Waking Up in Eden (9 page)

Throughout his career, Perlman regularly visited
Brighamia
populations. A few developed seeds, which Perlman collected and sent to botanists at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew; to Rancho Santa Anna Botanic Garden in California; and to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Florida. The botanists wrote back that they were successfully growing
Brighamia
.

But Perlman noticed that many of the
Brighamia
plants growing in the wild never produced seeds. They flowered, then the blossoms seemed to melt away without a trace. Fortunately, the plants were able to produce stamen heavy with golden pollen. So Perlman stepped in as surrogate father. He used a paintbrush, an old breeder's trick, to transfer pollen from the stamen on some plants into waiting pistils of others. A month later, he returned. It had worked. The plants developed fruit that ripened to seeds, giving him more to collect. He brought them back to the botanical garden.

F
RENCH COLLECTOR
J
ULES
R
EMY
first documented the genus
Brighamia
in 1851 on the islands of Niihau, Kauai, Molokai, and Maui and named it after William Tufts Brigham (1841 – 1926), a geologist and early collector of Hawaiian plants. Although one of the large Lobeliaceae family in Hawaii,
Brighamia
is the only lobelia with a succulent stem and ancillary inflorescences, or soft branches, that carry erect flowers. The weighty base allows it to rock in the wind. The succulent green leaves feel somewhat rubbery and store water during drought. Horizontal roots can penetrate deep crevasses in a sheer rock face.

The mere sight of a tall
Brighamia
can inspire awe but also a smile, because of its almost comical swollen base. In 1919, the botanist Joseph Rock recorded some specimens growing fifteen feet tall. More commonly it reaches three to six feet.

Perlman theorizes that very large moths once penetrated the six- to eight-inch-long flowers to serve as pollinators. Large sphinx moths — similar to those I thought were hummingbirds in my first days on Kauai — are likely candidates. Collectors used to commonly net Kauai's legendary green sphinx moth as it fluttered along the Na Pali Coast and across the high forests of Kokee State Park. But in the last fifty years, only twenty or so have been caught. Perlman believes that as
Brighamia
retreated to cliff edges, sphinx moths no longer ventured into the unprotected open where they could be snatched by aggressive cardinals or white-eyes. Without its natural pollinator, the
Brighamia
withered away.

By this time Perlman had tracked
Brighamia
onto the highest sea cliffs in the world, on the smaller island of Molokai, home of the infamous Kalaupapa leper colony. There he found the
Brighamia rockii
(named after Dr. Rock) species. Again he used his paintbrush.

Perlman had seen reports by botanists working in the early 1900s that
Brighamia
also grew on Haupu, the mountain hump that looms over Kauai's south shore. For six years, he looked for them without success, hiking all around its foothills, even hiring a helicopter to drop him off at the summit.

One Sunday in the early 1980s, he attended a party at the Lihue home of Chipper Wichman's grandmother Juliet Rice Wichman, one of the early Garden trustees and an avid plants-woman. Perlman confided to her his quest to find the lost
Brighamia
on Haupu. She remembered a long-ago party held near the canoe club on the Huleia River, in 1917. A couple of boys from the Lydgate family paddled directly across the river
and hiked partway up Mount Haupu. After about an hour, they returned holding big poles of plants —
Brighamia
!

Perlman immediately decided to retrace their route. He went to the canoe club, paddled a straight line across the river, and headed up a mountain gorge. Half an hour from the river, he approached a cliff, hiked around a corner, and found a small grove of
Brighamia
. That's how botanists work. Like detectives, they pore over the field notes of other botanists and herbarium records and pursue oral histories in order to track down plant populations.

Year after year, Perlman returned to the Haupu
Brighamia
drift of about a dozen plants. They served as the breeding stock for our botanical garden. Hurricane Iniki wiped them all out. One small plant survived alone in the Haupu gorge for a few years, but then it died. He used to get seeds from a few plants on Kauai near the ridge above Mahaulepu and the Kipu Kai gap, also on the south shore, but those plants also vanished after the hurricane.

Brighamia
colonies are crashing all over Hawaii.

