Waking Up in Eden Read online

  For an unbelievably low price, Val rented a five-acre fenced pasture near Poipu. Tall grass grew so deep that the horses could eat themselves fat, eliminating the need for daily feeding. Best of all, riding on Kauai meant saddling up and riding cross-country in whatever direction we pleased. We spurned the Western saddles used by most riders in Hawaii in favor of English, and were among the few who wore safety helmets. I, the greenhorn, followed Val, her long blond ponytail bobbing ahead of me with insouciant confidence, as she led us on canehaul roads up into the hills, canters around the Waita Reservoir, and along spots of deserted coastline. My hands scrabbled desperately to cling to Bo’s mane as we galloped the dirt road that circled a long-dead volcano cone like a racetrack.

  One day, as we broke from the cool shade of feathery ironwood trees, the horses’ hooves clattered on hard lava rock. As always, I thrilled at the deserted beauty of Mahaulepu Beach’s two miles of uninhabited shore stretching below us, while fighting terror at how close we pranced near a cliff edge over unforgiving waves and rocks forty feet below. Bo contentedly followed Val on Zealy and we turned onto a narrow trail that disappeared into a forest of ironwood pine. Down, down we lurched until we reached a small stream. “Wait, wait, not so fast. I have trouble holding him downhill,” I called in panic.

  Bo had quickly fattened up and now snorted full of life, stubborn and resistant. I could barely hold him back from a run. We reached the stream delta as it emptied into the sunstruck ocean, wading into the water, the horses wet up to their girths. Zealy splashed, kicking up sparkles of water. It’s against the law to ride on the beach in Hawaii, but nobody saw us in the early morning or at twilight. Bo ventured only a few feet into the swirling waves. I turned him toward land, into a slow canter along the hard sand at water’s edge. His legs stretched out further and further as we flew, seemingly afloat a few feet above the ground. We followed a path along cane fields and out to a small cove where a half dozen Hawaiian fishermen camped for the weekend. We cantered up dunes, then out to a headland peninsula, surrounded by the warmth of the sea breezes and the sunny azure of the Pacific.

  I had become determined to know the island, and Bo allowed me to trek further into its depths. I’d never cover it entirely, nor lose the fear of getting lost. The jungle greens run together as endless camouflage, and you often can’t tell whether you’re up or down, much less east, west, north, or south. In the islands there are only two useful directions, makai — toward the ocean, and mauka — toward the mountains. Although the island was only thirty miles in diameter, hikers and hunters often became disoriented, sometimes wandering without food or water for three days or more before stumbling on other hikers or search parties. Some people never get found. They step closer to a cliff’s edge for the view, not realizing until too late that the greenery underfoot grew over air, not terra firma.

  I had an urge to replicate Isabella Bird’s three-day trek on horseback from Koloa to the homestead of Mrs. Eliza Sinclair in the hills above Hanapepe on the west side. In the early 1800s, the Sinclairs had emigrated from Scotland to New Zealand, where they amassed a shipping fortune. When her sea captain husband died, Eliza loaded up her large family onto a sailing vessel and set out in search of a Utopia. She bought the small island of Niihau, seventeen miles northwest of Kauai, but later moved the family over to the more populated Kauai. Her descendents, the Robinson family, still owned one-third of the Garden Island. About twenty Robinsons remained on the island, holding shares of an estimated one hundred thousand acres, worth more than half a billion dollars. Patriarch Warren Robinson appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine in an article that described the family as one of the five hundred wealthiest in America but cash poor, crippled by inheritance and property taxes. Another cousin, Bruce Robinson, told the magazine that he was so poor that he ate in a restaurant only three times a year and subsisted on meat hunted in the mountains.

  Isabella Bird had set out from the Sinclair mountain homestead for Hanapepe Falls, a perilous journey that required crossing and recrossing a boulder-strewn stream until she reached the sheer drop of water over green walls into a mist-shrouded pool. Now everybody calls them Jurassic Park Falls, because they formed a backdrop for a dramatic shot by director Steven Spielberg for his movie of that name. Because the Robinsons employ armed workers to protect against trespassing, about the only way to see the falls now is from a tourist helicopter ride.

