Waking Up in Eden Read online

  I had told her, “Now, Mom. Come out to Hawaii in March, after the Garden’s board meeting,”

  “I’d rather come in February when the weather’s bad here,” she repeated.

  We’ve already been over that. “I just can’t do it then. I’ll be running around getting ready for the board meeting. March is better,” I said with a finality meant to close the discussion.

  She and I usually reverted to patterns established in my rebellious teenager years. Mothers generally fall into two categories: those who abandon or those who smother. Oddly she was both. I resisted her intrusiveness, her supervision, and her constant inquisitiveness, countering by withdrawing into quiet secrecy. Her only career advice was so retro, so unliberated: Study nursing so I could marry a doctor. I felt an unspoken dialogue underneath most of my exchanges with Mom. You missed all the important things in life, she’d reproach me with her eyes. Had I? I would answer. Poor Mom. She wanted us all to be conventional, settled, with happy family lives. Instead, she had two daughters who were non-producers, her name for childless women.

  “Romeo and Juliet” one of their friends had called them, in explanation of why their deaths came so closely together. We never knew exactly why Mom died, as we elected no autopsy — she was dead anyway, we figured. “Don’t you know? She died of a broken heart,” said my brother. Some cruelly implied that she was better off this way. I resented the easy assumption that she simply gave up and died rather than face life alone. I wanted to shout: “Where do you think we are? India? We don’t throw the wife on the husband’s funeral pyre!”

  And yet, guiltily, I realized that without parents I could do whatever I wanted. My own father had quoted Freud to me: “No man is free until his father is dead.” Adulthood had finally arrived, and I had no excuses. I had protested their vision of conventionality for me but now realized that I had adopted and internalized those constraints as my own. I could peel off cultural expectations, parental approval, and outdated identity struggles, yet I still needed to discover what remained at the core. The task of man is consciousness, Jung said. Looking up into the vast night sky, I felt immeasurably small, as if I were at the bottom of an immense glassed snowflake dome, shaken until every particle whirls.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A Walk on Mahaulepu — Deconstructing Extinction

  WHENEVER IN NEED of a restoration of the spirit, I drove to Mahaulepu, the stretch of deserted white sand I deemed the best beach on earth. My purpose was often simply to be on the beach, to see it, feel the warmth of the sand or let the infinity of the waves wash over me while I made my amateur naturalist’s observations.

  As sundown approached, I lurched from side to side along the rutted road trying to miss the deepest potholes. More than once I’d gotten stuck in a big mud hole. But willing young locals who’d been diving for tako — octopus — came along and cheerfully pushed me out. On either side of the dirt track, tall silver tassels of sour grass, Digitaria insularis, rippled elegantly in the breeze across gentle hills. Both it and a shorter, more purple finger grass, Chloris radiata, are native to the Pacific tropics, which means they are growing, more or less, in a place close to their origin.

  That couldn’t be said of most of what I saw. As I neared the beach, light blue and violet morning glory blooms gaily lined the roadside. It’s become a pest plant. A ring-neck pheasant burst into the air with a soft thudding. Before such introductions were tightly controlled, modern hunters imported pheasants and other game birds to the islands. At the end of an even more deeply rutted, muddy road lay a small cove, gloriously empty at the end of the day.

  Walking along the shoreline, I stopped at a small tidal pool to watch tiny fish zip away from my intruder’s eyes. The endless stretch of turquoise Pacific, the meeting ground of sand and surf and the glow of the sun, put me in a state of serene coexistence with the island elements. The sea reminded me of its infinite power to break mountains into grains of sand, to wash away entire islands, to rise and fall in waves for vast, endless eons. I saw our human world as subject to its rhythms and pace, as it undulates and roars without acknowledgment of our presence.

  After every big storm I searched for the petroglyphs, although I never expected to find them. Even Nelson Abreu, the Grove Farm security guard who locks and unlocks the Mahaulepu gate in mornings and evenings, had never seen them. One lucky morning after a storm, a sandstone ledge at water’s edge had surfaced, revealing the carved outline of a turtle about the size of my hand. Nearby, a primitive one-armed man with a spear was scratched in the soft stone. Later that day I rushed back with my friend Fran to share the sighting. By then the tide had started to surge in, settling sand over the rock ledge, and we could not find the carvings.

