Waking Up in Eden (31 page)

After only a few years, the Sinclairs moved to the west side of Kauai. The children married into the local gentry and soon acquired thousands of acres of land for their ranches and sugar plantation. But they never let go of Niihau, raising cattle on the island and using it as a summer retreat. For more than one hundred years, the Robinsons employed the entire Niihau population on its ranch, carrying them even when there was no work during frequent droughts. Residents continued to live, for no charge, in modest houses. A supply ship provided erratic transport to and from the island. The Robinsons also supplied free health care of a sort, free beef and mutton, and some supplies. But in return, they lay down the law, demanding that no Niihauans speak to outsiders about the family and their affairs and that residents follow “moral behavior” or face expulsion.

Keith's father, Aylmer Robinson, also instilled a strict Christian faith in his sons. Keith spent much of his boyhood on isolated Niihau. “In your business life, you were sober and wise,” he remembered. “In your personal life, you didn't attend wild parties and you didn't associate with people who did.”

Keith's paranoia about a government takeover of his nursery has some historic basis in fact. In the 1960s, the Hawaiian state government had succeded in appropriating hundreds of acres of Robinson land in the Kalalau Valley for a state park on Kauai's
north shore. Then in the 1970s, the government proposed to start condemnation proceedings in order to turn Niihau island into a national park. As the Hawaiian activist movement has grown, Hawaiians have increasingly called for the Robinsons to give Niihau to the residents.

When Keith and his brother, Bruce, were born, the extended Robinson family owned nearly a third of Kauai. Keith says the family has spent millions to support Niihau. That, plus inheritance and land taxes, he says, have left much of the family nearly broke. The Robinsons had hoped to sell several thousand acres on Kauai's north shore, but then the state blocked that possibility by zoning the land for conservation use.

Keith began his endangered plant nursery in 1986 with the idea of reestablishing the native flora as a model to be duplicated throughout Hawaii. He dreamed that he could convert some of the family's unprofitable agricultural land to high-quality eco tourism. For the past seventeen years, he's worked as a commercial fisherman, but spends most of his energy on his plant preserve. Except for caring for his mother, there was nothing else. “I don't have any wife or children. I'm not particularly enjoying life,” he told me, “and I have nothing to look forward to.”

W
HEN WE FINALLY ARRIVED
at the Outlaw Preserve, I wasn't prepared for how extensive it was. Nor how camouflaged. No one except a plant expert would recognize it as a treasure trove of rarities. Robinson's domain was an untamed, weedy place. Waist-high yellowing brush and grasses grew everywhere in a meadow as dry as a tinderbox. Trees and shrubs contained in wire pens strained to escape, like zoo animals in cages. A flowering yellow hibiscus trumpeted over the grass. Fan palms
of varying heights bobbed up and down. Although Robinson continued to address me as “Ma'am,” with courtly politeness, he seemed ready to erupt.

“There's going to be nothing pretty here,” he said grimly. “Nothing fun. This is reality. This is what the eco-Nazis don't tell you about. The work that needs to be done to keep these endangered species alive is slave labor.” Although many of the species grew from seeds he had collected — questionably — from state land, he never really risked prosecution. State and federal foresters respected Robinson's work so much that they sometimes slipped him rare seeds, a fact that Keith quietly admitted.

Now, sweat darkened the back of his polyester denim-colored shirt. Big, hand-sewn stitches — obviously his own work — held together a tear on the upper left sleeve. My eyes kept returning to that puckered patch, as if secret evidence of Robinson's fragile vulnerability despite his hard bluster.

“Oh my,” he worried as he bent over a hibiscus that had withered in the brutal heat. “Everything is showing stress.” A recent drought had dried up Kauai, particularly on the west side, forcing Keith to carry more water for a longer time than he had in the past. “How the devil am I going to carry the equivalent of three drums of water every day at the age of fifty-seven?” he asked, beseeching the heavens.