  One Sinclair descendent, the eccentric Keith Robinson, tended what he called his “Outlaw Preserve” in the inaccessible hills. Forget it, everybody told me; you’ll never get in. He hates the National Tropical Botanical Garden and everybody in it. Unless by some miracle I could sweeten up the Robinsons, I would have to give up on re-creating Isabella’s ride to the falls.

  Yet I couldn’t shake the desire to live Isabella’s experience. As she pierced the fern-shrouded Kauai forest and climbed higher on that trail one hundred years ago, she reached a high meadow. All around them soared knife-edge peaks covered in velvet green. She reveled in a day as brilliant and as cool as an English June, writing: “The sweet, joyous trade wind could not be brewed elsewhere than on the Pacific. The scenery was glorious, and mountains, trees, frolicsome water, and scarlet birds, all rioted as if in conscious happiness. Existence was luxury and reckless riding a mere outcome of the animal spirits of horses and riders, and the thud of the shoeless feet as the horses galloped over the soft grass was sweeter than music. If happiness is atmosphere, we were happy.”

  AFTER A RIDE, I would hose down Bo, rinse my own arms, streaked with sweat, horse smell, and red dust, and, alone at my car, I might wiggle into a swimsuit and drive down to Poipu Beach, only five minutes away, to fall into the ocean. Although my stiff and bruised limbs protested at the initial plunge into cold salt water, I did it just because I could.

  Now I regularly kept my saddle in the trunk and snorkel gear in the backseat.

  When I moved to Hawaii, I was conscious that I followed in a long tradition of lady writers retreating to pastoral countryside to write, to observe nature, to face solitude, to lick our wounds.

  There was Annie Dillard and her astonishing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Who could forget her account of watching an insect suck the innards out of a frog, or her other quiet observations of the natural world? She wrote it at twenty-five and promptly thereafter won the Pulitzer Prize.

  But while admiring her, I was more interested in middleaged women like myself, who faced adversity. Their country retreats became do-or-die missions. They were determined to write truth, find peace, and live fully. I needed to know how they survived and triumphed over all the slings and arrows that the world had flung and still got up and lived with joy.

  When digging my first garden in Philadelphia, a friend gave me a copy of May Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep. Like so many other women, I was enchanted by the sensitive poet’s account of moving, in her late forties, to her first house, a dilapidated eighteenth-century New Hampshire farmhouse which she renovated into a cozy nest. She dug out the surrounding land to build gardens. The book turned Sarton into a cult object, an early icon of feminine independence, particularly among young female undergraduates.

  With some eagerness I plowed through some of Sarton’s later journals, written at age seventy, eighty, and eighty-two, to find clues about how a woman alone faced old age. She continued to create, particularly the poems that constitute her best work. She wrote frankly of struggling to garden at age eighty, missing it when she couldn’t plunge her hands into dirt. I picked up her journal about how she eventually left New Hampshire to occupy a rented house on the coast of Maine. In it she confessed continuing doubts from which I’d like to be free. “Thinking so much these days about what it is to be a woman. I wonder whether an ingrained sense of guilt is not one feminine characteristic,” she wrote. “A man who has no children may feel personally deprived but he does not feel guilty, I suspect. A woman who has no children is always a little on the defensive.”

  I learned from a later j
ournal that her Nelson, New Hampshire, house had not been terribly isolated, and in fact fronted on the town green. The first biography of May Sarton, by noted literary biographer Margot Peters, further destroyed my enchantment. Peters revealed Sarton as often hysterical and selfdelusional, prone to martini-fueled rages. Even her romance of life alone at the Nelson house was semi-fake, mere snatches between hectic, frenzied activity and multiple visits from various lesbian girlfriends. Worse, she desperately stalked some targets of her frantic, unrequited lust.

  Of course, many of our most famous solitaires were not as sequestered as they let on. A modern examination of Thoreau’s letters and notes show that he frequently forsook the quiet of Walden Pond to run off for dinner with friends in Cambridge, a distance of fourteen miles. I abandoned May Sarton as a role model, repelled by her looniness, and turned to Sue Hubbell’s classic, A Country Year: Living the Questions. Her story is irresistible. When a thirty-year marriage ends, she is alone and broke, making a living by keeping bees and selling the honey. Hubbell writes more knowledgably about her natural surroundings than Sarton ever could, and she emanates a rock-solid common sense. Perhaps more important for any memoirist, she abhorred the confessional, writing more as an astute reporter.

