Waking Up In Eden Part 11

Although the cottage interior had been transformed, only sc.r.a.ps of foundation plantings adorned its exterior. No pastel petunias, geraniums, or daffodils from my previous life here, I vowed. This was my once-in-a-lifetime chance for a tropical garden. I unfurled a coiled garden hose into undulating curves to mark new outlines for expanded beds. The circle drive seemed forlorn. Perhaps it needed a tree in the center, encircled with ferns and hot splashes of color.

On my knees, I tried to rip out a yellowing, multi-stemmed bamboo sprawled against the house. Then I heard the clunky chug of James's beat-up car climbing the hill to the cottage. Oh murder, he's going to be mad that I'm messing up the yard, I thought.

James shot from the car like a cannonball and charged over, glowering. "What you doing?" he asked accusingly. "That's my job. I'll do that for you. It needs a pickax." He marched to the locked toolshed at the rear of the cottage and returned with a brutal ax.

By the weekend, the bamboo had disappeared. I dug in a few hundred pounds of composted cow manure until the red Kauai dirt ran black. When shopping for ferns at a nearby nursery, on impulse I abandoned my ban on temperate zone plants and lunged for several flats of mundane but useful pastel impatiens. For the driveway circle, I bought flats of low-growing heather covered with tiny lavender flowers, and New Guinea impatiens in hot magenta, cerise, and tangerine. That afternoon I cranked up the sound system inside the cottage to blast out the window: Wagner's Die Walkure and sound tracks from South Pacific and The Sound of Music. I broke open a package of new leather gardening gloves I had been h.o.a.rding. No reason to save them.

"The hiiiilllllllls are alllliiiiive with the sound of music," I sang as I set out the pots of fingered Laua'e ferns, interspersed with two shades of pink impatiens. I strapped on my riding helmet for protection because tall coconut palms swayed over some of the garden beds. Falling coconuts reputedly kill more people each year than sharks. Sam tried to help, rubbing against my ankles as I dug. I shooed her away. She picked herself up and moved off a few feet, then lay down and ate gra.s.s while she watched.

Preoccupation with the effort to drag a fifty-pound bag of manure or place a rock at the right angle of repose gave relief from the ever-growing office worries. Somehow not thinking helps to sort things out. Despite the memorial services, I hadn't yet grieved for Bill Klein. Now I knew how soldiers felt when comrades fell. You had to keep shooting and ducking before you could focus on your loss. But a garden is a good place to bury the dead. It's within the natural order for all living things to die; it allows for new growth. When I machete weeds to throw into the ravine, they decompose to a nouris.h.i.+ng organic matter. Walt Whitman's words that all flesh is gra.s.s is a hopeful idea to a gardener.

I finished planting a sweet little patch of green ferns and pink impatiens. Then I worked again to complete a second bed. At the end of the afternoon, I hiked out the drive to get a long view, to see if the new plants provided the islands of color I sought. Not really. They'll grow quickly, I reminded myself. But a true cottage garden now swept across the length of the house in soft ovals and curves. A lake of veined caladiums and red ti surrounded the platform lanai off the back door. Green ti continued across the bedroom wing of the house, interspersed with funnels of asparagus ferns. A brazen, multicolored croton guarded the front porch. On the other side of the steps, two low-growing cycads and shooting comets of blue agapanthuses anch.o.r.ed a kidney-shaped bed, which then fed into a sweep of ferns and impatiens across the living room. During a time when I felt the earth s.h.i.+fting under me, something about literally putting down roots helped create a feeling of sanity.

Over the next few weeks, every step out the front door became a joyful occasion for inspecting progress. I congratulated myself on each new agapanthus bloom and the growing carpet of blue daze, a ground cover dotted with periwinkle blue flowers. News of my little cottage garden traveled fast among the garden staff. "I hear you are making a beautiful garden," said Eddie, one of the oldest gardeners. "I want to see it."

One evening I returned home to find eight huge lava boulders in place around the center driveway circle. I knew immediately that they had been dumped by John Rapozo and gently nudged into place with a bulldozer. Another night I found two black plastic garbage bags on the porch, filled with plugs of mondo gra.s.s, a wordless gift from the venerated Hideo, to fill in bare dirt patches.

