Spirit of Aloha | Features | January/Febuary 2006

Into the Remnant Forest
By: Paul Wood
Photos by Ron Dahlquist

A good walk, unspoiled

The Ghost Chase

I figure this trip is a ghost chase—a pursuit of something that exists more in people’s minds than in fact on Earth. You could compare it to hunting for Bigfoot, but only if you knew for sure that Bigfoot was real and that he was still out there, still retreating from the crazy conquests, from the motor-ma­chines and the banks and the burger joints of Homo sapiens.

I want to see the Hawaiian forest before it vanishes forever.

All my adult life I have been stuck to this mountain, Haleakal¯a, as though it were a gigantic magnet and I were a teeny little hex nut. You stay stuck that long, you start to know stuff. For example, the last time I flew home in a plane full of tourists, everybody was so excited to look out the windows! It was winter, things were green, and the pilot did a slo-mo float through Maui’s central valley, the sharp winds shaking the plane and exciting the kids. “Isn’t it beautiful?” exclaimed a dad, and it was. It was all grass. The sugar cane look­ed good, wa­tered as it was by water from 50 miles away. The West Maui slopes had a green coating, finally, after the charcoaling they’d endured a few months before from an arson-caused wildfire that burn­ed out of control for four days. The high pastures of Hale­akal¯a, cleared by two centuries of cow, goat, pig and human grubbing, looked fresh. That’s grass for you. A little rainfall, it’s green.

No rain, it’s brown.

As Earth turns into a Mars-type planet, without atmosphere, without life, with its water cached underground and its history forgotten, it will go through a long period in which grass dominates the land. The big trees will vanish and, naturally, the large mammals. It will come down to sowbugs and cockroaches and small rats. Humans, of course, will continue to graze their ungulates until finally the grass will be gone and the seas will dry up. There will be no one to remember the forests.

I want to remember the forests of Haleakal¯a.

I’m not talking about those woodsy weed patches that jungle up the rainy parts of the mountain. I’m not talking about fake forests planted by the state using imported trees, such as eucalyptus or pine. I’m talking about the Native Hawaiian forest, the one that evolved here all on its own and was here like a sitting duck when human beings arrived.

From the airplane, I thought I could see it—a few dark clumps and strips high above human contact, up around 5,000 to 6,000 feet, just before the mountain gets subalpine. “Timberline” they call that on the Mainland, where there is room enough for such a commodity-minded term as “timber.” Hawai‘i has no timber. But it has forests. These forests were once living communities full of unusual birds and snails and lichens and plants of many sizes and levels and qualities. These forests—rather, this ever-changing forest—once clothed Haleakal¯a from peak to shore, ever shifting from windward to leeward. Today, many of this great forest’s peculiar and valuable living things exist in populations of numerable individuals. Remnants.

I want to see the Hawaiian forest. And describe it. Travel writing is a different game these days, now that the entire planet has already been trampled and filmed. You no longer go out to see what’s new. You go to see what’s left.

For example, during the 1860s, Mark Twain headed out West to write about new territories, such as Nevada and California, places that were just then getting subdivided into states and therefore into real estate. He and a friend hiked to Lake Tahoe and staked a claim to a big swath of lakeshore property by fabricating on it a brush shack. Then Twain goofed and lit the whole property on fire. “Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of flame!” he wrote in Roughing It. The two men paddled out onto the lake to watch awestruck for hours as the entire pine-and-manzanita-covered mountainside burned to ash.

There was forest to burn in those days. Me, I’m willing to spend the whole day working ever upward just to find a wee shred of the forest, a remnant, and then to imagine what it once was and to wonder if it could ever be so again. As absurd as this sounds, I need someone to help me find the forest. And I know who to ask to be my guide: Bob Hobdy.

The Cult of Biologists

There is a cult of biologists in Hawai‘i. I’m sure it is a statewide phenomenon, but I’m mostly aware of it on my home island, Maui. I call it a cult because these people are all driven by the same wild hope and fierce dedication—to save Hawai‘i. When I say biologists, I mean field biologists, people who go outdoors every day and work hard to save native plants, native bugs, native birds, snails, lichens, fruit flies, rocks, cloud formations, you name it. Some of them have university degrees, some are amateurs, but they all know each other.

