Fresh Air Fiend (44 page)

I met a man on Molokai soon after this. He said he had lived here for nineteen years. He had come as a surfer from California. I asked him how the island had changed.

He said, "It hasn't changed at all."

In almost two decades?

"No, sir."

I had never been to a place where I had heard such an answer to that question, so I insisted that it must have changed somehow, and I asked him for details.

"Oh, a few buildings have gone up." He equivocated. "One hotel has been built. Some buildings have fallen down. The agriculture's over. No more pineapples. There's no work here. Many of the people are on welfare. It's poorer than it was. There are fewer people. And not many tourists come here."

It is true that Molokai attracts few visitors. Of the millions of tourists who come to Hawaii each year, fewer than 100,000 visit Molokai. In Hawaiian terms Molokai is the poor relation, with a reputation for clannishness, local feuding, and xenophobia. In the distant past it was known as a place of refuge and tradition. Lozenge-shaped, only thirty-eight miles long and ten wide, it is an isolated place. Isolation breeds suspicion, even paranoia. But the positive result of isolation is that old ways are kept, the culture is maintained, and families become extended and interlinked. Molokai, once famous for its sorcerers, is still noted for its
mana,
spiritual power.

There are about seven thousand people on the island. About a hundred of them are lepers, living in the almost inaccessible Kalaupapa Peninsula. Molokai has a grim history of being the dumping ground of lepers in the nineteenth century. Father Damien de Veuster came from Belgium to tend them, and his effort in organizing the leprosarium of Kalaupapa put Molokai on the map and made him a candidate for sainthood. Jack London wrote about Kalaupapa. Robert Louis Stevenson, who briefly lived in Hawaii, also wrote of the island, an eloquent defense of Father Damien, in his open letter to the odious Reverend Hyde.

On Molokai's north coast, sea cliffs extend from Halawa Valley, on the eastern tip of the island, to Moomomi Bay in the west. The cliffs are a gothic wall, as soaring and complex as a green cathedral. The Na Pali coast of the island of Kauai is praised, and so are the high islands of the Marquesas, the smoldering volcanoes of Vanuatu, and the glorious mossy and ferny cones of Tahiti and Moorea. But nothing can compare with these thirty miles of green cliffs—the highest, the most beautiful I have seen in Oceania.

The question is how to see them.

"Be very careful," I was told by the resident of nineteen years. "They call this the Friendly Isle. But don't be fooled. It's not friendly. It was never friendly."

Yet which island in the world is friendly? The configuration of an island landscape is fortresslike; indeed, the high volcanic islands of the Pacific actually look like medieval castles. In order to survive, islanders have an innate suspicion of outsiders. They have the intuitive skills of seamen, and they need them, for if the volcanic islands appear castellated, then the low coral atolls are like ships, and their inhabitants are like sailors. "Friendly" is just a tourist-industry sobriquet. In my experience, the friendliest people on Pacific islands are those who have the greatest assurance that you are going to leave soon.

 

The high winds and heavy seas continued. Even on the south shore, an irregular sea of vicious waves stretched all the way to Maui on the east and Lanai on the south. I had planned a solitary trip along the north coast, from Halawa to Kalaupapa, but this was not paddling weather. Kept on shore, I found myself falling into conversations with local people. Some of them frankly and cheerfully warned me that if I camped anywhere near Halawa my gear would be stolen. Another man told me of the aggressiveness of local boys. It was mostly bad news.

Near Honouliwai Bay, on the south shore, I met a young woman named Puna (it means "spring," in the sense of water). She was about twenty, of mixed Hawaiian and Portuguese heritage.

She said, "I could not live anywhere but Molokai. It is lovely and quiet. I hate Honolulu."

"Have you been to the mainland?"

"To New Mexico," she said, and laughed. "People spoke to me in Spanish—they thought I was a Mexican!"

My backup plan was to camp at Honouliwai Bay. In many ways this little bay illustrates the strange fate of Molokai. Once it was the site of traditional fish ponds and taro growing. (Taro root is pounded into pasty poi and eaten with fish and fruit.) But hardly any taro grows in the valley now, and the fishing is poor, the fish stocks depleted. The valley stream is clogged in places with a runoff of silt from the hills, which have been overgrazed by cattle or nibbled by wild goats. Worst of all was this sign near where I was going to camp: "Warning: Leptospirosis Health Hazard—Fresh Water Stream and Mud Possibly Polluted with Bacteria—Swim at Your Own Risk."