  At the end of the beach, the brown muddy water of Waiopili Stream empties into the ocean. I bent aside dusty milo trees to head upstream, then veered toward a sheer limestone bluff. In the corner, a triangular cave entrance beckoned. I often crouched down to hop through a low tunnel, damp and clammy. The dark entrance widened almost immediately, leading to a dappled-sunlit open sinkhole.

  David A. Burney, a scrawny paleontologist from Fordham University, had begun drilling thirty-foot-deep samples into this unusual limestone cave system. When he first popped up on Kauai, Dr. Klein immediately befriended him. Bill encouraged Burney to put together an ambitious project proposal and lent him living quarters in a Garden cottage. The sinkhole began to yield an extraordinary diversity of plant and animal remains, remarkably preserved.

  Long gone are the King Tut glory days of archeology when diggers exhumed treasure chambers of ancient rulers. Nowadays, archeologists detect the presence of humans from microscopic particles of charcoal. They reconstruct diet and agricultural economies from the tiniest of fossilized seeds and whole plant ecologies from spores or, in the case of Dave Burney, duck turds.

  Not much carbon dating of fossils or other remains had been carried out in Hawaii, and on Kauai in particular. There was too little money and not enough interest until now. As a result, for years more than six hundred archeological samples sat unanalyzed at the Bishop Museum. But Burney brought impressive credentials to the task and won grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Geographic Society. He had used carbon dating and other paleoecological techniques in Madagascar caves to pinpoint the period when extinct lemurs and a dwarf hippopotamus flourished. He dated human arrival on Puerto Rico and studied the relationship between humans and cheetahs in Africa. In 1988, he performed carbon-dating experiments on a cache of duck coprolites — fossilized turds — deposited in a Maui lava tube by an extinct waterfowl. By analyzing pollen grains and spores, Burney determined that the duck ate a diet of almost exclusively fern fronds.

  He was drawn to the Kauai sinkhole, the largest intact limestone cave system in the Hawaiian Islands, because it was so easily accessible yet almost entirely undisturbed. Old maps showed that a large pond had flooded the entrance prior to the twentieth century. Because the present floor is still damp in spots, and because it lies only a few feet above sea level, Burney theorizes that a lake or marsh likely occupied the site. All these factors meant that sand and silty clay slowly accumulated on the sinkhole floor, undisturbed. Each layer trapped and preserved mollusk shells, pollen spores, tree seeds, and animal bones, as well as tools and other human detritus. Determine a date for each layer and decode history.

  Burney argues that no other single date is more important in evaluating possible causes for extinctions than the arrival of humans. Although he exudes an air of a mad scientist, Burney looks more like an Amish farmer, with a knobby nose and a long, scraggly white beard. His cheery optimism attracted more than three hundred volunteers on Kauai, who willingly got covered in brown mud head to toe.

  Investigators and his trained volunteers removed sediment by trowel, teaspoon, or hand, then wet-screened the material in fine mesh boxes. They set out bones and shells to air-dr
y, while sealing perishable wood, seeds, and wooden artifacts into plastic containers for storage in refrigerators.

  Back in mainland labs, experts analyzed samples from each sediment layer for the sudden presence and volume of microscopic charcoal particles — evidence of fire, and an effective method to elucidate human arrival.

  Some of the foremost experts on bird, mammal, and mollusk fossils, as well as Warren Wagner of the Smithsonian, compared the Mahaulepu fossils with the vast holdings in their museums and herbariums. The result is a ten-thousand-year natural history of Kauai, all in one place.

  About four hundred thousand years ago, chalky sand dunes solidified into rock. Acidic groundwater carved the Mahaulepu cave, occasionally depositing mollusks and other sea creatures on its floor. The walls weakened. The roof collapsed about seven thousand years ago, nearly blocking the cave entrance and sealing it against incoming tides. Silt and sand slowly settled, trapping shells from at least fourteen different endemic land snails, a giant land crab, and more than forty bird species — about half now extinct on Kauai.