Maybe they work for the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, or for The Nature Con­servancy, or for the Kaho‘olawe Island Reserve Commission, or for the East Maui Watershed Partnership, or for the Maui Invasive Species Committee. It doesn’t matter what their jobs are. They don’t really have jobs, in the ordinary sense. They share a mission: Painfully aware that nearly everything they love is headed for rapid extinction, they are going to refuse to let that happen on their watch—or else die trying.

The cult has its heroes. There was Joseph Rock, for example, who wrote the classic Indigenous Trees of the Hawaiian Islands in 1913. It is said that 50 years later he wept to see the deterioration of Haleakal¯a’s dryland forests. There was Otto Degener, author of Flora Ha­wai­iensi, a man widely admired in his day not only for his enthusiastic botan­izing but also his personal charisma. And there was Harold St. John, who published important works on the botany of Hawai‘i at the rate of about one a year his entire adult life until he died in 1990, just shy of age 100. Although these names may be obscure to the world in general, they’re to cult members as Hemingway and Joyce are to literary enthusiasts.

So is Hobdy—with the important difference that the retired state forester is far from deceased. As a living legend, he is an important physical link between the names mentioned previously and the cultists who are today in mid- or early career, many of whom consider Hobdy to be a kumu—that is, their teacher in the profound Hawaiian sense. Hobdy was Maui County’s forester for 31 years until he retired in 2002. He has flown, walked and even crawled over every square foot of Haleakal¯a. He’s been everywhere in Hawai‘i that we haven’t been, and then some. He has discovered 14 native plant species.

Here is a good Hobdy story. When he was a young forester stationed on Kaua‘i, his boss told him, “I just want you to get out there and learn the land.” So Hobdy disappeared. He would show up at the office once a week, fill out some paperwork, then disappear again. One week, he came to the office and found Dr. Harold St. John, who had flown over from Bishop Museum looking for help.

“I’m working on the genus Canavalia,” said the doctor. So Hobdy disappeared and collected canavalias for a while. (It’s a twining bean group.) Then St. John received a package from Hobdy that contained evidence of a silversword-related plant from the Koke‘e region. To the doctor’s delight, it turned out to be a new species. St. John named it Wilkesia hobdyi.

Only a few hundred individuals of this Hobdyish species are known today. Hobdy has the emotional temperament and loquaciousness of an enormous tree. If anyone has ever known Hobdy to raise his voice, I don’t want to know about it. Let me believe there was one person in my life whose behavior was myopic and mumbly and Buddhist by nature. For, although his beard has whitened and thickened, I believe that Hobdy has always been unchangingly Hobdy and that he will continue to be so even after his mortal frame gives out.

He is a man who found his perfect calling—walking alone in the forest—and who has been fortunate enough to let that vocation permeate his entire life. When I call him up and tell him I want him to take me into the remnant forest, go back in time, help me generate images of what Hawai‘i looked like 2,000 years ago, before human intervention—in other words, to see what the Islands would look like today if we hadn’t bleeped them up—he says, “Sure.”

Here’s another good Hobdy story: He grew up on L¯ana‘i, of all places. When he was a teen with a brand-new driver’s license, he was given the task of chauffeuring some botanists around the island. Turns out these were Otto Degener and his wife, Isa, neither of whom drove. Hobdy, the kid, knew nothing about them. He simply shook hands with the tall, jovial German man, who said, “Well, lad, show me some native plants.”

He thought of some yellow flowers growing wild by the side of M¯anele Road, so he drove the Degeners down there. Otto leaped from the car. “Oh, Isa, it a nehe! This is the variety maneleana, which Sherff described in 1937. We must take specimens.”

