Waking Up in Eden Read online

  Then Robinson’s brother, Bruce, caught Garden field collector Ken Wood trespassing and marched him to the Waimea Police Station. “Wood had been pretending to be buddies,” Robinson remembered acidly. “I had given him a lot of stuff. Really rare stuff from Robinson land. When I got to the police station, Wood laughed at me. He told me, ‘This became necessary because you are such a selfish person.’ I got really mad. A police sergeant had to come between us. He thought I was going to take a swing.”

  Similar alliances and friendships with Oahu botanists Keith Woolliams from Waimea Botanical Garden and Charlie Lamoureux at Lyon Arboretum also dissolved in storms of perceived betrayal.

  “What do you think about when you’re up here?” I asked.

  “Think and you go crazy,” he said. “Mostly, I’m planning work. Many times I’m thinking bitterly about the government and how they’re not doing the work I’m doing. I’m getting real resentful about that.” I rested on a mossy rock. Sweat soaked my own shirt, even in the shade. I wilted in the midday heat. I noticed a pile of stuff under a tarp and asked him what it was.

  “I backpacked in five thousand pounds of concrete and now I have to bring in another five thousand pounds,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “To make a base for the composting toilet.” He pointed a few yards away to a large square mound the size of an outhouse, covered with blue plastic tarp.

  I was confused. “Who’s going to use it?” I questioned.

  He explained impatiently that it was part of his plan to use the preserve for ecotourism. The shrouded toilet made the skin on my scalp prickle. What motivates a man to break his back carrying materials to build a toilet up a steep trail and deep into the woods for nonexistent tourists? Assuming that he could ever organize such a thing, assuming that he could ever talk to tourists in civil terms, assuming they would want to ride an hour up a bumpy road, shimmy across a narrow dam, and hike up here, a toilet might not be the first thing they would need.

  As Keith spooned hatfuls of water on his specimens, I thought of the other petty wars that raged in this elusive paradise, this Garden of Eden. Many of these plantsmen and plantswomen got along better with plants than with people.

  Robinson and I hiked another hour and a half uphill as he repeated his now-common refrain. “I will destroy my preserve rather than let the government get its hands on it. I would rather die than let them take over.” He seemed to believe that the most serious threat had come a few years earlier when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed a rare tree, Caesalpinia kavaiensis, on its endangered species list and proposed a recovery plan to save its habitat. Only one specimen of the tree grew on Kauai — in the middle of Robinson’s preserve. When he read the plan, he concluded that the Feds intended to seize his Outlaw Preserve.

  Robinson’s face paled with exertion. As we reached the edge of a clearing, he walked over to a charred, blackened tree trunk that stood about twelve feet high. I saw that this dead tree was his Boston Tea Party; his Waco, Texas; his Ruby Ridge. He encircled the remains of Caesalpinia kavaiensis with one hand and intoned, “Once it was a flowering tree. The last of its gene pool. They were warned. They published the plan anyway. What I created, I can destroy. Anytime you feel like taking this place, bring in the Army. They won’t even see me in the hills with my sniper scope.”

  LATER I TRACKED DOWN the facts about the federal plan to “take over” the Outlaw Plant Preserve.

  Early botanists had first discovered Robinson’s tree, Caesalpinia kavaiensis, on Kauai in 1860, when it spread widely in upland forests. By the time the federal government began listing endangered species in Hawaii in the 1980s, the population of the dense-wood tree had dwindled to forty-two known specimens. Eleven grew on Oahu, and another thirty in North Kona on the Big Island. Only single trees grew on Lanai and Kauai.

  The government’s draft plan for Caesalpinia kavaiensis called for establishment of new populations of the rare tree. The plan recommended “Secure habitat of current populations and manage threats.” That was what led Keith Robinson to conclude that the feds were trying to take over his land.

  “It was a semantic disconnect,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service botanist John Fay when I reached him in his Washington, D.C., office. “That’s not what we meant, but that’s how Keith took it. I explained to him at great length that we would not take his land, and we were never going to take his land, but he couldn’t see it that way. He was stockpiling arms to fight a government takeover.”