  My own observations of the natural world began early. Shortly after my birth, my parents moved west from a small house in Minneapolis to the more countrified suburb of Hopkins. They expanded a big house to fit what eventually became a family of five children, in a charmed setting called Sherwood Forest. While my parents joined the other adults for entertainments, we children formed our own pack to climb trees, build forts, and wade for tadpoles and frogs in ponds and streams.

  When I was four a new girl named Laurie Shepherd moved close by, and the two of us became best friends. We prided ourselves on running barefoot and bare-chested, pretending to be boys or Indians or Huck Finn. In truth, Laurie was more of a free spirit than I. She took our games more seriously, and even then I sensed she pushed the boundaries more than I dared. By junior high, we drifted apart; then at age thirteen, my family moved to Connecticut. I never saw Laurie again. I heard that she was building her own log cabin in the deep woods of northern Minnesota and was writing a book about it.

  For decades, I avoided finding that book, A Dreamer’s Log Cabin: A Woman’s Walden, most likely out of jealousy. When I finally hunted it down, it brought tears to my eyes to read her remembrances of playing Robin Hood and Peter Pan in Sherwood Forest. I learned that after graduating from the University of Minnesota, she taught art in the small-town public school of Wabasha in southern Minnesota. She never let go of an ambition to live in a log cabin. To save for land and logs, Laurie quit teaching, sold her house, and worked almost around the clock as an insurance agent, bus driver, dishwasher, janitor, Army reservist, chimney sweep, and piano tuner. At age twenty-eight, she lived in a tent with her Siberian Husky and two cats and began constructing her dream house.

  Laurie peeled bark from felled trees, bathed in the river, and fashioned a boom to lift her logs into place at the same time that I was married, living in a Manhattan apartment, and commuting to The Record newspaper in Bergen County, New Jersey. My foes were not large logs, but a newsroom full of aggressive reporters competing for good assignments.

  Often when people speak of searing childhood memories, they refer to mean poverty or abuse. Our adventures in the woods branded Laurie and me not only with a desire and need to forge strong friendships, but to run free in wild places. She still lives in her cabin, now with a husband and two children. And two decades behind her, I was soon going to inhabit a secluded cottage surrounded by empty Hawaiian valleys.

  CHAPTER NINE

  My Plantation Cottage

  “I LIKE THIS HOUSE,” Mike Faye said as he walked from room to room on one of his late afternoon inspection visits at the cottage. “There’s an almost Japanese quality to it, an openness. Out the kitchen windows you can see Mount Haupu.” He gestured at the far-off mountain. “And on the other side,” he pointed to the back door, “you see the valley.”

  The main room could be easily fixed up with a new coat of paint and a few patches of trim to replace termite damage. But sagging kitchen cabinets needed to be torn out, repaired, and reattached. Faye said he could rehab the cabinet doors with raised molding and paint them in white lacquer to give them an English-country look. We’d add a microwave, cover the counters in gray-granite Formica, and install stainless steel double sinks. I stopped worrying about James’s warnings of burglaries. “He was just trying to scare you,” Scott Sloan, assistant director in charge of the grounds crew, told me. “He liked having the house empty.”

  A stickler for historical detail, Faye insisted we install traditional Canec for the bathroom ceiling: a spongy, fibrous board made from sugarcane fibers. We argued over light switches for two weeks. Old-style plantation cottages like mine had single-wall construction, which meant just that: a single wall of heavy lumber served as both exterior and interior wall, allowing no hidden spaces for electrical wiring. Traditionally, builders enclosed wires in ugly squared tubing with raised boxes for switches, all in dark brown. I hated them. Faye stubbornly countered, “It’s historical.” He finally gave in, and found me modern, paddlestyle toggle switches. In white.

  I brought in a second telephone line for a fax. Connected cable TV. Installed a dishwasher. Wired the closets, as storing clothes in humid Hawaii could lead to disaster. The Kleins told me that their wool jackets broke out in green mold after a couple of months. At Ace Hardware I found electric heat tubes for the closet baseboards to keep the closets dry. I salvaged a chest and two coffee tables from the old cottage furnishings. Everything else, I told John Rapozo, the Garden foreman assigned to oversee renovations, I never want to see again.