I found more and more diversions outside the office: Not only my lifesaving little cottage garden, my research into Allerton history, and my return to writing, but also a sport that unexpectedly connected me more deeply to Hawaii than I could have imagined.

I DON'T WANT TO GET UP. It's 4:30 a.m., starless and black outside. It's probably raining at the river, anyway, and no one will show up. I don't wanna to go. Jeez, whose idea was this anyhow? Even the cat thinks it's too early. She's asleep on my feet and if I move she'll wake up and yowl.

Rousing myself to rearrange Sam, I got up and s.h.i.+vered into a robe, shuffled down the dark hallway to the kitchen, and switched on the small light under the stove hood. Sam didn't even bother following, she thought it so indecently early. Under a cone of light, I poured leftover coffee into a mug, put it in the microwave, punched one minute and ten seconds. Groped my way back to the bathroom. Wiggled into a Speedo bathing suit and black spandex bicycle shorts, then pulled on a sweat suit. Zapped another cup of coffee for the road, and clicked on a flashlight to guide me out the front door, down the steps to the driveway, and into the car. At this hour, only a handful of trucks and another early bird driver or two sped along Route 50 and through an empty Lihue.

Several weeks earlier at an art opening, I had met Carol Lovell, director of the Kauai Museum. She had raved about paddling with an all-women's outrigger canoe club. "We have enough to qualify for a women's master division," she said.

Wistfully I asked, "How do you manage to work it into your schedule?"

"We're on the river at five-thirty a.m.," she said.

"Five-thirty?"

As I reached the boat landing on the Wailua River, I pulled up beside four parked cars, then walked through heavily dewed gra.s.s toward silhouettes of figures, bent at the waist, stretching over legs spread wide. "Hallooooooo," I called. As usual, there was no chitchat. A stately, full-figured Hawaiian woman with waist-length hair approached out of the dark. She drew me close and kissed me on the cheek, saying "Aloha" with the dignity of a Hawaiian queen. As race director for Kawaikini Canoe Club, Puna Dawson had already transformed a laid-back bunch of woman into a serious training team.

Six of us lined up along the canoe, three to each side. One, two, three, and we heaved, lifting the heavy boat out of its cradle and sliding it over a bed of old tires. Our fibergla.s.s boat - the vaha - weighed four hundred pounds, much lighter than the hand-carved wooden crafts used by ancient Hawaiians. I scrambled down the riverbank into chilly water to guide the canoe. Puna directed me to sit last, in the number six seat, then hopped on behind me, astride the back of the canoe for a steering lesson. We headed upstream into blackness. After several weeks of practices I had learned the basic strokes, but steering was new. And more difficult. I tried to insert the paddle vertically into the water alongside the boat like a rudder. The boat tacked sharply from one side of the river to the other until Puna dispatched me to the number four seat while she took over. Old, teenage feelings of odd man out made me blush.

Each seat position had a job. Number six was the steersman, the captain who called which stroke to use. The strongest stroker sat in the number one seat and set the pace. The number two seat called the paddle changes. After six, eight, or twelve strokes, she yelled "Hut!" The crew responded "Ho," and pulled paddles from one side of the boat to the other, all in smooth, synchronized motion. The three and five seats provided balance, leaning out of the boat if necessary to keep it from tipping over. My seat, number four, had the least responsibility. I kept missing the beat, fumbling with the paddle.

As the sky paled to a thin wash of rose we headed downriver and took the boat out of the water. Puna looked at me appraisingly and said, "Lucinda, you're going to feel rotten for a while. The others have been paddling longer than you have. Don't beat yourself up about it."

I had never partic.i.p.ated in women's team sports in school. But I figured I was a late bloomer anyway and now had as good a chance as any to redo my teenage years. "It's never too late to be what you might have been" was a motto for George Eliot. Why not for me? After all, the Kawaikini Canoe Club members were mostly middle-aged, and the early morning practices took place on the calm Wailua, the only navigable river in the Hawaiian Islands, instead of the undulating ocean. As I retreated, weak and marginalized at the office, my body got tougher and tougher.

One Sunday morning, Puna gathered twelve of us around her and announced, "We're going to take the boat out to the ocean." Sundays were for fun paddles that didn't begin until well past daybreak. We fell quiet. We had seen the big combers rolling in, pounding the beach.

Irene, a strong paddler, expressed what we all felt. "I don't want to go," she said. "I'm not ready. I'm afraid."