  Keith apparently never read the sentence on page fifty-one of the sixty-four-page plan that mentioned him specifically, although not by name: “The landowner’s current program of rare plant conservation should be supported and assisted.”

  Robinson and Fay, as it turns out, were longtime friends. Fay had begun his botany career at the then–Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden in the early 1970s. Later, he joined the Fish and Wildlife Service, eventually serving as consulting botanist when the government listed the spotted owl as endangered, setting off a colossal battle with the lumber companies in the Pacific Northwest. When Robinson first decided to start his preserve, he paid Fay to fly back to Kauai to advise him.

  I asked Fay, “Are you aware that he burned his Caesalpinia tree to deliver a warning to the government?”

  Fay sighed with resignation. “No. I recall him threatening to torch the whole place. Keith is paranoid. I’m not a psychologist, but I’d describe it as unfounded apprehension, which is what paranoia is. It fits the Robinson family’s view of life.”

  But even the burned tree does not stop Fay from admiring Keith. Although the two have quarreled and Keith wouldn’t speak to him for years at a time, Fay has since returned several times to the preserve. “I couldn’t in my wildest imagination have predicted what would happen there,” said Fay. “It’s remarkable in almost every way. The preserve has the appearance of a regenerative native Hawaiian forest. Nobody has ever seen that before. Some things are from Maui and the Big Island, so it isn’t completely authentic, but the gestalt of the place is ‘Here you’ve got a forest composed of native, rare, Hawaiian plants.’ It is how the land would have looked one thousand years ago.”

  Fay thinks that Robinson loves his plants too much to have really burned his last specimen of Caesalpinia. Perhaps, he suggested with hope, in a corner of the preserve there are one or two others, unlabeled, unmarked, thriving in anonymity.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Saying Good-Bye to a Garden

  WITH GREAT POMP and circumstance, a ceremonial Hawaiian blessing, and the unveiling of a gift shop, the little sugar shack opened to the public. Mike Faye had woven his magic, and now the cottage’s pistachio-green wood sides and gingerbread touches drew visitors in droves. I was proud — few fund-raisers manage to see a project from start to finish.

  I had sworn not to do any more gardening at my own plantation but couldn’t help adding a new plant here and there. Gardeners can never really stop. I had always known the cottage was never mine to keep, but it had been a source of pride. Wanting to leave it in prime condition, I shined the floors and washed the windows. Living in the little cottage had extinguished a need for a bigger house. I never once missed the three stories of my Philadelphia house, nor its formal dining room. The happiness doctors — the Ph.D. psychologists who track and analyze what it takes to make a modern American happy these days — will tell you that the big house will do virtually nothing to increase your well-being. I can subscribe to that.

  Outside, the driveway circle, now ringed in jagged lava boulders thanks to John Rapozo, was filled with hot-colored impatiens and lavender-studded heather. But it lacked a centerpiece. There was only one choice. While the oak or elm defines most of America, the palm symbolizes the tropics. “Few people ever forget the first sight of a palm-tree of any species,” wrote Isabella Bird.

  At Kauai Nursery in Lihue, Steve, one of the nursery’s landscape designers, drove me in an electric golf car to the back nurseries to make a
selection. I dismissed the Manila palms, the nursery’s biggest sellers, as too common, although their shiny green shanks were attractive straight poles, topped by a symmetrical crown of feather fronds. I also worried that the big fan palms would present too much sail to the wind in the exposed plateau of the driveway.

  Steve steered me down a row of triangle palms, whose bases, not surprisingly, are formed by three flat sides. The trunks reached only about four feet high, but the wide-spreading fronds of silvery blue reached another twelve feet into the air and rustled against one another with an almost imperceptible click-click-click. For a semi-reasonable sum, I could acquire one of medium maturity, which Steve, with a little prodding, said would include free delivery. I told him confidently that I would have the eighteen-inch hole dug and ready.