Perlman is the first to admit that it's an uphill battle to convince people of the need to save rare and nearly extinguished plants. His local friends look at the Kauai jungles and don't see that the island's plants are in danger. It's all green, they say, not realizing that most of it nowadays is alien
scheffleras,
guavas, and other imports. In frustration, Perlman finally started to tell his friends that the native Hawaiian plants taste good in stir-fry, like bok choy. Only that convinced them that the plants were worth saving.

Selling the public on conservation of endangered species has
never been easy — that's why a big mammal like a whale or giant panda gets to be the poster child for such campaigns. The plant people have tried to construct a worldwide database for tracking plant populations and storing seeds, but not much has been done for Hawaii, where scientific collaboration seems almost nonexistent and tropical seeds are too pulpy to last very long. Botanists in general have typically been a timid lot, usually confined to their dusty herbariums. That was the beauty of Bill Klein — he realized that only by engaging a wider public would anything really be accomplished. He saw the botanical garden's real role as education. “People only will make an effort to save something they care about, and to care about it, they have to know about it,” he'd say.

Plants provide everything we humans need — the oxygen to breathe, crops to eat, grain to feed animals, even the fossil fuels we so greedily consume. There are many examples of obscure tropical rain forest plants that have proved to contain ingredients for valuable medicines or other uses. A native Hawaiian cotton plant, for instance, can't be spun into cloth, but was so disease resistant that commercial growers hybridized it to produce a stronger cotton.

The need to preserve the inhabitants, plant or animal, on Earth should be obvious enough; they exist, whether we humans have use for them or not. Who knows what we'll discover about them in the future? When tinkering with the machinery, don't throw any pieces away.

In my mind, just the very beauty of each species demands divine protection. We probably wouldn't miss the elimination of a trombone or two in a two-hundred-piece orchestra. But if you take away the oboes, then lose the violas, misplace the winds,
and remove the cymbals, you begin to hear a meager, dull band instead of a symphony.

Over the last twenty years, Perlman has pollinated by brush at least one hundred
Brighamia
plants. His collected seed yielded thousands of plants grown in the Garden nursery that have been sent to other Hawaiian botanical gardens.

A lot of people became familiar with
Brighamia
's dramatic story thanks to the film
Hidden Hawaii,
which played at the Waikiki IMAX theater in Honolulu for more than a decade. The filmmakers pushed Perlman to exaggerate his cliff climbing, portraying him stretched spread-eagle across rocks and dangling more precariously from precipices than his usual cautious style. Now you can buy a T-shirt with a picture of the semi-ugly little cabbage plant, a symbol of plant rescue.

But the publicity hasn't helped save the plant.

“Pretty soon, all
Brighamia
will die out,” says Perlman. “They are going very quickly and probably will be extinct in the wild in twenty years.”

N
IGHTS IN THE
Kleins'
ohana,
I delved into the literature of Hawaiiana. I plowed through the journals of Captain Cook's voyages aboard his ships,
Discovery
and
Resolution
, then attacked Jack London. London first visited Hawaii in 1904, then returned several times with his second wife, Charmian. They frequented Waikiki, where London learned to surf. Incongruously, he lived on Oahu when he wrote “To Build a Fire,” his most famous short story about death in Alaska's Arctic tundra. Mark Twain's
Letters from Hawaii
recounted his own travels throughout the islands in 1866. Writing dispatches for
The Sacramento Union,
Twain bought a sorry-looking horse to ride up the volcanoes, tried his hand at surfing, and ate poi at luaus. Back then, Hawaii was a mythic land, occupying a position in the American conscious as a faraway paradise of savages and bare-breasted beauties.

But it was Isabella Lucy Bird to whom I kept returning. Bird grew up a semi-invalid and amateur botanist, the spinster daughter of an English clergyman. A spinal deformity required her to lie down much of the time, and depression sometimes kept her in bed all day. In 1872, the year she turned forty, she sailed on a recuperative cruise to the South Seas. A typhoon
damaged her ship, and it limped into Honolulu Harbor. While the ship underwent repairs, so did she. For six months she explored the islands on horseback in what became a life-changing experience, then a book published under the title
Six Months in the Sandwich Islands.
Throwing off the restraints of a refined Victorian lady, Bird trekked by mule up the icy mountainside of Mauna Loa on the Big Island. She galloped the coast of Kauai at midnight, alone, and visited its enchanted rain forests. No camping in huts or long rides were too rough.

