Waking Up in Eden (13 page)

Further out, craniums of coral anchored on the ocean floor. Most mornings I jogged around the beach roads at first light, then cooled off with a swim. The underwater rock formations at Poipu Beach had become as familiar as the island's terrestrial geography. In deeper water, big black and orange jacks darted in synchronization next to unicorn fish with their single horns and expressions of startled stupidity. Deeper still, a shower of bubbles sparkled around me, signaling the wave break above. A sudden shiver trilled down my spine, an uncontrollable reaction when the thought of a shark splashed into consciousness. None
had surfaced near Poipu Beach in recent memory, but every year there were one or two shark attacks around the Hawaiian Islands. A surfer might lose a foot, or a swimmer, an arm. I sprinted for shore.

The hurricane had ruined the beach's grassy expanse, turning the park into patches of weeds and red dirt. Nearby, the boarded-up wreckage of the Waiohai Resort remained an eyesore.

According to the morning radio surf report, south shore waves rose a mere two to three feet. Although it was only 7 a.m., already four or five surfers bobbed on boards a hundred yards offshore, waiting for a decent swell. One sprung to standing position and skimmed left ahead of a curl.

An outdoor shower at the edge of the sand beach consisted of a simple concrete post with four showerheads. Mothers doused their bare babies here next to locals with warrior tattoos. Cold water only, but sufficient for Hawaii's preternatural, nearly continual perfect weather. I brought a small bottle of shampoo to lather up. Sometimes I went for days without an indoor, hotwater shower. Rinsing the salt from my rubber mask, I hung it on the faucet, then tucked the fins into the narrow crevice behind the shower pipe to drain, local style. A surfer walked over to join me. I had seen him other mornings, startled by the intensity of his good looks. Strong, perfect white teeth. A mop of auburn, curly hair. Rivulets of water streamed through graying chest hair. He flashed a high-voltage smile that reduced me to a blush, which I tried to conceal.

“Morning,” he said with a grin, sticking his head under the water. There was something intimate about showering with a stranger, even if we were outdoors and wearing swimsuits.
“Fine way to start a day. Fine way,” he said. I primly agreed and turned off the water.

“That's a real antique you got there,” he said, eyeing my black snorkel mask, bought for a Caribbean trip fifteen years ago.

“I know,” I said. “But I have a small face, and it's the only one I can find that doesn't leak.”

“You just keep on using it.”

The islands attracted lots of these guys, who had come for the surfing and now drifted from job to job, woman to woman. Would an erotic plot twist be worth it? Kauai was the smallest of small towns. Kansas in the middle of the ocean. People noticed where your car had been parked and knew if you drove to Lihue, or stopped at Koloa Landing to snorkel the deep water. At the botanical garden, grounds workers learned about plans to renovate my little plantation cottage almost before I made them. The coconut wireless, they called it. How long would it take to get around that the Garden fund-raiser was having a fling with a surfer?

I could see in his eyes what he registered in an instant: mutual sexual attraction. An animal behaviorist would see it as a scenting, an atavistic response to a receptive mating partner.

B
ACK IN THE CAR
, I drove through the back streets of Old Koloa Town with its little wooden houses, remnants of a plantation camp. Jumbles of potted orchids and fountain-like red and green ti filled the cottage gardens with gaudy color. Japanese stone lanterns stood in many of the tiny yards. Other gardens pressed tires, buckets, even an old bathtub, into use as planters. Gardens on Kauai fell into two categories: the Polynesian Adventure landscapes at the big hotels, or these mixed-up
plantation cottage gardens. I had come to prefer the hodgepodges that festooned the small cottages.

Down the road I passed the Koloa Fire Station, which like all volunteer brigades on the island maintained cribs of small boxes for lost shearlings. At breeding times the night birds become disoriented by the electric lights on the island and land on lawns. People pick them up and deposit them in the fire station boxes, so forest rangers can return the birds to a beach, to head back into the wind.

After passing the New England–white steeple of the Union Church, I entered Koloa Town proper — three blocks of ramshackle, one-story wooden buildings on dusty streets. After one unsatisfactory experiment in high-rise resorts that allowed a six-story hotel, now the Marriott, to be built in Lihue back in the 1960s, the people of Kauai insisted that no building could rise higher than a coconut tree. Thus, the Koloa tree tunnel of eucalyptus trees and the lines of Norfolk pines trimmed by the hurricane into tall bottle brushes gave the lowland coastal landscape its only high points.