Robinson led me through his wonderland of specimens. Here he was king and protector, gathering lonely sole survivors, or pairs like Noah, that he coaxed to develop seed. He reeled off each plant's Latin botanical name with the familiarity of a grandfather.
Kokia kauaiensis,
a native hibiscus that grows only in the mountains of Kauai.
Munroidendron racemosum,
the Waimea Canyon variety. “Only five or six trees have ever
been seen,” he said. “I discovered the first one around 1982. The parent tree was killed by a falling boulder, but now I have several growing, from seed.” Other miracles included a a native plumeria and a huge native palm,
Pritchardia aylmer-robinsonii,
from Niihau.

“NTBG has nothing like this,” he said with disgust. “Those air-conditioned bureaucrats there don't know that this kind of work exists.”

Robinson walked back to the truck. He shouldered an empty fifty-five-gallon plastic drum, carried it fifteen yards to the dam, lugged it across, then up the hill to the preserve. Back and forth, back and forth, he carried drums, wire, and long iron poles. He could have saved himself enormous effort just by parking the truck closer to the dam and unloading it there. Drawing water one bucket at a time from the ditch was equally laborious.

“Keith, couldn't you rig up an electric pump and hose to make an irrigation system?” I asked, careful to phrase it as diplomatically as possible.

He shook his head dismissively. “There is no cost efficient way to do it.”

I'm not sure a harder way to water plants existed. As he carried water, he ranted and fumed. Mosquitoes, thick and buzzing everywhere, bit all the way through my long-sleeved shirt. I rolled up a sleeve and found a dime-sized welt that itched and prickled in the heat. The sun beat down unrelentingly on our heads and backs.

As we hiked higher up the mountain, we approached a rocky stream, shrunk to a yard wide. Despite his earlier bravado about not ever drinking water, he lay on a flat rock, stretched his neck out, and put his lips to the muddy stream, the only pristine,
drinkable natural water in Hawaii, he claimed. He drank long and hard. “My, that was good,” he said, smacking his lips.

We continued to pass his caches of water and supplies. In a forest glen, he unpacked a rusted coffee can of crystallized blue fertilizer. Like a cook measuring salt, he took a tiny pinch from it and sprinkled it at the base of several trees and shrubs. “You have to put this fertilizer on a certain distance from the trunk, put in only a certain amount,” he explained.

“How did you learn to get these plants to grow in the wild?” I asked.

He answered with an impatient snort. “Lady, this isn't the wild. I'm standing over these plants every five minutes with water and fertilizer. Yeah, I've licked it, but only because of fantastic amounts of hard labor.” He removed his hard hat and, using it as a dipper, scooped up water from a drum. Ever so slowly he poured the water down the stalks of his penned beauties. The water mixed with the perspiration in his hat so that he literally gave the sweat of his brow to the endeavor. A tenderness cleared all the furies from his visage as he poured a steady stream, seemingly willing it to be absorbed down to the roots.

“Keith,” I asked neutrally, “why did you never forge ties with the National Tropical Botanical Garden? It seems like it would make such a natural partnership. Steve Perlman and Ken Wood explore the remote reaches of Hawaii's mountaintops to bring back seeds, Kerin propagates them in the Garden nursery, and you plant them back into the countryside.”

To my surprise, he answered calmly. From the beginning, he said, he planned his preserve as a mid-elevation level nursery for NTBG's seedlings. Robinson said he worked with several of the early botanists at the Garden, but they were fired. Then,
“it became a twittering fairy festival,” he snorted. “The tiptoe boys. They made a few overtures but I had nothing to do with them.” The current crew at the Garden acted snobbishly to him, he said.

Then Robinson's brother, Bruce, caught Garden field collector Ken Wood trespassing and marched him to the Waimea Police Station. “Wood had been pretending to be buddies,” Robinson remembered acidly. “I had given him a lot of stuff. Really rare stuff from Robinson land. When I got to the police station, Wood
laughed
at me. He told me, ‘This became necessary because you are such a selfish person.' I got really mad. A police sergeant had to come between us. He thought I was going to take a swing.”

Similar alliances and friendships with Oahu botanists Keith Woolliams from Waimea Botanical Garden and Charlie Lamoureux at Lyon Arboretum also dissolved in storms of perceived betrayal.