  A bone fragment from the ignoble Pacific rat denotes the first presence of arriving Polynesians. Burney found the fragment of a pelvic bone of Rattus exulans ten feet down, in layers of sediment dating from A.D. 1039 to 1241. No doubt the rodent had stowed away on Polynesian canoes. While modernists tend to blame white Europeans for all the extinctions in Hawaii, the wreckage actually began as soon as any humans, white or brown, stepped foot on the fragile island ecosphere. The bones of many birds now extirpated from Kauai can still be found in the sinkhole’s layers from the Polynesian era — the Laysan duck and the Hawaiian hawk, for instance — but they and endemic snails became more scarce. Burney’s crew found bones of large flightless ducks — evidence that the turtle-jawed moa-nalo once waddled over the island. Probably related to the mallard, it had grown as big as a turkey, equipped with a tortoise-like beak to mow down grasses like a turtle.

  By the time the Renaissance occurred in Europe (A.D. 1430 – 1665) artifactual evidence indicates that Polynesians lived near the sinkhole, tossing their postprandial bones and other refuse into it. Historians have long presumed that the new Hawaiians hunted and roasted the fat, flightless ducks, thereby quickly contributing to the extinction of the moa-nalos. But although Burney found lots of chicken, dog, and pig bones from feasts, flightless duck skeletons had already become scarce by this time.

  Pollen, seed, and plant fossils show that the early Hawaiians found a profusion of native trees and other plants growing along the dry coast — rare Kauai species that now survive only in small numbers, atop mountains or in high-elevation rain forests. Burney documented a wealth of native loulu (Pritchardia), including a species that no longer grows on Kauai. Interestingly, he also found screw pines, or hala trees, extensively used by native Hawaiians for weaving and long presumed to have been imported by the earlier Polynesians. Not so, says Burney. They predate humans.

  Burney detected the arrival of Captain Cook on Kauai by the sudden presence of iron — nails, sharp tools, and other bits — previously unknown to the stone-age islanders. Even before Cook, the Hawaiians had cleared much of the coastal lands on Kauai for complex agricultural systems. They dammed lowlands to grow taro, and constructed seawater fish ponds. But while the Polynesians had contributed to the loss of the native island ecology, it was nothing compared to the rapid and chaotic transformation after contact with Europeans.

  Many previously well-represented plant species disappeared entirely. Others became increasingly rare. The remaining native terrestrial snail species declined after European arrival, then disappeared entirely once a carnivorous American snail arrived — Euglandina rosea. During the nineteenth century, the sinkhole’s abundant bones of cows, horses, and other European livestock supported historical accounts and photographs that feral livestock ranged along the coast, eating any vegetation in sight. Burney’s pollen data confirmed the open and disturbed character of the landscape at this time and the introduction of trees and other European plants. A thick layer of sand from the denuded landscape blew into the sinkhole and settled. By the twentieth century, plantation owners drained the pond outside the cave, plowed the nearby fields, and quarried the hills. All led to the highest sedimentation rates recorded at the site — more than one hundred times the previous rate.

  Ironically, I seek spiritual restoration at Mahaulepu, although the site is yielding a record of the sad loss of Hawaii’s biology. While Warren Wagner studies the genesis of the island’s plant life, Dave Burney deconstructs its demise. Yet Burney has big plans for the Mahaulepu sinkhole. On the mainland, sometimes landscapes can be restored by a process known as ecological recovery — simply let the system alone, keep people out of it, and the native landscape will eventually recover. “That never works in Hawaii,” says Burney. “No management is the worst. Exotics gain the upper hand.”