As Degener clipped his specimens, he said, “This is for the New York Bo­tanical Garden. And this is for the mu­seum in Munich. This is for Paris.” Hobdy told me this story. He said, “I’m standing there thinking, ‘Holy smoke.’ My horizons were being pushed back. And Degener told me, ‘The reason I am doing this—during World War II, all of Wilhelm Hillebrand’s collection got bombed into oblivion during the Allied attack on Berlin. This must never happen again. I take specimens and spread them all over the world.’ During that summer, for a couple of months we drove all over L¯ana‘i. And that set me on my life course.”

Writing elsewhere about the hotel room of the future, Wolff identifies several “paradoxical trends” that will influence its design. People seek adventure, but want safety and security. They value their privacy, but also want company. They’re concerned about the environment, but they still want to be pampered. They want to get away from it all, while staying in touch with family and friends. And while they are willing to spend money, they insist on value.

If this story makes you squirm all over and giggle, then you, too, belong in the cult of biologists.

Foot Soldiers

For a while, I am serious about renting a helicopter and getting permission from the state to fly up to the 6,000-foot level on the lee side of the mountain, above Kahikinui, where a few very precious forest scraps are clinging by their root hairs to survive. The view would have been fantastic, but the chopper expensive and the state permission process slow.

I begin by calling people within the cult—where “Hobdy” equals “Open Sesame.” Pretty soon, Scott Meidell comes forward and makes everything happen. Scott is the man. He manages Haleakal¯a Ranch, and Haleakal¯a Ranch is the ranch.

The second-largest landowner on Maui, Haleakal¯a Ranch is the reason the long drive through Kula to Haleakal¯a Summit remains so bucolic and gorgeous and free of commercial enterprises. Hale­akal¯a Ranch is also the reason certain remnant Hawaiian forests exist at all, because the ranch handed over thousands of its uppermost acres to The Nature Conservancy so that the land could persist as an “aggressively managed wet forest.” That’s Scott’s terminology. Scott used to be a cop, narcotics division, and he still has some of that demeanor—handsome jutting chin, clipped sentences. What happened to Scott was a nearly fatal helicopter crash that forced him to get religion—religion, that is, of the John Muir kind. He went to work in the West Maui Mountains, in the Pu‘u Kukui Forest Reserve, and then Haleakal¯a Ranch recruited him.

He offers to take us four-wheeling up nearly 6,000 feet, to the zone of perpetual mist, where the N¯aulu cloud rests on the mountain every day. Our primary destination will be the firmly fenced forest primeval patrolled by The Nature Conservancy’s foot soldiers, who hunt pigs and yank out noxious weeds, including the invasive kahili ginger. Along the way he will point out what the ranch is doing to increase its conservation efforts, and he will take us into gulches inhabited by gargantuan koa trees. He will also have a chance to spend the day with his hero, Hobdy.

On our chosen day, we assemble at ranch headquarters just after sunrise: Scott, me, Hobdy and his son Na­than, who has come along just for kicks, and Ron the photographer. It’s a stiff-breeze day full of mist and cloud-spumes that tumble raucously on the hilltops. The mist keeps thickening the higher we go. It seems to silverize the bright sunlight, causing it to blare even more, and, by the time we have slipped, rattled, crept and bounced our way to the up­per­most pastures, passing through one locked gate after another—I think Scott may have spent more time getting in and out of the truck with his jangle of keys than he did driving—there is a perpetual rainbow lying on the mountain below us, as we look down from inside the filmiest of clouds to the brilliantly lit world below.

When we finally park our two trucks, we are underneath a grove of stately, red-flowering ‘¯ohi‘a trees. There are gulch­es here, where we intend to snoop around and botanize. A third truck ap­proaches from another direction, carrying three workers for The Nature Con­ser­vancy, two men and a woman, all dress­ed in camouflage wear. They smile shyly with slight Mona Lisa smiles. There’s a kind of gleam in their eyes. They don’t say much. It’s as if they prefer mental telepathy. They follow along with us for a ways, apparently just to pick up a little Hobdy vibration. Then they slip away. I don’t even notice when. They just seem to vanish. Going up to the forest. The silent people.

