Waking Up in Eden (5 page)

Peace reigned, at first. Just as in the original Garden of Eden described in the Book of Genesis, God gave the native foliage no thorns or thistles. Nor did the plants develop other warrior characteristics, such as toxic secretions to poison encroaching vegetation or ward off predators. They didn't need defenses in the early days of Hawaii because the islands were too far away for any land mammal migrations; the fauna consisted of only a few snails, a long-distance bird, or a seal. The ultimate hothouse varieties, native Hawaiian plants could survive only in paradise.

So when intruders arrived, the natives could put up little resistance. Polynesian voyagers brought new food crops of taro, coconut, and yam, paper mulberry for fiber to make clothing, and pigs for slaughter. Captain Cook discovered what he named “the Sandwich Islands,” in 1778, and let loose some of his own pigs, which intermingled with the feral Polynesian variety. The American missionaries, mostly Presbyterians and Congregationalists
from Connecticut and Massachusetts, started arriving in 1810, as did the sailors from all over the globe who stopped in Hawaii to resupply their ships for whale hunts. Traders raped the forest, mining it for the native sandalwood, coveted in the Orient for its spicy scent. They took it all, leaving none to survive. Highland forests turned into clear-cut wastelands. And then the onslaught really began.

In the last 150 years, an eye blink in geological time, plantation owners consumed thousands of acres for sugar and pineapple crops, using up most of the dry forest that had fringed the mountainous islands and depleting the soil. The plant species that had thrived were pushed to small pockets and ledges. Droves of tourists started discovering Hawaii in the 1930s, and in galloping pace over the next decades built hotels, condos, shopping centers, and highways, eradicating more of the specialized habitats with devastating consequences. But it was what the incoming settlers brought with them that delivered the coup de grace. Escaped barnyard goats proliferated in the mountains and mowed down plants in quantity. The growing pig population rooted deep trenches, throwing up plants with abandon, not discriminating between the rarest of orchids or commonest of weeds. Banana poka, yellow ginger, strawberry guava, and other imports spread rapidly through forests, sturdy, aggressive, and better equipped for battle. Like all incoming carpetbaggers, the newcomers' greatest offensive tactic was their ability to steal. They grew tall, robbed sunlight from those below, sent down deeper roots that sucked up nutrients, and crowded out the delicate Hawaiian varieties.

Airline passengers coming or leaving the Hawaiian Islands are prohibited from transporting any plant material; Department
of Agriculture agents X-ray all baggage to ensure that no seeds or other possible contaminants are carried in. But the horse has long escaped the barn.

Now botanists count more than eight thousand nonnative, or imported, plant species growing in Hawaii, about one hundred of which are so out of control that they have consumed tens of thousands of acres. It's the story of all Hawaii, mirroring the horrifying tale of the native Hawaiian peoples themselves. When the missionaries and sailors arrived, they found a civilization of more than three hundred thousand people — by some accounts, as many as one million. Within fifty years, measles, smallpox, syphilis, and other Western disease reduced the population to thirty thousand.

Now I was the new import, the interloper.

I felt deflated by Keith Woolliams's doomsday message. Perhaps his own losing effort to keep Waimea Garden solvent colored his view? Overwhelmed, sinking, he obviously couldn't take on the fight to right the botanical health of the Hawaiian Islands. Surely not everyone would go quietly into the night?

After bidding Woolliams good-bye, I emerged from his office into the blinding sun and headed off to the main attractions at Waimea Garden. I walked up the paved paths past a grove of heliconia, the waxy torches of crimson and sunset pink ginger. I bent to read a label and saw they had originally come from Brazil. Further along the curved path, I marveled at a drift of orchids, flashy purple, pale green, and snowy white. Also imports, from India, New Zealand, and Brazil. A thicket of birds-of-paradise, the flame orange and blue blooms that resembled a plumed heron's head and beak? South Africa. Showers of cerise bougainvillea? Brazil again. The treacly sweet smelling groves of
plumeria, whose blooms form the five-dollar leis bestowed on incoming tourists? Central and South America.

All the showy tropical flowers that we foreigners thought spilled from every corner in Hawaii were imports. Venus flytraps to hook the tourists. The average visitor to Hawaii rarely sees a native plant.

