Waking Up in Eden (2 page)

That first spring, every inch of the yard exploded into lavenders, nasturtiums, and lilies. Brooding, black-red Don Juan roses and nude-colored New Dawn pink climbers veiled the second-story balcony. A really good garden requires an almost religious adherence to its theme. I couldn't resist growing American-as-pie zinnias by the score or cramming dinner-plate-sized dahlias into the back of the border, ignoring one English garden writer's dismissal of dahlias as “so vulgar.”

I cared not. The garden became a place of abandon for me, a joy of fantasies.

Dr. Klein had introduced me to the notion of the garden as an intellectual journey, a physical record of the history of civilization. From him I learned that medieval monks cultivated medicinal herbs in the first botanical gardens. For thirteen years, Dr. Klein had directed the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania, transforming it from a weedy and forgotten Victorian botanical garden into a thriving educational center with new buildings, explosive plans, and thousands of visitors. “If Bill Klein had been a plant, he would be a pachysandra,” I had written in a profile of him for the
Inquirer
. “Invasive and slightly out of control.” One of those rare scientists who knew how to spin a story, he enlisted people to his cause. Some found the ebullient, verbose botanist rather alarming. And like all visionaries who goad for more and more progress, he eventually found himself out on a limb. Just as university regents were
about to impose budget controls to rein in his little Eden, he quit to become the director of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida.

I kept in touch after he left Philadelphia, and flew down to Miami to write a story for the newspaper shortly after Hurricane Andrew blew apart much of south Florida. The storm toppled Fairchild Garden's collection of rare palms and turned its manicured grounds into a snarl of overturned trees. Many staff members lost their own houses, yet they showed up to work long days for Dr. Klein. As he walked through the rubble, Dr. Klein promised, “Fairchild will rise again. It's the nature of gardeners to take these disasters and improve on them.”

His garden reopened to the public in thirty days. “It was nothing that General Patton couldn't have done,” he insisted. The performance earned him a reputation in the garden world as the hurricane-fixer. But he quarreled with Fairchild Garden's intrusive board of directors, complaining that they were always leaning over his shoulder, hampering his plans, restricting his vision. So he jumped at the chance to become executive director, CEO, and president of the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. “As soon as I heard that the board of trustees lived five thousand miles away and met only twice a year, I knew it was the place for me,” he confided. Now aged sixty-two, he planned to stay until retirement, transforming his last garden institution into his masterwork.

Sunday evening I studied my closet full of clothes, looking for something suitably dressy for a pricey dinner. I had a classy wardrobe, thanks to hand-me-downs from my sister who lived in Milan with her Italian clothier husband. I chose a tailored
navy blazer and slacks, with a silk top draped into a V-neck, a chunky gold ring set with an emerald-cut green tourmaline, flashy earrings to match, and navy heels.

I always enjoyed the sunset drive down to Center City along the Schuylkill. Rowing sculls skimmed the river, bathed in the same golden light Thomas Eakins painted more than a century ago. I regarded Philadelphia as just the right size. Big enough for a world-class orchestra, great restaurants, and museums, small enough that I could drive home in thirty minutes.

When I entered the noisy lobby of the nondescript Hershey Hotel on South Broad Street, I did not see any sign of Dr. Klein. Finally he appeared, dressed in rumpled pants, wrinkled sweater, and a green baseball cap. He looked kind of schlumpy, balding with professorial wire-rim glasses and a girth of extra pounds he was always trying to lose. “Where should we go?” he asked. I groaned silently. He had forgotten his promise of an upscale meal. I slipped off my too-fancy earrings and hid them in a pocket, then suggested Upstares at Varalli, a casual Italian restaurant across the street. I tried to suppress my irritation. By the entrée, I regained enough humor to ask about life in Hawaii. “Mah-velous, mah-velous,” he said expansively. “You should see my office. I can see whales breaching in the distance out one window. The other looks out onto a hillside where cows graze.”

“Sounds like the boondocks,” I said. “What are you doing on the East Coast?”

