Waking Up in Eden (30 page)

Like Dr. Klein, I was beginning to see the history of plant life and the study of botany as the root (sorry, can't help myself!) behind all human achievement. And in Hawaii, the root that became critical to development of the sturdy Hawaiian canoe was attached to the koa tree.
Acacia koa.
The new Hawaiians surely must have fallen to their knees in astonishment and gratitude when they explored the Islands' interiors and discovered immense forests of tall native hardwood trees that reached one hundred feet into the air. Circumferences spanned as many as thirty-six feet. Whole villages of one hundred men and more would decamp to the interior to fell one of the giant trees, rough out a dugout, then drag the ten-ton canoe down to the coast. At the time koa covered many of the Islands, the most populous tree second only to ohia. After five centuries of plunder, only
a small fraction remain, a testament to the continued modern demand for koa art frames, furniture, and even wall paneling.

Early European explorers envied the speed, maneuverability, and seaworthiness of the Hawaiian watercraft. “One man will sometimes paddle a single canoe faster than a good boat's crew could row a whaleboat,” wrote one eighteenth-cenury British captain. Yet despite their canoes' obvious advantages, the Hawaiians nearly abandoned them after they saw tall ships. Only ten years after Cook's arrival, King Kamehameha entreated American and British captains for ships' carpenters so they could build their own Western-style brigs. By the 1840s the Hawaiian “navy consisted of decked vessels . . . armed schooners of from twenty to a hundred tons,” according to nineteenth-century explorer George Simpson. What little enthusiasm for canoe racing that survived was effectively smothered by zealous missionaries to whom the gambling element, so much a part of the canoe race, was utterly sinful.

In 1875, King David Kalakaua, who was dedicated to reviving traditional Hawaiian water sports, set aside his birthday, November 16, as the date for an annual regatta. Men and women alike — even royalty — joined in. A number of clubs came into existence during Kalakaua's reign, but when he died, water sports again went into decline. Not until the 1930s did a local group of paddlers with Hawaiian, Japanese, and Portuguese ancestry in South Kona begin building canoes exclusively for racing.

When famed paddler A. E. “Toots” Minvielle first called for a race of the treacherous Molokai Channel, forty miles from Molokai to Waikiki, not even his own canoe club, the Outrigger Canoe Club in Honolulu, supported him. They feared it
too long, too dangerous, and too impractical. That was 1939. He continued to lobby, finally persuading three clubs to enter the first race thirteen years later.

A
S EARLY MORNING
canoe practices continued, I began to realize that team spirit would determine whether we would ever race. Our first test came when Puna approached us one morning about catering a traditional luau for a young Japanese couple who wanted to celebrate the first birthday of their daughter, a big occasion in the islands.

“We could earn some of the money to pay for racing entry fees, shipping the canoe to other islands, and hiring an escort boat,” Puna told us.

The local women all knew what to do. Staging a luau is as much a part of their repertoire as putting on a Thanksgiving turkey dinner is for women in the rest of the country. Preparations consumed the better part of a week.

When I arrived at Carol Lovell's house, stacks of aluminum trays and cook pots filled the small kitchen and spilled out into the living room. Her five-year-old grandson and three of his coconspirators ran in and out between our legs. Outside on the deck, Carol's sister, Irene, emptied gallon bags of concentrated purple paste into a huge pail at a laundry sink. She added water, then mixed the concoction with one assured hand, scooping and pulling, until it became smooth and ropey. “Some people can't do it, their poi has lumps in it,” she said. “Hawaiians don't like lumps in their poi.”

Neither Carol nor Irene would trust us
haoles
with any important tasks, so we got the grunt work. We scooped poi into Dixie cups, added a few drops of water to keep it moist, wiped
the cup clean, then covered it with a plastic top. “Water keeps it sour,” Irene told us. “Hawaiians like it sour, so it's almost furry on top. I like it real sour,” she continued. “One of my favorite dinners is a can of sardines mixed with shoyu sauce, a little sesame oil, and fresh poi on top.” Just the thought made my tongue recoil.

