Waking Up in Eden Page 2

  He never met my eyes and continued to leaf through papers. Okay, I would not have to write about real estate, but I could forget about going abroad. Or anywhere else. I wasn’t going anywhere. He ran through a list of trumped-up offenses. “That’s a bunch of crap,” I said. I may have sounded tough. But as I stood, I felt like I teetered on a tightrope. As I walked out the door I knew I had reached a dead end.

  Enough of my friends had signed on to The New York Times and The Washington Post that I might be able to land at either one. Nausea swept over me, and an icy sweat slid down my spine and withered my spirit.

  TEN DAYS LATER, I woke up at 3 a.m. and sat upright in bed. Why not take that job in Hawaii?

  Why the hell not?

  I switched on the lamp and moved across the hall to the study. I pulled down an atlas and turned to the Hawaiian Islands. Dozens of tiny specks and dots of land formed a chain that started in the mid-Pacific and stretched northwest for 1,500 miles. The Hawaiian archipelago is the most isolated place on earth, in terms of distance from continents. Los Angeles lies 2,550 miles away; Tokyo 3,860, with nothing in between.

  The southernmost Big Island (Hawaii) anchors the chain. Ovals and amoeba shapes of Maui, Lanai, Molokai, and Oahu bunch together like a closely strung necklace. Smaller, circular Kauai lies farther north and west, distanced from the rest.

  As an adventure, it struck me as suitably remote and exotic, but not all that daring. My own grandmother, Otelia Breck, risked more when she traveled from Germany to Ellis Island in 1909 at age twenty-four, alone, unattached, with no English and little money. Plus, the top honeymoon destination in America couldn’t be too wild and woolly. I feared drinks with umbrellas and tourist hulas. But I had dreamed of living in the pastoral countryside, with a pared-down life far from suburban materialism and out of reach from corporate America.

  Nature — rugged, ferocious, and raw — always had a restorative effect on me and quieted my inner storms. Henry Beston, in the foreward to a new edition of his classic book, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, wrote famously of our need to return to nature. “Nature is part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.”

  I wanted my journey to the outermost island to bring me closer to that divine mystery. A time for serious reflection, for stilling the unease over what I had not accomplished in the first half of life and for discovering what I wanted for the second half. A chance to revise my biography.

  As I continued my research over the next few days, I discovered that Kauai was nicknamed “the Garden Island.” Considered by many to be the most beautiful of the islands, it was also the greenest. A year-round population of fifty thousand barely filled its 550 square miles, much of it impenetrable jungle or sheer cliffs. The inaccessible Mount Waialeale, claimed to be the wettest spot on earth with 624 inches of rainfall per year, dominated the interior. Lavish amounts of water, sun, and fertile soil provided ideal growing conditions. Yet Hawaii was America’s imperiled Eden. Called “the Extinction Capital of the World,” Hawaii had lost more plant and animal species than any other place in America, with many more wavering on the brink. Five hundred and forty U.S. plant and animal species had now become extinct — almost half, or 250 of those, had occurred in Hawaii. I wanted to get there before the cosmic outlaws had taken them all.

  All these troubles made Hawaii a botanist’s paradise, a microcosm for carrying out important, planet-saving work. If we can’t save 550 miles, how can we save the rest of the earth?

  Dr. Klein’s National Tropical Botanical Garden was grander and more extensive than I had realized. An empire. On the island of Kauai, there were two NTBG jewels: the imposing Allerton Garden, one of the great garden estates of the world; and the Limahuli Garden and Preserve, a one-thousand-acre treasure of native species and ancient remnants of a Hawaiian settlement. On the tip of Maui, the NTBG managed the most sacred site in all of Polynesia, Piilanihale heiau — a sixteenth-century war temple where human sacrifices were thought to have occurred. Two preserves on the Big Island were untouched expanses of open territory. On the mainland, the NTBG owned the elegant Kampong in Coconut Grove, Florida, home and estate of plant explorer David Fairchild.

