The Problem With Molokai
Molokai video slideshow (plays sound)
I started thinking about going to Hawaii the day before Christmas. The presents were all wrapped, the tree was lit, and I was feeling a little melancholy that Christmas was almost over and I wanted something else to look forward to.
Since becoming addicted to the TV show Lost I’ve spent hours on Google Earth marveling at how vast the South Pacific is and how little land mass it has to break it up. Hawaii was the jumping off point for my imaginary trip to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and the South Pole. But airfare for three even to Hawaii, much less all those other places, is too much for my family.
That afternoon it occurred to me that though airfare for three from Boston to Hawaii is way too expensive, airfare for one might actually be quite affordable. I thought of how many times I had dropped my husband and our son off at Logan Airport that year, for business trips and summer camps, and began to feel a bit aggrieved and soon worked up a sound rationalization for why I should up and go to Hawaii all by myself.
I logged into our American Airlines frequent flyer accounts and saw that my husband had accrued nearly 20,000 miles, enough for a ticket to the West Coast. I checked my calendar and realized that March would be one of those magic months with an extra paycheck, and conveniently also the month of my birthday. I could go to Hawaii for my birthday and, using the extra paycheck, barely even dip into savings!
I started googling variations of “Hawaii cheap” and came across an amateur website that said, “Since everything on Molokai is inexpensive I won’t bother to include it.” I immediately started googling “Molokai.” On the official Molokai Tourism website I found a Bed and Breakfast that advertised a $35 per night “very private backpacker’s special” with a solar shower.
Unsure of what kind of horrors the phrase “backpacker’s special” might indicate, and if “very private” was some sort of serial killer code for “no one can hear your screams,” I mentioned my find on an Internet forum that I spend most of my waking hours on. I got a prompt response from someone I had been posting with for years.
“Is that A'ahi Place, Debby? If so, I stayed there for a week in November 2005. It's fairly bare bones, but the owners are nice and Molokai is very chill laidback. I think a couple from Alaska was in that cottage when we were there and they seemed happy. The outdoor solar shower is the one we used and it was fine.”
Fortified with the Internet endorsement I called A’ahi place and made a tentative reservation for mid March. Even if the accommodations weren’t great, really, how much can being in Hawaii suck?
While on the phone I asked the owner, Steve, logistics questions and asked if I really had to rent a car. “Well, everything is kind of spread out, the airport is on the other end of the island, and there’s only one cab.” He gave me the number for Molokai Fish and Dive and said they’d rent me a car for $25 a day. “Or you could hitch hike,” he added. “Its really safe here. I had a couple of girls from Japan who hitch hiked here from the airport. They barely even spoke English and they were fine.”
I booked a flight from Honolulu to Molokai on Pacific Wings Express for $29.00 and waited impatiently for the departure date to arrive.
The more I read about Molokai and its rural undeveloped splendor, the more I worried that my usual habit of paying for everything with my cash card and not carrying any actual cash might not work there. So I asked the Pacific Wings booking guy if he knew what the ATM situation on the island was.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been there, but its pretty country. Our pilots say those guys are always wanting to pay for tickets with cash.”
In mid February I received a phone call from Steve. “Are you still coming next week?” he asked.
“No Steve, I’m coming next month,” I reminded him.
“Oh, why did I think you were coming now?” he asked. He sounded a little buzzed.
“Is your calendar on the right page?” I asked.
There was a flipping sound, “Oh yeah, right.”
A week later I received another call from him. There was a slight problem; he had double booked the room for the first two days I was there. He gave me the name and number of “a nice lady who sometimes rents out rooms.” I called her, she sounded reasonably sane, much better able to operate a calendar than Steve, and had a room available the two nights I needed.
Just when I was starting to feel a little smug, I realized I had forgotten to call Molokai Fish and Dive for the cheap rental car. When I did call they had nothing available for my dates and referred me to Budget at the airport.
At 7 am on March 6, 2007, I finally boarded my flight. The first leg, Boston to Dallas was quite comfortable and uneventful. At the Dallas airport it seemed like everyone else had a really cool cowboy hat and I got jealous.
Dallas to Honolulu was a nine-hour flight, and while uneventful was extremely uncomfortable. My legs were numb right up to my hips when I finally unfolded myself from my seat and stared out the window at the volcanic mountains behind the airport. I called Mike to report my safe arrival and gasped, “It looks just like it does on TV.”
