Waking Up in Eden (28 page)

And so I kept my mouth shut. Every morning as I readied for work, I felt fear rising in me like a smothered scream. I looked into the bathroom mirror in my enchanting cottage and gave myself a little pep talk:
Smile on your face, back straight, act as if nothing is happening, show the flag, hide your opinions, get through the day. Model prisoner. Today, you're going to keep your job!

Acting exhausted me. There's a violence inflicted on those who need to suppress their voice and silence their opinions. A death of self. A veil of gray depression descended, making me doubt and blame myself. At home, at dawn, I made frantic calls to old friends on the mainland. “Get out, get out!” most counseled. There were other nonprofit organizations, ones that prized fund-raising skills. Conceivably I could climb to ever-larger institutions, with ever-larger salaries. Perhaps become a director myself. The best of these jobs required passionate leadership, not just the urge to be in charge. At times, Bill Klein drove me mad with his ego and occasional pomposity, yet he had assumed the identity of the Garden. The Garden's growth was his growth; its transformation became his transformation.

I realized I could never embrace the task of presiding over an institution, though, immersing myself in administrative improvement while inspiring a collective effort. Individual work interested me more. The hunt of reporting, of crafting the results into a narrative, then getting the story out and contributing to the public debate — those were my interests. And I missed the rest of the world. I missed men. Smart men and ambitious women. Careerists who wanted to move mountains. I missed journalists, the fomenters of ideas, experimentation,
and the kind of competition that spurred greater achievement. I missed talking about issues and the news of the day. I missed writing under my own name instead of the reams of letters and reports I produced anonymously. I was a journalist and needed to go back to that. Though I had grown weary of daily deadlines and the short half-life of news stories, journalism offered more choices. Magazine pieces, books, perhaps teaching. In early mornings at the cottage, a return to writing started with diary entries, sometimes no more than notes that served as warm-up exercises.

As I knew that my time in Hawaii was running out, I wanted to fill in the missing pieces in the Hawaiian plant story. I wasn't sure whether saving them was truly a lost cause. What could be done to protect the biodiversity of Hawaii, if not the rest of the planet? And why hadn't the National Tropical Botanical Garden led the charge? Keith Robinson remained a puzzle. I desperately wanted to see how he had reintroduced rare and endangered plants into the wild, succeeding when no one else could. John Rapozo had been a childhood friend of the mysterious Robinson, had even helped him carry water up at the Outlaw Plant Reserve. John volunteered to intercede and arrange a meeting with Robinson.

C
ARLOADS OF EAGER
customers were lined up for the volunteers' annual plant sale. A temporary nursery of canvas tents shaded potted palms, ferns, bougainvillea, and, most in demand, one-of-a-kind anthuriums bred by Allerton Garden's master gardener, Hideo Teshima. I held up a pot of the delicate, lipstick-pink, arrow-shaped blossoms. Before I knew it, I had snatched several pots of anthuriums and seven containers of ti, those fountains of red or green leaves. Then, in a mad rush, I grabbed three palms and half a dozen ferns. John Rapozo, unofficial foreman for the sale, piled my pots onto a large wheelbarrow. We could barely pack all of the plants into my car, so the palms extended out the trunk.

Suddenly, I recognized my inner urges. Spring fever. March had arrived. In Philadelphia I would have been sowing seeds in flats on the kitchen counter. Hawaii's seasonal changes creep in so subtly that I failed to recognize the signs, but my body clock registered the lengthening days. Settling in, work, and grief had consumed so much attention that I hadn't time or energy to start a garden at the cottage. Unsure of how much longer I'd remain after Dr. Klein died, creating a garden seemed pointless.
But now I remembered his words: It's the nature of gardeners to take these disasters and improve on them.

Although the cottage interior had been transformed, only scraps of foundation plantings adorned its exterior. No pastel petunias, geraniums, or daffodils from my previous life here, I vowed. This was my once-in-a-lifetime chance for a tropical garden. I unfurled a coiled garden hose into undulating curves to mark new outlines for expanded beds. The circle drive seemed forlorn. Perhaps it needed a tree in the center, encircled with ferns and hot splashes of color.