  The next Saturday I approached the driveway circle, shovel ready. I swung back high, then hit the dirt, penetrating a mere two inches. Again with more force, I had the same result. For half an hour I worked, my hair tied up in a bandanna, my shoes and pants getting more and more stained with red dirt. Each shovel blow dislodged a scant cup of hard-packed clay, a legacy from the years of pineapple farming on the property. I was a prisoner, trying to tunnel out through concrete dirt, one teaspoon at a time.

  To soften the soil, I filled the shallow depression I had dug with several inches of water. Fifteen minutes later the water had not fully seeped into the ground, a disquieting signal that I had to shovel through even more densely packed clay.

  Over the next three days I intermittently continued to dig and finally succeeded in making an eighteen-inch-deep hole. When Steve arrived with the palm on the back of his pickup truck, I proudly told him the hole I dug was plenty deep. No, it’s not, he grunted.

  With easy strokes he took the shovel and sliced through another foot of earth. Steve was clearly a professional and gave a treatise on palm planting as we worked. He scuffed up the sides of the hole a bit, so that the roots would spread and not be confined in an underground clay chamber. I sprinkled small amounts of granular fertilizer into the hole and on the surrounding dirt. Steve deftly lowered the palm into place, then mixed piles of earth and humus for backfill. For the final smoothing, he handled a rake like a blackjack dealer, grading the soil surface, constructing a little saucer well to capture water.

  “These roots really need watering in the next two weeks. Don’t count on rainfall,” he instructed. As he packed up his tools, I stumbled over an offer to tip him. He shook his head.

  “Well, now we’ve planted a palm together,” I said. “Thank you.”

  With luck, the palm will grow to sway over another generation of gardeners. It was a way to leave something behind, a benediction of gratitude. The last months had held more for me than I could have imagined for myself. Adversity leads to happiness, if not too crushing. I had found peace here at the cottage, and that’s what I took with me. And I had devised my own maxim: The way to say good-bye to a garden is to improve it.

  FORTY YEARS AGO Robert Allerton’s last act of generosity was a gift of one million dollars to the newly formed Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden, thus creating a new institution to showcase and study Hawaii’s unique flora. At the age of ninety-two, Robert slipped and broke a leg; he died a few days later on December 22, 1964.

  John Allerton inherited Lawai-Kai, Robert’s art collection, his personal effects, and two million dollars. Robert gave away the bulk of his money to a charitable trust, because the income taxes for John would have consumed most of it. To this day, one-third of the income on that trust is annually donated to the Honolulu Academy of the Arts and two-thirds to the Art Institute of Chicago.

  The absolute decorum dictated by Robert relaxed. Servants sometimes walked around the house naked. John soon discovered that he did not have the money to support the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. Still, John made a habit of walking through Allerton Garden every day, especially in late afternoon, chatting with Steve Perlman, who lived in the chalet near Pump Six for some of those years, and asking about Steve’s cat or a new bunch of kittens. By the early 1980s he was growing infirm and often preferred a golf cart.

  In a document dated May 6, 1968, John Allerton made a promise to other Garden trustees. “After you have acquired at least two hundred acres of land adjacent to Lawai-Kai to be used for the botanical garden I will create an irrevocable declaration of trust and will transfer to this trust all of Lawai-Kai.” Garden leaders celebrated jubilantly. Allerton Garden would soon be theirs — land, title, money, everything. John hosted a luau at Lawai-Kai for the dedication ceremony. In coming years, John helped the new garden staff lay out its first trails and gardens.

  I kept looking for the secret, the reason why the botanical garden never excelled, never fulfilled its promise. What I heard was the same old story. No earth-shaking secret. Just ordinary, run-of-the mill, undistinguished human nature: inertia, lack of ambition, lack of vision, lack of leadership. Young scientists hired by the new botanical garden fell under the spell of Allerton Garden. They felt a thrilling responsibility to help create the jewel of tropical research. After short tenures, they left, embittered. The first two directors had taken some important steps but were never able to lead the institution into serious scientific endeavors or even envision, much less perform, the groundwork needed to operate a true public garden. Dr. Klein had begun to change all that. Mightily. But I could see that the garden could easily revert into obscurity.