For two long days we worked. Carol's family already had its own
imu
pit that dominated their small backyard like an open grave. Mary and Ellen hauled pine logs to stoke up the fire, while Beth, Irene, and others chopped onions, olives, and boiled potatoes for potato and macaroni salads, staples of a modern luau. Carol's fisherman husband, Sol, diced fifteen pounds of fresh marlin for
poke,
then mixed it with flecks of seaweed. Grandpa Lovell made long rice in huge aluminum pots at his house next door. Irene and Carol scraped salmon into mushy pulp for the
lomi-lomi.
A neighbor stretched fishing line between her hands and used it to cut small cubes of
kulolo,
a sticky cake of dark purple taro and coconut, similar in richness and texture to marzipan.

The
imu
fire still raged after several hours, heating bowling-ball-sized lava rocks until they burned an incandescent red. When the flames banked down into coals, the men lined huge wire pans with aluminum foil to hold a hundred-pound pig, headless and quartered. They added six turkeys wrapped in foil, as well as sweet potatoes and vats of rice for rice pudding — other modern luau accoutrements. The men pulled the wire cages onto the fire and covered them with a fragrant layer of split banana stalks. To get them evenly spread apart, they had to step on the coals. As they walked on fire in heavy boots, billowing clouds of heat and smoke cloaked them.

We laid fans of ti leaves over the pit in an overlapping design. Quickly, six men pulled a sheet of plastic over it all, then rushed to shovel cold ashes and dirt all along the edges, sealing in heat and steam. They all looked at one another, about to congratulate themselves, when Sol hit himself on the head with the heel of a hand. “The bags! We forgot the bags!”

Nearby a pile of wet burlap bags lay untouched. Frantically, the crew shoveled the dirt away, struggling through the heat and smoke to pull away the plastic. They arranged the bags, then reclosed the pit to steam overnight. “What did the Hawaiians do before they had plastic?” I teased Sol.

“That's a good question,” he said.

The next morning we returned at dawn to uncover the pit. The men pulled the smoked meat off the bone and carried big trays to long tables set up in the open carport. Six of us paddlers, dressed in aprons over our shorts, worked quickly with tongs to remove all gristle, bone, and skin, shredding the meat into fine pieces. We diverted crispy pigskin and crackling outer meat to a special pan. Irene carried it over to Grandpa Lovell's house, a trail of kids behind her, all begging. I followed, too, and we gorged ourselves on it before Grandma Lovell took it. “We'll chop it up for
saimin,
” she said.

We worked all day, then rushed home to change into our Kawaikini pink and blue team T-shirts, ready to report for duty at our clients' house. We helped the young mother decorate picnic tables with balloons and stuffed animals in honor of the birthday girl, who toddled around in a red and white kimono. As guests arrived, a five-piece band played Hawaiian songs. A curtain strung between two palms served as a “fish pond” for
kids to troll for a gift. Doughnuts dangled on strings for a messy doughnut-eating contest.

In the carport, Mary dished kalua pig and turkey while Ellen manned the poi cups and long rice. Beth, the youngest team member, distributed
lomi-lomi
salmon and marlin
poke.
My job was to dish out the salads, as well as a bowl of precious
opihi
— meat from tiny periwinkles picked from rocks, as prized as Beluga caviar and almost as expensive.

Every time we sensed that no one could see us, Beth and I pounced on the food, stuffing ourselves on tender, smoky pork and turkey, free from fat and gristle. “That's how it's supposed to be,” Carol informed me. Even so, I declined the special treat of
lomi-lomi
salmon mixed with poi. As the guests finished their last helpings, we scrubbed dishes and packaged copious leftovers into big Ziploc plastic bags. Part of the tradition, Puna insisted, included sending relatives home with leftovers.

One of the doctors, Karen, had failed to show for any of the preparations over the two days. But at the end of the event, she appeared in jeans to help clean up. “I've been on call all weekend,” she explained.

One paddler went to hug Sol and thank him for all the work he did.

“It's what makes a family,” he said.

W
ITH SOME ANXIETY
, I drove through the cane fields to reach a rundown, ramshackle house. A once-grand portico sagged forlornly over a parked Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Oldsmobile with three flat tires and a registration sticker that had expired two years ago. Keith Robinson's mother, Helen, wore the vacant smile and quizzical expression of advanced senility as she wandered around the front yard. Her sweater bagged and had been buttoned crookedly. “In case you haven't guessed, there isn't a lot of money left,” Keith said quietly, as we loaded his truck. He set down on its seat his food for the day: a half loaf of store white bread and three bags of potato chips.