I thought Puna would insist, but instead she gathered us in a circle. "If someone speaks out against something, it may be telling us something. Some negativity could affect the enterprise. Go walk along the river under the bridge and I'll meet you on the beach."

On a sand dune with the incoming surf to her back, Puna lined us up in a row, sternly addressing us: "When you're out in a race, you're going to have to swim through water like this, so I want you to get comfortable in it." For sprints, "iron man" crews paddle the whole race themselves. But for longer distances, an escort motorboat pulls up alongside the canoe, and relief paddlers dive into the water and swim to the canoe as the tired crewmembers vault into the ocean from their seats.

"On the count of three, I want you to run into the surf and swim six strokes out, then return. One, two, three," she called, and we charged down the dune into the water, ducked under a wave, and stroked against the heavy, sucking pull. We body surfed in on a wave, then tried to dash out of the water before another surge hammered us into the sand. Puna sent us out again, this time for eight strokes. Then twelve. By sixteen, I panted. A heavy wave filled my mouth with salt water. I spit and sputtered and dragged myself out, thinking I couldn't go again. Thank G.o.d, she stopped.

"In a distance race," she told us, as we sprawled on the sand, "there will be twenty-eight changes when you'll have to jump off the escort boat and swim to the canoe, or leave the canoe and swim to the escort boat. You just did five. And look what happened. You're all exhausted. In an ocean race, you have to keep paddling after you've been in the salt water and swallowed salt."

After we stowed the canoe back on its cradle, we sat on a picnic table and listened to Puna talk about all the improvements we had made in recent weeks. We were beginning to hit the water together, she said, and we were getting stronger. We'd enter a short sprint race. After that, we could qualify for a long-distance race, the annual Molokai Channel race between the islands of Molokai and Oahu. "Forty-two miles, in a straight line, across rough water. Longer if you tack from side to side," Puna said. "Next year we'll aim for the Molokai. How many are interested?"

Every hand went up.

Puna fascinated me. She had plenty to do other than show up at 5:30 to coach a bunch of neophyte paddlers. She worked for a social agency that delivered meals to the elderly. Her five children were mostly grown, with the youngest age eighteen. But she had a goal, and it was nothing less than to make Hawaiian outrigger canoe paddling an Olympic sport. Puna took the long view and moved toward her goal like a chess player, each advance requiring years of organizing work. Like most generals, she realized that a grand plan was fine, but the battles were won in the trenches. And this particular trench was right here, at 5:30 a.m. with an unlikely group of middle-aged novices.

Puna had grown up at Kailua Beach on Oahu, her father, grandfather, and uncle all boat builders. Back then, canoes were beautiful objects of polished koa. Paddling provided entertainment for children, along with surfing, sand boarding, and fis.h.i.+ng. Puna starting paddling in regattas at age eight, usually pressed into duty as an extra.

Men ran all the canoe clubs then. After they raced, the women fit in their sprints. "We had to fight for canoe time," she remembers fiercely. But the big events were the long-distance races - and they were only for men. Even in Hawaii, though, the rumblings of the women's movement began to shake things up. Women started agitating for their own long-distance racing. "Women were becoming alive, and it all stemmed from that," Puna told me.

By the time she was twenty-four, Puna was married with two children and pregnant with a third, but still paddling. Her husband, Kalani Dawson, became a.s.sistant to the race director of the Honolulu Canoe Racing a.s.sociation. Both Puna and Kalani became deeply involved in the administration and organization of racing.

Parents came to watch their children paddle; Puna and Kalani enticed the parents to start paddling themselves. Originally they did it for exercise, but the adults inevitably caught the compet.i.tion bug and starting training to enter sprint regattas. Puna checked into what was necessary to make outrigger canoeing an Olympic sport. For one thing, an Olympic sport had to have partic.i.p.ation by both s.e.xes and all age groups. Even for consideration as an exhibition sport at the Olympics, they would have to show that at least thirty-eight countries partic.i.p.ated in the sport. Puna saw that the only venue that could draw that many other countries was the legendary Molokai Channel crossing that drew paddlers from as far away as Tahiti and Java. By counting over a span of years, they could show that teams from enough countries had raced the Molokai.

