Waking Up in Eden (18 page)

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 Dick 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 Dick into running for Congress. My father just ignored her, so sadly I never met her.

My parents' ascendancy to professional rank and middle-class 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 cocktail 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 embarrassed, 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
basement 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 cocktail, 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 balls 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 masse, 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 passed 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 assumption 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 identity 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 glassed snowflake dome, shaken until every particle whirls.

W
HENEVER 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 tassels of sour grass,
Digitaria insularis,
rippled elegantly in the breeze across gentle hills. Both it and a shorter, more purple finger grass,
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 shoreline, 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 turds.

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 unanalyzed 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 Institution, 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 turds — deposited in a Maui lava tube by an extinct waterfowl. By analyzing 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 accumulated on the sinkhole floor, undisturbed. Each layer trapped and preserved mollusk shells, 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 knobby 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.