Waking Up in Eden Read online

  Neither Carol nor Irene would trust us haoles with any important tasks, so we got the grunt work. We scooped poi into Dixie cups, added a few drops of water to keep it moist, wiped the cup clean, then covered it with a plastic top. “Water keeps it sour,” Irene told us. “Hawaiians like it sour, so it’s almost furry on top. I like it real sour,” she continued. “One of my favorite dinners is a can of sardines mixed with shoyu sauce, a little sesame oil, and fresh poi on top.” Just the thought made my tongue recoil.

  For two long days we worked. Carol’s family already had its own imu pit that dominated their small backyard like an open grave. Mary and Ellen hauled pine logs to stoke up the fire, while Beth, Irene, and others chopped onions, olives, and boiled potatoes for potato and macaroni salads, staples of a modern luau. Carol’s fisherman husband, Sol, diced fifteen pounds of fresh marlin for poke, then mixed it with flecks of seaweed. Grandpa Lovell made long rice in huge aluminum pots at his house next door. Irene and Carol scraped salmon into mushy pulp for the lomi-lomi. A neighbor stretched fishing line between her hands and used it to cut small cubes of kulolo, a sticky cake of dark purple taro and coconut, similar in richness and texture to marzipan.

  The imu fire still raged after several hours, heating bowling-ball-sized lava rocks until they burned an incandescent red. When the flames banked down into coals, the men lined huge wire pans with aluminum foil to hold a hundred-pound pig, headless and quartered. They added six turkeys wrapped in foil, as well as sweet potatoes and vats of rice for rice pudding — other modern luau accoutrements. The men pulled the wire cages onto the fire and covered them with a fragrant layer of split banana stalks. To get them evenly spread apart, they had to step on the coals. As they walked on fire in heavy boots, billowing clouds of heat and smoke cloaked them.

  We laid fans of ti leaves over the pit in an overlapping design. Quickly, six men pulled a sheet of plastic over it all, then rushed to shovel cold ashes and dirt all along the edges, sealing in heat and steam. They all looked at one another, about to congratulate themselves, when Sol hit himself on the head with the heel of a hand. “The bags! We forgot the bags!”

  Nearby a pile of wet burlap bags lay untouched. Frantically, the crew shoveled the dirt away, struggling through the heat and smoke to pull away the plastic. They arranged the bags, then reclosed the pit to steam overnight. “What did the Hawaiians do before they had plastic?” I teased Sol.

  “That’s a good question,” he said.

  The next morning we returned at dawn to uncover the pit. The men pulled the smoked meat off the bone and carried big trays to long tables set up in the open carport. Six of us paddlers, dressed in aprons over our shorts, worked quickly with tongs to remove all gristle, bone, and skin, shredding the meat into fine pieces. We diverted crispy pigskin and crackling outer meat to a special pan. Irene carried it over to Grandpa Lovell’s house, a trail of kids behind her, all begging. I followed, too, and we gorged ourselves on it before Grandma Lovell took it. “We’ll chop it up for saimin,” she said.

  We worked all day, then rushed home to change into our Kawaikini pink and blue team T-shirts, ready to report for duty at our clients’ house. We helped the young mother decorate picnic tables with balloons and stuffed animals in honor of the birthday girl, who toddled around in a red and white kimono. As guests arrived, a five-piece band played Hawaiian songs. A curtain strung between two palms served as a “fish pond” for kids to troll for a gift. Doughnuts dangled on strings for a messy doughnut-eating contest.

  In the carport, Mary dished kalua pig and turkey while Ellen manned the poi cups and long rice. Beth, the youngest team member, distributed lomi-lomi salmon and marlin poke. My job was to dish out the salads, as well as a bowl of precious opihi — meat from tiny periwinkles picked from rocks, as prized as Beluga caviar and almost as expensive.

  Every time we sensed that no one could see us, Beth and I pounced on the food, stuffing ourselves on tender, smoky pork and turkey, free from fat and gristle. “That’s how it’s supposed to be,” Carol informed me. Even so, I declined the special treat of lomi-lomi salmon mixed with poi. As the guests finished their last helpings, we scrubbed dishes and packaged copious leftovers into big Ziploc plastic bags. Part of the tradition, Puna insisted, included sending relatives home with leftovers.

  One of the doctors, Karen, had failed to show for any of the preparations over the two days. But at the end of the event, she appeared in jeans to help clean up. “I’ve been on call all weekend,” she explained.

  One paddler went to hug Sol and thank him for all the work he did.