On my knees, I tried to rip out a yellowing, multi-stemmed bamboo sprawled against the house. Then I heard the clunky chug of James's beat-up car climbing the hill to the cottage. Oh murder, he's going to be mad that I'm messing up the yard, I thought.

James shot from the car like a cannonball and charged over, glowering. “What you doing?” he asked accusingly. “That's my job. I'll do that for you. It needs a pickax.” He marched to the locked toolshed at the rear of the cottage and returned with a brutal ax.

By the weekend, the bamboo had disappeared. I dug in a few hundred pounds of composted cow manure until the red Kauai dirt ran black. When shopping for ferns at a nearby nursery, on impulse I abandoned my ban on temperate zone plants and lunged for several flats of mundane but useful pastel impatiens. For the driveway circle, I bought flats of low-growing heather covered with tiny lavender flowers, and New Guinea impatiens in hot magenta, cerise, and tangerine. That afternoon I cranked up the sound system inside the cottage to blast out the window:
Wagner's
Die Walküre
and sound tracks from
South Pacific
and
The Sound of Music
. I broke open a package of new leather gardening gloves I had been hoarding. No reason to save them.

“
The hiiiilllllllls are alllliiiiive with the sound of music,
” I sang as I set out the pots of fingered Laua'e ferns, interspersed with two shades of pink impatiens. I strapped on my riding helmet for protection because tall coconut palms swayed over some of the garden beds. Falling coconuts reputedly kill more people each year than sharks. Sam tried to help, rubbing against my ankles as I dug. I shooed her away. She picked herself up and moved off a few feet, then lay down and ate grass while she watched.

Preoccupation with the effort to drag a fifty-pound bag of manure or place a rock at the right angle of repose gave relief from the ever-growing office worries. Somehow
not
thinking helps to sort things out. Despite the memorial services, I hadn't yet grieved for Bill Klein. Now I knew how soldiers felt when comrades fell. You had to keep shooting and ducking before you could focus on your loss. But a garden is a good place to bury the dead. It's within the natural order for all living things to die; it allows for new growth. When I machete weeds to throw into the ravine, they decompose to a nourishing organic matter. Walt Whitman's words that all flesh is grass is a hopeful idea to a gardener.

I finished planting a sweet little patch of green ferns and pink impatiens. Then I worked again to complete a second bed. At the end of the afternoon, I hiked out the drive to get a long view, to see if the new plants provided the islands of color I sought. Not really. They'll grow quickly, I reminded myself. But a true cottage garden now swept across the length of the
house in soft ovals and curves. A lake of veined caladiums and red ti surrounded the platform lanai off the back door. Green ti continued across the bedroom wing of the house, interspersed with funnels of asparagus ferns. A brazen, multicolored croton guarded the front porch. On the other side of the steps, two low-growing cycads and shooting comets of blue agapanthuses anchored a kidney-shaped bed, which then fed into a sweep of ferns and impatiens across the living room. During a time when I felt the earth shifting under me, something about literally putting down roots helped create a feeling of sanity.

Over the next few weeks, every step out the front door became a joyful occasion for inspecting progress. I congratulated myself on each new agapanthus bloom and the growing carpet of blue daze, a ground cover dotted with periwinkle blue flowers. News of my little cottage garden traveled fast among the garden staff. “I hear you are making a beautiful garden,” said Eddie, one of the oldest gardeners. “I want to see it.”

One evening I returned home to find eight huge lava boulders in place around the center driveway circle. I knew immediately that they had been dumped by John Rapozo and gently nudged into place with a bulldozer. Another night I found two black plastic garbage bags on the porch, filled with plugs of mondo grass, a wordless gift from the venerated Hideo, to fill in bare dirt patches.

I found more and more diversions outside the office: Not only my lifesaving little cottage garden, my research into Allerton history, and my return to writing, but also a sport that unexpectedly connected me more deeply to Hawaii than I could have imagined.

• • •

I
DON'T WANT TO GET UP
. It's 4:30 a.m., starless and black outside. It's probably raining at the river, anyway, and no one will show up. I don't wanna to go. Jeez, whose idea was this anyhow? Even the cat thinks it's too early. She's asleep on my feet and if I move she'll wake up and yowl.

