Waking Up in Eden Read online

  I rushed pell-mell into this momentous change and I am stuck with it, alone in the jungle, marooned in a filthy and dilapidated house. I am overwhelmed with loneliness and the feeling of having made bad choices in life. Here I am, footloose and unmoored. Why did I take this job? I have been so wrapped up in the romance of moving to Hawaii that I did not analyze the full impact of picking up and moving 5,000 miles away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  This Is the Boondocks

  AFTER A SOLITARY weekend, on Monday morning I hurried the Volkswagen Golf into the Lawai Valley below the cottage and around a hairpin curve, barely missing a dusty pickup truck driven by a leather-colored cowboy. Three happy dogs of indiscriminate breeding rode in the open back, heads into the wind. A banana plantation grew around the corner from the cottage, its long canoes of leaves upturned like celery bunches. Squawking broods of feral chickens materialized out of the brush, dowdy hens with trains of chicks, or solitary cocks. Sorrel-colored cows grazed the rolling green hillsides. Jeez, this really is the boondocks.

  The Garden offices were only a five-minute drive from the cottage but still difficult to find at the end of a residential road. Not a single helpful sign pointed the way. I approached the entrance gate. A forbidding placard hung crookedly on a metal gate:

  NTBG HEADQUARTERS

  A RESEARCH AND EDUCATION FACILITY

  PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING.

  No wonder they have trouble attracting visitors. They scare away anybody who can actually find it. I parked and walked up a sidewalk between two low garden beds contained by sharp-edged lava rock, then paused at the head of a terrace to inhale the beauty of the setting. Minimalist and modern, the Garden’s cement headquarters banked into the earth like a gunnery pillbox, partly cantilevered over the steep-walled Lawai Valley. Standing here, it felt almost possible to lift off into the air with the white tropic birds and swoop over the valley and out to the crinkled blue Pacific in the distance.

  An imperious rooster eyed me from the lawn, cocking a russet head and rustling gorgeous green tail feathers, as lustrous as those plucked by Scarlett O’Hara to adorn a bonnet. In front of the sliding glass front doors to the Garden office lay a tumble of shoes: ladies’ pumps, sandals, a pair of large sneakers. One quickly learns in Hawaii that the iron in the ubiquitous red dirt stains the floors, so people take off their shoes before entering private homes. Apparently, the Garden office followed the custom. I slipped off new rubber-treaded hiking sandals and slid open the door.

  A sleek blond secretary nodded coolly: “Oh, there you are. Hello.”

  Beyond her I could see into Dr. Klein’s empty office, with its three walls of glass that looked out to that panoramic view. A slab of koa wood served as a conference table, set over a jeweltoned Oriental rug. Administrative offices and an open area for clerical staff extended in the other direction. Four women sat at teak desks facing the windows to the valley. Two rose to greet me with excitement. Cindy, a slight woman about my age, had handled fund-raising operations alone for many years and was now to be my assistant. Teri, my secretary, was a small woman in her fifties with short platinum blond hair. She fluttered around and ushered me into my office. The room was big enough, although it faced away from the valley, to the parking lot.

  Apologetically, Teri gestured at stacks of beat-up cardboard boxes that dominated the room. “We’re so short of storage space that we’re using this office to keep our materials,” she said.

  I, too, had a spiffy teak desk, although my office chair listed when I sat down. Except for my own staff, nobody else said hello. “Did everyone welcome you?” demanded Dr. Klein when he telephoned from San Francisco later that morning.

  “Err. Yes.”

  “I thought they’d present you with flowers.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “How was the cottage? Everything there to suit you?”

  This one I couldn’t bluff. “Well. Not really.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked with alarm.

  I paused, then said flatly, “It’s filthy.”

  “Get out of there,” he cried. “I’ll get the staff to book you into a bed-and-breakfast. Now I’m really angry. I ordered everything to be put in good shape for you.” When I put down the receiver, I was buoyed with relief that I didn’t have to spend another night in that cottage. I turned to settling into my office. The boxes had to go. I needed a comfort able desk chair, a worktable, and chairs. I gave a quiet but celebratory yelp of glee, crumpled up scrap paper into a ball, and aimed for the wastebasket. Missed.