Women started to secure their own funding, paddling became a bigger and bigger sport, and, at the 1990 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, outrigger canoeing debuted as an exhibition sport. There are still hurdles to overcome for full Olympic compet.i.tion status - international regulations have yet to be adopted for boat design and equipment. Just as Puana was making progress, her husband, Kalani, was transferred to Kauai. Paddling interest on Kauai was low. Puna and Kalani saw that their task was to prod Kauai's lackadaisical canoe clubs into races.

The Kawaikini Canoe Club members had never entered a race. They were known for showing up once a week, on Sunday, for a desultory run up the river followed by beer. But the new members brought compet.i.tive spirit and a rigorous practice schedule. Carol, the lanky director of the Kauai Museum, acted as our team captain. She was a handsome woman with white streaks in her short wavy hair, a natural athlete, diplomat, and leader. She enlisted her sc.r.a.ppier sister, Irene, who sang in a Hawaiian band and arranged flowers at the trendy Pacific Cafe. Both sisters were married to fishermen. Their friend Angie was another key member, loud and boisterous, who sometimes brought her beautiful teenage daughter to paddle. Though often wisecracking, Angie could also be found sweeping the boat landing. "That's part of clubbing, too," she said.

Several doctors joined in order to squeeze in exercise before reporting to duty at Wilc.o.x Memorial Hospital and quickly became a divisive presence. The local women contended that the doctors never helped with the fund-raising necessary to buy the canoes and rigging. Dr. Karen showed up for early morning practice but rarely said a word. Dr. Mary was the most outgoing, our Miss Congeniality, although she didn't realize she branded herself a recent import by showing up at practices in her Mercedes and inviting the club to her sw.a.n.ky mini-mansion overlooking the river. Dr. Ellen was a relative youngster at thirty-five, and the most aggressive, with a combative air not disguised by a tousled ma.s.s of blond curls. Beth, a nurse, was the only regular under thirty. A steady presence with good humor, she had broad, powerful shoulders and a dark blue medallion design tattooed in the middle of her back. Martha, another nurse, was local and sometimes brought her boyfriend, Brian, a fisherman who also acted as a.s.sistant coach.

But as we progressed together, this early morning crew became a force, attending the monthly club meetings and insisting on a racing schedule. A revolution had occurred in Kawaikini Canoe Club and I became a part of it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

Obake

BEFORE I KNEW it, spring turned into summer. I was still hanging on at the Garden, faking it, but my spirits had started to revive. One Sat.u.r.day after a late ride with Bo, I returned to the pasture after a harvest moon had risen. Hungry, I decided to stop at the Big Save grocery. As I got out of the car, I heard a high-pitched singing in j.a.panese, accompanied by a steady boom of a ba.s.s drum. The Bon Dance in Koloa.

Although I wore riding clothes - a jean s.h.i.+rt over black stretch riding pants and cowboy boots, all streaked with red dirt stains - I crossed the road to join the fair at the Koloa Jodo Mission. Paper lanterns bobbed along spokes strung from a central post, from which big speakers broadcast the harsh nasal tones of j.a.panese singing. Every August, Buddhist missions all over the island held ritual dances to grieve lost loved ones and bid them a return to the spiritual world.

About fifty women in their best kimonos moved together in intricate steps, each waving a white handkerchief, a symbol of a departed soul. Obake, or ghosts, they called them. One tall, slender woman, probably seventy, was dressed in brilliant red silk tied with a pale pink obi. She turned her face upward with the joy of movement, dancing with grace, her arms and feet swinging in long-memorized patterns. Other dancers sneaked glances at neighbors to follow the steps, but she knew them, unerringly. A few small girls in tiny kimonos pranced amid the other dancers, improvising with unrestrained energy.

At the snack booths, men turned out hot "flying saucer" sandwiches by slapping bread into round, black iron holders, then spooning in a spicy hamburger mixture. Closing the holder sealed the crusts and nipped off the edges, making little round bread pockets, grilled over hot flames. Delicious. After consuming two, I headed for the Okinawa doughnut booth for a paper bag of the deep-fried delights. I remembered that Bill Klein had introduced them to me, saying, "You can tell they're good when the paper bag is soaked with grease."