“Looking to hire somebody to help me raise money, actually,” he said. “Are you interested?” He threw it out so casually that I didn't see the barbed lure.

“Oh sure,” I said. “It probably doesn't pay anything.”

“Actually, it does.”

I said quickly, “I'll never leave journalism.”

He looked away, eyelids dropping over half-closed eyes.

T
WO WEEKS LATER
, I waited on the couch outside the executive editor's office, surveying the familiar newsroom landscape. I had spent years here on midnight deadlines and frenzied story chases. Cheap metal desks jammed against one another, cluttered with newspapers and file folders. A plastic shark head hung over one desk. The newsroom had served almost as a college dorm for my generation of journalists who spent most of their professional lives at
The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Truthfully, it was better than college — a couple hundred of the best young journalists in the country, all intensely inquisitive and engaged, had fought and schemed to get here. We were drawn by the newspaper's legendary editor, Eugene L. Roberts, Jr., who valued creative writing and investigative reporting and gave reporters enough time and money to pursue their best work. Despite the dedicated individualism of journalists, we all drank the same elixir, a heady promise that we were building a great newspaper. The stories produced in those years soared, uncovering police brutality, budget excesses at the Pentagon, chaos at the IRS, and deep narratives of ordinary lives made brilliant. Then the apparatchiks and bean counters took over and corporate greed became the dominant goal. Roberts couldn't fight off Knight Ridder, the newspaper chain owners, and even he left.

A newspaper resembles a grand opera company, with its repertoire cast and fierce competitions, endless fallings-out and countless love affairs. Once it slips, it can never attain those high notes again, and you spend the rest of your life remembering.

Now, editors relegated more and more reporters to the Shit List. Including me, I feared. Whether covering New Jersey gambling, corruption at city hall, or cultural institutions, I could dig out stories. But in the new era, support was vanishing for that kind of reporting. A couple of years ago I had volunteered to create the Home and Design section. An odd choice for a hard news and investigative reporter, but I saw it as a refuge that also offered a chance to write about architecture and gardening. It worked for a while. The new section editor didn't know anything about home or design but delivered pep rally speeches in Dale Carnegie platitudes:
We're going to be number one in the country! We're building a team!
Lately I had to fight off news-you-can-use stories. I got away with turning down an assignment to write a shopper's guide to summer fans. But when I refused to write puff pieces promoting real estate for sale, I ventured into insubordination. I asked for a transfer, reactivated a campaign to go overseas, to cover science, to do anything to get out of Features.

The secretary signaled me to go into the executive editor's office. Max stood poised before an antique worktable, his carved mahogany desk and bookcase behind him. Its sumptuous decor had the odd style of a turn-of-the-century robber baron. Max's starched blue oxford shirt was rolled up to the elbows as he ruffled papers, ostensibly busy. He glanced sideways at me and said, “Sit down, Lucinda, this will only take a minute.” He remained standing. Max was handsome, in a rich kid's preppy Harvard way, with dark hair curled over chiseled features. Charming and so fresh-faced that I instinctively smiled and forgot to be wary.

He never met my eyes and continued to leaf through papers.
Okay, I would not have to write about real estate, but I could forget about going abroad. Or anywhere else. I wasn't going anywhere. He ran through a list of trumped-up offenses. “That's a bunch of crap,” I said. I may have sounded tough. But as I stood, I felt like I teetered on a tightrope. As I walked out the door I knew I had reached a dead end.

Enough of my friends had signed on to
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
that I might be able to land at either one. Nausea swept over me, and an icy sweat slid down my spine and withered my spirit.

T
EN DAYS LATER
, I woke up at 3 a.m. and sat upright in bed. Why not take that job in Hawaii?

Why the
hell
not?

I switched on the lamp and moved across the hall to the study. I pulled down an atlas and turned to the Hawaiian Islands. Dozens of tiny specks and dots of land formed a chain that started in the mid-Pacific and stretched northwest for 1,500 miles. The Hawaiian archipelago is the most isolated place on earth, in terms of distance from continents. Los Angeles lies 2,550 miles away; Tokyo 3,860, with nothing in between.