  “It’s what makes a family,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Renegade Plant Rescuer

  WITH SOME ANXIETY, I drove through the cane fields to reach a rundown, ramshackle house. A once-grand portico sagged forlornly over a parked Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Oldsmobile with three flat tires and a registration sticker that had expired two years ago. Keith Robinson’s mother, Helen, wore the vacant smile and quizzical expression of advanced senility as she wandered around the front yard. Her sweater bagged and had been buttoned crookedly. “In case you haven’t guessed, there isn’t a lot of money left,” Keith said quietly, as we loaded his truck. He set down on its seat his food for the day: a half loaf of store white bread and three bags of potato chips.

  “Aren’t you bringing water, Keith? I have two quarts in my backpack.”

  “No, ma’am. I usually work the whole day without water.” The pickup truck rattled and jostled us harshly as we left the cane plains and climbed through scruffy dry forest. Robinson reached around behind his seat. “Oh, gee,” he said with elaborate nonchalance, “I forgot my shoulder holster and pistol. Normally I carry weapons as a matter or course. Particularly when taking a woman up to the preserve.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Might run into outlaws, bad guys, marijuana growers,” he said brusquely. After an hour we reached an isolated spot in the west side’s backcountry, eleven miles above Waimea. He put on his trademark Kelly-green construction hardhat. On foot, he led me across a narrow concrete dam over a ditch and up a hill to an unmarked clearing, then stopped.

  “Welcome to the Kauai Outlaw Preserve,” he said with a sardonic grin.

  As PROMISED, JOHN RAPOZO had arranged an initial meeting for me with Robinson a week before. I knew it was a chance for Robinson to decide whether I was trustworthy. When he picked me up in his battered pickup, I was surprised by his nondescript looks: thin, very pale, with gray hair clipped short around a receding hairline. I insisted he call me by name rather than the ma’am he kept using, but he shook his head earnestly. “It’s my upbringing, ma’am. I’ve been taught to treat ladies with respect.” Inside the truck, where my legs would have rested, were newspapers, crumbled bags, empty soda cans, and about fifty pounds of other trash. I edged onto the seat with my knees under my chin, then tried to brace myself against the jarring, bumpy ride of a truck whose shocks had long been shot. He didn’t need much prompting to start what became an all-day monologue. Before he would take me to the preserve, he said, he needed to educate me about “realities.”

  We drove up the Waimea Canyon Road to the mountains, Robinson talking a mile a minute. “First thing you have to understand is that the environmental movement is based on massive lies,” he lectured. “The eco-Nazis are perfecting a fiction that Hawaii’s native species can be saved. But native plants are biologically incompetent. They’re far less efficient than nonnative species in extracting nutrients and water from the soil. They recover much slower from grazing than nonnative species. They cannot compete for sunlight. Their seed dispersal systems are far poorer. Their root systems are a lot shallower. They lack the internal mechanisms that nonnative species have, such as resistance to disease or lack of rainfall.”

  Yet while Robinson harshly recited the botanical deficiencies of Hawaiian plants, he was still devoting his life to trying to save them. Why? I asked. He shook his head, chuckling, as if bemus
ed at his own folly in a noble yet doomed mission. “It’s the way I was brought up,” he says. “To take care of the land.”

  It’s not the first time a Robinson has tried to stage a last stand against the intrusion of civilization. Since his great-greatgreat-grandmother Eliza Sinclair bought the island of Niihau in 1868, the Sinclairs and their descendants, the Gay and Robinson families, have tried to preserve it as the last pure settlement of Hawaiian life. Often called the Forbidden Island, Niihau still harbors about two hundred Hawaiians who live without cars and only a few electric generators. It’s the last place on earth where the native Hawaiian language is still spoken daily. Visitors are not allowed unless invited, and any resident who chooses to leave may never come back. The Robinson stewardship has been both praised for preserving a last scrap of authentic antique culture and condemned as feudal dictatorship, a remnant of colonial society, rife with abuse.

  Ever since the Sinclair family acquired Niihau, the island has been as much albatross as prize. The widowed Mrs. Sinclair, then sixty-two, and her large family arrived in Hawaii from New Zealand in 1868 looking for a new place to settle. King Kamehameha V offered them Niihau, the small island that lay seventeen miles northwest of Kauai. The king demanded ten thousand dollars, and they paid it in gold. No one told the Sinclairs that the island had received record high rainfalls the previous two years. After the family settled on Niihau, the lush green meadows quickly returned to their usual state of drought, and the freshwater lakes dried up into brackish mudflats.

  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.”

  WHEN 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 meas
uring 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.