I
STILL NEEDED
a place to live. In those first disconnected weeks, I moved from one bed-and-breakfast to another. The Volkswagen's static-filled radio could not pick up National Public Radio. The B and B rooms had no radios, ei ther.
The New York Times
was flown in only on Sundays. I had rarely felt so isolated, so cut off from what was happening in the larger world. Each morning at dawn, I'd put on my gym clothes and drive to Poipu Beach to either work out at the Hyatt hotel's health club or run along the coastline. I liked that hour, when the night sky streaked pink. One morning as I turned down Koloa Road, the VW Golf silently died.

I walked to work that day. When I arrived, I asked about getting another vehicle to tide me over until the Golf could be fixed. I was handed the keys to a late-model Mazda sedan unused except for a daily run to the post office. I got in and saw, blissfully, that it had air-conditioning. I tuned into NPR to hear Cokie Roberts reporting from the White House. “I love you, Cokie!” I yelled.

Later that afternoon, I told Dr. Klein how happy I was to be able to listen to mainland news again. “I'm surprised,” he said, puzzled. “We had that Mazda put in shape for you before you came.”

“The Mazda?”

“You know, the gray Mazda.”

“No, I've been driving an old VW.”

“How did that happen? You weren't supposed to be getting that old thing.”

First the house, inexplicably filthy. The junker car. My office mates continued to treat me with subzero indifference, and I realized I was undergoing a form of hazing. It felt petty to even notice their snippy salutations, the poor welcome, the fact that nobody except Dr. Klein invited me to lunch. I was the hired gun, yet it seemed like every time I looked up from my desk, somebody was in my office complaining that I hadn't followed “proper organizational procedure.” Employees weren't supposed to use the Allerton beach. They couldn't visit the garden on weekends. Volunteers couldn't explore the back hills and trails. One day I taped an urgent note to Dr. Klein's door so he would see it when he came in, only to find it ripped down. “The Garden doesn't do that,” one of his assistants informed me. The bald-headed finance director hired to sort out the tangled books was particularly pained by my presence. Before I arrived he had been the most senior staff member; now there were two of us in what Dr. Klein grandly titled “the senior management team.” As I investigated my budget numbers, I realized that the finance director had assigned me impossible fund-raising goals, doomed to fail. I put an end to that. I don't work for you; I work for Dr. Klein, I told him, and knew I had made an enemy.

This was an institution peopled with staff who had been at the Garden for years, sometimes decades, free to do what they wanted at their own pace. Dr. Klein was changing things, but slowly. My task was to raise money but also to put the place on the map by bringing people in, defining the Garden's image,
promoting it. It would require a fundamental shift in outlook. I wasn't sure we could pull it off.

I
STARTED ANSWERING
ads in the local newspaper and looking at modern apartments in the Poipu area, with its luxury hotels, condo villages, and fake stone waterfalls. This was Tourist Hawaii, a pampered retreat that most visitors to Kauai never left. The places I could afford didn't have great views and were packed together so closely that I'd have to draw the curtains for privacy. With their hotel-room decor of bland pastels, they could be in Miami or San Diego.

When I returned to the Garden office after one discouraging housing search, I went into the quiet library to have a discreet chat with Rick Hanna, the Garden's librarian, resident computer expert, historian, marine biologist, but most important to me, potential friend. He, too, was a refugee of sorts, having migrated from California to Honolulu in the 1970s. When a relationship broke up at the same time a job at the University of Hawaii library went sour, he applied to the Garden as a fluke. Handsome, in his late forties, he had a lean athlete's frame and dark curly hair that I had heard attracted a series of blondes. Still, I sensed that if I needed to know something about the Garden's history or some arcane fact about Kauai, Rick would give a straight answer.

I asked him what he thought I should do about my housing dilemma.

He counseled considering a salvage job before I gave up on the cottage. “Some of these plantation cottages are really fabulous when they're fixed up. You ought to go talk to Michael Faye out at the Waimea Plantation Cottages. He's become a
real expert on the plantation cottage style. He restored a whole settlement of them and turned them into a high-priced resort.” The Fayes, he said, were an old, established family on the island's west side, where they owned a lot of land and had been involved in ranching and sugar enterprises for a hundred years.

