Waking Up in Eden (29 page)

On a sand dune with the incoming surf to her back, Puna lined us up in a row, sternly addressing us: “When you're out in a race, you're going to have to swim through water like this, so I want you to get comfortable in it.” For sprints, “iron man” crews paddle the whole race themselves. But for longer distances, an escort motorboat pulls up alongside the canoe, and relief paddlers dive into the water and swim to the canoe as the tired crewmembers vault into the ocean from their seats.

“On the count of three, I want you to run into the surf and swim six strokes out, then return. One, two, three,” she called, and we charged down the dune into the water, ducked under a wave, and stroked against the heavy, sucking pull. We body surfed in on a wave, then tried to dash out of the water before another surge hammered us into the sand. Puna sent us out again, this time for eight strokes. Then twelve. By sixteen, I panted. A heavy wave filled my mouth with salt water. I spit and sputtered and dragged myself out, thinking I couldn't go again. Thank God, she stopped.

“In a distance race,” she told us, as we sprawled on the sand, “there will be twenty-eight changes when you'll have to jump off the escort boat and swim to the canoe, or leave the canoe and swim to the escort boat. You just did five. And look what happened. You're all exhausted. In an ocean race, you have to keep paddling after you've been in the salt water and swallowed salt.”

After we stowed the canoe back on its cradle, we sat on a picnic table and listened to Puna talk about all the improvements we had made in recent weeks. We were beginning to hit the water together, she said, and we were getting stronger. We'd enter a short sprint race. After that, we could qualify for a long-distance
race, the annual Molokai Channel race between the islands of Molokai and Oahu. “Forty-two miles, in a straight line, across rough water. Longer if you tack from side to side,” Puna said. “Next year we'll aim for the Molokai. How many are interested?”

Every hand went up.

Puna fascinated me. She had plenty to do other than show up at 5:30 to coach a bunch of neophyte paddlers. She worked for a social agency that delivered meals to the elderly. Her five children were mostly grown, with the youngest age eighteen. But she had a goal, and it was nothing less than to make Hawaiian outrigger canoe paddling an Olympic sport. Puna took the long view and moved toward her goal like a chess player, each advance requiring years of organizing work. Like most generals, she realized that a grand plan was fine, but the battles were won in the trenches. And this particular trench was right here, at 5:30 a.m. with an unlikely group of middle-aged novices.

Puna had grown up at Kailua Beach on Oahu, her father, grandfather, and uncle all boat builders. Back then, canoes were beautiful objects of polished koa. Paddling provided entertainment for children, along with surfing, sand boarding, and fishing. Puna starting paddling in regattas at age eight, usually pressed into duty as an extra.

Men ran all the canoe clubs then. After they raced, the women fit in their sprints. “We had to fight for canoe time,” she remembers fiercely. But the big events were the long-distance races — and they were only for men. Even in Hawaii, though, the rumblings of the women's movement began to shake things up. Women started agitating for their own long-distance racing.
“Women were becoming
alive,
and it all stemmed from that,” Puna told me.

By the time she was twenty-four, Puna was married with two children and pregnant with a third, but still paddling. Her husband, Kalani Dawson, became assistant to the race director of the Honolulu Canoe Racing Association. Both Puna and Kalani became deeply involved in the administration and organization of racing.

Parents came to watch their children paddle; Puna and Kalani enticed the parents to start paddling themselves. Originally they did it for exercise, but the adults inevitably caught the competition bug and starting training to enter sprint regattas. Puna checked into what was necessary to make outrigger canoeing an Olympic sport. For one thing, an Olympic sport had to have participation by both sexes and all age groups. Even for consideration as an exhibition sport at the Olympics, they would have to show that at least thirty-eight countries participated in the sport. Puna saw that the only venue that could draw that many other countries was the legendary Molokai Channel crossing that drew paddlers from as far away as Tahiti and Java. By counting over a span of years, they could show that teams from enough countries had raced the Molokai.

Women started to secure their own funding, paddling became a bigger and bigger sport, and, at the 1990 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, outrigger canoeing debuted as an exhibition sport. There are still hurdles to overcome for full Olympic competition status — international regulations have yet to be adopted for boat design and equipment. Just as Puana was making progress, her husband, Kalani, was transferred to Kauai.
Paddling interest on Kauai was low. Puna and Kalani saw that their task was to prod Kauai's lackadaisical canoe clubs into races.