Spreading monkeypod trees shaded a dozen Koloa Town tourist boutiques, two surf shops, Fathom Five Divers, Kauai Fish Market, a handful of restaurants, and two grocery stores. At the corner under a purple jacaranda tree stood an almost naked man, bare gut hanging over baggy shorts. He wore “rubba slippas,” as the locals call their ubiquitous flip-flops. People walking around nearly unclothed had startled me at first. Now I joined them, wrapping only a sarong over my wet suit to go into the grocery store.

To pick up some milk for breakfast, I parked in front of the Big Save, the catch-all grocery that devoted an entire aisle to
fishing gear and suntan lotion. I nodded to the clerk at the cash register, gestured to another acquaintance. We locals hardly noticed the tourists. It was as if we put on special sunglasses that screened them out and made their rental convertibles disappear.

That initial, alarming encounter with local food at Sueoka's market on my first weekend turned out to have been a good introduction to island food, with its mixture of six great culinary traditions: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Polynesian, and Filipino. Most meals, either in highbrow restaurants or at private parties, featured samples from several cuisines. Luckily, dishes bore no resemblance to what I tasted as a teenager in West Hartford Center's South Seas Village, with its pupu platter and deep-fried chicken in sweet-sour glop studded with pineapple and maraschino cherries.

Even so, I mournfully passed the produce sections of the large grocery stores those first months. Fresh fruits and vegetables were mostly shipped in from the mainland and were extraordinarily expensive and often poor quality: peaches like sawdust; red bell peppers with astronomical prices; pallid tomatoes. While the islands may be the extinction capital of the world for the plant and animal kingdoms, it's a fruit fly's paradise. Scientists have identified more than one thousand species of fruit flies proliferating in Hawaii, ready to attack fresh produce before it can be harvested. Only truck farmers fussing over small quantities of fruits and vegetables can keep the flies at bay.

Though the produce section disappointed, I exulted over the fish counter with its ahi, mahimahi, and occasional
opakapaka,
all flakily fresh. I tried them all. Next door, the Kauai Fish Market's glass cases offered an even more dazzling array, including
its daily lunch plate specials with choice of fish, rice, macaroni salad, and greens. Per capita fish consumption in Hawaii is twice that of mainlanders; the consumption of tuna ranks second only to Japan. Hawaii's unique contribution to raw fish cuisine is
poke,
small chunks of rough-cut raw fish mixed with Hawaiian salt, chopped seaweed, and roasted, ground
kukui
nut. Fish stores offer a half dozen or so styles, perhaps tuna, marlin, or swordfish with seasonings that might include scallion,
shoyu
(soy sauce), onion, sesame oil, and chili peppers.

At Garden headquarters, Clarissa and Evelyn in the finance department brought in more strange and exotic foods: dried plums dusted with a hot Japanese spice; pickled green mango slices; squishy mountain apples with their creamlike white flesh;
manapua,
white buns stuffed with pork; and the Hawaiian snack
Musubi
— a mini-meal that can be bought at convenience stores for a dollar. Of Japanese origin, its rectangular bar of sticky rice is wrapped in nori seaweed and contains a slice of SPAM or egg.

SPAM continues to hold an unfathomable but revered place in Hawaii's diet. A condensation of the words “spiced ham,” so named in a 1937 contest sponsored by the Hormel Company, it reigns as a holdover from pre-refrigerator days when canned meat was prized as a sign of wealth. Grocery stores sell out of SPAM. People hoard cans during wartimes. Locals mix it with Chinese fish cake, make SPAM wontons and SPAM tempura, or fry it with rice or eggs. All this means that Hawaii's population eats three times more SPAM than any other state of the union — and suffers a high rate of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease to go along with it.

