Waking Up in Eden (19 page)

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 shells to air-dry, while sealing perishable wood, seeds, and wooden artifacts into plastic containers for storage in refrigerators.

Back in mainland labs, experts analyzed 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 shells 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 ignoble 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 grasses 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 documented 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.

A
S
I
SETTLED MORE
into Kauai, I became involved in the lives of new friends. So when the coconut wireless telegraphed the news that John Rapozo had throat cancer, I worried, even more when I heard that his doctor wanted to removed his vocal chords. The image of Big John without a voice struck me as impossibly unfair. His rough island pidgin, the authoritative commands leveled at other men, the sentences that grew quicker and tumbled together when he was excited — they were as much a part of John Rapozo as his calloused fingers.

I telephoned his home that night.

“John, what's going on?” “The doctor said he's going to cut. He said if he don't cut, it's going to be all over for me.”

As I walked into Garden headquarters the next morning, Dr. Klein was bent over his secretary's desk, arranging flights to Honolulu. He had gone into his memory banks of all the hundreds of people he had charmed over the years. He remembered a prominent cancer research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Magically, John Rapozo had an appointment tomorrow with the best cancer doctor in Honolulu. Dr. Klein quietly paid for John's airfares.

After a week of tests in Honolulu, John announced that there would be no surgery. He now spoke in a scratchy whisper, as radiation treatment had begun. “The doctor, he laid down the law,” he said. “No more smoking. And he said I've got to lose weight and eat right. I'll never sing again. But I'll talk.”

As often happens in crisis, our friendship deepened during the hard coming months.

T
HE TRADE WINDS
had arrived from the northeast Pacific, exhaling their soft, welcoming breezes, blowing out the recent humidity, and tempering the hot tropical sun with puffs of clouds. The trades transform summer from unbearable to paradise, and bring a lightness and sparkle to the air, particularly on Kauai.

One Saturday morning, I walked into the clear morning air to join James outside the cottage. He seemed to have realized that I would not change his routine or duties, so he had relaxed and started showing me the treasures in my yard. James plucked a couple of low leaves from the lollipop-shaped “Autograph Tree.” Using a blunt pencil, he scratched my name on a shiny leaf. A half hour later, the letters developed bright and clear, like a print in a photo lab. The macadamia trees had started to drop dark brown, globe-shaped nuts. When their thick husks split, they revealed hard marbles. My trusty
Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery,
source for solving all cooking conundrums, warned that the hard shell would crack an ordinary nutcracker. When I told James this, he laughed. “You got to find a rock with a little dent in it, put it in, smash it. Don't eat too many, you get trots.” The lychee trees now bore cherry-sized pink balls with a hard rind covered with spikes. Their cloudy white flesh resembles a
peeled grape. The mango trees grew thousands of elongated oblong fruit of dark jade that blushed yellow, bronze, and reddish. James sniffed dismissively at them. “Water mangos. Watery inside,” he said. On Kauai the prized mangos are Haydens. The gardening staff carefully monitor the Hayden trees in Allerton Garden. When the mangos turn into a red ripeness, the fruit mysteriously disappears.

But plenty of people liked my mangos. My friend Jeanie came over with her own bags and took away dozens. She sent some of them back, in the form of Mango Betty, made just like the apple version, although tangier. Rick Hanna picked a year's supply to freeze for mango smoothies. Not content to reach the lower branches, he used a picker on an extension pole to go after perfect specimens at the top. We peeled them with potato peelers at my kitchen sink, then sliced and bagged chunks until our hands were almost raw.

Sometimes locals came and asked for permission to cut some of the bamboo shoots that lined the hill drive. I had pestered James several times to dig up some shoots so I could see how to eat them myself. He disapproved: “Shoots are bamboo
keikis
(babies). Dig up all the
keikis
and pretty soon, no more bamboo.”

All the same, today he went to the tool shed and came out with a machete. We walked up and down the bamboo tunnel, searching for young stalks. James kneeled by a thick, pointed spear that looked as tough as a rhinoceros horn. He whacked it off near the ground and handed me a two-foot shoot. Not satisfied, he sheared off a more tender, one-foot spear. I boiled and boiled it, until it turned a translucent pink and tasted awful. Later, John Rapozo counseled that I should have frequently changed the cooking water.

I continued to ask James questions about the Allertons, feints and advances which he usually resisted. Despite a growing obsession with unraveling the Allerton story, I could find few clues about them or their lives. Robert and John Allerton lived guardedly. I began tracking down Garden scientists, employees, friends, and others who knew the Allertons in their later years but found that the two Allertons left little evidence of their interior lives. Their only record was a material one, of their elegant possessions, many now in museums. Scholars in the tiny, growing field of gay and lesbian history say homosexuals who lived through eras of prejudice or banishment typically destroyed incriminating diaries or other records. Gay history must be written by inference and analogy, pieced together from slim hints and clues.

I tried James again. To my surprise, he returned the next day bearing a stack of scrapbooks.

James began working as a gardener for the Allertons in the mid-1950s. After two years, the Allertons called him to work in the house. “They wanted me to start immediately, serving lunch to guests that day,” James remembered. “I told them I had to go home and get my fancy clothes. John said, ‘No, no,' and took me into his room and gave me shirt and shoes. They were so big on me, I look like a clown. Then they show me, ‘Do this, do that, take the dishes this way.' They had these tiny little coffee cups — what you call them, demitasse? I had never seen them before in my life. So I serve them, so nervous the spoons rattle on the plates.” James's wife, Sarah, started doing laundry for the Allertons, and then Robert said she had better come inside, too. In those days, the house was often full of houseguests, mostly men, creating undercurrents of jealousy.

“James, what did you all think about all that?” I asked.

“Whatever they do, they do,” he said. James had tremendous admiration for Robert and John Allerton.

Anyone of import who could get the right introduction wangled a visit to Lawai-Kai. Jackie Kennedy alighted from a helicopter on the beach, just in time for a tour and cocktails. Robert showed her his collection of ballet books. James met John Wayne and other stars who filmed movies at Lawai-Kai. When Richard Nixon stopped by, John asked James to take pictures of him talking with the president, and James showed me his photo albums to prove it.

“I've seen poor and I've seen rich, and I like poor better,” was James's conclusion. “The rich, all they talk about is money, money, money. I seen. I served them all. They would be invited for nice meal, nice time, and then they would want something, ask them for something. That's how it works.”

James drove off, done reminiscing for the day. I walked down to the giant mango tree. Rick had left his fruit-picking basket, and I extended it to its longest length. Above my head dangled a prize specimen. If I stood on my toes, I just might reach it. With a jiggle of the pole, the mango plopped into the basket. It was a moment of sweet happiness. I couldn't explain it, but even though I had few close friends yet, and grieved the deaths of my parents, I felt more alive, more healthy, and less lonely here than I did in Philadelphia. The insomnia that racked my nights in Philadelphia had disappeared, and I slept soundly through the night. Even my allergies had improved.

Isabella Bird had also sampled mangos. “The mango is an exotic fruit,” she wrote, “and people think a great deal of it. . . . I think it tastes strongly of turpentine at first, but this is a heresy.
The only way of eating it in comfort is to have a tub of water beside you. It should be eaten in private by any one who wishes to retain the admiration of his friends.”