  Granted a rare charter by the United States Congress in 1964, the Garden’s mission was to serve as a national resource to preserve Hawaii’s threatened tropical flora. Yet Dr. Klein sketched a portrait of a closed, reclusive institution. For several years as a cultural reporter, I had chronicled the transformation of the quirky Barnes Foundation, the repository of the world’s foremost collection of French impressionist and postimpressionist art. It was preposterously located in a mansion just outside of Philadelphia. Founded by eccentric Dr. Albert Barnes, whose prescient collecting taste was unfortunately accompanied by bombastic ravings about art education, his foundation was run by cultlike followers who operated it like a private club. From what I learned through Bill Klein, Allerton Garden might rival the Barnes Foundation in its determination to remain hidden. His mission to turn Allerton and the other sites into true public gardens appealed to me. It might be fun to work from the inside for once, instead of trying to burrow my way in as a journalist. Dr. Klein didn’t resemble a fairy godmother, but perhaps he was.

  I had never seriously contemplated leaving journalism or the Inquirer; I imagined I would grow old there, perhaps die with a half-written story still in the computer. But now that I had made the decision to leave I saw it as inevitable. James Michener in Hawaii, his wonderful if sometimes fictionalized history of the islands, concocted what to me was an entirely believable tale of why natives of Bora-Bora left their home around A.D. 800 to sail five thousand miles north, thrusting into the unknown, eventually landing in Hawaii as the first settlers. Michener wrote that powerful and greedy high priests imposed worship of a new god on the Bora-Bora populace as a thinly disguised grab for political power. The priests killed anyone who questioned the new order. The rebellious King Tamatoa watched with horror as his best warriors were slain. He realized he had to leave. Michener wrote, “He saw, as if in a revealing vision, how foolish he had been to combat the will of the inevitable. New gods were being born, and new gods conquer; but what Tamatoa did not realize was that the contentment of soul which his confession induced was merely the prerequisite for a decision toward which he had been fumbling for some months.”

  Journalism as I knew it would not recover for at least another generation or two. A vast bloodletting had just begun. News chain owners and their bean counters and finance directors triumphed in ascendancy, looting news outlets for greater and greater profits. Perhaps worse, during these fat times while newspapers were making a killing, no serious research or development was undertaken to plot the future of what we’d soon be calling “dead-tree journalism.” As the newfangled Internet came barreling down the track, our leaders’ solution was to give its news away on free Web sites. And once that happened, they couldn’t figure out a way to get it all back, even to save their skins. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

  Yet leaving brought a sense of failure. I felt akin to Michener’s Tamatoa as he led his people into exile: “No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure; but having failed in one location and having been ejected, it is possible that in the next he will be a little wiser. . . .

  “Only if they had been craven could they have swallowed their humiliation and remained on Bora Bora; this they would not do. It is true that they fled into the dark, but each man carried as his most prized possession his own personal god of courage.”

  Circumstances have to pile on top of one another, pushing us out from the comfortable heap and forcing us either to act decis
ively, or quietly accept what is unacceptable and slowly fade away. Moving to another place would not be enough. I needed a new vocation, one that would capture me as fiercely as journalism once had. Perhaps the garden would become my calling. If not, I sensed it would at least provide a place to heal.

  Was this not destiny, after all, that my path that had begun in a garden of English perennials should lead to the Garden Isle?

  DESPITE MY GROWING EXCITEMENT, preparations for leaving Philadelphia plunged me into deep anxiety. Job, career, house, comfortable niche of friends — I had put them all on the line. I comforted myself that true adventures come without safety nets. “If not now, when?” was a question that we women of a certain age use to justify an extravagant purchase. Not many role models stood out for me to follow. In her revelatory book, Writing a Woman’s Life, Barnard professor Carolyn Heilbrun traced how many women of accomplishment — Virginia Woolf and Colette, for example — did not come to their most serious endeavors, their awakening to their true selves and voices, until after they turned fifty. Those late bloomers also had to forge ahead into terra incognita, avoiding the only real narratives society offered them — either the marriage story that ends when the prince and princess walk down the aisle, or the erotic tale, in which characters like Madame Bovary flout social conventions for passionate affairs, only to be punished by early death, ostracism, or suicide. Not much of a choice. Even now, in twenty-first century America, we are still trying to figure out our own narratives for aging. Heilbrun wrote about the challenge. “As we age, many of us who are privileged . . . those with some assured place and pattern in their lives, with some financial security — are in danger of choosing to stay right where we are, to undertake each day’s routine, and to listen to our arteries hardening. . . . Instead, we should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular.”