Many of her detailed accounts describing the Hawaiian flora and its lush jungle landscapes rent with pouring waterfalls were still accurate more than one hundred years later. Her writing helped me imagine nineteenth-century Hawaii, as well as understand it today. But it was her life story that intrigued me. I had only its briefest outlines. She never returned to Hawaii but went on to travel through Korea, Persia, Japan, and elsewhere, becoming the foremost British woman travel writer of her era.

“Her last years were sad, indeed,” wrote Terence Barrow, Ph.D., in the foreword to a 1974 paperback edition of her Hawaii book. Barrow recounted how Bird had married after Hawaii, but her husband died within five years. She lived out the next decades in loneliness, he said. Even with this sketchy information, I questioned whether we were hearing Barrow's personal views on the suitable life for ladies, or Isabella's own assessment. Any woman who had thrown off the shackles of convention, galloped alone at midnight through jungle ravines, and then went on to travel for the next thirty years on the back of yak, pony, mule, or stallion did not strike me as a woman paralyzed by early widowhood and sentenced to bleak loneliness.

Sad, indeed, eh? I rankled at this presumption that the most
celebrated female travel writer of the nineteenth century lived unfulfilled, despite her unorthodox success. Or was it precisely
because
of her unorthodox life you drew this conclusion, Mr. Terence Barrow, Ph.D.?

Isabella herself gave no hint of self-analysis in her writing; self-disclosure was not the Victorian style. Perhaps because of this lack of information, my imagination filled in the blanks. Here was a woman in profound midlife crisis who, after forty years of refinement, abandoned her corsets and petticoats to plunge headfirst into the tropics. She had not chosen an easy path, or one free from conflict and ambiguity. What made her take such a leap? It became my habit to pick up
Six Months in the Sandwich Islands
and read Isabella's description of each place I visited. I found myself comparing then and now. While she described Hawaii of a century ago, I wanted to report on its contrasts, the modern next to the archaic.

I kept wondering,
Isabella, what happened to you?

D
AVID
C
HANG WAITED
in the Koloa library parking lot, his face tight with irritation, almost tapping his foot because I was ten minutes late. About my age and graying at the temples, he was collecting an oral history of Koloa, so I wanted to consult him about Isabella Bird's sojourn in the area. Trying to conscript him as an ally, I pulled out a photocopy of an 1868 map I had found at the Kauai Historical Society. “I'm trying to figure out exactly where Isabella Bird traveled during her four weeks on Kauai,” I ventured. “She sailed in at Koloa Landing in 1873 and was met by Dr. James Smith.”

“Back then Koloa Landing was the third largest whaling port in all of Hawaii,” offered Chang, warming up. Now only a concrete
boat ramp remains, where outrigger canoe clubs put their crafts into the water and snorkelers dive in the thirty-five-foot-deep water.

“Dr. Smith must have brought her to Koloa on the old Hapa Road,” I said, tracing on the map the route of a now unused dirt track. Dr. Smith lived up the road in what Isabella described as a large adobe structure with a heavy thatched roof next to the old Koloa Church. The doctor put her up in a white thatched guest cottage overlooking Waikomo Stream.

Chang pondered, “The church has been rebuilt, but it's been on the same spot since 1835.” We walked up the road and crossed the street to the church grounds to find the bend in the stream she had described. No solid evidence of a cottage. But we rummaged through dead leaves and found a pile of broken bricks, stucco, and stones of an old hearth. It could easily date to the 1870s.

One local history book asserted that Isabella rode through the lands now owned by the botanical garden. On another trip, she trekked west to the town of Hanapepe. Chang provided confirmation. “Back in the old days,” he said, “Koloa Road and Route 50 didn't exist. Only one road traveled to the west side. Lauoho,” he said, running his finger on the map along the snake-curved road I knew well.