Part 4 (1/2)

CHAPTER NINE.

My Plantation Cottage

”I LIKE THIS HOUSE,” Mike Faye said as he walked from room to room on one of his late afternoon inspection visits at the cottage. ”There's an almost j.a.panese quality to it, an openness. Out the kitchen windows you can see Mount Haupu.” He gestured at the far-off mountain. ”And on the other side,” he pointed to the back door, ”you see the valley.”

The main room could be easily fixed up with a new coat of paint and a few patches of trim to replace termite damage. But sagging kitchen cabinets needed to be torn out, repaired, and reattached. Faye said he could rehab the cabinet doors with raised molding and paint them in white lacquer to give them an English-country look. We'd add a microwave, cover the counters in gray-granite Formica, and install stainless steel double sinks. I stopped worrying about James's warnings of burglaries. ”He was just trying to scare you,” Scott Sloan, a.s.sistant director in charge of the grounds crew, told me. ”He liked having the house empty.”

A stickler for historical detail, Faye insisted we install traditional Canec for the bathroom ceiling: a spongy, fibrous board made from sugarcane fibers. We argued over light switches for two weeks. Old-style plantation cottages like mine had single-wall construction, which meant just that: a single wall of heavy lumber served as both exterior and interior wall, allowing no hidden s.p.a.ces for electrical wiring. Traditionally, builders enclosed wires in ugly squared tubing with raised boxes for switches, all in dark brown. I hated them. Faye stubbornly countered, ”It's historical.” He finally gave in, and found me modern, paddlestyle toggle switches. In white.

I brought in a second telephone line for a fax. Connected cable TV. Installed a dishwasher. Wired the closets, as storing clothes in humid Hawaii could lead to disaster. The Kleins told me that their wool jackets broke out in green mold after a couple of months. At Ace Hardware I found electric heat tubes for the closet baseboards to keep the closets dry. I salvaged a chest and two coffee tables from the old cottage furnis.h.i.+ngs. Everything else, I told John Rapozo, the Garden foreman a.s.signed to oversee renovations, I never want to see again.

The plastic lavender tub had to go. We worked out a plan for an open j.a.panese-style shower on one side of the ten-by-twelve-foot bathroom. Faye presented me with an antique showerhead the size of a plate that looked like it had come from a 1930s Malaysian rubber plantation. He designed a long vanity and mirror to stretch along the entire opposite wall. His carpenter built the cabinet of fir, then stained it a deep, glossy cherry so it looked like fine library furniture. Dr. Klein approved the plan without a murmur over costs. ”Lucinda, I want you to be happy here,” he said. ”I want you to feel that every issue has been resolved, so you can put it to rest and just concentrate on your work.” Wow.

Mike Faye had researched the plantation cottage style, and one day I got him to tell me about it. In the early 1900s, sugar plantation owners faced more and more criticism over labor conditions for their workers, imported from j.a.pan, China, the Philippines, and Korea. Foreign emba.s.sies protested housing conditions, which often consisted of rough campsites or dormitories. As Hawaii was seeking statehood, the planters felt the pressure. They began building what was called ”sanitary housing.”

”For the first time,” said Faye, ”families had their own houses and privacy. Lo and behold, it led to a baby boom.” When all the baby boys grew up, they went off to become soldiers in World War II, and fought in the famous 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team of j.a.panese-American soldiers. They were given the most dangerous a.s.signments, and more than half of them were killed. But those who survived came back to Hawaii as war heroes, got involved in politics, and changed the whole political and economic landscape in Hawaii. Democratic landslide elections overwhelmed the Republican stronghold of Hawaii. The state earned the reputation as so Democratic as to verge on socialism. ”And all because of these houses,” said Faye with a smile.

He showed me his collection of old pattern books used as construction plans by the all-powerful Hawaiian Sugar Planters' a.s.sociation for its ”sanitary” worker villages. They included common bathhouses, baseball diamonds, incinerators, and small stores. ”The lighter your skin, the better your house,” Faye explained. ”It wasn't right, but that's the way it was.” Supervisors, called lunas, were mostly haoles and claimed the largest houses in the center of the village. j.a.panese workers received higher wages and better houses close to the center, while the Filipinos on the bottom of the caste system got lower wages and houses on the village outskirts.

Plantation owners imported j.a.panese temple builders to erect Buddhist temples. When the carpenters finished those jobs, they went to work on the managers' grand Victorian chalets, then later, smaller residences. Each temple builder had his own signature marks, like the crude exterior window frames on my house that extended slightly over the window tops, like ears. Faye and his carpenters became connoisseurs of the nameless temple builders. Someone might tell them that this house or that was built by the j.a.panese temple builder in Waimea, but they'll look at it and say, ”No way. Maybe the Ha.n.a.lei builder.”

When Faye's crew crawled under my cottage, they discovered paint on the underside of the living room floor. He pointed out a seam in the flooring between the living room and dining areas where the two rooms had been joined together. After the war, he said, builders recycled many houses because of a scarcity of lumber. Faye concluded that the cottage living room must have originally been used elsewhere, perhaps as a second-story porch.

It explained why the house had such an open-air feel.

EARLY MORNINGS I adopted the habit of stopping by the cottage to see how renovations were going. Often Faye's workers had already arrived, telltale surfboards extending out the backs of their pickup trucks, as the guys liked to catch some waves before work. But today I had the place to myself. I stood on the front porch and surveyed the empty landscape. I was falling in love with the place.

I heard a vehicle and saw a brown truck hurtle up the drive. Garden superintendent John Rapozo frequently dropped by to check on progress. I always liked to see him, and thought of him as the Man in Black, like country singer Johnny Cash. Rapozo had a craggy, rawhide face and always wore the same uniform of neatly pressed black pants, big black cowboy boots, buckskin hat, and a black T-s.h.i.+rt imprinted with the Garden's breadfruit logo. Now he only picked up the guitar to sing for family gatherings, but in his younger days he and his two brothers, Mannie and Georgie, played regularly at the Coconut Palms Hotel. John said he used to bring the house down when he strummed ”Try a Little Tenderness.”

From a west-side Portuguese ranching family, he spoke pidgin staccato in a rough, smoker's voice. His dialect was so thick that even his wife sometimes didn't understand him. I missed about every fourth word. Haoles often mistake anyone speaking pidgin as a dumb hick. Rapozo was a simple man, but I sensed intelligence and an inner toughness that gave him unquestioned authority. He had worked for the botanical garden since its beginning, first as a contractor, later as foreman. He personally had bulldozed most of the roadbeds.

His favorite activity was to move earth with big machinery.

”Is this house ever going to be finished?” I asked laughingly when he got out of the truck.

”Lucinda. I call them this morning,” his finger jabbed the air emphatically. ”I told them: By the end of next week. Finished.”

I sighed happily. This was vastly different from renovation projects at my Philadelphia house. I had been looking for someone like John all my life. I didn't need a husband. I needed an enforcer.

Faye warned me that the gra.s.s walk to the cottage would turn into a sea of mud during the winter rains. John hauled in rock to form a stepping-stone path from the front porch to where I parked the car. One night I returned home to find a fresh layer of cinders and gravel spread over the dirt drive. John, of course, I knew in an instant.

When he learned that my family called me Lucy, he did, too. Sometimes he popped his head into my Garden office to report on construction at the cottage. When I started hearing mysterious chewing sounds at my cottage, John dispatched one of his sons, Chad the exterminator, to investigate. Chad immediately diagnosed the problem as roof rats that climb trees and sneak into attics. ”Lady, you've got to realize you're in the middle of a jungle,” Chad told me. He returned with traps that caught a cat-sized rat, and stuffed up holes and cracks in the attic walls with copper Brillo pads.

One late afternoon at my office I turned from the computer and saw John standing in the doorway. Everybody followed the no-shoes rule at headquarters, so he stood in his stocking feet, his hands tucked behind his back, hiding something. ”Lucy,” he called softly. ”I've got something for you.” He brought out his two hands. Each held a softball-sized green gla.s.s ball. My eyes widened. These hollow gla.s.s fis.h.i.+ng net floats, lost from j.a.panese s.h.i.+ps, were becoming increasingly rare. I coveted one. Nowadays fis.h.i.+ng fleets mostly used plastic buoys.

”I found these in the tall gra.s.s down on Lawai-Kai,” John said. ”By the Hawaiian graveyard. Would you like them?”

”Oh, John, would I ever! Are you sure you want to give them up?”

John smiled in satisfaction. When he left, I placed the b.a.l.l.s on my desk, positioning them so they would catch the light. The c.o.ke bottlegreen globes seemed to hold the ocean, with frozen bubbles of spray. So fragile, but strong enough to be tossed on waves and thrown ash.o.r.e. Later, Dr. Klein came into my office, papers in hand. ”Look what John gave me,” I showed him.

Dr. Klein beamed. ”You've found a friend!”

CHAPTER TEN.

Sow a Seed, Reap a Life's Work

WEEKS Pa.s.sED WHEN it seemed like I never left the office. Like a hamster in a wheel, I churned out reports, brochures, grant proposals, campaign materials, and thank-you letters to donors. Lost was an earlier vow to go down to the Garden grounds every day, if only for ten minutes. I felt guilty that I wasn't riding Bo enough. But one morning I impulsively shut off the computer and walked out the door, hurrying down the lanai along the front of the office before anyone could stop me with a phone call or question. Only Henry, the rooster who stalked the office entrance looking for handouts, saw me.

s.h.i.+fting the car into low gear to drive down the steep grade and sharp curves into the Lawai Valley, I swooped past a grove of young Pritchardia, native Hawaiian palms, then curved around a bend to fly past the water lily pond. A gray gallinule, or Hawaiian coot, darted in and out of the pink flowers and lily pads.

The road followed the Lawai Stream under overhanging red rock cliffs to an old plantation railroad bridge that obscured the view of any oncoming cars. I honked my horn to warn approaching vehicles, then splashed through six inches of water. The Garden hadn't yet solved the problem of a stream running across its sole access road. I parked at Pump Six, the former irrigation station that housed the Garden's carpentry shop, offices for the grounds foremen, and whatever else could be crammed under its termite-ravaged rafters. Behind its red barn, three tents of green cloth formed the nursery.

As I entered the shade, I knew that this was what I had missed - a connection to plants, the feel of the humid, languid air that conspired with hot tropical sun, daily rain showers, and rich soil to produce the vivid tropical flora of Hawaii. Dr. Klein called the nursery ”the Emergency Room,” site of the Garden's most significant plant-rescue work. Rows of waist-high tables held hundreds of seed flats and pots, all color-coded: yellow tags for common plants. Blue for rare. Red for federally listed endangered species. Most of the tags were red.

”Hi, Simon,” I called to the shy black-and-white cat that snoozed between two pots on a far table. He roused himself to quickly escape under the table. Rats used to sneak in at night and gorge themselves on all the rare seeds before they sprouted, until Simon arrived. Now we honored him as an important staff member.

The nursery manager, a tall woman with carrot-colored hair named Kerin Lilleeng-Rosenberger, rose to greet me from a rain-stained wooden desk in the back. Her steady, frank eyes could shoot sparks if provoked. I felt a kins.h.i.+p with her and we smiled easily. We were both loners of a sort, and outsiders at the Garden. Kerin worked by herself, without benefit of mentor or instructor, perennially battling the rest of the staff. The Garden's glamorous plant hunters Steve Perlman and Ken Wood returned from field trips around Hawaii or other Pacific isles and dumped bags of seeds on her desk, booty from their explorations. ”Always the seeds are given to me with no instructions,” she'd rail. ”Here's a bag of seeds, Kerin, go at it,” they'd say. Sometimes she'd plead, ”Give me at least a hint. Did they grow in mesic forest or rain forest?”

We walked to the front of the nursery to inspect two high wooden planters. Each container cradled a low-growing shrub, with crooked branches and tiny, parsimonious leaves. Like most native Hawaiian plant species, it didn't look like much. Yet this was one of the Garden's big success stories. Perlman and Wood had discovered the last two known specimens of this scraggly bush on the small, degraded Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe, used over the last fifty years by the U.S. military as a practice bombing target. By chance, the two collectors climbed over to a stone column that did not look as if it had ever been botanized. Perlman lowered Wood by rope down to a small ledge, where he found two skeletal plants. When they brought a sample back to the botanical garden for identification, it initially mystified the staff botanists. They p.r.o.nounced it to belong to a new genus never before seen in Hawaii, and named it Ka.n.a.loa kahoolawensis. Ken and Steve collected a few seeds and brought them to Kerin.

”The most difficult problems for me are these real rare plants,” she said. ”They won't grow from cuttings or air-layering. Basically they kill themselves. It's like hybrid fruits - they become so hybrid that they are as.e.xual or sterile and can't reproduce.” But she succeeded in growing Ka.n.a.loa kahoolawensis, and she was the only one who ever had. Seeds had also been sent to Lyon Arboretum on Oahu to be cloned and grown in test tubes. Yet despite Lyon's state-of-the-art techniques that worked well on other species, those seedlings died. The roots just spiraled round and round, cramped in gla.s.s tubes.

Kerin studied seeds to divine their requirements. In the case of the Kahoolawe plant, she immediately recognized a legume (bean) seed and knew from experience that it needed scarification, a nick in the sh.e.l.l to allow the germ within to escape. She then figured out that the plant had adapted to long periods of drought by sending out unusually deep roots. She was surprised by its speedy growth. It germinated in a day and a half in a tiny seed flat. By the end of the week it needed a one-gallon pot, and after that, progressively deeper containers.

By successfully growing two of the seedlings into bushes, she doubled the world's population, from two to four. Even so, they only survived here in captivity as museum pieces.

”Are the Hawaiian native species going to be saved at all?” I asked.

”Only in zoos, like the botanical garden. Not in the wild,” she said. ”The odds are against them. Totally. Goats, sheep, rats, deer, maile and mokihana hunters who plunder the forests for lei making, all are destroying the rarities. I'm like a Band-Aid. It's unrealistic to think we're going to bring them back to a preserve and they'll be able to repopulate. But I accept the zoos.”

Near the garden entrance, dozens of Brighamia plants, now the Garden's unofficial mascot, flourished. Some towered above us, germinated by Kerin from tiny seeds, half the size of a sesame seed. I told her: ”When I was up at Kilauea Lighthouse last weekend I saw that they have whole beds of Brighamias. Hundreds. Are they all yours?”