Tramp Royale (50 page)

Maybe just a little one-

But the cat certainly would not like it and we hardly ever do anything without the advice and consent of the cat. I put it out of my mind . . . mostly. Ticky surprised me by not taking up one minor feature of Hawaii; she is probably the only white wahine ever to go there who did not attempt hula. All of the white female residents have studied hula at some time, as a graceful accomplishment and a delightful exercise, whereas the women visitors from the Mainland sign up in droves for about three lessons each, then go home and demonstrate to their friends that they have "learned" the hula-an accomplishment requiring ten years or more and for which study should start at about the age of five.

But, knowing that Ticky delighted in every form of dancing from rumba to waltzing on ice and including ballet and square dancing, I found out the name of the best teacher available to beginners and signed her up for a quickie course. But she never got there, not when she discovered that bare feet were obligatory. "I'll wear heelless sandals," she had said comfortably.

I looked shocked. "Would you take a swimming lesson in riding boots?" For once, Vi formed an alliance with me, instead of against me, and convinced Ticky that anything but bare feet for hula would be as ridiculous as a tail coat at a picnic.

Whereupon Ticky canceled the lessons and never did study hula. I had known that she disliked to go barefoot but I had not realized that she carried it to such extremes-I had had not too much difficulty in persuading her not to wear shoes to bed and she always takes them off while bathing. But it seems that some no-nonsense adults had forced her to go barefoot in the country during summer while a small child, which had offended her baby dignity. So no hula.

Now I am the one who demonstrates hula to defenseless guests. I don't do it any worse than most females who visit Hawaii.

I have promised not to take you step by step around the islands but I cannot refrain from listing some things which you must not miss when you go there. The first of these is Volcano House on the Island of Hawaii, a fine hotel which sits on the edge of a great live volcano in the middle of one of our National Parks. You will probably not have the luck (good or bad, depending on how you look at it) to see Kilauea in eruption but you will see steam rising and will be awed by looking down into the crater, and you will see the scientific demonstrations and documentary motion pictures prepared by the vulcanists who maintain a research station there. The last are in color and are at least as frightening as having a tomahawk thrown at you out of a 3-D screen.

Despite the continuous watch by scientists Kilauea last went into major eruption without any warning. It might do so while you are there, making of you either a victim or an extraordinarily favored observer; the possibility is one of the fascinations of the place. After all, you don't want to live forever. Or do you?

Orchids you cannot avoid seeing; they grow here as easily as dandelions on the Mainland, and the residents grow them in their back yards and in their living rooms. But while you are on the Big Island go see the commercial orchid nurseries in Hilo-if you are on a guided tour you are certain to be taken. The sight of tens of thousands of blooms in hundreds of species makes one a little drunk.

There are at least three thousand cultivated species of orchids, an estimated fifteen thousand species wild and tame, and nobody has ever tried to count the enormous number of varieties. I was amazed to learn that there were some forty native species in my own mountain area-I had not known there were any. The flavoring in vanilla ice cream comes from the seeds of the vanilla orchids. The common cattleya, the "orchid"-colored orchid used in the United States by wolves to break down the resistance of females and which costs from three to eight dollars a bloom on the Mainland, is so common in Hawaii that you are likely to be given one as a free sample.

Most temperate zone orchids grow on the ground but tropical orchids, as almost all cultivated orchids are, grow on trees, clinging to them and never touching the ground. They are air plants; the term is "epiphytic"-since "epidemic" means a disease raging among humans and "epizootic" means the same thing for animals, "epiphytic" sounds as if it should mean a pretty sad state of affairs for fish, but what it does mean is a plant that rests on another plant without deriving nourishment from it. Orchids sometimes are called parasites but this is an unfair slur; they use trees only for mechanical support. Just how they do make a living has me buffaloed-apparently by taking in each other's washing.

If you want to raise them yourself, go right ahead. Don't let Nero Wolfe fool you, it is not hard. A few years ago Philip Wylie had an article in
The Saturday Evening Post
telling how to do it and the periodical index in any public library will locate it for you.