  Although my windows looked out on the parking lot, they also gave me a terrarium-like view into a bed of tropical plants, which appeared gigantic and extraterrestrial to my temperate-zoned eyes. Clusters of maroon flowers emerged from the center of a five-foot-tall plant. Two hummingbirds beat rapidly in and out of its juicy petals. A lucky omen?

  THAT AFTERNOON, I STOPPED by the cottage on the hill to collect my suitcases. A dented sedan sped up the bamboo tunnel and parked. A wizened, ancient Filipino darted out of the vehicle, eying me with suspicion. A cigarette dangled from his lip, seemingly glued in place. Thinning hair was brushed back with old-fashioned cream. His T-shirt blared the name of a rock group while his jeans hung low on his hips, showing a bit of flat belly. He had a helper with him, a sullen, shirtless young man with homemade tattoos on both arms.

  “I’m James,” said the older man, in a none-too-friendly tone. I realized he was the caretaker. I had heard that James had worked for thirty-eight years as the house servant to Robert and John Allerton, the Chicago millionaires who had built the Kauai estate that became the centerpiece of the botanical garden. Now retired, James looked after this little cottage as a parttime job. “Been a lot of break-ins,” James informed me. “No one here in day, people get into the house. Not too safe.” During the two years the house had been empty, he said, a television set, a china closet, and other valuables had disappeared. What would happen, I silently worried, to my computer equipment, television, and sound system?

  I asked James about the monkey noises at night. “No monkeys in Hawaii,” he snorted. “That’s bamboo rubbing together.” I listened, and could hear faint creaks and pops that in stronger wind had sounded like a horde of chimpanzees. James offered to show me the property, and as we walked up a small hill and down the long lawn, I grew intimidated. It was a much larger canvas than my tiny Philadelphia garden.

  One of the Garden’s wealthiest patrons had donated the cottage and its five acres of land for staff use. Her identity was kept secret, although Dr. Klein said that at one time she had been identified as one of the six wealthiest women in Amer ica. James informed me, “She used to fly to the island in her private plane and put the pilot up in a hotel while she stayed in the cottage. She liked to get away from it all.”

  Because she hadn’t visited the place in years, James worked without supervision. At one time, the hilly property had been planted in pineapple, which had sucked up the soil’s nutrients and left it dry and empty. “Everything you see, I put in,” he said proudly, with a sweep of an arm. “Botanical garden gave me nothing. I brought all myself. Trees, plants, cuttings.” The result was what is sometimes called Apache landscaping — a patch of this, a patch of that. No guiding design prevailed, but the sheer amount of plant material impressed me. Manila palms acted as sentries along the curving dirt drive. A hedge of hibiscus sprouted huge, aromatic blossoms in oranges, reds, and pinks. Gaudy birds-of-paradise soared nearby. A line of scraggly macadamia trees dangled nuts. Other bounty included a lychee tree and a dozen or so large mango trees. Rock-edged circles held deep purple bromeliads. Giant versions of what I recognized as schefflera, grown as houseplants back home, formed a long allée along the drive. Here they produced upturned clusters of red spokes covered with knobby purple seeds. “Octopus trees,” James called them, and I saw how the spokes resembled tentacles and suckers.

  The plateau surrounding the cottage fell off on all sides into steep ravin
es. Dense, impen etrable hedges of ferns and shrubs edged the lawn, in effect creating a high-topped fortress. Relentlessly the sun beat down. But the cottage itself was cool, and if you opened all the windows it would catch the cross breezes. The vastness of the property and its wondrous seclusion tempted me. From the front porch, one could not see an other house. It was as if I were in a sanctuary.

