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Waking Up in Eden Page 4
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Now I was the new import, the interloper.
I felt deflated by Keith Woolliams’s doomsday message. Perhaps his own losing effort to keep Waimea Garden solvent colored his view? Overwhelmed, sinking, he obviously couldn’t take on the fight to right the botanical health of the Hawaiian Islands. Surely not everyone would go quietly into the night?
After bidding Woolliams good-bye, I emerged from his office into the blinding sun and headed off to the main attractions at Waimea Garden. I walked up the paved paths past a grove of heliconia, the waxy torches of crimson and sunset pink ginger. I bent to read a label and saw they had originally come from Brazil. Further along the curved path, I marveled at a drift of orchids, flashy purple, pale green, and snowy white. Also imports, from India, New Zealand, and Brazil. A thicket of birds-of-paradise, the flame orange and blue blooms that resembled a plumed heron’s head and beak? South Africa. Showers of cerise bougainvillea? Brazil again. The treacly sweet smelling groves of plumeria, whose blooms form the five-dollar leis bestowed on incoming tourists? Central and South America.
All the showy tropical flowers that we foreigners thought spilled from every corner in Hawaii were imports. Venus flytraps to hook the tourists. The average visitor to Hawaii rarely sees a native plant.
I STILL NEEDED a place to live. In those first disconnected weeks, I moved from one bed-and-breakfast to another. The Volkswagen’s static-filled radio could not pick up National Public Radio. The B and B rooms had no radios, ei ther. The New York Times was flown in only on Sundays. I had rarely felt so isolated, so cut off from what was happening in the larger world. Each morning at dawn, I’d put on my gym clothes and drive to Poipu Beach to either work out at the Hyatt hotel’s health club or run along the coastline. I liked that hour, when the night sky streaked pink. One morning as I turned down Koloa Road, the VW Golf silently died.
I walked to work that day. When I arrived, I asked about getting another vehicle to tide me over until the Golf could be fixed. I was handed the keys to a late-model Mazda sedan unused except for a daily run to the post office. I got in and saw, blissfully, that it had air-conditioning. I tuned into NPR to hear Cokie Roberts reporting from the White House. “I love you, Cokie!” I yelled.
Later that afternoon, I told Dr. Klein how happy I was to be able to listen to mainland news again. “I’m surprised,” he said, puzzled. “We had that Mazda put in shape for you before you came.”
“The Mazda?”
“You know, the gray Mazda.”
“No, I’ve been driving an old VW.”
“How did that happen? You weren’t supposed to be getting that old thing.”
First the house, inexplicably filthy. The junker car. My office mates continued to treat me with subzero indifference, and I realized I was undergoing a form of hazing. It felt petty to even notice their snippy salutations, the poor welcome, the fact that nobody except Dr. Klein invited me to lunch. I was the hired gun, yet it seemed like every time I looked up from my desk, somebody was in my office complaining that I hadn’t followed “proper organizational procedure.” Employees weren’t supposed to use the Allerton beach. They couldn’t visit the garden on weekends. Volunteers couldn’t explore the back hills and trails. One day I taped an urgent note to Dr. Klein’s door so he would see it when he came in, only to find it ripped down. “The Garden doesn’t do that,” one of his assistants informed me. The bald-headed finance director hired to sort out the tangled books was particularly pained by my presence. Before I arrived he had been the most senior staff member; now there were two of us in what Dr. Klein grandly titled “the senior management team.” As I investigated my budget numbers, I realized that the finance director had assigned me impossible fund-raising goals, doomed to fail. I put an end to that. I don’t work for you; I work for Dr. Klein, I told him, and knew I had made an enemy.
This was an institution peopled with staff who had been at the Garden for years, sometimes decades, free to do what they wanted at their own pace. Dr. Klein was changing things, but slowly. My task was to raise money but also to put the place on the map by bringing people in, defining the Garden’s image, promoting it. It would require a fundamental shift in outlook. I wasn’t sure we could pull it off.
I STARTED ANSWERING ads in the local newspaper and looking at modern apartments in the Poipu area, with its luxury hotels, condo villages, and fake stone waterfalls. This was Tourist Hawaii, a pampered retreat that most visitors to Kauai never left. The places I could afford didn’t have great views and were packed together so closely that I’d have to draw the curtains for privacy. With their hotel-room decor of bland pastels, they could be in Miami or San Diego.