The Kawaikini Canoe Club members had never entered a race. They were known for showing up once a week, on Sunday, for a desultory run up the river followed by beer. But the new members brought competitive spirit and a rigorous practice schedule. Carol, the lanky director of the Kauai Museum, acted as our team captain. She was a handsome woman with white streaks in her short wavy hair, a natural athlete, diplomat, and leader. She enlisted her scrappier sister, Irene, who sang in a Hawaiian band and arranged flowers at the trendy Pacific Café. Both sisters were married to fishermen. Their friend Angie was another key member, loud and boisterous, who sometimes brought her beautiful teenage daughter to paddle. Though often wisecracking, Angie could also be found sweeping the boat landing. “That's part of clubbing, too,” she said.

Several doctors joined in order to squeeze in exercise before reporting to duty at Wilcox Memorial Hospital and quickly became a divisive presence. The local women contended that the doctors never helped with the fund-raising necessary to buy the canoes and rigging. Dr. Karen showed up for early morning practice but rarely said a word. Dr. Mary was the most outgoing, our Miss Congeniality, although she didn't realize she branded herself a recent import by showing up at practices in her Mercedes and inviting the club to her swanky mini-mansion overlooking the river. Dr. Ellen was a relative youngster at thirty-five, and the most aggressive, with a combative air not disguised by a tousled mass of blond curls. Beth, a nurse, was the only regular under thirty. A steady presence with good humor, she
had broad, powerful shoulders and a dark blue medallion design tattooed in the middle of her back. Martha, another nurse, was local and sometimes brought her boyfriend, Brian, a fisherman who also acted as assistant coach.

But as we progressed together, this early morning crew became a force, attending the monthly club meetings and insisting on a racing schedule. A revolution had occurred in Kawaikini Canoe Club and I became a part of it.

B
EFORE
I
KNEW
it, spring turned into summer. I was still hanging on at the Garden, faking it, but my spirits had started to revive. One Saturday after a late ride with Bo, I returned to the pasture after a harvest moon had risen. Hungry, I decided to stop at the Big Save grocery. As I got out of the car, I heard a high-pitched singing in Japanese, accompanied by a steady boom of a bass drum. The Bon Dance in Koloa.

Although I wore riding clothes — a jean shirt over black stretch riding pants and cowboy boots, all streaked with red dirt stains — I crossed the road to join the fair at the Koloa Jodo Mission. Paper lanterns bobbed along spokes strung from a central post, from which big speakers broadcast the harsh nasal tones of Japanese singing. Every August, Buddhist missions all over the island held ritual dances to grieve lost loved ones and bid them a return to the spiritual world.

About fifty women in their best kimonos moved together in intricate steps, each waving a white handkerchief, a symbol of a departed soul.
Obake,
or ghosts, they called them. One tall, slender woman, probably seventy, was dressed in brilliant red silk tied with a pale pink obi. She turned her face upward with the joy of movement, dancing with grace, her arms and feet
swinging in long-memorized patterns. Other dancers sneaked glances at neighbors to follow the steps, but she knew them, unerringly. A few small girls in tiny kimonos pranced amid the other dancers, improvising with unrestrained energy.

At the snack booths, men turned out hot “flying saucer” sandwiches by slapping bread into round, black iron holders, then spooning in a spicy hamburger mixture. Closing the holder sealed the crusts and nipped off the edges, making little round bread pockets, grilled over hot flames. Delicious. After consuming two, I headed for the Okinawa doughnut booth for a paper bag of the deep-fried delights. I remembered that Bill Klein had introduced them to me, saying, “You can tell they're good when the paper bag is soaked with grease.”

The fair lasted two nights and would end with a ceremonial good-bye to the spirits that both honored the dead and subtly instructed the grieving that it was time to resume their lives. I went inside the temple to buy a ghost ship, a small wooden boat with a paper sail to shield a candle flame. I wrote three names on a slip of paper and tucked it behind the sail. Dad. Mom. Bill.