The Mother of the Forest

Before starting our saunter through the old gulches that slice deep and long into the turfy upper slopes, Hob­dy adjusts his gear. He slips into high rubber boots, drapes binoculars over his neck and grabs the handle of a two-foot-long machete. “When I go in the forest, this becomes an extension of my arm,” he says. And then he chants. He says, “This is just an e ho‘o mai chant to those who have gone before, to thank them for their knowledge and wisdom.” He listens. The wind roars in the eucalyptus grove above us. Then Hobdy’s voice comes in, softly at first, then lifting and lifting. When someone who never raises his voice suddenly raises his voice, the effect is resounding. I’m sure the trees can hear it.

We spend hours tooling around in those gulches, and I guess you could say we never get anywhere, because in the end we just circle back to the trucks. But you could say the same thing about an H.G. Wells time machine. And you could sneer at the myopic travels of thought. Our Hobdy trip is certainly both of those. He says, “This lobe of forest is a remnant of what extended all the way to Kaup¯o. Mixed koa, ‘¯ohi‘a and pilo, probably some ‘¯olapa. In the gullies, tree ferns. This forest was rich and dense in the old days. You wouldn’t think of this elevation in Kula as fern forest.

“In the 1800s, there was no electricity, nothing. People used wood. They let their animals go. Little by little, the forests opened up. Old trees started to die, and the animals kept eating up all the babies. Pretty soon the forest was just gone. And so were all those birds, and all those snails. L¯ana‘i once had 42 species of native snails.”

He tells about unearthing some charcoal in Hanawı¯ and getting it carbon-dated as 3,000 years old. He talks about the unusually nutritious nectar of the kokia flower. He describes the contrast between the little black Polynesian pigs of yore and the enormous European hogs that are loose in the forests today. “When I first started,” he says, “there were no pigs in the upper forests.” But he does not despair for the forests. People are waking up. When Bob started in the forestry division, people generally considered the natives to be “worth nothing” and Hobdy to be odd. But now the natives are front and center.

Koa harvests the mist with its specially designed leaves. It combs water out of the N¯aulu cloud and adds it to the soil. It also lifts water from the depths of the Earth. Koa roots have the power of nitrification—that is, they capture nitrogen from the air and convert it into an organic fertilizer. One more remarkable fact: Unlike so many other dominant forest trees, koa has an open, airy crown. Instead of crowding out all life below, koa makes room for others. Hobdy says, “I call koa the mother of the Hawaiian forest.”

I spend some time running my fingers along the slick, cool, grooved length of a koa leaf. It is sickle-shaped, curved like the tumbling pattern of a puff of mist. Koa is a type of acacia, one that evolved specifically in Hawai‘i. Other acacias don’t have leaves like this. They have filmy little leaves made of myriad leaflets. Koa dropped those leaflets and formed phyllodes—leaf stems that swell and widen and curve in this particular way. I can see how it works—the minute beads condensing on this flat blade, collecting in one of these groove tracks, then snowballing down the track and flying off the pointed tip. In this way, the monstrous lava lump known as Hale­akal¯a became clothed in a miraculous garment of living diversity.

So many great inventions are specific to Hawai‘i. I mean, of course, such marvels as the hula, the mele, the feather cape, the art of kapa making, the water-engineering systems of taro cultivation, the ahupua‘a system for keeping people sane on the land—here we go—the voyaging canoe, the star charts, the heiau and their strategic cosmological placements, Hawaiian martial arts, various radical uses of pray­er, the makahiki season, slack key tunings, the effect of sliding a glass bottleneck up and down a guitar string, the very idea of an all-guitar music band, and I have not yet mentioned the surfboard.

Yet what I consider to be the greatest of all Hawai‘i inventions is lying right here in my hand, floppy and supple, cool as the fog it was designed to harvest. The most remarkable quality of this great invention is that human beings had nothing whatsoever to do with inventing it.

Nowhere

At last, the edge of nowhere.

We drive ever upward on grassland and right through the middle of dense groves of eucalyptus and redwood, which grow in the manner of many non-Hawaiian forests—crowding out all other life forms and dominating the otherwise barren soil with their brawling roots and tree-fall. We come to the final fence, and park next to The Nature Conservancy.