Rousing myself to rearrange Sam, I got up and shivered into a robe, shuffled down the dark hallway to the kitchen, and switched on the small light under the stove hood. Sam didn't even bother following, she thought it so indecently early. Under a cone of light, I poured leftover coffee into a mug, put it in the microwave, punched one minute and ten seconds. Groped my way back to the bathroom. Wiggled into a Speedo bathing suit and black spandex bicycle shorts, then pulled on a sweat suit. Zapped another cup of coffee for the road, and clicked on a flashlight to guide me out the front door, down the steps to the driveway, and into the car. At this hour, only a handful of trucks and another early bird driver or two sped along Route 50 and through an empty Lihue.

Several weeks earlier at an art opening, I had met Carol Lovell, director of the Kauai Museum. She had raved about paddling with an all-women's outrigger canoe club. “We have enough to qualify for a women's master division,” she said.

Wistfully I asked, “How do you manage to work it into your schedule?”

“We're on the river at five-thirty a.m.,” she said.

“Five-thirty?”

As I reached the boat landing on the Wailua River, I pulled up beside four parked cars, then walked through heavily dewed grass toward silhouettes of figures, bent at the waist, stretching
over legs spread wide. “Hallooooooo,” I called. As usual, there was no chitchat. A stately, full-figured Hawaiian woman with waist-length hair approached out of the dark. She drew me close and kissed me on the cheek, saying “Aloha” with the dignity of a Hawaiian queen. As race director for Kawaikini Canoe Club, Puna Dawson had already transformed a laid-back bunch of woman into a serious training team.

Six of us lined up along the canoe, three to each side. One, two, three, and we heaved, lifting the heavy boat out of its cradle and sliding it over a bed of old tires. Our fiberglass boat —
the vaha
— weighed four hundred pounds, much lighter than the hand-carved wooden crafts used by ancient Hawaiians. I scrambled down the riverbank into chilly water to guide the canoe. Puna directed me to sit last, in the number six seat, then hopped on behind me, astride the back of the canoe for a steering lesson. We headed upstream into blackness. After several weeks of practices I had learned the basic strokes, but steering was new. And more difficult. I tried to insert the paddle vertically into the water alongside the boat like a rudder. The boat tacked sharply from one side of the river to the other until Puna dispatched me to the number four seat while she took over. Old, teenage feelings of odd man out made me blush.

Each seat position had a job. Number six was the steersman, the captain who called which stroke to use. The strongest stroker sat in the number one seat and set the pace. The number two seat called the paddle changes. After six, eight, or twelve strokes, she yelled “Hut!” The crew responded “Ho,” and pulled paddles from one side of the boat to the other, all in smooth, synchronized motion. The three and five seats provided balance,
leaning out of the boat if necessary to keep it from tipping over. My seat, number four, had the least responsibility. I kept missing the beat, fumbling with the paddle.

As the sky paled to a thin wash of rose we headed downriver and took the boat out of the water. Puna looked at me appraisingly and said, “Lucinda, you're going to feel rotten for a while. The others have been paddling longer than you have. Don't beat yourself up about it.”

I had never participated in women's team sports in school. But I figured I was a late bloomer anyway and now had as good a chance as any to redo my teenage years. “It's never too late to be what you might have been” was a motto for George Eliot. Why not for me? After all, the Kawaikini Canoe Club members were mostly middle-aged, and the early morning practices took place on the calm Wailua, the only navigable river in the Hawaiian Islands, instead of the undulating ocean. As I retreated, weak and marginalized at the office, my body got tougher and tougher.

One Sunday morning, Puna gathered twelve of us around her and announced, “We're going to take the boat out to the ocean.” Sundays were for fun paddles that didn't begin until well past daybreak. We fell quiet. We had seen the big combers rolling in, pounding the beach.

Irene, a strong paddler, expressed what we all felt. “I don't want to go,” she said. “I'm not ready. I'm afraid.”

I thought Puna would insist, but instead she gathered us in a circle. “If someone speaks out against something, it may be telling us something. Some negativity could affect the enterprise. Go walk along the river under the bridge and I'll meet you on the beach.”