Doug Kinney had finally found a new Garden director, a botany professor. The professor had never run a botanical garden, nor expressed any interest in the art or demands of one. I feared for the worst.

If I didn't get out I would shrink into a gutless wimp.

Ever since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I had been intrigued by stories of American journalists who traveled to Iron Curtain countries to help build a free press. At the time, I could never afford to take time off from the weekly paycheck that paid my mortgage and bills. But when I left the Garden, I would be cut loose again from any obligations. I filled out an application for
a Knight International Press Fellowship, run by a Washington, D.C., organization that sent reporters and editors abroad in sort of a journalistic Peace Corps. What is your preferred destination? the application asked. Eastern Europe, I wrote. Expect hardship conditions, they warned. Pay was low. I wouldn't hear whether I was accepted for another month or two, but I had made my decision. Tomorrow I would call Doug. I was beginning another journey whose destination was not yet revealed.

I wasn't afraid. In Philadelphia, I had allowed myself to be diminished by others. How small my visions for myself had been then, how limited my imagination of what possibilities lay before me. I felt solid within now and could move on my own power to protect myself, without the deus ex machina that had brought me to Kauai.

Yet I no longer wanted to make long-term plans, nor try to design my fate. Life can change in a second. If you let it. The essence of grace was to live within the mysteries, accept the uncertainties, and greet whatever develops.

The next night a crowd gathered on the rock pier at Kukuiula Harbor in Poipu to observe the final act of the Bon ceremony. A phalanx of young men in swimsuits carried on their shoulders three flat-bottomed rowboats, each holding hundreds of ghost ships, candles all lit. The men swam the boats out beyond the wave break to tie them to a small outboard craft. The silent crowd watched. The outboard motor hummed, then shifted into higher gear as it moved off, trailing a wake of dancing, flickering candle flames. As the boats moved further and further out to sea, the outline of the outboard disappeared into darkness. We could make out only the glimmering lights.

And then the flames no longer advanced with purpose. They drifted, bobbing on the waves. The motorboat had let them go.

I
N THE END
, Doug graciously allowed me to live at my cottage for a few months after I quit. I left campaign plans, drafts for the end-of-year fund appeals, the last newsletter, and a script for a video about the Garden, which I knew would never be completed without Dr. Klein but agreed to write anyway. In return, I unrolled into the luxury of having days to myself to fill with hours at the laptop in the sunlit cottage, unrushed rides through the hills with Bo, and, of course, canoeing.

Outrigger canoeing history captured me. It wasn't just because I could participate; the canoes were intrinsic to Hawaiian life, responsible for the settling of the Hawaiian Islands in the first place. Polynesians had invented the double-hulled voyaging canoe for their vast organized migrations that began two thousand years ago in Samoa and thrusted north and west to unknown Pacific islands. Expert navigators, they memorized the seasonal changes of the sun and stars and learned to discern distant land from ocean waves and flotsam and jetsam. They studied bird migration. The Pacific golden plover, among other birds, arrived each fall on wind currents from the unknown north. The tiny bird tarried a few days, then flew off to the south, bound for islands whose distance the early Polynesians had already measured. So more islands must lie northward, they concluded.

For everyday life the Polynesians paddled lightweight, shallow fishing canoes that skimmed the surface of their calm ocean lagoons. But settlers in the Hawaiian Islands needed a new sort
of fishing canoe if they wanted to eat. Unlike most of Oceania, the Hawaiian Islands lie in the middle of deep ocean trenches, without rings of coral reefs to protect them from the most violent storms or to create many shallows full of fish. The Hawaiians needed heavier canoes to pierce the treacherous surf and yet also navigate close to the shorelines of rocky cliffs. They built heavier and more deeply drawing boats, fitted with one-piece hulls, higher surf guards, and simplified outriggers.

The end product, the Hawaiian canoe, “may well be the most versatile and seaworthy rough water craft ever designed or built by any culture in any time,” contended the celebrated paddler and canoe historian Tommy Holmes. (The need for these rough-water canoes was particularly evident on Kauai, where a harbor dock that could meet and off-load ships was not built until 1962. Up until then, sugarcane had to be cabled out to ships. Locals in canoes met seaplanes to ferry smaller cargo ashore.)