  The plastic lavender tub had to go. We worked out a plan for an open Japanese-style shower on one side of the ten-by-twelve-foot bathroom. Faye presented me with an antique showerhead the size of a plate that looked like it had come from a 1930s Malaysian rubber plantation. He designed a long vanity and mirror to stretch along the entire opposite wall. His carpenter built the cabinet of fir, then stained it a deep, glossy cherry so it looked like fine library furniture. Dr. Klein approved the plan without a murmur over costs. “Lucinda, I want you to be happy here,” he said. “I want you to feel that every issue has been resolved, so you can put it to rest and just concentrate on your work.” Wow.

  Mike Faye had researched the plantation cottage style, and one day I got him to tell me about it. In the early 1900s, sugar plantation owners faced more and more criticism over labor conditions for their workers, imported from Japan, China, the Philippines, and Korea. Foreign embassies protested housing conditions, which often consisted of rough campsites or dormitories. As Hawaii was seeking statehood, the planters felt the pressure. They began building what was called “sanitary housing.”

  “For the first time,” said Faye, “families had their own houses and privacy. Lo and behold, it led to a baby boom.” When all the baby boys grew up, they went off to become soldiers in World War II, and fought in the famous 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team of Japanese-American soldiers. They were given the most dangerous assignments, and more than half of them were killed. But those who survived came back to Hawaii as war heroes, got involved in politics, and changed the whole political and economic landscape in Hawaii. Democratic landslide elections overwhelmed the Republican stronghold of Hawaii. The state earned the reputation as so Democratic as to verge on socialism. “And all because of these houses,” said Faye with a smile.

  He showed me his collection of old pattern books used as construction plans by the all-powerful Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association for its “sanitary” worker villages. They included common bathhouses, baseball diamonds, incinerators, and small stores. “The lighter your skin, the better your house,” Faye explained. “It wasn’t right, but that’s the way it was.” Supervisors, called lunas, were mostly haoles and claimed the
largest houses in the center of the village. Japanese workers received higher wages and better houses close to the center, while the Filipinos on the bottom of the caste system got lower wages and houses on the village outskirts.

  Plantation owners imported Japanese temple builders to erect Buddhist temples. When the carpenters finished those jobs, they went to work on the managers’ grand Victorian chalets, then later, smaller residences. Each temple builder had his own signature marks, like the crude exterior window frames on my house that extended slightly over the window tops, like ears. Faye and his carpenters became connoisseurs of the nameless temple builders. Someone might tell them that this house or that was built by the Japanese temple builder in Waimea, but they’ll look at it and say, “No way. Maybe the Hanalei builder.”

  When Faye’s crew crawled under my cottage, they discovered paint on the underside of the living room floor. He pointed out a seam in the flooring between the living room and dining areas where the two rooms had been joined together. After the war, he said, builders recycled many houses because of a scarcity of lumber. Faye concluded that the cottage living room must have originally been used elsewhere, perhaps as a second-story porch.

  It explained why the house had such an open-air feel.

  EARLY MORNINGS I adopted the habit of stopping by the cottage to see how renovations were going. Often Faye’s workers had already arrived, telltale surfboards extending out the backs of their pickup trucks, as the guys liked to catch some waves before work. But today I had the place to myself. I stood on the front porch and surveyed the empty landscape. I was falling in love with the place.

  I heard a vehicle and saw a brown truck hurtle up the drive. Garden superintendent John Rapozo frequently dropped by to check on progress. I always liked to see him, and thought of him as the Man in Black, like country singer Johnny Cash. Rapozo had a craggy, rawhide face and always wore the same uniform of neatly pressed black pants, big black cowboy boots, buckskin hat, and a black T-shirt imprinted with the Garden’s breadfruit logo. Now he only picked up the guitar to sing for family gatherings, but in his younger days he and his two brothers, Mannie and Georgie, played regularly at the Coconut Palms Hotel. John said he used to bring the house down when he strummed “Try a Little Tenderness.”