  I remembered an old garden proverb: Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is.

  As I packed, I heard warnings. There’s nothing to do in Hawaii. It’s a place where you turn on the television and watch basketball in the afternoon. Food is bad. Architecture uninteresting. No suitable men.

  It may be good for the soul to dispossess every few years, but it takes fortitude to dismantle a house and confront your unfilled hopes and intentions, assigning them destinations: Put into storage on the East Coast; pack for Hawaii; discard.

  Waterford crystal I’d received as wedding presents and used once a year. Good riddance!

  The canning jars bought at the height of vegetable production in my garden. Never again. Out!

  The plaid wool armchair next to the fire. Storage.

  The embroidered baby’s quilt I stitched in college, so sure then that I would have a babe in arms of my own someday. Someday hadn’t come and I had never gotten around to finishing it. Storage.

  I felt as if I were throwing out a hope chest.

  Friends threw a good-bye luau, complete with roast pig. Girlfriends danced a hula enacting the story of Lucinderella as she bid Aloha Oe to traffic jams and meddlesome editors. They prepared the traditional send-off gift, a mock front page. Headlines read WHIRLWIND LUCINDA KAUAI BOUND; ISLANDERS BEWARE, FLEESON EN ROUTE.

  My charming little house sold after only one day on the market. The small profit paid off all my credit card debt. I had no mortgage, no bills, no husband, no reason to stay. The question became not how could I leave, but why had I remained so long? I didn’t fit, never had, and more important, didn’t want to anymore. I was a woman who lived alone although I wasn’t sure that was a choice made by inclination or fate. I was going to a Pacific island to start all over again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Treasure Island

  FOR THE LAST twelve hundred years, the small Hawaiian Island of Kauai has been luring adventurers to its crystalline bays and rain-forested mountains. It was the first of the islands settled by voyaging Polynesians, and the first landfall of Captain James Cook. Called “the Separate Kingdom” by the Hawaiians because a treacherous one-hundred-mile channel protected it from invasion by King Kamehameha’s canoeing warriors, Kauai has kept this discrete status. Commuter jets from Honolulu make the trip in twenty minutes. As my plane passed over the white-flicked channel below, the Garden Island rose sharply from the waves, a fertile universe, primordial and undisturbed. Towering green sugarloaf mountains loomed over the rocky southern shore, indented here and there with crescents of pure white sand. Mist shrouded higher peaks in the distance. I sensed the quickening of pulse, the leap of spirit that comes with the beginning of an adventure. It would be impossible for anyone to approach a small island from the air without feeling its call of mystery, perhaps risk and danger. Or treasure.

  As we neared, the plane banked around a mountain hump, so close I felt I could reach out and touch its sharp cliffs, defined like a contour map that fell off sharply without mercy into the turmoil of crashing waves. We approached a toy-sized harbor surrounded by a rolling carpet of a seaside golf course and a patchwork quilt of agricultural fields.

  As we disembarked into a hick-town terminal, languid slackkey guitar music twanged over the airport PA system. Resort employees in gaily printed aloha shirts hung purple orchid leis on many passengers.

  No one greeted me. My arms felt heavy, as if swimming through the moist air laden with thick, pungent scents of tropical flowers. Five minutes, and I felt sticky with perspiration. A sullen driver appeared, the husband of a Garden employee pressed into duty to drop me at my new house. He walked ahead of me to the car, reluctantly carrying one of my three heavy suitcases. Dr. Klein had gone to San Francisco for meetings but had sent ahead house keys to the cottage where I could live, rent-free. Unexpectedly, he had thrown in a company car as part of the deal.