“What do you think about when you're up here?” I asked.

“Think and you go crazy,” he said. “Mostly, I'm planning work. Many times I'm thinking bitterly about the government and how they're not doing the work I'm doing. I'm getting real resentful about that.” I rested on a mossy rock. Sweat soaked my own shirt, even in the shade. I wilted in the midday heat. I noticed a pile of stuff under a tarp and asked him what it was.

“I backpacked in five thousand pounds of concrete and now I have to bring in another five thousand pounds,” he said.

“Why?”

“To make a base for the composting toilet.” He pointed a few yards away to a large square mound the size of an outhouse, covered with blue plastic tarp.

I was confused. “Who's going to use it?” I questioned.

He explained impatiently that it was part of his plan to use the preserve for ecotourism. The shrouded toilet made the skin on my scalp prickle. What motivates a man to break his back carrying materials to build a toilet up a steep trail and deep into the woods for nonexistent tourists? Assuming that he could ever organize such a thing, assuming that he could ever talk to tourists in civil terms, assuming they would want to ride an hour up a bumpy road, shimmy across a narrow dam, and hike up here, a toilet might not be the first thing they would need.

As Keith spooned hatfuls of water on his specimens, I thought of the other petty wars that raged in this elusive paradise, this Garden of Eden. Many of these plantsmen and plantswomen got along better with plants than with people.

Robinson and I hiked another hour and a half uphill as he repeated his now-common refrain. “I will destroy my preserve rather than let the government get its hands on it. I would rather die than let them take over.” He seemed to believe that the most serious threat had come a few years earlier when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed a rare tree,
Caesalpinia kavaiensis,
on its endangered species list and proposed a recovery plan to save its habitat. Only one specimen of the tree grew on Kauai — in the middle of Robinson's preserve. When he read the plan, he concluded that the Feds intended to seize his Outlaw Preserve.

Robinson's face paled with exertion. As we reached the edge of a clearing, he walked over to a charred, blackened tree trunk that stood about twelve feet high. I saw that this dead tree was his Boston Tea Party; his Waco, Texas; his Ruby Ridge. He encircled the remains of
Caesalpinia kavaiensis
with one hand and intoned, “Once it was a flowering tree. The last of its gene pool.
They were warned. They published the plan anyway. What I created, I can destroy. Anytime you feel like taking this place, bring in the Army. They won't even see me in the hills with my sniper scope.”

L
ATER
I
TRACKED DOWN
the facts about the federal plan to “take over” the Outlaw Plant Preserve.

Early botanists had first discovered Robinson's tree,
Caesalpinia kavaiensis,
on Kauai in 1860, when it spread widely in upland forests. By the time the federal government began listing endangered species in Hawaii in the 1980s, the population of the dense-wood tree had dwindled to forty-two known specimens. Eleven grew on Oahu, and another thirty in North Kona on the Big Island. Only single trees grew on Lanai and Kauai.

The government's draft plan for
Caesalpinia kavaiensis
called for establishment of new populations of the rare tree. The plan recommended “Secure habitat of current populations and manage threats.” That was what led Keith Robinson to conclude that the feds were trying to take over his land.

“It was a semantic disconnect,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service botanist John Fay when I reached him in his Washington, D.C., office. “That's not what we meant, but that's how Keith took it. I explained to him at great length that we would not take his land, and we were never going to take his land, but he couldn't see it that way. He was stockpiling arms to fight a government takeover.”

Keith apparently never read the sentence on page fifty-one of the sixty-four-page plan that mentioned him specifically, although not by name: “The landowner's current program of rare plant conservation should be supported and assisted.”

Robinson and Fay, as it turns out, were longtime friends. Fay had begun his botany career at the then–Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden in the early 1970s. Later, he joined the Fish and Wildlife Service, eventually serving as consulting botanist when the government listed the spotted owl as endangered, setting off a colossal battle with the lumber companies in the Pacific Northwest. When Robinson first decided to start his preserve, he paid Fay to fly back to Kauai to advise him.

I asked Fay, “Are you aware that he burned his
Caesalpinia
tree to deliver a warning to the government?”