  IN THE OFFICE the next morning, I sensed a transformation from yesterday’s Sleepy Hollow doze. Dr. Klein had returned. The office staff walked more briskly and sat at their desks with more purpose. Dr. Klein’s habit was to rise at 4:30 a.m. and work at home for several hours, making telephone calls to the East Coast or working out on his NordicTrack with a book balanced in front of him. An extreme extrovert, he seemed to require those hours of dark, solitary quiet before the rest of the world intruded. After he arrived at Garden headquarters in late morning, secretaries, botanists from the science building, and garden foremen streamed in and out of his office. As he and I met intermittently throughout the day, I felt reassured. Everyone addressed him as Dr. Klein and, although I decided I’d continue to call him Bill to his face, I already found myself referring to him in the third person by his formal title. It suited him.

  By 7 p.m. that second day on the job, everyone else had gone home. I bent over my computer, working on a to-do list, when I looked up to see Bill standing in my office door. “Lucinda’s still here!” he said, padding into the room in stocking feet, a wide grin on his face. “Working late, I see. Well, I always tell my staff that there are twenty-four hours in a day. You are welcome to work day and night. How do you like your new office?”

  “Great. I even have hummingbirds outside my window.”

  “There are no hummingbirds in Hawaii,” he said definitively.

  “Really? C’mere. What’s buzzing around that big plant that looks like some kind of spider lily?”

  He walked over and gave a cursory glance out the window. “ Sphingidae. Sphinx moths. That’s a Queen Emma’s Lily. Crinum augustum. Lucinda, you should bone up on these tropi cal plants.”

  I appraised the fat-bodied moths and wondered whether the climate fostered gigantism. “Give me a break,” I said. “First I’ll learn the pedigrees of the Garden’s big donors. Then I’ll work on Ha waiian names. Then maybe I’ll get around to tropical flora. God, Bill. There’s a lot to do.”

  “Lucinda, this is an opportunity for you to have an impact. Larger institutions may be more developed, but here you can shape something, have a say in how it grows. Remem ber Henry V.”

  I knew the Shakespeare play, a favorite of his, chronicling the battle of Agincourt in 1415. The French outnumbered the English by ten to one. At dawn before the battle, young King Henry wanders among his British troops and overhears one sol dier wishing aloud for more confederates. Later, the king exhorts his comrades in the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech: “ ‘The fewer men, the greater share of honour.’” Dr. Klein began reciting. “ ‘We few. We happy few, we band of brothers.’ I wouldn’t wish for a single man more.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They’re All Lost

  WAIMEA ARBORETUM AND Botanical Garden on the north shore of Oahu struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. Designed as sort of a botanist’s version of Disneyland, the tourist attraction could not compete with the surf at Waikiki, the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, or even Honolulu’s Ala Moana shopping center, until recently the largest in the world. Without much success, Waimea Garden operators tried to lure paying visitors with a nighttime luau featuring dancers in grass skirts who ran through the grounds carrying lighted torches, then dove from a cliff into a pool.

  Dr. Klein sent me here — a short plane ride away — to check out the competition. Wasn’t much, I thought, as I made my way to a shabby trailer and office of the garden’s chief botanist, Keith Woolliams. A slight, white-haired Brit, Woolliams remained ghostly pale despite spending decades in the tropics. If he had lived a century ago, he’d be wearing a pith helmet. Now his white-collared shirt drooped and his knobby knees under khaki shorts showed nary a glimpse of a tan. His En glish accent, honed while training at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, boomed strong as he used Latin nomenclature for plants. Yet he delivered a dismal message. “The botanists know that all the Hawaiian plants are lost,” he said quietly.

  “Lost?” I sputtered.

  “Nothing can save them,” he said.

  We walked to his greenhouse, a stifling hot enclosure roofed in hard green plastic. With my reporter’s curiosity I had begun to research the looming extinction crisis that threatened all of Hawaii’s native species: plant, animal, insect, and mollusk. But I had not perceived the future as so bleak.

  Woolliams ticked off the problems. Hawaii has only about a thousand native plants. Eighty-nine percent of them are endemic — found only in the islands. If a species dies out here, there is no other population elsewhere to provide a genetic safety net. Compare this to California native plants, of which 30 percent are endemic, or Florida natives, of which only 5 percent are endemic plants, and you begin to sense the wonder, weirdness, and utter fragility of the Hawaiian flora.