I mused, “The condos I've seen are modern and nice, but so generic they could be located anywhere. The cottage would be a chance to experience something really Hawaiian.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “This is your chance.”

A
S I FOLLOWED
Route 50 westward, the landscape became hotter, drier, dustier. I passed a sign identifying a red dirt road that led to where Captain Cook took his first step in Ha waii. On January 20, 1778, on his third voyage around the world, Cook had sailed his ship
Resolution
into Waimea Bay. The gentle islands were among the very last place on earth still undiscovered by Western navigators. Thousands of curious natives — most of the women naked — paddled hundreds of canoes into the bay to greet him, mistaking him for a white god in plumed hat.

Smoke rose across the horizon and drifted across my windshield in a thick fog. A temporary road sign warned:
CANE BURNING, LOW VISIBILITY NEXT FIVE MILES
. Stray cinders swirled everywhere. In preparation for harvest, plantation workers burned sugarcane to draw the plant juices up into the stalks, later to be pressed to extract the juice in the nearby mill, then boiled into syrup and dried into a granular state. Sugar had made fortunes in the islands. Now the cane fields were fast disappearing as even such stalwart clients as Pepsi and Coca-Cola switched to corn and beet syrup. Tourism reigned these
days. Almost one million tourists arrived on Kauai each year, drawn by its rugged, unspoiled beauty, the famous wave breaks known throughout surfdom, the Na Pali Coast hiking trail, called one of the ten best in the world by some guidebooks, and the stretches of empty white-sand beaches. Hollywood had long ago discovered the island and frequently used it as a backdrop when a tropical setting was needed. A colony of movie stars lived on the north shore, giving Hanalei and Haena the status of Vail or Aspen.

Yet Kauai still lagged behind the other resort islands in their mad rush into tourism development. Hurricane Iniki had pushed the island back even further. Residents would later recall these early post-Iniki years as halcyon days, when you could buy an ocean-view condo for under $100,000, before tour companies unleashed all-terrain vehicles to jar the countryside, before
USA Today
named Poipu as the best beach in America, before several hundred surfers met in the ball field at Koloa Park to try to stop the advent of a surfing world championship that would attract too many competitors to their favorite haunts. That would come later.

All the islands seemed to have a village named Waimea (
wai
means
water
in Hawaiian), and Kauai's Waimea looked like a sleepy, small Texas cow town, circa 1950. False-fronted Old West-style stores lined the main road. Half a dozen jackedup, high-rigged pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive Jeeps were parked outside a grocery store. As I left the town's outskirts, I approached a grove of several hundred coconut palms. A whiterailed entrance bore the sign
WAIMEA PLANTATION COTTAGES. AN AUTHENTIC SUGAR EXPERIENCE
. I parked in the shade of a palm and mounted wooden stairs onto a shaded veranda with
wicker armchairs. A receptionist called Mike Faye on his cell phone and, after a short wait, a tanned man with laughing eyes, black hair, and full mus tache came into the lobby. He picked up a master key and led me out to the lawn through an avenue of palms leading to the ocean. Tin-roofed cottages painted in pastel blues and greens were sprinkled throughout the grounds, each set at an angle and screened by ferns and bamboo palms.

Sounds from the highway dropped off. A sprinkler pulsed. A parrot squawked. I sensed this was a place where one could close the door and forget about stress, appointments, or anything purposeful for a long while. Faye had furnished the cottages with Morris chairs, rattan furniture, and ceiling fans that re-created an atmosphere of 1930s plantation life. Except for the bathrooms. Showers were the size of small rooms, with big, fat nozzles raining like waterfalls in a tropical forest. No need for a curtain, you just stood in the breeze and got wet. I was charmed.

“How did you work out this style?” I asked.

“We had fifty cottages to work on,” Faye said. “One late night a bunch of us were sitting around a bonfire, drinking beer and singing ancient songs from the 1920s and 1930s. I thought, ‘This is the real Hawaii. How do we capture this feeling?' The cult of old houses has never been strong in Hawaii. Everything is modern. But I always had a feeling for these old cottages.” He hunted down vintage plantation camp houses all over the island, pulled them apart, trucked them here, and reassembled them with modern amenities.