More bad news: leptospirosis (a problem in some European streams) is spread by rat urine. And on the eastern, rocky end of the island many fences had been put up by private ranches. My impression of Molokai so far was of an island of restrictions and barriers: warnings and No Trespassing signs and whispered suspicions and fences.

But the ocean is free, is it not? Making an island to the east my objective, I set up my kayak and paddled into the wind. The humpbacked island, called Moku Ho'oniki, is a bare black cinder cone from Hawaii's period of volcanism—in effect, the birth of the islands. "Written permission must be given before anyone can land on the island," I had read in my guidebook. It had been designated a seabird sanctuary. But I was not planning to land, only to paddle around it.

The ferocity of the wind and waves here made me wary of attempting a north coast trip. Yet, as with all kayaking in the Pacific, I gained a new perspective of Molokai itself. It was one of the emptiest islands I had seen, a place of great scarred bluffs and volcanic ridges that lay below the rugged heights of Molokai's highest peak, Kamakou (4,961 feet). Ancient ruins were visible from offshore: altars, abandoned house platforms made of black boulders, and the sacred places called
heiau.
Enormous rock formations dwarfed the sparse stands of trees, and although there were coconut palms and mangroves at the shoreline, the tiny houses were hidden, giving an impression of an island without people, rather ghostly and stark, its
mana
almost visible.

I did not make it to Ho'oniki—the sea was just too rough. After I came ashore, I looked for a camping place. I had not sought permission in advance—my idea was to use a secluded stretch of beach, under the palms. I found nothing but Keep Out signs and angry guard dogs and more fences. The place had been designed to repel any casual visitor. Campers were not wanted, and so I found an inexpensive hotel and stayed there, making forays to Halawa Valley to contemplate the wind and waves.

"It's the wrong time of year," a surfer named Harry told me. He was watching the waves breaking from the sandy beach at the Halawa's shore. "This is pretty bad even for surfing—all that wind is awful."

Junk waves—no good for surfing—slapped into the bay. Beyond them was a rough sea, torn by the strong northeast wind.

There were other ways of seeing the lovely sea cliffs of the north coast. If I could not paddle, I would hike over the top and down to the Kalaupapa Peninsula.

More permission was needed—written permission from an official of Kalawao County. Amazing! Here, on one of the emptiest and least-visited islands I had ever seen, it seemed impossible to roam freely. Molokai welcomed short-timers, day trippers, golfers—people who would obey regulations. Since I had come to the Pacific to get away from regulations, this was obviously a problem.

Yet the contradiction interested me. The island's xenophobia and maddening restrictions had kept it underdeveloped. There was no traffic, no stop lights, no big buildings. A little paradise, you might say—wonderful, yet a paradise in which you are not really welcome. If people came in large numbers, it would cease to be what it is. Molokai is the only Hawaiian island that is less prosperous than it was twenty years ago, where employment and income are on the decline. That would be fine if there were a traditional lifestyle of fishing and agriculture, but that is not the case. Many of those people flying the Hawaiian flag and living in charming huts and sitting under the palm trees are welfare recipients who buy their fish and poi in the supermarket.

Nowhere on the island is the sense of isolation more profound than on the Kalaupapa Peninsula, the old leper settlement, where I hoped to paddle. Small planes can land on the airstrip, but the usual way people visit is on horseback, down a two-and-a-half-mile trail that zigzags from the top of the cliff down to sea level. Only organized tours are allowed. Although the beach at the foot of the cliff is spectacular, swimming is not permitted. In the early nineteenth century, when lepers were dumped here, it was like a prison camp, noted for death and suffering. An extreme example of Molokai itself, perhaps—a refuge, a place apart. And so it has remained, isolated and beautiful.

Rejecting the horseback ride, I secured written permission to hike to the bottom of the cliff. The county official warned me that I was not allowed to camp, not allowed to use the beach, not allowed to enter even the outskirts of the leper settlement. And he closed by saying, "The hiking trail is very strenuous and steep. If I were you, I would not do it."

Determined to defy him, I set off early, before the party of horseback riders started out. The official had not exaggerated: the trail was more difficult than I had imagined, but it was also vastly more beautiful. Though the horses' hooves had worn a deep groove in it, the trail had been carefully secured against erosion by boulders and steps. In the cool sparkling morning, with some birds twittering and long-tailed tropicbirds making their harsh cry, with the brilliant green cliffs towering over the furious sea, scored blue and white like a world of marble, I made the hour-and-a-half descent down the miles of staircase to the foot of the Kukuiohapu'u cliffs.

I walked to the edge of the Kalaupapa settlement and peered at it: small neat houses, a church, a dispensary, many graveyards. It was a tiny village surrounded by gravestones.

A pickup truck drove toward me, a woman at the wheel. She said, "Are you looking for the bus?"

She said that I was not allowed to walk around the settlement, but that a bus was waiting for the horse riders. She offered to take me to it.

"I married a patient," she said, explaining how it was that such a healthy sixty-year-old happened to be driving a truck around a leper colony on this lovely morning.

"What's it like living here?"

She laughed out loud. "It's different!"

That was all she said, but it was enough: the simple word was full of meaning.

The tour was led by Henry Nalaielua. He told us about the history of the place, the effort of Father Damien, of Sister Marianne, of Brother Dutton, who, speaking of good intentions, said significantly, "It is the same one place as another. One's Molokai can be anywhere." We saw the original settlement, which dated from 1866. The memorials. St. Philomena's Church. The sacred groves of the old Hawaiian villages. In the past, the prevailing mood of Kalaupapa had been "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," and one of the Hawaiian sayings was, "In Kalaupapa there is no justice."

Henry said all this with a smile. He was a pleasant man with a kindly manner. He was also a leper. After being diagnosed with Hansen's disease, he had been sent from the Hamakua coast of the Big Island to Kalaupapa in 1941, at the age of fifteen. Except for ten years in a leprosarium in Louisiana (the only one on the mainland), he had spent his whole time here.

"When I came here, it was a place of many deaths. People were dying before I could say my last name. There were three deaths the day I arrived. It was a place of suffering, and the people here had memories of great suffering. I myself have suffered—the nerves in my body so painful that I couldn't sleep. See the graves over there, and there. Thousands of them."

Beyond the toppling graves, the memorial to Damien, and the wooden houses of Kalaupapa were the vertiginous heights of sea cliffs, the rounded and fluted folds of their walls, the deep, dark green recesses of the valleys. I stood on aching legs and sore feet, bewitched by these soaring cliffs and the mists of the wave-pounded shores.

This forbidden place of lepers and illness and abandonment had become, because of its very isolation, a place of magic. That is probably the way of the world: a place is preserved as wilderness because it is inaccessible—too far, too hidden, too maddening to visit, with a rocky coast buffeted by wild weather. It is also the conundrum of Molokai, beautiful and impossible.

A
S SOMEONE
who prides himself on traveling light, it seemed awkward to be flying across the Pacific, to an uninhabited island in the Republic of Palau, with five bags, seriously overweight.

"What's in these?" the customs inspector demanded at Won Pat International Airport in Guam, where I was spending the night.

The smallest bag held my clothes (not many; Palau is warm). Another held camping equipment (tent, sleeping bag, lamp, stove, mask, snorkel, fins), and two were filled with electronic devices (night-vision goggles, a camcorder, a Newton message pad, and so forth). The heaviest bag contained a fifty-pound Navcom satellite phone, with its own power supply (a Ni-Cad battery slab) and built-in antenna dish—a "secure uplink," Steven Seagal called this phone in
Under Siege,
although his was an older, heavier model.

"A satellite telephone, a computer, a CD player—"

Bored by my power-user litany, the customs man interrupted me. "You got fruit?"

"No fruit."

"Pass."

I had with regret left another portable phone, an Alden Satphone, in Honolulu. It was a user-friendly device, very light and affordable, with fax capability, but I had not been able to solve the power-supply problem (a car battery as additional hand luggage). And beyond Agana, Guam (specifically Wet Willie's Bar in Tumon Bay, where they were conversation pieces), my pager and Virtual Vision TV goggles were no use. Heavily laden, a tech-weenie traveler, I was headed for Koror.