or, in the case of Dave Burney, duck t.u.r.ds.
Not much carbon dating of fossils or other remains had been carried out in Hawaii, and on Kauai in particular. There was too little money and not enough interest until now. As a result, for years more than six hundred archeological samples sat una.n.a.lyzed at the Bishop Museum. But Burney brought impressive credentials to the task and won grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, and the National Geographic Society. He had used carbon dating and other paleoecological techniques in Madagascar caves to pinpoint the period when extinct lemurs and a dwarf hippopotamus flourished. He dated human arrival on Puerto Rico and studied the relationship between humans and cheetahs in Africa. In 1988, he performed carbon-dating experiments on a cache of duck coprolites - fossilized t.u.r.ds - deposited in a Maui lava tube by an extinct waterfowl. By a.n.a.lyzing pollen grains and spores, Burney determined that the duck ate a diet of almost exclusively fern fronds.
He was drawn to the Kauai sinkhole, the largest intact limestone cave system in the Hawaiian Islands, because it was so easily accessible yet almost entirely undisturbed. Old maps showed that a large pond had flooded the entrance prior to the twentieth century. Because the present floor is still damp in spots, and because it lies only a few feet above sea level, Burney theorizes that a lake or marsh likely occupied the site. All these factors meant that sand and silty clay slowly acc.u.mulated on the sinkhole floor, undisturbed. Each layer trapped and preserved mollusk sh.e.l.ls, pollen spores, tree seeds, and animal bones, as well as tools and other human detritus. Determine a date for each layer and decode history.
Burney argues that no other single date is more important in evaluating possible causes for extinctions than the arrival of humans. Although he exudes an air of a mad scientist, Burney looks more like an Amish farmer, with a k.n.o.bby nose and a long, scraggly white beard. His cheery optimism attracted more than three hundred volunteers on Kauai, who willingly got covered in brown mud head to toe.
Investigators and his trained volunteers removed sediment by trowel, teaspoon, or hand, then wet-screened the material in fine mesh boxes. They set out bones and sh.e.l.ls to air-dry, while sealing perishable wood, seeds, and wooden artifacts into plastic containers for storage in refrigerators.
Back in mainland labs, experts a.n.a.lyzed samples from each sediment layer for the sudden presence and volume of microscopic charcoal particles - evidence of fire, and an effective method to elucidate human arrival.
Some of the foremost experts on bird, mammal, and mollusk fossils, as well as Warren Wagner of the Smithsonian, compared the Mahaulepu fossils with the vast holdings in their museums and herbariums. The result is a ten-thousand-year natural history of Kauai, all in one place.
About four hundred thousand years ago, chalky sand dunes solidified into rock. Acidic groundwater carved the Mahaulepu cave, occasionally depositing mollusks and other sea creatures on its floor. The walls weakened. The roof collapsed about seven thousand years ago, nearly blocking the cave entrance and sealing it against incoming tides. Silt and sand slowly settled, trapping sh.e.l.ls from at least fourteen different endemic land snails, a giant land crab, and more than forty bird species - about half now extinct on Kauai.
A bone fragment from the ign.o.ble Pacific rat denotes the first presence of arriving Polynesians. Burney found the fragment of a pelvic bone of Rattus exulans ten feet down, in layers of sediment dating from A.D. 1039 to 1241. No doubt the rodent had stowed away on Polynesian canoes. While modernists tend to blame white Europeans for all the extinctions in Hawaii, the wreckage actually began as soon as any humans, white or brown, stepped foot on the fragile island ecosphere. The bones of many birds now extirpated from Kauai can still be found in the sinkhole"s layers from the Polynesian era - the Laysan duck and the Hawaiian hawk, for instance - but they and endemic snails became more scarce. Burney"s crew found bones of large flightless ducks - evidence that the turtle-jawed moa-nalo once waddled over the island. Probably related to the mallard, it had grown as big as a turkey, equipped with a tortoise-like beak to mow down gra.s.ses like a turtle.
By the time the Renaissance occurred in Europe (A.D. 1430 1665) artifactual evidence indicates that Polynesians lived near the sinkhole, tossing their postprandial bones and other refuse into it. Historians have long presumed that the new Hawaiians hunted and roasted the fat, flightless ducks, thereby quickly contributing to the extinction of the moa-nalos. But although Burney found lots of chicken, dog, and pig bones from feasts, flightless duck skeletons had already become scarce by this time.
Pollen, seed, and plant fossils show that the early Hawaiians found a profusion of native trees and other plants growing along the dry coast - rare Kauai species that now survive only in small numbers, atop mountains or in high-elevation rain forests. Burney doc.u.mented a wealth of native loulu (Pritchardia), including a species that no longer grows on Kauai. Interestingly, he also found screw pines, or hala trees, extensively used by native Hawaiians for weaving and long presumed to have been imported by the earlier Polynesians. Not so, says Burney. They predate humans.
Burney detected the arrival of Captain Cook on Kauai by the sudden presence of iron - nails, sharp tools, and other bits - previously unknown to the stone-age islanders. Even before Cook, the Hawaiians had cleared much of the coastal lands on Kauai for complex agricultural systems. They dammed lowlands to grow taro, and constructed seawater fish ponds. But while the Polynesians had contributed to the loss of the native island ecology, it was nothing compared to the rapid and chaotic transformation after contact with Europeans.
Many previously well-represented plant species disappeared entirely. Others became increasingly rare. The remaining native terrestrial snail species declined after European arrival, then disappeared entirely once a carnivorous American snail arrived - Euglandina rosea. During the nineteenth century, the sinkhole"s abundant bones of cows, horses, and other European livestock supported historical accounts and photographs that feral livestock ranged along the coast, eating any vegetation in sight. Burney"s pollen data confirmed the open and disturbed character of the landscape at this time and the introduction of trees and other European plants. A thick layer of sand from the denuded landscape blew into the sinkhole and settled. By the twentieth century, plantation owners drained the pond outside the cave, plowed the nearby fields, and quarried the hills. All led to the highest sedimentation rates recorded at the site - more than one hundred times the previous rate.
Ironically, I seek spiritual restoration at Mahaulepu, although the site is yielding a record of the sad loss of Hawaii"s biology. While Warren Wagner studies the genesis of the island"s plant life, Dave Burney deconstructs its demise. Yet Burney has big plans for the Mahaulepu sinkhole. On the mainland, sometimes landscapes can be restored by a process known as ecological recovery - simply let the system alone, keep people out of it, and the native landscape will eventually recover. "That never works in Hawaii," says Burney. "No management is the worst. Exotics gain the upper hand."
Burney wants to stage what is called a "rehabilitation," an attempt to restore the elements of the sinkhole"s original ecology without trying a complete restoration or recreation of the original system. Already he has compiled a wish list of trees and plants that would have been at home here. Steve Perlman and Ken Wood have been collecting seeds from elsewhere on Kauai and throughout Polynesia to grow in the Garden"s nursery. In the following months and years I"d return to the sinkhole, astonished by the lost world being reconstructed.