You will want to attend a luau while in the islands. These feasts are a great treat socially, but the authentic Hawaiian foods do not especially appeal to me. Here "poi" are not little dancing spheres but is a sticky grey paste made from taro root, sort of an underprivileged tapioca eaten with the fingers. It was the staple of the natives until they encountered corn flakes and hamburgers and such, and a great deal of it is still eaten. You will be served it at luau; if you really like it, let me know. Laulau is a chunk of pork, a piece of fish, and a handful of taro leaf, all wrapped in ti leaf (the long leaves from which grass skirts are made) and baked. Laulau makes quite acceptable food but nothing to get excited about. The rest of the feast is likely to be fish, possibly raw, pig barbecued whole, fruit, and much aloha, some of it liquid. Pig is the authentic main dish as the Hawaiians never did have the vice of "long pig"-they were never cannibals. They fought among themselves until Kamehameha the Great put a stop to tribal war with one last big one, but they never ate the slain.

Sophisticated modern variations of primitive island cookery are delightful indeed. Honolulu is bulging with gourmet restaurants, some of them surprisingly reasonable. The Sky Chef at the airport terminal building is as good a restaurant as may be found in New York and New Orleans taken together, but I would hesitate to say that it is the best restaurant in Honolulu because there are so many fine ones. If you do not like poi, you need not lose weight. Ticky gained back the eleven pounds she lost in New Zealand and I gained weight I did not need. Oh well, the Hawaiians say it takes a big opu (belly) to hula properly.

I found myself wondering constantly why it was that Hawaii was such a paradise while New Zealand was such a grim washout. The two island groups are basically much more alike than they are unlike, except that New Zealand is much, much richer in resources, having far more usable land, much gold, much coal, oil and many other minerals, and unlimited water power. Hawaii has nothing but farm land, no commercial minerals of any sort. If there is any advantage in climate, it lies with New Zealand, not with Hawaii. Hawaii is much overpopulated for its resources, while New Zealand is underpopulated-an economic advantage unless the population is very small, but New Zealand nevertheless has four times the population of Hawaii.

Hawaii does have an advantage in tourist trade in being more centrally located, but in all other ways New Zealand is more favored, being bigger and very much better endowed. Even in the tourist trade New Zealand is not too badly at a disadvantage, as she is much nearer the heavily populated east coast of Australia than Hawaii is to our west coast and also she draws on the entire pound-sterling area for tourists, a trade not available to Hawaii because of the money embargos placed against us.

Then
why?

I was forced to conclude that the difference must lie in the people themselves. The New Zealanders have saddled themselves with endless laws and government regulations restricting competition, reducing production, discouraging incentive, and almost prohibiting initiative. The wage fixing, price fixing, licensing, and forbidding outright of many economic activities considered routine with us is almost beyond belief. New Zealanders themselves complain that their own people will not put in an honest day's work. Between fixed wages with no incentive to work harder on one hand and a social security system so pervasive that not working is almost as good as working on the other hand, the New Zealand employee has precious little reason to do a good job-and his employer has even less incentive to risk new capital in a game that is intentionally rigged against him. To a stranger, the result looks and feels like stagnation.

The economic environment in Hawaii is essentially like that in all the rest of the United States. We do have government regulations, certainly, enough of them to make some of our citizens apoplectic, but compared with New Zealand we live in economic anarchy. Whether we think we have too much or too little, or perhaps the wrong ones, nevertheless our rules are not such as to make ambition fruitless. Hard work and imagination still pay off, despite what the crepe-hangers say, and Hawaii is a showcase proof of the fact. The residents of Hawaii work like beavers in spite of the lazy climate and they get rewards for their efforts. Even unskilled labor receives the highest wages in the entire world. As for those higher up the ladder the material evidence of their rewards are everywhere around you in Hawaii.

But of course no one in Hawaii is satisfied with his share, any more than people are on the Mainland. Perhaps that is the real difference between the two sets of islanders: those in Hawaii are hustling to get more while those in New Zealand sit back content with the government-controlled minimums assigned to them. Why hustle when the prizes are predetermined?