The southernmost Big Island (Hawaii) anchors the chain. Ovals and amoeba shapes of Maui, Lanai, Molokai, and Oahu bunch together like a closely strung necklace. Smaller, circular Kauai lies farther north and west, distanced from the rest.

As an adventure, it struck me as suitably remote and exotic, but not all that daring. My own grandmother, Otelia Breck, risked more when she traveled from Germany to Ellis Island in 1909 at age twenty-four, alone, unattached, with no English and little money. Plus, the top honeymoon destination in America
couldn't be too wild and woolly. I feared drinks with umbrellas and tourist hulas. But I
had
dreamed of living in the pastoral countryside, with a pared-down life far from suburban materialism and out of reach from corporate America.

Nature — rugged, ferocious, and raw — always had a restorative effect on me and quieted my inner storms. Henry Beston, in the foreward to a new edition of his classic book,
The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod,
wrote famously of our need to return to nature. “Nature is part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.”

I wanted my journey to the outermost island to bring me closer to that divine mystery. A time for serious reflection, for stilling the unease over what I had not accomplished in the first half of life and for discovering what I wanted for the second half. A chance to revise my biography.

As I continued my research over the next few days, I discovered that Kauai was nicknamed “the Garden Island.” Considered by many to be the most beautiful of the islands, it was also the greenest. A year-round population of fifty thousand barely filled its 550 square miles, much of it impenetrable jungle or sheer cliffs. The inaccessible Mount Waialeale, claimed to be the wettest spot on earth with 624 inches of rainfall per year, dominated the interior. Lavish amounts of water, sun, and fertile soil provided ideal growing conditions. Yet Hawaii was America's
imperiled Eden. Called “the Extinction Capital of the World,” Hawaii had lost more plant and animal species than any other place in America, with many more wavering on the brink. Five hundred and forty U.S. plant and animal species had now become extinct — almost half, or 250 of those, had occurred in Hawaii. I wanted to get there before the cosmic outlaws had taken them all.

All these troubles made Hawaii a botanist's paradise, a microcosm for carrying out important, planet-saving work. If we can't save 550 miles, how can we save the rest of the earth?

Dr. Klein's National Tropical Botanical Garden was grander and more extensive than I had realized. An empire. On the island of Kauai, there were two NTBG jewels: the imposing Allerton Garden, one of the great garden estates of the world; and the Limahuli Garden and Preserve, a one-thousand-acre treasure of native species and ancient remnants of a Hawaiian settlement. On the tip of Maui, the NTBG managed the most sacred site in all of Polynesia, Piilanihale
heiau —
a sixteenth-century war temple where human sacrifices were thought to have occurred. Two preserves on the Big Island were untouched expanses of open territory. On the mainland, the NTBG owned the elegant Kampong in Coconut Grove, Florida, home and estate of plant explorer David Fairchild.

Granted a rare charter by the United States Congress in 1964, the Garden's mission was to serve as a national resource to preserve Hawaii's threatened tropical flora. Yet Dr. Klein sketched a portrait of a closed, reclusive institution. For several years as a cultural reporter, I had chronicled the transformation of the quirky Barnes Foundation, the repository of the world's foremost
collection of French impressionist and postimpressionist art. It was preposterously located in a mansion just outside of Philadelphia. Founded by eccentric Dr. Albert Barnes, whose prescient collecting taste was unfortunately accompanied by bombastic ravings about art education, his foundation was run by cultlike followers who operated it like a private club. From what I learned through Bill Klein, Allerton Garden might rival the Barnes Foundation in its determination to remain hidden. His mission to turn Allerton and the other sites into true public gardens appealed to me. It might be fun to work from the inside for once, instead of trying to burrow my way in as a journalist. Dr. Klein didn't resemble a fairy godmother, but perhaps he was.