The fair lasted two nights and would end with a ceremonial good-bye to the spirits that both honored the dead and subtly instructed the grieving that it was time to resume their lives. I went inside the temple to buy a ghost s.h.i.+p, a small wooden boat with a paper sail to s.h.i.+eld a candle flame. I wrote three names on a slip of paper and tucked it behind the sail. Dad. Mom. Bill.

Doug Kinney had finally found a new Garden director, a botany professor. The professor had never run a botanical garden, nor expressed any interest in the art or demands of one. I feared for the worst.

If I didn't get out I would shrink into a gutless wimp.

Ever since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I had been intrigued by stories of American journalists who traveled to Iron Curtain countries to help build a free press. At the time, I could never afford to take time off from the weekly paycheck that paid my mortgage and bills. But when I left the Garden, I would be cut loose again from any obligations. I filled out an application for a Knight International Press Fellows.h.i.+p, run by a Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., organization that sent reporters and editors abroad in sort of a journalistic Peace Corps. What is your preferred destination? the application asked. Eastern Europe, I wrote. Expect hards.h.i.+p conditions, they warned. Pay was low. I wouldn't hear whether I was accepted for another month or two, but I had made my decision. Tomorrow I would call Doug. I was beginning another journey whose destination was not yet revealed.

I wasn't afraid. In Philadelphia, I had allowed myself to be diminished by others. How small my visions for myself had been then, how limited my imagination of what possibilities lay before me. I felt solid within now and could move on my own power to protect myself, without the deus ex machina that had brought me to Kauai.

Yet I no longer wanted to make long-term plans, nor try to design my fate. Life can change in a second. If you let it. The essence of grace was to live within the mysteries, accept the uncertainties, and greet whatever develops.

The next night a crowd gathered on the rock pier at Kukuiula Harbor in Poipu to observe the final act of the Bon ceremony. A phalanx of young men in swimsuits carried on their shoulders three flat-bottomed rowboats, each holding hundreds of ghost s.h.i.+ps, candles all lit. The men swam the boats out beyond the wave break to tie them to a small outboard craft. The silent crowd watched. The outboard motor hummed, then s.h.i.+fted into higher gear as it moved off, trailing a wake of dancing, flickering candle flames. As the boats moved further and further out to sea, the outline of the outboard disappeared into darkness. We could make out only the glimmering lights.

And then the flames no longer advanced with purpose. They drifted, bobbing on the waves. The motorboat had let them go.

IN THE END, Doug graciously allowed me to live at my cottage for a few months after I quit. I left campaign plans, drafts for the end-of-year fund appeals, the last newsletter, and a script for a video about the Garden, which I knew would never be completed without Dr. Klein but agreed to write anyway. In return, I unrolled into the luxury of having days to myself to fill with hours at the laptop in the sunlit cottage, unrushed rides through the hills with Bo, and, of course, canoeing.

Outrigger canoeing history captured me. It wasn't just because I could partic.i.p.ate; the canoes were intrinsic to Hawaiian life, responsible for the settling of the Hawaiian Islands in the first place. Polynesians had invented the double-hulled voyaging canoe for their vast organized migrations that began two thousand years ago in Samoa and thrusted north and west to unknown Pacific islands. Expert navigators, they memorized the seasonal changes of the sun and stars and learned to discern distant land from ocean waves and flotsam and jetsam. They studied bird migration. The Pacific golden plover, among other birds, arrived each fall on wind currents from the unknown north. The tiny bird tarried a few days, then flew off to the south, bound for islands whose distance the early Polynesians had already measured. So more islands must lie northward, they concluded.

For everyday life the Polynesians paddled lightweight, shallow fis.h.i.+ng canoes that skimmed the surface of their calm ocean lagoons. But settlers in the Hawaiian Islands needed a new sort of fis.h.i.+ng canoe if they wanted to eat. Unlike most of Oceania, the Hawaiian Islands lie in the middle of deep ocean trenches, without rings of coral reefs to protect them from the most violent storms or to create many shallows full of fish. The Hawaiians needed heavier canoes to pierce the treacherous surf and yet also navigate close to the sh.o.r.elines of rocky cliffs. They built heavier and more deeply drawing boats, fitted with one-piece hulls, higher surf guards, and simplified outriggers.