  While only about one hundred — 10 percent — of the Hawaiian plants have become extinct, the situation is far worse than that figure suggests. About a third of the native species consist of only one hundred individual specimens, often far fewer. A couple of the rarest orchids live deep in the rain forest with a grand total population of about five plants each. Even without the clanging alarm bells ringing over global warming, scientists predict that perhaps two-thirds of the Hawaiian plant species could disappear by the end of the century.

  The geography of the Hawaiian Islands accounts for much of the problem. Under the ocean more than seventy million years ago, volcano eruptions built towers of lava until the peaks jutted above the water, forming islands. Eons of hurricanes and rainfall eventually broke down the lava to black soil. Plant colonizations came slowly. Seeds and wisps of root hopped from landfall to landfall across the Pacific, eventually arriving in Hawaii, borne by bird, adrift wave-tossed flotsam, or blown by storm. Only one species made it every twenty thousand to thirty thousand years.

  Once rooted, plants evolved with specialized traits required by the island ecology, where high mountains rose precipitously from beaches, and rain forest or bog at one level turned into dry forest only a few hundred feet lower, and around the corner, wind-tormented drought. Small islands often harbored seven or more different climates. Some plants existed in only one valley, or two.

  Peace reigned, at first. Just as in the original Garden of Eden described in the Book of Genesis, God gave the native foliage no thorns or thistles. Nor did the plants develop other warrior characteristics, such as toxic secretions to poison encroaching vegetation or ward off predators. They didn’t need defenses in the early days of Hawaii because the islands were too far away for any land mammal migrations; the fauna consisted of only a few snails, a long-distance bird, or a seal. The ultimate hothouse varieties, native Hawaiian plants could survive only in paradise.

  So when intruders arrived, the natives could put up little resistance. Polynesian voyagers brought new food crops of taro, coconut, and yam, paper mulberry for fiber to make clothing, and pigs for slaughter. Captain Cook discovered what he named “the Sandwich Islands,” in 1778, and let loose some of his own pigs, which intermingled with the feral Polynesian variety. The American missionaries, mostly Presbyterians and Congregationalists from Connecticut and Massachusetts, started arriving in 1810, as did the sailors from all over the globe who stopped in Hawaii to resupply their ships for whale hunts. Traders raped the forest, mining it for the native sandalwood, coveted in the Orient for its spicy scent. They took it all, leaving none to survive. Highland forests turned into clear-cut wastelands. And then the onslaught really began.

  In the last 150 years, an eye blink in geological time, plantation owners consumed thousands of acres for sugar and pineapple crops, using up most of the dry forest that had fringe
d the mountainous islands and depleting the soil. The plant species that had thrived were pushed to small pockets and ledges. Droves of tourists started discovering Hawaii in the 1930s, and in galloping pace over the next decades built hotels, condos, shopping centers, and highways, eradicating more of the specialized habitats with devastating consequences. But it was what the incoming settlers brought with them that delivered the coup de grace. Escaped barnyard goats proliferated in the mountains and mowed down plants in quantity. The growing pig population rooted deep trenches, throwing up plants with abandon, not discriminating between the rarest of orchids or commonest of weeds. Banana poka, yellow ginger, strawberry guava, and other imports spread rapidly through forests, sturdy, aggressive, and better equipped for battle. Like all incoming carpetbaggers, the newcomers’ greatest offensive tactic was their ability to steal. They grew tall, robbed sunlight from those below, sent down deeper roots that sucked up nutrients, and crowded out the delicate Hawaiian varieties.

  Airline passengers coming or leaving the Hawaiian Islands are prohibited from transporting any plant material; Department of Agriculture agents X-ray all baggage to ensure that no seeds or other possible contaminants are carried in. But the horse has long escaped the barn.

  Now botanists count more than eight thousand nonnative, or imported, plant species growing in Hawaii, about one hundred of which are so out of control that they have consumed tens of thousands of acres. It’s the story of all Hawaii, mirroring the horrifying tale of the native Hawaiian peoples themselves. When the missionaries and sailors arrived, they found a civilization of more than three hundred thousand people — by some accounts, as many as one million. Within fifty years, measles, smallpox, syphilis, and other Western disease reduced the population to thirty thousand.