Waking Up in Eden (10 page)

“You're kidding. Lauoho? That means she rode right by the property where my cottage is now?”

“Yeah, that was the only way she could go,” he said. I shivered in eerie delight. Hawaiians have a name for the goose-bumply reaction to strange and beautiful events that seem to have been divined by unseen forces.

Chicken skin, they call it.

W
HEN HE HEARS ME
honk the horn, he usually comes running out of the brush and races to the pasture gate as if he were Secretariat, snorting and stamping and showing off. But today he doesn't appear, nor his girlfriend, Zealy, a mare from New Zealand. I open the old metal refrigerator lying on its side that we use as a feed locker, and scoop out pellets of compressed alfalfa. And although I keep whistling, still no Bo.

I start the long hike back through the brush, along narrow horse trails, up a rock pile, and through a scrub forest. Fresh droppings. Evidence that they've been down this way recently. Air plants fill the field with tall stems shooting up to waist height with thousands of lanternlike translucent pods that dance in the bright morning light.

Silent beehives lean at angles, remnants of a long ago plantation house. Wild cane and grass grows higher and higher, until it closes over my head. I seem to shrink smaller and smaller, as if going back to my childhood wanderings in Minnesota, where parents allowed their children to roam out of sight without fear. My friends and I would go miles into what we called “the Secret Woods,” far from adult supervision and into a fantasy of adventures and dangers, of deep glens haunted by witches and winged horses named Pegasus.

With slight apprehension, I enter the horses' private realm as if finding myself inside the zoo cage with the animals. Nests of beaten-down brush form their private rooms of tall grass. A rustling of leaves and thud of hooves announce their approach. Suddenly, Bo towers before me, head thrown back and nostrils flaring. The sun burnishes his dark brown coat to a shiny copper. He lumbers over at a slow walk, lowering his head shyly and preening. He noses behind my back for a carrot. I let him take
it in his mouth, but don't let go, so he'll bite off a big chunk. I give the other half to Zealy, close on his heels. Bo nuzzles my hand, and I pat his neck then reach up to give him a hug, which he tolerates for a few seconds.

As I head back to the front pasture, Bo follows me, his nose too close, bumping me on the shoulder. Then both he and Zealy simultaneously remember that I usually leave grain in their feed pans. They prick their ears up, look forward, then rush off in an almost silent run, weaving through the trees. It takes me longer. I find the two of them with their heads down in the feed. I easily slip a halter over Bo's neck and wait for Val to show up.

I was surprised that horses were such a ubiquitous part of the Hawaiian landscape, and have been for a long time. After English and American colonists arrived with bulls and cows in the early 1800s, so many cattle escaped that they bred into dangerous herds stampeding over several islands. Finally King Kamehameha III imported Spanish
vaqueros
from Mexico to teach Hawaiians how to rope and ride. The Hawaiians coined the word
paniolo,
from the Spanish word
español,
for these island cowboys. Riding, roping, and rodeos remain an important part of rural Hawaiian life. Declare any day a holiday, and Hawaiians hold rodeos and parades that may have few participants or spectators, but always attract
paniolos
astride their horses, festooned with leis.

Mark Twain and Isabella Bird both noted in their Hawaiian journals how much the Hawaiians loved to ride. Nineteenth-century ladies dressed up in long Victorian gowns, donned leis of crimson ohia flowers, and galloped in packs down the streets of Honolulu. Bird wrote, “The women seemed perfectly at home in their gay, brass-embossed, high peaked saddles flying along
astride, bare-footed, with their orange and scarlet riding dresses streaming on each side beyond their horses' tails, a bright kaleidoscopic flash of bright eyes, white teeth, shining hair, garlands of flowers and many colored dresses.”

Isabella herself concocted an island riding outfit that must have startled the natives. She donned Turkish-style bloomer pants, New Zealand boots, Mexican spurs, and a flannel riding coat.

I
HAD FOUND
Bo by chance. I often spent Saturdays or Sundays in the office, but one late Friday afternoon, hungry for a change of routine, I impulsively booked a weekend trail ride at Silver Falls Ranch on the north shore.

That day I joined a group of six, all tourists I presumed, and followed a guide on a rather tame, flat trail. We stopped at a waterfall tumbling into a dark green pool, and some of us plunged in for a swim. One of the other riders, a woman named Val Pilari, accompanied her ten-year-old granddaughter on the ride. As water cascaded over our heads, I learned that Val, too, was a resident, and lived near Poipu Beach on the south shore. She already owned one horse, but wanted another so she could ride with her grandchildren or husband. It all seemed natural and plausible when she asked if I'd be interested in going halves on a horse. Sure, I said offhandedly. Although I had some riding experience, owning a horse in Philadelphia had cost too much to contemplate. I had fantasized about trying to re-create Isabella Bird's horseback adventures. Unexpectedly, I was presented with the means to realize that dream.

When Val telephoned a few weeks later to report that she had found a horse, I was skeptical of entering such a partnership
with someone I had met only once. Yet I instinctively sensed honesty in Val. She had owned horses all her life, for which I would be immeasurably grateful when she schooled me on the particulars of feed and the treatment for rain rot, a fungus that appeared on Bo's hindquarters during the rainy season.

We drove together to the Anini Beach polo grounds on the north shore where weekly games are held, a vestige of the old plantation elite's pastimes. A grizzled, not particularly trustworthy-appearing polo wrangler wanted to unload a six-year-old islandbred mix of quarter horse and thoroughbred. The horse, named Bo, hadn't taken to the fast pace of polo. An excellent recommendation in my mind.

The man easily roped and saddled a dark brown horse so skinny his ribs showed. Val elected to watch while I mounted and trotted around the polo field, gratified when the gelding responded to my commands to turn, slow, and halt. I reined in, reporting that Bo appeared well trained.

We paid, the wrangler threw in an old, broken-in saddle and some sorry-looking tack, worn and stiff with disuse, and we had our horse. Later, when Bo showed himself difficult to handle, Val would say, “That guy drugged Bo the day you tried him.”

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.”

A
FTER 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.