The end product, the Hawaiian canoe, "may well be the most versatile and seaworthy rough water craft ever designed or built by any culture in any time," contended the celebrated paddler and canoe historian Tommy Holmes. (The need for these rough-water canoes was particularly evident on Kauai, where a harbor dock that could meet and off-load s.h.i.+ps was not built until 1962. Up until then, sugarcane had to be cabled out to s.h.i.+ps. Locals in canoes met seaplanes to ferry smaller cargo ash.o.r.e.) Like Dr. Klein, I was beginning to see the history of plant life and the study of botany as the root (sorry, can't help myself!) behind all human achievement. And in Hawaii, the root that became critical to development of the st.u.r.dy Hawaiian canoe was attached to the koa tree. Acacia koa. The new Hawaiians surely must have fallen to their knees in astonishment and grat.i.tude when they explored the Islands' interiors and discovered immense forests of tall native hardwood trees that reached one hundred feet into the air. Circ.u.mferences spanned as many as thirty-six feet. Whole villages of one hundred men and more would decamp to the interior to fell one of the giant trees, rough out a dugout, then drag the ten-ton canoe down to the coast. At the time koa covered many of the Islands, the most populous tree second only to ohia. After five centuries of plunder, only a small fraction remain, a testament to the continued modern demand for koa art frames, furniture, and even wall paneling.

Early European explorers envied the speed, maneuverability, and seaworthiness of the Hawaiian watercraft. "One man will sometimes paddle a single canoe faster than a good boat's crew could row a whaleboat," wrote one eighteenth-cenury British captain. Yet despite their canoes' obvious advantages, the Hawaiians nearly abandoned them after they saw tall s.h.i.+ps. Only ten years after Cook's arrival, King Kamehameha entreated American and British captains for s.h.i.+ps' carpenters so they could build their own Western-style brigs. By the 1840s the Hawaiian "navy consisted of decked vessels . . . armed schooners of from twenty to a hundred tons," according to nineteenth-century explorer George Simpson. What little enthusiasm for canoe racing that survived was effectively smothered by zealous missionaries to whom the gambling element, so much a part of the canoe race, was utterly sinful.

In 1875, King David Kalakaua, who was dedicated to reviving traditional Hawaiian water sports, set aside his birthday, November 16, as the date for an annual regatta. Men and women alike - even royalty - joined in. A number of clubs came into existence during Kalakaua's reign, but when he died, water sports again went into decline. Not until the 1930s did a local group of paddlers with Hawaiian, j.a.panese, and Portuguese ancestry in South Kona begin building canoes exclusively for racing.

When famed paddler A. E. "Toots" Minvielle first called for a race of the treacherous Molokai Channel, forty miles from Molokai to Waikiki, not even his own canoe club, the Outrigger Canoe Club in Honolulu, supported him. They feared it too long, too dangerous, and too impractical. That was 1939. He continued to lobby, finally persuading three clubs to enter the first race thirteen years later.

AS EARLY MORNING canoe practices continued, I began to realize that team spirit would determine whether we would ever race. Our first test came when Puna approached us one morning about catering a traditional luau for a young j.a.panese couple who wanted to celebrate the first birthday of their daughter, a big occasion in the islands.

"We could earn some of the money to pay for racing entry fees, s.h.i.+pping the canoe to other islands, and hiring an escort boat," Puna told us.

The local women all knew what to do. Staging a luau is as much a part of their repertoire as putting on a Thanksgiving turkey dinner is for women in the rest of the country. Preparations consumed the better part of a week.

When I arrived at Carol Lovell's house, stacks of aluminum trays and cook pots filled the small kitchen and spilled out into the living room. Her five-year-old grandson and three of his coconspirators ran in and out between our legs. Outside on the deck, Carol's sister, Irene, emptied gallon bags of concentrated purple paste into a huge pail at a laundry sink. She added water, then mixed the concoction with one a.s.sured hand, scooping and pulling, until it became smooth and ropey. "Some people can't do it, their poi has lumps in it," she said. "Hawaiians don't like lumps in their poi."

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 sc.r.a.ped salmon into mushy pulp for the lomi-lomi. A neighbor stretched fis.h.i.+ng 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 ap.r.o.ns 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-s.h.i.+rts, 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 Cutla.s.s 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 b.u.t.toned 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, b.u.mpy 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 ma.s.sive lies," he lectured. "The eco-n.a.z.is 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 bemused at his own folly in a n.o.ble yet doomed mission. "It's the way I was brought up," he says. "To take care of the land."