We were having a wonderful time in Hawaii but I had to get Ticky out of there before she picked out a building site-and before I weakened and leased it. Leaving by air is not very ceremonious, thank goodness, for neither one of us was in emotional shape to stand at the rail of the
Lurline
and listen to "Aloha Oe" as the ship warped slowly away from the dock. A plane departure is mercifully swift. As it was, we were both weeping as the Markhams piled leis around our shoulders. I wonder if anyone ever leaves those glorious islands without promising himself through tears that he will return?

It was a short sleeper flight back to San Francisco. By the time we finished breakfast the Golden Gate bridge was in sight. Before eight o'clock we were standing on the soil of the Mainland and were home for a second time. I had caught cold on the flight, so I rested up in a hotel bed for a couple of days while Ticky shopped. Despite Singapore and Buenos Aires she considers San Francisco tops for shopping and complains that I never allow her enough time for it there; my indisposition was convenient. As soon as I was able to totter around we had a drink at the Top o' the Mark, then caught an evening flight to Denver-and we were home for a third time.

To us, softened up by summer in both hemispheres and months in the tropics, Denver was unbelievably cold. It was too late to catch a shuttle flight to Colorado Springs, so we hurried to the Brown Palace with our fingers numb and our teeth chattering while Ticky pointed out that we would be warm through had we stayed in Hawaii. I conceded the point but was interested then only in getting into a hot tub of water as quickly as possible. Our room turned out to have a nice big tub and all the hot water I could want; we got warm. The room was luxurious in every way and reminded me of New Zealand because it was so different. But I must admit that it cost twice as much as our room in the Waverly.

But it was worth at least six times as much. The next foreigner to make a disparaging remark about bathtub & plumbing as the vulgar criterion of culture in America in my presence is going to get a swift poke in the eye. Decent bathrooms do not constitute civilized living, but they are as necessary to high civilization as water is to a fish. Music festivals and such are necessary, too-but we have
both.

The shuttle flight from Denver to our little town is only twenty-five minutes; one does not even unfasten seat belts. For the last time I made sure that all the suitcases went with us, then breathed a sigh of relief, feeling that all worries were over.

Ten minutes after we took off that confounded daisy clipper caught fire. The pilot made a sharp U-turn and headed us back for an emergency landing while the hostess hurried up and down the aisle, assuring the passengers that there was no danger. Ticky leaned over to me and whispered bleakly, "If we walk away from this, I'm going the rest of the way by bus." I did not have an answer.

The plane filled up with smoke to the point where we could not see each other's faces and I began to wonder if we would smother even if we did not burn. But the hostess-gallant as airline hostesses have proved themselves to be in many an emergency-turned out to be right; the fire was not dangerous, being merely some excess oil in a cabin heating system and involving neither structure nor engine. We landed easily and walked away untouched.

I did not attempt to argue with Ticky's determination to go the rest of the way on the ground; I kept quiet while cursing silently the perversity of chance that took us forty thousand miles around and up and down a planet without a single mishap, not a missed connection, not a missing piece of luggage, not even a flat tire-then saddled me with a fire in the air when we were actually within sight of the mountain we lived on. I felt sure that I would never live it down, that I would never again persuade Ticky to risk her slender neck in one of those pesky flying machines.

So I did not argue; I simply guided her steps toward the cocktail bar and administered several doses of nerve tonic to her as rapidly as possible. I had one, too, to keep her company-and just a bit because I had been a touch nervy myself when the cabin filled up with smoke and the plane lost altitude rapidly. Nothing important, mind you, since I am a fatalist. But the first dose of medicine tasted so good I had a second one.

It took them an hour and a half to get that bucket of bolts ready to fly again, but by the time they did Ticky was no longer talking about catching a bus. With only a little effort she could have flapped her wings and flown down unassisted. The second try at getting to Colorado Springs was uneventful, though we were amazed to find that we had been away so long that they had had time to build a new airport terminal while we were gone. But we did not stop to admire it; friends were waiting there to meet us, with hugs and handshakes and more tearful kisses. Ticky, with great care, had managed to keep one orchid lei fresh; she wore it, and carried that ubiquitous and utterly unpackable big coolie hat she had bought in Java. Between the two she looked quite out of place in that bleak and cold mountain day. We were home.