  As John Allerton aged, he retreated more and more into his grand beach house. When he died of heart failure on September 1, 1985, at eighty-six years old, the botanical garden leaders assumed they would finally assume ownership of Allerton Garden. John’s will came as a shock. After twenty years of coy, veiled promises, he did, in fact, deed the Allerton property to a charitable trust as he had stated he would do — but not to the National Tropical Botanical Garden. Instead, Allerton Garden, along with its multimillion-dollar endowment, went to a private trust administered by the First National Bank of Chicago. The bank contracted with NTBG to manage Allerton Garden but would always retain ownership and control. Although NTBG was furious, they shouldn’t have been surprised — in his last years John Allerton had expressed continued unhappiness at their lack of progress.

  Soon after John’s death, his Chicago attorney and the manager of the Allerton Trust for First National Bank of Chicago boarded a helicopter. They scattered John’s ashes over Lawai-Kai on the outgoing tide. Just as John had done for Robert sixteen years earlier.

  In an instant, the ocean swallowed the tiny cinder specks.

  “LET US LIVE,” I said in a low voice.

  “Let them find us,” offered Beth.

  On the morning of race day, a dozen canoes in brightly colored racing rigs lay beached at the Waimea town pier. Angry gray swells rolled in. Beth, looking buff in a two-piece suit that showed off her tattooed back, chugged water from a wide-mouth plastic bottle. She and I made repeated trips to the bathroom, probably more out of nerves than need. Other Kawaikini Canoe Club members had shown up to cheer us on.

  A bearded paddler in surfing jams, the race organizer, called for a group prayer. About seventy-five paddlers made a circle and held hands. “We want to welcome the Kawaikini Canoe Club to their first appearance at this race,” he said. We smiled shyly. As the circle broke, Beth and I agreed quietly that we needed the prayers.

  Puna had borrowed a sleek blue and yellow racing canoe from the Hanalei Canoe Club to give us a fighting chance. We walked out on the wooden pier to watch the men, first to race. The starting horn blew. Eight boats shot forward, strong and fast. They mounted swells, swooped down water mountains, and disappeared from sight. They rounded the first buoy, then set off for the second. They returned to the finish line, stroking hard.

  Now the women’s race was to begin. We gathered excitedly around the beached outrigger, ready to push it into the water. Puna told us to rest our hands on the gunnels and bow our heads. She chanted in Hawaiian but also spoke in En
glish, “When you are out there, there will be a time when you ask yourselves why you are doing this. Remember, you are doing it because you are empowered Hawaiian women, doing Hawaiian things.” Right. Empowered Hawaiian women. We pounded the gunnels with our fists, then shouted in unison, “Kawaikini!”

  I tore off my T-shirt as we strode into the water, rushed the vaha through the breaking surf, and scrambled into the boat. A strong wave knocked my left thigh hard against the gunnel, shooting pains down my leg. I had to lift it into the boat with two hands. I zipped up the blue racing cover around me guiltily; I didn’t want the others to know.

  We arrived first at the starting buoy. A novice’s mistake, we soon learned. Another team wedged itself between our boat and the buoy, pushing us to a rear position. Then another boat squeezed in, separating us even further from the buoy and putting us behind all the other boats. Paddlers all around us whooped war cries when the starting horn blared. We stroked hard but couldn’t move forward. One boat rammed our right side. Boats to our left cut in front of us. Paddles, canoes, and arms locked together in a squirming mass. The pack broke free, surging far ahead of us before we even had begun to paddle. Our lightweight vaha was tippy and seemed to lift out of the water at the slightest wave. Dark water sucked below.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Hut!

  Ho!

  We neared the first buoy, but the other boats had all rounded it and were already headed for the second marker.

  “It takes a lot of guts to be last,” I yelled.

  We made for the second buoy. Faster, faster, the paddles whirled.

  . . . nine, ten, eleven, twelve, Hut!

  All the other canoes were racing back to the finish line by the time we rounded the second turning point. A green and white canoe trailed behind the frontrunners. We sensed a chance to beat it!

  . . . four, five, six, Hut!