The fence here is rigged with extra metal, forming a sketchy sort of ladder so that humans can slip into the primeval domain. The mist is thick now. It seems to stick to our hair and fill every crevice. The whole world is as cold and silver as a clean butcher knife, and quiet—the kind of heavy quiet that seems to add five pounds to your weight. We scale the fence and enter the forest. The land drops sharply into a narrow gulch. We pick our steps carefully, as if entering a dark pit, then scale the other side. I turn around to look back at our truck and it is not to be seen. We are in the forest, and the change of the world is so abrupt and complete it is as if we have just dived to the bottom of the sea. We have been swallowed.

There is no distance in this forest. It begins at the edge of my nose. I am the last in our single file as we weave ourselves deeper into this entity, following strips of orange tape that some predecessors have tied to branches in lieu of an actual trail. I pause to look around, try to take it all in, and within moments I am entirely alone—just me and about 8 billion plants, all different kinds, interwoven and draped among each other in the most intricate patterns imaginable. Every glimpse in every direction is as wildly detailed as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The ground is an enormous salad of lichens, blooming mosses and the frailest of ferns. Fallen limbs gape open, black and damp, to reveal natural terrariums within their microchasms.

When I lift my gaze a foot off the ground, there’s a whole other layer of forest to study, a whole other set of mixed foliage, and so on for every foot up and up into the highest canopy. Only by looking straight overhead can I discern that the largest trees in here, the real big trunks, include koa—I can see those dark sickles in lacy ranks. But I see plenty of ‘¯ohi‘a, too, and other foliage that Hobdy will have to name for me. Even though I keep looking up and down, trying to trace the lines of the branches, I just can’t decipher the pattern enough to decide which of the many trees in front of me is a koa.

Instead I get absorbed in tiny stuff, the smallest of the small. I get down on my knees in the cold wetness and look at a plant I recognize. It’s a peperomia, one of a genus that’s very popular in the houseplant trade for its fine leaves, so succulent and healthy-looking. This one is, of course, a wild native, one of the 25 species of endemic or indigenous peperomias. It is petite, a finely crafted miniature, with leaves about half the size of shirt buttons and flower spikes as thin as stamens—negligible, except for its brilliant green color and the pleasing pattern it forms against the mossy, matted forest floor.

I think of the silent people in The Nature Conservancy truck. They are here in this forest somewhere, eradicating pigs and pulling ginger. The ginger in here won’t die. You can hang a ginger plant upside down in one of these tree branches and it will stay alive for years. All the silent people can do is pile the ginger into heaps and cover the heaps with sheets of heavy black plastic, then patrol the heaps, making sure nothing gets away. I won­der if they hunt the pigs in the old Por­tu­guese way, by jumping them with long knives. No wonder they have that manner about them, those silent people—kind of a cross between Bilbo Baggins and characters out of Apoca­lpyse Now. They stay in this forest all the time. It is mesmerizing. Track­less. Thornless. Free of mosquitoes and mam­bo snakes. Accommodating. Dis­turbing.

There is one freakish, inappropriate, ugly invasive species in this forest: me. There is room in this place, a generosity of aloha, for all things cold-blooded. But there is no room for pigs or cows or goats, and there is no room for humans. This forest is the domain of the gods. We have driven the gods out of our lives just as we have driven the forest back—because the gods have no room for us. I wonder, if I really did have a time machine, would I dare to use it? At what cost to happiness and hope, to self-assurance and even sanity? What if you looked into the face of God and beheld no human reflection? The hardest question a person can ask is simply: Do I belong here? Do I fit in nature? Merely to contemplate the negative reply is to touch a coldness deeper and blacker than the bottom of the sea.

I look up into the forest canopy again, look at the koa leaves curving daintily overhead like fingers combing the dense mist. I see a drop of water leave the tip of one of those fingers and fall, arcing a little as it swings through the air. The drop comes straight to­ward me and I watch until it hits me directly in the center of my right eye.

PAUL WOOD, author of False Confes­sions, received the 2006 Elliot Cades Award for Literature. He is also an Artistic Teaching Partner with the State Foundation on Cul­ture and the Arts.

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