Spirit of Aloha | Features | November/December 2006

Hawai‘i Is a Place in Time
By Joan Conrow

Is it a magical paradise for 7 million visitors? Or a real place with a million real people?

Photo: Carl Shaneff/Pacific Stock Photo: Jim Watt/Pacific Stock Photo: Ann Cecil Photo: Brett Uprichard Photo: Jim Watt/Pacific Stock

It’s 9:30 a.m. when I stop at Pono Market. Owner Bobby Kubota, who is sweeping the entryway, holds open the door, offers a sweet, shy smile. I pick out a glossy, green ti-leaf lei adorned with roses crafted from red ti to send to my mother in Arizona. She wore the last one on her straw hat until the waxy, twisted strands finally gave up their moisture to the dry desert heat.

I also select a tray of maki sushi—seaweed and rice wrapped around slivers of vegetables and a sprinkling of canned tuna. The refrigerated display case is filled with them, and more: Ca­li­fornia rolls, cone sushi, dried marlin, raw ‘ahi sa­shimi and assorted poke, with tiny plastic containers of shoyu mustard and chili-pepper water on the side.

Most of it will be gone in a few hours, devoured by the lunch crowd that braves the downtown Kapa‘a traffic to pick up kälua pig and cabbage, hamburger steak, chicken tofu and other re­gu­larly changing entrées for a mixed plate that in­cludes potato-macaroni salad and, if you buy laulau, lomi salmon.

Fresh-baked manju—a flaky Chinese pastry filled with apple, sweet bean paste or purple Okinawan sweet potato—are neatly wrapped and stacked be­side the cash register, where a Hawaiian lady, face aglow with a warm smile, hands me my change.

“Have a wonderful day,” she says.

“You, too,” I reply, with equal sincerity.

“And come again,” she adds, to which I respond, with full certainty: “I will.”

We beam at each other for a mo­ment.

“Are you off to work now?” she asks.

“Eventually,” I say, and we’re both chuckling when I walk out the door.

Next stop is Anahola Post Office, where I get another big smile from Brian, the postal clerk, who greets me by name and asks what I’m writing about this week. You get to know the postal workers when you live in rural Hawai‘i, be­cause you’ve got to go pick up your mail, since it isn’t delivered to you.

Brian and Diane, the postmaster, be­gin bantering with each other, then with me, and I’m laughing when I walk out, as I often am. People have mentioned that they’ve driven by when I was leaving the post office, grinning, and wondered why I was so happy.

It’s nothing major—just people being nice to one another.

Back in the car, disc jockey Ka‘iulani Edens-Huff is talking on the radio about the many words for love in the Ha­waiian language: love of country, love for these Islands, love for Kaua‘i—the center of the universe.

It’s 10 a.m. I’m done with my er­rands, the sun’s out, the water beckons. Should I? In the backseat, as always, sits a backpack stocked with beach shorts and swimsuit, and now I’ve got lunch. The decision is quickly made.

I park and walk down to the shore. Not a soul is around. I sit with my back against the trunk of a heliotrope tree, not far from where I buried my dog, Kau­kau. People laughed at her name, which means food in Hawaiian, and she did love to eat. But like many Hawaiian words, it has multiple meanings; in this case, a lament for the dead suited her acquisition shortly after the passing of my purebred Golden retriever. Kaukau was no pedigree, just a black and white variation of the small, shorthaired, short-legged, mixed-breed poi dogs distinct to the Islands.

On the night she died, a Hawaiian friend who had been with me went home and was looking at his books, when one fell off the shelf: Dogs and Man in the Ancient Pacific. It was his grandmother’s—and so is a prized possession—but he loaned it without hesitation, certain it had a message for me.

Such occurrences—supernatural signs known as hö‘ailona —are part of daily life everywhere, I believe, but at least in the Islands you aren’t deemed crazy when you notice.

I dive into the clear blue-green water, something I’ve done probably 7,000 times in the last 20 years, always with a giddy excitement, a tremulous joy.

It’s reefy here, like much of Hawai‘i’s coastline, but I don’t mind. There’s a narrow channel where I can swim and loll, like the endangered monk seals that sometimes haul out and sunbathe on the beach. I saw two, lying side by side, not long ago, the younger one as glossy and immobile as the black rocks along the water line.

I float, letting the current and waves bring me to shore. I like to pretend I’m a sea creature, crawling up onto land for the first time. It takes longer than you might think to be washed in, grounded—and usually I prolong the pleasure by plunging in again before I’m quite there. The surge rubs me gently against the coarse sand, a treatment that would cost hundreds at a spa—not that it could even be replicated.

I sit on a rock in the shade and eat the sushi while I drip dry. People often express surprise, even envy, when they learn I go to the beach nearly every day.

How do you find the time? they invariably ask.

It’s simple, I tell them. I make it. I take it—whenever and wherever the op­por­tunity may arise. And I don’t spend any time at all in front of the TV. Not when nature is running a gazillion chan­nels, with something good always on.

Now, however, it’s time to go home and do some work. I’ve seen the ads of a laptop at the beach, but once you start factoring in wind, paper, grit and two phones, well, you get the picture.

Besides, I need to hang the laundry, which is wet and slowly drying in my car, not that I’m fussed by the prospect. Nobody here cares if I have wrinkles in my T-shirts, towels, sarongs. Like a lot of country dwellers, I don’t have a wash­ing machine. Besides the emergency room, the laundromat in Lïhu‘e is the only place on Kaua‘i open 24 hours. But at least I can avoid the dryers, since I have a clothesline, which is banned as un­sightly in communities like Prince­ville.

I drive home on narrow roads still pitted with potholes six months after torrential winter rains. Cars veer this way and that to avoid them; a friend was re­cently pulled over for erratic driving, then let go by a cop who nodded in understanding when my friend ex­plain­ed the reason for his evasive maneuvers.

I pass surveyors; they are everywhere on Kaua‘i, like the heavy equipment and pickup trucks fitted with pipe racks, all busy dividing the island, digging up, building. It sounds bizarre, I know, but it keeps the economy going.

It’s 5 a.m., or something like that, too dark yet in my bedroom to see the clock, and it doesn’t matter, anyway. Outside, where the roosters are crowing, first one, then another, then another, then the first one again and then another, it’s just getting light. Kaua‘i has a lot of wild chickens, scratching, shuffling, squawking, snuffling.

The fighting chickens down the street crow just before sunrise and are done with it. The wild ones crow all day long, on moonlit nights, and often repeatedly, right outside my window, when I’m on the phone with a very important call, prompting a New York editor recently to pause, mid-sentence, and inquire: “Are you having a little chicken incident over there?”

I get up in the pre-dawn to walk with Koko, a sweet, small, velvety brown poi dog whose previous home was the animal shelter. It’s silent, save for nature’s sounds, the way I like it. Mist clings to steep gullies of native forest, drifts up to drape the jagged mountain peaks. In the distance, rain drums loudly on a dense leaf canopy as a squall blows through. At the end of my road is a dirt trail used by horseback riders, walkers, bicyclists, wild pigs and, if it’s a weekend, hunters with their dogs. It’s Monday, so sniffing conditions are good, and Koko presses on, nose to the muddy ground, as the climbing sun streaks the sky with color.

As a farmer friend recently reminded me, Hawai‘i is predominantly a rural state, but city folks, from Honolulu and elsewhere, tend to forget that. Not so Neighbor Islanders. We live in the wide-open spaces—and expanses of it—characteristic of true country; for us, life follows that simple, slow flow typical of small towns.

They’d be hick towns, without the cosmopolitan influence of tourism, but we don’t mind. We know what we are. Paniolo Boys proudly proclaims the sticker emblazoned across the front windshield of a jacked-up pickup, a tribute to the local cowboys and their newly gourmet, free-range cattle.

Another rig sports a decal of a boar’s head emerging from a ring of fire; the requisite wire dog cages of a bona fide hunter line the truck bed. A lot of Ha­wai‘i people still know how to get their food from the land, from the fields, forests, reefs, streams, and their carports and yards are jammed with nets, poles, kennels, boats, tractors.

Others buy their food: One of the top vegan restaurants in the nation is just down the hill from my house, near the hunting supply store with its sign for humane “hog buster” services. Wild pigs are not quite so abundant as feral cats and chickens, but they do a lot more damage to the freshly mulched landscaping around the new mansions popping up alongside cow pastures and old shacks.

Such juxtapositions are nothing out of the ordinary here, like the rapid-fire pidgin and perfect English uttered by the same mouth, depending on who is listening. Hawai‘i is a magical paradise visited each year by more than 7 million vacationers, yet it’s also a real place inhabited by some 1 mil­lion real people, most of them struggling to survive.

With housing, gas, electricity and grocery prices constantly on the rise, Ha­wai‘i is becoming an increasingly ex­pensive place to live; 73 percent of the Islands’ young are considered fi­nan­cially challenged.

Despite the pressures, folks on the lower rungs of the economic ladder aren’t all being squeezed out. They’re hanging in there, hanging on, because it hasn’t always been all about money in the Islands, especially the rural places, where they understand why Hawaiians use the same word, wai, for both wealth and water, where family, friends, cooperation and a subsistence lifestyle that gets you out and about—while putting food on the table, to boot—have traditionally held greater worth than stock portfolios and bank accounts.

My own materialistic values have taken a decidedly mystical turn under the influence of the Islands, where I’m constantly confronted with the choice of time or money—and reluctant to sacrifice the former for the latter. As a result, my finances are sketchy, my car is old, my clothes are out of style.

Still, as I sit on the beach with Koko watching a full moon rise, pink-orange in lacey rain, I’m confident I’ve made some very wise investments.

JOAN CONROW is a Kaua‘i-based free­lance writer who writes frequently about Hawai‘i’s natural world and the curious two-legged creatures that inhabit it.

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