When I returned to the Garden office after one discouraging housing search, I went into the quiet library to have a discreet chat with Rick Hanna, the Garden’s librarian, resident computer expert, historian, marine biologist, but most important to me, potential friend. He, too, was a refugee of sorts, having migrated from California to Honolulu in the 1970s. When a relationship broke up at the same time a job at the University of Hawaii library went sour, he applied to the Garden as a fluke. Handsome, in his late forties, he had a lean athlete’s frame and dark curly hair that I had heard attracted a series of blondes. Still, I sensed that if I needed to know something about the Garden’s history or some arcane fact about Kauai, Rick would give a straight answer.
I asked him what he thought I should do about my housing dilemma.
He counseled considering a salvage job before I gave up on the cottage. “Some of these plantation cottages are really fabulous when they’re fixed up. You ought to go talk to Michael Faye out at the Waimea Plantation Cottages. He’s become a real expert on the plantation cottage style. He restored a whole settlement of them and turned them into a high-priced resort.” The Fayes, he said, were an old, established family on the island’s west side, where they owned a lot of land and had been involved in ranching and sugar enterprises for a hundred years.
I mused, “The condos I’ve seen are modern and nice, but so generic they could be located anywhere. The cottage would be a chance to experience something really Hawaiian.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “This is your chance.”
AS I FOLLOWED Route 50 westward, the landscape became hotter, drier, dustier. I passed a sign identifying a red dirt road that led to where Captain Cook took his first step in Ha waii. On January 20, 1778, on his third voyage around the world, Cook had sailed his ship Resolution into Waimea Bay. The gentle islands were among the very last place on earth still undiscovered by Western navigators. Thousands of curious natives — most of the women naked — paddled hundreds of canoes into the bay to greet him, mistaking him for a white god in plumed hat.
Smoke rose across the horizon and drifted across my windshield in a thick fog. A temporary road sign warned: CANE BURNING, LOW VISIBILITY NEXT FIVE MILES. Stray cinders swirled everywhere. In preparation for harvest, plantation workers burned sugarcane to draw the plant juices up into the stalks, later to be pressed to extract the juice in the nearby mill, then boiled into syrup and dried into a granular state. Sugar had made fortunes in the islands. Now the cane fields were fast disappearing as even such stalwart clients as Pepsi and Coca-Cola switched to corn and beet syrup. Tourism reigned these days. Almost one million tourists arrived on Kauai each year, drawn by its rugged, unspoiled beauty, the famous wave breaks known throughout surfdom, the Na Pali Coast hiking trail, called one of the ten best in the world by some guidebooks, and the stretches of empty white-sand beaches. Hollywood had long ago discovered the island and frequently used it as a backdrop when a tropical setting was needed. A colony of movie stars lived on the north shore, giving Hanalei and Haena the status of Vail or Aspen.
Yet Kauai still lagged behind the other resort islands in their mad rush into tourism development. Hurricane Iniki had pushed the island back even further. Residents would later recall these early post-Iniki years as halcyon days, when you could buy an ocean-view condo for under $100,000, bef
ore tour companies unleashed all-terrain vehicles to jar the countryside, before USA Today named Poipu as the best beach in America, before several hundred surfers met in the ball field at Koloa Park to try to stop the advent of a surfing world championship that would attract too many competitors to their favorite haunts. That would come later.
All the islands seemed to have a village named Waimea (wai means water in Hawaiian), and Kauai’s Waimea looked like a sleepy, small Texas cow town, circa 1950. False-fronted Old West-style stores lined the main road. Half a dozen jackedup, high-rigged pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive Jeeps were parked outside a grocery store. As I left the town’s outskirts, I approached a grove of several hundred coconut palms. A whiterailed entrance bore the sign WAIMEA PLANTATION COTTAGES. AN AUTHENTIC SUGAR EXPERIENCE. I parked in the shade of a palm and mounted wooden stairs onto a shaded veranda with wicker armchairs. A receptionist called Mike Faye on his cell phone and, after a short wait, a tanned man with laughing eyes, black hair, and full mus tache came into the lobby. He picked up a master key and led me out to the lawn through an avenue of palms leading to the ocean. Tin-roofed cottages painted in pastel blues and greens were sprinkled throughout the grounds, each set at an angle and screened by ferns and bamboo palms.