  We drove without conversation through the county seat of Lihue, now a dilapidated main street with more than half of its businesses empty or boarded up. Three years earlier, the worst recorded hurricane in Hawaiian history had swept over the island. Recovery from Hurricane Iniki was obviously incomplete. We headed west on the two-lane Route 50, the island’s one and only highway. Banks of silver and green sugarcane waved on either side of the road.

  After about thirty minutes we passed a century-old factory building, whose roof had caved into a tawdry ruin. “Old pineapple cannery,” the surly driver ex plained. Huge, towering trees draped with thick jungle vines blocked the late-afternoon sun. As we turned onto a narrow, serpentine road, a curtain of vines parted to reveal a cemetery of junked cars and washing machines corroded by rust. After another sharp curve, we pulled into a dirt driveway to begin a long, slow uphill climb. Giant feathery bamboo trees enclosed the drive, their soaring branches meeting to form a Gothic tunnel. As the car ascended through the bam boo arches, I felt as if I were entering the nave of a filigreed green cathedral. So perfect was the Gothic illusion that I found myself listening for anthems and the crescendo of organs.

  We burst from the tunnel’s cloistered light into the hot tropical sun onto an immense open plateau of green lawn. Bent palm trees dotted the verdant expanse like hoops on a giant croquet field. I glimpsed a one-story cottage at the far end, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. As we neared I saw that the house perched on stilts, one edge overlooking a jungle ravine, so that a wide expanse of windows opened straight into treetops. It had a childlike appeal, like a grownup’s tree house. Spiky bromeliads, staghorn ferns, and orchids sprouted from forks in surrounding trees, casting the house in calming shade.

  The driver set my bags on the front porch and sped off. I unlocked the glass door and stepped in. A rush of musty overheated air enveloped me. As I struggled to open a locked window, a flesh-colored lizard dropped onto my head.

  Eeek! It fell to the floor and slithered away. Gecko.

  The cottage’s main room was a huge expanse walled with banks of windows, although dirt filmed the panes. Scratches in the black-painted wood floors revealed under coats of many colors, like a Jackson P
ollock canvas. A sagging couch and a couple of rickety tables seemed sad and forlorn. In the kitchen, rust spots erupted on the door of an old refrigerator. Inside, an assortment of jars and bottles looked ancient and moldy. Ugh. I pulled open a creaky drawer to find silverware, rusty from tropical moisture.

  Down the hall in the bathroom, two mouse-sized roaches skittered across the floor. A pile of unsavory-looking sheets and towels lay crumpled on a bottom shelf. I turned on the faucet in a plastic lavender-tinted tub. A trickle of brown water dribbled out, accompanied by a loud clanging and knocking.

  Get out! Run! Get some cleaning supplies, some new sheets, some air!

  Outside, an old rusty Volkswagen Golf sat parked in the dirt drive. So this is the promised company car. No air-conditioning, I discerned with disappointment. As I reached up to adjust the rearview mirror, it came off in my hand like a cheap toy. Someday this might seem funny, I thought. At the moment, though, I felt trapped in a Goldie Hawn movie.

  Dr. Klein had frankly described the house as unoccupied for two years, and promised the Garden would fix it up. But the damage looked too extensive. And expensive.

  Hoping to get some immediate supplies, I drove to the nearest supermarket, Sueoka’s in Old Koloa Town, which sent me further into shock. A bewildering mishmash of goods, many labeled in foreign languages, were piled high along crowded aisles of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino foods. An incongruous selection of Portuguese delicacies was tucked amid large shelves of Polynesian and Hawaiian specialties. What strange land had I fallen into?

  I had wanted pastoral country, the real Hawaii, but this might be too real.

  I AWOKE IN A PANIC in the middle of the night. The air seemed to vibrate with weird noises, a confused cacophony of moans, low groans, and creaks that filled the terrible black outside the cottage. Ooooh, oooh, ahhh, ahhhh, oooooooh. Are there monkeys in Hawaii? The sinister black seemed so thick that I had to grope for a light switch, and sighed to see that the clock read 3 a.m. My mind raced to what a horrible fix I had gotten myself into. I knew that I couldn’t sleep again, so I set up the laptop on the dining room table and began to write: