Part 11 (1/2)

Although the cottage interior had been transformed, only sc.r.a.ps of foundation plantings adorned its exterior. No pastel petunias, geraniums, or daffodils from my previous life here, I vowed. This was my once-in-a-lifetime chance for a tropical garden. I unfurled a coiled garden hose into undulating curves to mark new outlines for expanded beds. The circle drive seemed forlorn. Perhaps it needed a tree in the center, encircled with ferns and hot splashes of color.

On my knees, I tried to rip out a yellowing, multi-stemmed bamboo sprawled against the house. Then I heard the clunky chug of James's beat-up car climbing the hill to the cottage. Oh murder, he's going to be mad that I'm messing up the yard, I thought.

James shot from the car like a cannonball and charged over, glowering. ”What you doing?” he asked accusingly. ”That's my job. I'll do that for you. It needs a pickax.” He marched to the locked toolshed at the rear of the cottage and returned with a brutal ax.

By the weekend, the bamboo had disappeared. I dug in a few hundred pounds of composted cow manure until the red Kauai dirt ran black. When shopping for ferns at a nearby nursery, on impulse I abandoned my ban on temperate zone plants and lunged for several flats of mundane but useful pastel impatiens. For the driveway circle, I bought flats of low-growing heather covered with tiny lavender flowers, and New Guinea impatiens in hot magenta, cerise, and tangerine. That afternoon I cranked up the sound system inside the cottage to blast out the window: Wagner's Die Walkure and sound tracks from South Pacific and The Sound of Music. I broke open a package of new leather gardening gloves I had been h.o.a.rding. No reason to save them.

”The hiiiilllllllls are alllliiiiive with the sound of music,” I sang as I set out the pots of fingered Laua'e ferns, interspersed with two shades of pink impatiens. I strapped on my riding helmet for protection because tall coconut palms swayed over some of the garden beds. Falling coconuts reputedly kill more people each year than sharks. Sam tried to help, rubbing against my ankles as I dug. I shooed her away. She picked herself up and moved off a few feet, then lay down and ate gra.s.s while she watched.

Preoccupation with the effort to drag a fifty-pound bag of manure or place a rock at the right angle of repose gave relief from the ever-growing office worries. Somehow not thinking helps to sort things out. Despite the memorial services, I hadn't yet grieved for Bill Klein. Now I knew how soldiers felt when comrades fell. You had to keep shooting and ducking before you could focus on your loss. But a garden is a good place to bury the dead. It's within the natural order for all living things to die; it allows for new growth. When I machete weeds to throw into the ravine, they decompose to a nouris.h.i.+ng organic matter. Walt Whitman's words that all flesh is gra.s.s is a hopeful idea to a gardener.

I finished planting a sweet little patch of green ferns and pink impatiens. Then I worked again to complete a second bed. At the end of the afternoon, I hiked out the drive to get a long view, to see if the new plants provided the islands of color I sought. Not really. They'll grow quickly, I reminded myself. But a true cottage garden now swept across the length of the house in soft ovals and curves. A lake of veined caladiums and red ti surrounded the platform lanai off the back door. Green ti continued across the bedroom wing of the house, interspersed with funnels of asparagus ferns. A brazen, multicolored croton guarded the front porch. On the other side of the steps, two low-growing cycads and shooting comets of blue agapanthuses anch.o.r.ed a kidney-shaped bed, which then fed into a sweep of ferns and impatiens across the living room. During a time when I felt the earth s.h.i.+fting under me, something about literally putting down roots helped create a feeling of sanity.

Over the next few weeks, every step out the front door became a joyful occasion for inspecting progress. I congratulated myself on each new agapanthus bloom and the growing carpet of blue daze, a ground cover dotted with periwinkle blue flowers. News of my little cottage garden traveled fast among the garden staff. ”I hear you are making a beautiful garden,” said Eddie, one of the oldest gardeners. ”I want to see it.”

One evening I returned home to find eight huge lava boulders in place around the center driveway circle. I knew immediately that they had been dumped by John Rapozo and gently nudged into place with a bulldozer. Another night I found two black plastic garbage bags on the porch, filled with plugs of mondo gra.s.s, a wordless gift from the venerated Hideo, to fill in bare dirt patches.

I found more and more diversions outside the office: Not only my lifesaving little cottage garden, my research into Allerton history, and my return to writing, but also a sport that unexpectedly connected me more deeply to Hawaii than I could have imagined.

I DON'T WANT TO GET UP. It's 4:30 a.m., starless and black outside. It's probably raining at the river, anyway, and no one will show up. I don't wanna to go. Jeez, whose idea was this anyhow? Even the cat thinks it's too early. She's asleep on my feet and if I move she'll wake up and yowl.

Rousing myself to rearrange Sam, I got up and s.h.i.+vered into a robe, shuffled down the dark hallway to the kitchen, and switched on the small light under the stove hood. Sam didn't even bother following, she thought it so indecently early. Under a cone of light, I poured leftover coffee into a mug, put it in the microwave, punched one minute and ten seconds. Groped my way back to the bathroom. Wiggled into a Speedo bathing suit and black spandex bicycle shorts, then pulled on a sweat suit. Zapped another cup of coffee for the road, and clicked on a flashlight to guide me out the front door, down the steps to the driveway, and into the car. At this hour, only a handful of trucks and another early bird driver or two sped along Route 50 and through an empty Lihue.

Several weeks earlier at an art opening, I had met Carol Lovell, director of the Kauai Museum. She had raved about paddling with an all-women's outrigger canoe club. ”We have enough to qualify for a women's master division,” she said.

Wistfully I asked, ”How do you manage to work it into your schedule?”

”We're on the river at five-thirty a.m.,” she said.

”Five-thirty?”

As I reached the boat landing on the Wailua River, I pulled up beside four parked cars, then walked through heavily dewed gra.s.s toward silhouettes of figures, bent at the waist, stretching over legs spread wide. ”Hallooooooo,” I called. As usual, there was no chitchat. A stately, full-figured Hawaiian woman with waist-length hair approached out of the dark. She drew me close and kissed me on the cheek, saying ”Aloha” with the dignity of a Hawaiian queen. As race director for Kawaikini Canoe Club, Puna Dawson had already transformed a laid-back bunch of woman into a serious training team.

Six of us lined up along the canoe, three to each side. One, two, three, and we heaved, lifting the heavy boat out of its cradle and sliding it over a bed of old tires. Our fibergla.s.s boat - the vaha - weighed four hundred pounds, much lighter than the hand-carved wooden crafts used by ancient Hawaiians. I scrambled down the riverbank into chilly water to guide the canoe. Puna directed me to sit last, in the number six seat, then hopped on behind me, astride the back of the canoe for a steering lesson. We headed upstream into blackness. After several weeks of practices I had learned the basic strokes, but steering was new. And more difficult. I tried to insert the paddle vertically into the water alongside the boat like a rudder. The boat tacked sharply from one side of the river to the other until Puna dispatched me to the number four seat while she took over. Old, teenage feelings of odd man out made me blush.

Each seat position had a job. Number six was the steersman, the captain who called which stroke to use. The strongest stroker sat in the number one seat and set the pace. The number two seat called the paddle changes. After six, eight, or twelve strokes, she yelled ”Hut!” The crew responded ”Ho,” and pulled paddles from one side of the boat to the other, all in smooth, synchronized motion. The three and five seats provided balance, leaning out of the boat if necessary to keep it from tipping over. My seat, number four, had the least responsibility. I kept missing the beat, fumbling with the paddle.

As the sky paled to a thin wash of rose we headed downriver and took the boat out of the water. Puna looked at me appraisingly and said, ”Lucinda, you're going to feel rotten for a while. The others have been paddling longer than you have. Don't beat yourself up about it.”

I had never partic.i.p.ated in women's team sports in school. But I figured I was a late bloomer anyway and now had as good a chance as any to redo my teenage years. ”It's never too late to be what you might have been” was a motto for George Eliot. Why not for me? After all, the Kawaikini Canoe Club members were mostly middle-aged, and the early morning practices took place on the calm Wailua, the only navigable river in the Hawaiian Islands, instead of the undulating ocean. As I retreated, weak and marginalized at the office, my body got tougher and tougher.

One Sunday morning, Puna gathered twelve of us around her and announced, ”We're going to take the boat out to the ocean.” Sundays were for fun paddles that didn't begin until well past daybreak. We fell quiet. We had seen the big combers rolling in, pounding the beach.

Irene, a strong paddler, expressed what we all felt. ”I don't want to go,” she said. ”I'm not ready. I'm afraid.”

I thought Puna would insist, but instead she gathered us in a circle. ”If someone speaks out against something, it may be telling us something. Some negativity could affect the enterprise. Go walk along the river under the bridge and I'll meet you on the beach.”

On a sand dune with the incoming surf to her back, Puna lined us up in a row, sternly addressing us: ”When you're out in a race, you're going to have to swim through water like this, so I want you to get comfortable in it.” For sprints, ”iron man” crews paddle the whole race themselves. But for longer distances, an escort motorboat pulls up alongside the canoe, and relief paddlers dive into the water and swim to the canoe as the tired crewmembers vault into the ocean from their seats.

”On the count of three, I want you to run into the surf and swim six strokes out, then return. One, two, three,” she called, and we charged down the dune into the water, ducked under a wave, and stroked against the heavy, sucking pull. We body surfed in on a wave, then tried to dash out of the water before another surge hammered us into the sand. Puna sent us out again, this time for eight strokes. Then twelve. By sixteen, I panted. A heavy wave filled my mouth with salt water. I spit and sputtered and dragged myself out, thinking I couldn't go again. Thank G.o.d, she stopped.

”In a distance race,” she told us, as we sprawled on the sand, ”there will be twenty-eight changes when you'll have to jump off the escort boat and swim to the canoe, or leave the canoe and swim to the escort boat. You just did five. And look what happened. You're all exhausted. In an ocean race, you have to keep paddling after you've been in the salt water and swallowed salt.”

After we stowed the canoe back on its cradle, we sat on a picnic table and listened to Puna talk about all the improvements we had made in recent weeks. We were beginning to hit the water together, she said, and we were getting stronger. We'd enter a short sprint race. After that, we could qualify for a long-distance race, the annual Molokai Channel race between the islands of Molokai and Oahu. ”Forty-two miles, in a straight line, across rough water. Longer if you tack from side to side,” Puna said. ”Next year we'll aim for the Molokai. How many are interested?”

Every hand went up.

Puna fascinated me. She had plenty to do other than show up at 5:30 to coach a bunch of neophyte paddlers. She worked for a social agency that delivered meals to the elderly. Her five children were mostly grown, with the youngest age eighteen. But she had a goal, and it was nothing less than to make Hawaiian outrigger canoe paddling an Olympic sport. Puna took the long view and moved toward her goal like a chess player, each advance requiring years of organizing work. Like most generals, she realized that a grand plan was fine, but the battles were won in the trenches. And this particular trench was right here, at 5:30 a.m. with an unlikely group of middle-aged novices.

Puna had grown up at Kailua Beach on Oahu, her father, grandfather, and uncle all boat builders. Back then, canoes were beautiful objects of polished koa. Paddling provided entertainment for children, along with surfing, sand boarding, and fis.h.i.+ng. Puna starting paddling in regattas at age eight, usually pressed into duty as an extra.

Men ran all the canoe clubs then. After they raced, the women fit in their sprints. ”We had to fight for canoe time,” she remembers fiercely. But the big events were the long-distance races - and they were only for men. Even in Hawaii, though, the rumblings of the women's movement began to shake things up. Women started agitating for their own long-distance racing. ”Women were becoming alive, and it all stemmed from that,” Puna told me.

By the time she was twenty-four, Puna was married with two children and pregnant with a third, but still paddling. Her husband, Kalani Dawson, became a.s.sistant to the race director of the Honolulu Canoe Racing a.s.sociation. Both Puna and Kalani became deeply involved in the administration and organization of racing.

Parents came to watch their children paddle; Puna and Kalani enticed the parents to start paddling themselves. Originally they did it for exercise, but the adults inevitably caught the compet.i.tion bug and starting training to enter sprint regattas. Puna checked into what was necessary to make outrigger canoeing an Olympic sport. For one thing, an Olympic sport had to have partic.i.p.ation by both s.e.xes and all age groups. Even for consideration as an exhibition sport at the Olympics, they would have to show that at least thirty-eight countries partic.i.p.ated in the sport. Puna saw that the only venue that could draw that many other countries was the legendary Molokai Channel crossing that drew paddlers from as far away as Tahiti and Java. By counting over a span of years, they could show that teams from enough countries had raced the Molokai.

Women started to secure their own funding, paddling became a bigger and bigger sport, and, at the 1990 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, outrigger canoeing debuted as an exhibition sport. There are still hurdles to overcome for full Olympic compet.i.tion status - international regulations have yet to be adopted for boat design and equipment. Just as Puana was making progress, her husband, Kalani, was transferred to Kauai. Paddling interest on Kauai was low. Puna and Kalani saw that their task was to prod Kauai's lackadaisical canoe clubs into races.

The Kawaikini Canoe Club members had never entered a race. They were known for showing up once a week, on Sunday, for a desultory run up the river followed by beer. But the new members brought compet.i.tive spirit and a rigorous practice schedule. Carol, the lanky director of the Kauai Museum, acted as our team captain. She was a handsome woman with white streaks in her short wavy hair, a natural athlete, diplomat, and leader. She enlisted her sc.r.a.ppier sister, Irene, who sang in a Hawaiian band and arranged flowers at the trendy Pacific Cafe. Both sisters were married to fishermen. Their friend Angie was another key member, loud and boisterous, who sometimes brought her beautiful teenage daughter to paddle. Though often wisecracking, Angie could also be found sweeping the boat landing. ”That's part of clubbing, too,” she said.

Several doctors joined in order to squeeze in exercise before reporting to duty at Wilc.o.x Memorial Hospital and quickly became a divisive presence. The local women contended that the doctors never helped with the fund-raising necessary to buy the canoes and rigging. Dr. Karen showed up for early morning practice but rarely said a word. Dr. Mary was the most outgoing, our Miss Congeniality, although she didn't realize she branded herself a recent import by showing up at practices in her Mercedes and inviting the club to her sw.a.n.ky mini-mansion overlooking the river. Dr. Ellen was a relative youngster at thirty-five, and the most aggressive, with a combative air not disguised by a tousled ma.s.s of blond curls. Beth, a nurse, was the only regular under thirty. A steady presence with good humor, she had broad, powerful shoulders and a dark blue medallion design tattooed in the middle of her back. Martha, another nurse, was local and sometimes brought her boyfriend, Brian, a fisherman who also acted as a.s.sistant coach.

But as we progressed together, this early morning crew became a force, attending the monthly club meetings and insisting on a racing schedule. A revolution had occurred in Kawaikini Canoe Club and I became a part of it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

Obake

BEFORE I KNEW it, spring turned into summer. I was still hanging on at the Garden, faking it, but my spirits had started to revive. One Sat.u.r.day after a late ride with Bo, I returned to the pasture after a harvest moon had risen. Hungry, I decided to stop at the Big Save grocery. As I got out of the car, I heard a high-pitched singing in j.a.panese, accompanied by a steady boom of a ba.s.s drum. The Bon Dance in Koloa.

Although I wore riding clothes - a jean s.h.i.+rt over black stretch riding pants and cowboy boots, all streaked with red dirt stains - I crossed the road to join the fair at the Koloa Jodo Mission. Paper lanterns bobbed along spokes strung from a central post, from which big speakers broadcast the harsh nasal tones of j.a.panese singing. Every August, Buddhist missions all over the island held ritual dances to grieve lost loved ones and bid them a return to the spiritual world.

About fifty women in their best kimonos moved together in intricate steps, each waving a white handkerchief, a symbol of a departed soul. Obake, or ghosts, they called them. One tall, slender woman, probably seventy, was dressed in brilliant red silk tied with a pale pink obi. She turned her face upward with the joy of movement, dancing with grace, her arms and feet swinging in long-memorized patterns. Other dancers sneaked glances at neighbors to follow the steps, but she knew them, unerringly. A few small girls in tiny kimonos pranced amid the other dancers, improvising with unrestrained energy.

At the snack booths, men turned out hot ”flying saucer” sandwiches by slapping bread into round, black iron holders, then spooning in a spicy hamburger mixture. Closing the holder sealed the crusts and nipped off the edges, making little round bread pockets, grilled over hot flames. Delicious. After consuming two, I headed for the Okinawa doughnut booth for a paper bag of the deep-fried delights. I remembered that Bill Klein had introduced them to me, saying, ”You can tell they're good when the paper bag is soaked with grease.”