Sounds from the highway dropped off. A sprinkler pulsed. A parrot squawked. I sensed this was a place where one could close the door and forget about stress, appointments, or anything purposeful for a long while. Faye had furnished the cottages with Morris chairs, rattan furniture, and ceiling fans that re-created an atmosphere of 1930s plantation life. Except for the bathrooms. Showers were the size of small rooms, with big, fat nozzles raining like waterfalls in a tropical forest. No need for a curtain, you just stood in the breeze and got wet. I was charmed.
“How did you work out this style?” I asked.
“We had fifty cottages to work on,” Faye said. “One late night a bunch of us were sitting around a bonfire, drinking beer and singing ancient songs from the 1920s and 1930s. I thought, ‘This is the real Hawaii. How do we capture this feeling?’ The cult of old houses has never been strong in Hawaii. Everything is modern. But I always had a feeling for these old cottages.” He hunted down vintage plantation camp houses all over the island, pulled them apart, trucked them here, and reassembled them with modern amenities.
As I confided my quandary over whether to renovate the cottage, Faye suddenly turned, recognition on his face, “When I was growing up, my family had a ranch in the Lawai Valley, where I would go on weekends to fool around with horses. Now, where is this house?”
“On Lauoho Road. You know, around the corner from the banana plantation and up the hill through a bamboo tunnel?”
“Yeah, I know it. On Halloween, my friends and I went trick or treating on horseback around there, so we knew all the houses. But we never went up to that one. There was something about it, so removed from everything else, that was kind of spooky.” Great, I thought, I’ve got the neighborhood haunted house.
I wanted nothing to do with renovations. I knew all about the dust, the upset, the workmen traipsing through the house early in the morning or not showing up for weeks until I wanted to strangle them. The projects that didn’t turn out quite right and made my blood boil every time I looked at them. Never again. And yet I remembered that wondrous privacy of five acres. I asked him, “So? Do you think I should do it?”
He just pressed his lips into a straight line. Slowly he nodded his head.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Secret Garden
UUUU-GHHA, UUUUU-GGHAAA, the horn blared like a submarine’s dive signal as a cartoonish vehicle bore down on us with threatening speed. Dr. Klein drove the fanciest of the Garden’s three antique touring cars, a restored, silver-gray 1947 Dodge land sampan once used as a public taxi on the Big Island. The Rube Goldberg-like contraption had a long snout festooned with acres of shiny chrome. A surrey-style roof provided shade for open-air seating. None of us at the Garden entirely trusted Dr. Klein behind the wheel, as he usually got so involved delivering the botanical lecture of the day that he paid scant attention to the road. He screeched to a stop where I waited with half a dozen prospective donors invited to a late Sunday afternoon barbecue. Few could resist a private, after-hours invitation to Allerton Garden. I ushered the guests up onto rear leather benches. We jostled against one another as the sampan careened out of the parking lot, seemingly on two wheels.
At the end of the public road, two massive brick King Kong gates barred our way. Dr. Klein cheerfully refused all offers of help, hopped down to unlock the gate, drove through, then hopped back down again to lock it behind us. We followed a red dirt road through two more locked gates, along the edge of a field of tall sugarcane. Then we entered a lane enclosed by hedges of thorny night-blooming cereus vine that blocked any view.
With a dramatic flourish, Dr. Klein drew to a stop before an opening in the dense foliage. A steep cliff fell away before us, revealing a hidden cove of blue waters veiled by bending palms and the chartreuse lawn of the Allerton estate. Bathed in late afternoon sunshine, there stretched before us a strange other world, isolated and enclosed by jagged lava cliffs surrounding the valley. Two of the guests gasped, as people always did at their first sight of Lawai-Kai. It was an iconic vision of a rich man’s paradisiacal hideaway — calm, inviolate, alluring in its secretiveness.