  Burney wants to stage what is called a “rehabilitation,” an attempt to restore the elements of the sinkhole’s original ecology without trying a complete restoration or recreation of the original system. Already he has compiled a wish list of trees and plants that would have been at home here. Steve Perlman and Ken Wood have been collecting seeds from elsewhere on Kauai and throughout Polynesia to grow in the Garden’s nursery. In the following months and years I’d return to the sinkhole, astonished by the lost world being reconstructed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mango Madness

  AS I SETTLED MORE into Kauai, I became involved in the lives of new friends. So when the coconut wireless telegraphed the news that John Rapozo had throat cancer, I worried, even more when I heard that his doctor wanted to removed his vocal chords. The image of Big John without a voice struck me as impossibly unfair. His rough island pidgin, the authoritative commands leveled at other men, the sentences that grew quicker and tumbled together when he was excited — they were as much a part of John Rapozo as his calloused fingers.

  I telephoned his home that night.

  “John, what’s going on?” “The doctor said he’s going to cut. He said if he don’t cut, it’s going to be all over for me.”

  As I walked into Garden headquarters the next morning, Dr. Klein was bent over his secretary’s desk, arranging flights to Honolulu. He had gone into his memory banks of all the hundreds of people he had charmed over the years. He remembered a prominent cancer research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Magically, John Rapozo had an appointment tomorrow with the best cancer doctor in Honolulu. Dr. Klein quietly paid for John’s airfares.

  After a week of tests in Honolulu, John announced that there would be no surgery. He now spoke in a scratchy whisper, as radiation treatment had begun. “The doctor, he laid down the law,” he said. “No more smoking. And he said I’ve got to lose weight and eat right. I’ll never sing again. But I’ll talk.”

  As often happens in crisis, our friendship deepened during the hard coming months.

  THE TRADE WINDS had arrived from the northeast Pacific, exhaling their soft, welcoming breezes, blowing out the recent humidity, and tempering the hot tropical sun with puffs of clouds. The trades transform summer from unbearable to paradise, and bring a lightness and sparkle to the air, particularly on Kauai.

  One Saturday morning, I walked into the clear morning air to join James outside the cottage. He seemed to have realized that I would not change his routine or duties, so he had relaxed and started showing me the treasures in my yard. James plucked a couple of low leaves from the lollipop-shaped “Autograph Tree.” Using a blunt pencil, he scratched my name on a shiny leaf. A half hour later, the letters developed bright and clear, like a print in a photo lab. The macadamia trees had started to drop dark brown, globe-shaped nuts. When their thick husks split, they revealed hard marbles. My trusty Wise Encyclopedia of Cookery, source for solving all cooking conundrums, warned that the hard shell would crack an ordinary nutcracker. When I told James this, he laughed. “You got to find a rock with a little dent in it, put it in, sm
ash it. Don’t eat too many, you get trots.” The lychee trees now bore cherry-sized pink balls with a hard rind covered with spikes. Their cloudy white flesh resembles a peeled grape. The mango trees grew thousands of elongated oblong fruit of dark jade that blushed yellow, bronze, and reddish. James sniffed dismissively at them. “Water mangos. Watery inside,” he said. On Kauai the prized mangos are Haydens. The gardening staff carefully monitor the Hayden trees in Allerton Garden. When the mangos turn into a red ripeness, the fruit mysteriously disappears.

  But plenty of people liked my mangos. My friend Jeanie came over with her own bags and took away dozens. She sent some of them back, in the form of Mango Betty, made just like the apple version, although tangier. Rick Hanna picked a year’s supply to freeze for mango smoothies. Not content to reach the lower branches, he used a picker on an extension pole to go after perfect specimens at the top. We peeled them with potato peelers at my kitchen sink, then sliced and bagged chunks until our hands were almost raw.

  Sometimes locals came and asked for permission to cut some of the bamboo shoots that lined the hill drive. I had pestered James several times to dig up some shoots so I could see how to eat them myself. He disapproved: “Shoots are bamboo keikis (babies). Dig up all the keikis and pretty soon, no more bamboo.”

  All the same, today he went to the tool shed and came out with a machete. We walked up and down the bamboo tunnel, searching for young stalks. James kneeled by a thick, pointed spear that looked as tough as a rhinoceros horn. He whacked it off near the ground and handed me a two-foot shoot. Not satisfied, he sheared off a more tender, one-foot spear. I boiled and boiled it, until it turned a translucent pink and tasted awful. Later, John Rapozo counseled that I should have frequently changed the cooking water.