Not until I discovered the Monday Koloa Farmers' Market
did I start to realize the full culinary possibilities in Hawaii. At precisely noon, the official and strictly enforced starting time, the market grand master drops a rope barrier and lets the crowds in. “Walking only,” he calls to little avail, as shoppers rush to several dozen vendors hawking fresh-picked, foot-long beans, bouquets of local Manoa lettuce, yams, purple potatoes, radishes, Maui onions, bay leaf, pineapples (yellow and sweet or the pale white low-acid variety), grapefruit, cucumbers, even corn on the cob and beefy tomatoes.

I marveled at the dozens of foreign fruits such as bitter melons, which resemble pale green cucumbers with warts, giant papayas, and avocados the size of cantaloupe. One vendor whacked ice-cold coconuts in half with a machete and offered them to customers. Some locals prized the spoon meat, a thin, gelatinous layer of slippery flesh that lines immature coconuts. A bag of tangerines was so cheap that one could squeeze them for juice — nectar of gods!

On my first trip to the market, I purchased a nosegay of deep purple orchid sprays circled with maidenhair fern, then grabbed bunches of tall red heliconia stalks and periwinkle blue agapanthus blooms. A pickup truck displayed barrels of white calla lilies. I bought a dozen. The vendor presented me two for free. A full armload of tropical flowers for practically nothing!

On the mainland I had despised anthuriums for their glossy red elephant ears and dangling pistils. Here, I grew to love the lime-green varieties, or those of bubble-gum pink. Even the deep-red ones soon appealed to me, as their loud colors seemed at home in the tropics. Most of all, I adored the large, transparent blooms shaded from palest whisper pink to greenish white. Called
obake,
Japanese for
ghosts,
they grow so thin you can
see light through them. Some extend to a foot long, and more. I became a connoisseur, searching out the largest and most transparent.

As I edged closer to local life, I experienced for the first time what it was like to be a minority, as Caucasians accounted for a mere 11 percent of the population in Hawaii. Most of the residents had a mixed ancestry of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and maybe a dash of native Hawaiian or Portuguese. The state attorney general announced that she couldn't comply with a federal order to track hate crimes because there was no standing majority. I had heard tales, mostly from the mean streets of Honolulu, that locals shunned white people. But on Kauai I never experienced any such discrimination except for the hazing at the office, which I attributed to general suspicion of outsiders and fear of competition. The people of Kauai prided themselves on what they called “the Aloha spirit,” of welcoming. One guidebook said that Kauai locals were so accommodating that they stood by the side of the road, waiting to yield.

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited frontier America in 1835, he observed that the national characteristic was the propensity to form associations “of a thousand kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.” This trait endured on small-town Kauai in a way not often still evident in the continental United States. On any given weekend, Boy Scouts and soccer leagues, canoe clubs, high school bands, and an orchid society organized car washes, shaved-ice stands, hot dog sales, walkathons, and countless other activities.

M
IKE FAYE AND HIS CREW
had finally finished their work on the cottage, allowing me to move in. A huge container
filled with my household goods and furniture from Philadelphia arrived. I had brought Sam the stray cat over from the Kleins'
ohana,
and, in record time, he took command of the large yard, wormed his way into the house, and now slept every night on my bed. As I dressed for work one morning, I heard the clanky sound of an approaching car chugging up the long bambootunneled drive. James the caretaker. Twice a week he showed up early in the morning to mow the lawn or tend the bromeliads and orchids. James and I had come to an accommodation — I didn't ask him to change a thing, and he maintained a wary distance. “You not going to work today?” he called from outside.

“Yes, I'm going. I go in later,” I answered through the bathroom window. If I hadn't left by 8 a.m., James regarded me as appallingly late. Garden groundsmen observe plantation hours, reporting to work at seven.

Getting dressed here meant throwing on a pair of khaki pants, a white linen shirt, and a pair of sandals. My hair dried itself. Makeup now consisted of a few swipes of color. I went out to the front porch. James put down his rake and sputtered with anger.

“The pigs are back,” he said indignantly. “Ten of them — momma, poppa, and eight little piggies. They're rooting around, ruining the grass. Digging up my plants,” he snorted. “Making a mess.”

I only half-believed him. Oh, I had heard about the wild pigs that roamed the interior mountains of Kauai. Hunters stalked the tusked boar as big sport. Some carry only a knife and a sewing kit — the knife to slit the pig's throat and a sewing kit to sew up their dogs if they got gored. But surely the wild pigs didn't dare come so close to civilization.