Subdued by the breathtaking beauty, we were quiet for the rest of the descent, veering away from the ocean into the forest. We passed through a narrow rock canyon where air roots from a giant banyan tree above brushed our roof, then through a plumeria grove that wrapped us in its musky scent. On the valley floor, Dr. Klein parked the sampan at Pump Six, a red barnlike building that once housed irrigation pumps for the old sugar plantation that had filled the valley before the botanical garden was established. We’d ferry the picnic supplies to the beach in electric golf carts.
Dr. Klein opted to walk, leading what I privately called “the Big Donor Tour.” Tonight’s guests included a wealthy couple targeted for the Garden’s $1,000-per-year Fellows Society; a couple of local businessmen; a visiting scientist. Not really A-list, but Dr. Klein gave them the mil lion-dollar treatment: his lecture on the history of gardens; his views of landscape design; his plans for turning NTBG into not only a tourist attraction but a preeminent center for botanical research. To fuel his ever-expanding enterprises, Dr. Klein adopted the P. T. Barnum approach to fund-raising. The moneyed were no different than others, he theorized, and what they really missed was passion and the chance to do something important. He was selling dreams.
For the staff, long neglected and ignored, Bill became their uber-mentor, encouraging them to reach for new aspirations. He invited them to dinner, sponsored study trips to mainland gardens to broaden their outlooks, and advised further education for some. “Gardens are for growing people” was a Klein motto. While much of the Garden staff worshipped him as the long-sought savior who could shake up the place and turn it into a showplace, others resisted his plans for change. “You’re turning it into a Disneyland,” accused one of the intransigents in a meeting. “Visitors will tramp over the plants and ruin our scientific collections,” they complained. In a rare fit of temper, Dr. Klein had turned an apoplectic red to address them, “This is our future, folks. We need to bring in people or the Garden will die.”
He seemed to befriend any and all, promiscuously. A visiting scientist, author, or other personage with even the shakiest of credentials could wangle a free tour and lengthy discussion with him. I protested after one late Friday night when he pressed me and several other staff members into entertaining a couple of bozos from L.A. — filmmakers, they claimed. But he was unrepentant. “Make friends, because come a hurricane, you’re going to need them,” he insisted.
Our group trailed behind him as we walked into the tropical fruit orchard planted by the garden’s creators, Robert and John Allerton, soon after they arrived from Illinois in 1938. Gnarled orange and lem on trees grew
in profusion, but also cherry trees. Cannonball-sized pomelos resembling thick-skinned grape fruit littered the ground. Dr. Klein reached up and plucked a waxy yellow star fruit, took out his penknife, and cut samples for the group. Munching the crisp applelike slices, the guests were literally eating out of his hand.
We meandered down a cinder-covered pathway, past a castiron shell urn that marked the entrance to Allerton Garden. The light changed, the temperature dropped, and a green gloom enmeshed us in a sense of lost antiquity. High Java plum trees soared above, dwarfing our mere human forms. No mat ter how many times I came here, I was never quite prepared for its arching vastness. As we strolled, we passed the Thanksgiving Room, the first of what the Allertons called their “garden rooms.” An opening in the far leaf wall revealed the white latticework of a whimsical gazebo and another, more secret, garden beyond. The story was that Robert and John Allerton had invited guests to a casual picnic on Thanksgiving Day, then ushered them here for a surprise formal banquet.
The two Allertons, almost Victorian in formality, were the best of hosts. They famously induced guests to choose from their extensive costume collection of silk Chinese robes and skullcaps, gold-threaded saris from India, Japanese kimonos, or the Bali dancer’s spired headdress that made the Allertons giggle when the women unknowingly chose it, a prostitute’s gilded finery. Looking into the shadowy, green-walled room, I imagined long tables garbed in white linens, silver candelabra, and dark-skinned butlers serving from lavish trays. I could almost see specters of costumed guests, glasses in hand, gliding among the tables, laughing.
I discerned a hint of camp at Allerton, a humor that stops just at the edge of bad taste. The Victorians built garden follies — fake Gothic castle ruins, grottoes, and forest huts — to create an atmosphere of a lost world. Allerton Garden is a Victorian folly, but with a wink. Coy cupids and naked stone gods spy on visitors along the garden walks.