“Aren't you bringing water, Keith? I have two quarts in my backpack.”

“No, ma'am. I usually work the whole day without water.” The pickup truck rattled and jostled us harshly as we left the cane plains and climbed through scruffy dry forest. Robinson reached around behind his seat. “Oh, gee,” he said with elaborate nonchalance, “I forgot my shoulder holster and pistol. Normally I carry weapons as a matter or course. Particularly when taking a woman up to the preserve.”

“Why is that?”

“Might run into outlaws, bad guys, marijuana growers,” he said brusquely. After an hour we reached an isolated spot in the west side's backcountry, eleven miles above Waimea. He put on his trademark Kelly-green construction hardhat. On foot, he led me across a narrow concrete dam over a ditch and up a hill to an unmarked clearing, then stopped.

“Welcome to the Kauai Outlaw Preserve,” he said with a sardonic grin.

As
PROMISED
, J
OHN
R
APOZO
had arranged an initial meeting for me with Robinson a week before. I knew it was a chance for Robinson to decide whether I was trustworthy. When he picked me up in his battered pickup, I was surprised by his nondescript looks: thin, very pale, with gray hair clipped short around a receding hairline. I insisted he call me by name rather than the
ma'am
he kept using, but he shook his head earnestly. “It's my upbringing, ma'am. I've been taught to treat ladies with respect.” Inside the truck, where my legs would have rested, were newspapers, crumbled bags, empty soda cans, and about fifty pounds of other trash. I edged onto the seat with my knees under my chin, then tried to brace myself against the jarring, bumpy ride of a truck whose shocks had long been shot. He didn't need much prompting to start what became an all-day monologue. Before he would take me to the preserve, he said, he needed to educate me about “realities.”

We drove up the Waimea Canyon Road to the mountains, Robinson talking a mile a minute. “First thing you have to understand is that the environmental movement is based on massive lies,” he lectured. “The eco-Nazis are perfecting a fiction that Hawaii's native species can be saved. But native plants are
biologically incompetent. They're far less efficient than nonnative species in extracting nutrients and water from the soil. They recover much slower from grazing than nonnative species. They cannot compete for sunlight. Their seed dispersal systems are far poorer. Their root systems are a lot shallower. They lack the internal mechanisms that nonnative species have, such as resistance to disease or lack of rainfall.”

Yet while Robinson harshly recited the botanical deficiencies of Hawaiian plants, he was still devoting his life to trying to save them. Why? I asked. He shook his head, chuckling, as if bemused at his own folly in a noble yet doomed mission. “It's the way I was brought up,” he says. “To take care of the land.”

It's not the first time a Robinson has tried to stage a last stand against the intrusion of civilization. Since his great-greatgreat-grandmother Eliza Sinclair bought the island of Niihau in 1868, the Sinclairs and their descendants, the Gay and Robinson families, have tried to preserve it as the last pure settlement of Hawaiian life. Often called the Forbidden Island, Niihau still harbors about two hundred Hawaiians who live without cars and only a few electric generators. It's the last place on earth where the native Hawaiian language is still spoken daily. Visitors are not allowed unless invited, and any resident who chooses to leave may never come back. The Robinson stewardship has been both praised for preserving a last scrap of authentic antique culture and condemned as feudal dictatorship, a remnant of colonial society, rife with abuse.

Ever since the Sinclair family acquired Niihau, the island has been as much albatross as prize. The widowed Mrs. Sinclair, then sixty-two, and her large family arrived in Hawaii from New Zealand in 1868 looking for a new place to settle. King
Kamehameha V offered them Niihau, the small island that lay seventeen miles northwest of Kauai. The king demanded ten thousand dollars, and they paid it in gold. No one told the Sinclairs that the island had received record high rainfalls the previous two years. After the family settled on Niihau, the lush green meadows quickly returned to their usual state of drought, and the freshwater lakes dried up into brackish mudflats.