I caught the Wiki-wiki shuttle bus to the commuter terminal and just made my flight, a little prop plane with six seats, not counting the pilot and co-pilot. The first two seats were occupied by a three year old and her teen aged mother. The little girl kept hanging over the pilot’s shoulder and grabbing at the wheel. He nudged her hand away good-naturedly and didn’t seem to mind.
When I arrived on Molokai it was about 7 pm local time, midnight for me. I was exhausted and starving and asked Ilima, my hostess, if there was anywhere to get some food. She looked worried and said, "You better eat ours. I have rice and meat, the meat is too tough though..." and while I dragged my suitcase out of the car and up the front steps she wandered ahead of me muttering that the next time she cooked meat she would grind it first for her poor husband with no teeth.
In New England a B&B means an insufferably twee little house steeped in history overlaid with a smothering fussiness, lace doilies and mid-range antiques. This place is the opposite of that. It is a regular house on a regular, for Molokai, street, ramshackle aluminum sided houses, packs of unleashed dogs, and a fleet of muddy trucks and ATVs crammed in the front yards. Think New Brunswick or New Hampshire with tropical foliage.
By the time I dumped my suitcase and backpack in the perfectly comfortable, spotless little bedroom and came back out to the kitchen Ilima was pulling a bowl of oxtail soup out of the microwave. It was the most delicious soup I have ever eaten, sort of like Scotch broth, lots of carrots and barley and little chunks of meat. Then she gave me a plate of brown rice and steak (she was right, it was a little tough) and I seasoned it with the bottle of soy sauce on the table.
While I ate Ilima wandered around chatting, fussing with her computer, and showed me the pictures of the painted cats her son had emailed her, which she was in the process of posting on an Internet forum. She was very unhappy about the painted cats, she kept saying it was just wrong to do that to a cat, and speculated that the cats had to have been sedated, which was just cruel. While I was doing my dishes her husband Richard came in. He was a spry white bearded guy, who looked vaguely like a professor. Since I was elbow deep in dishwater when he came in he hugged me lightly and smooched my cheek instead of shaking hands.
After dinner Ilima showed me the beaded necklaces she makes as a hobby and sells at the market on Saturdays. Judging by the stacks of plastic bins full of hundreds of thousands of beads she buys over the internet there is no way she could come close to breaking even on this enterprise. She also paints water colors and said she’d like to open a gallery but added “I’m 70 years old, what do I want to take on a project like that for?”
She asked me how long I was staying and I told her after two days at her place I was moving to A’ahi place with Steve for another 8 days. “Oh Steve, he’s such a sweet guy!” she said, which is exactly what Christine, on the internet, had said about him. I told her I wanted to do some hiking and took out the flyer for “Molokai Cultural and Historical Hikes” I had printed from the internet and showed it to her.
“Oh no, don’t hike with Lawrence!” she said, stabbing the photo of the authentic Hawaiian tour guide. “He’s a jerk; he thinks he owns the island. Go with my friend Kalani, he advertises $75 so there won’t be any trouble with Lawrence, no fisticuffs, but he doesn’t really charge that at all, more like $35. He just doesn’t want to upset Lawrence.”
While I contemplated why there would be “fisticuffs” over hiking tours, Ilima was back at her computer, reading aloud a story of a bird trapped in a house one of her online friends in Canada had posted.
Wanting to relax, I asked if it was safe to walk around the streets by their house. Ilima shuddered and said “most of the dogs are so friendly, too friendly; it’s just the pit bulls that scare me.” I decided to risk it and wandered down the street, careful to keep within running distance of the front door and had a smoke. There were a handful of stars in the hazy sky, someone down the street was having a loud party, and I could hear the dogs barking all around me. I made it safely back into the house and was in bed and fast asleep by 8:30 local time.
At three am I woke up to a strange sound. It sounded like a rooster, only more like 20 roosters. And since I have never heard more than one rooster at a time I was confused, wondering what it could be, a flock of geese? A whatever a group of squealing pigs is called? I know, those raptors that flocked and killed people in Jurassic Park Two! I looked out my window towards where the sound was coming from but couldn’t see anything but a solid wall of tropical bushes. So I took half an ambien and fell back asleep.
I woke up again at about 6 am and wandered out to the kitchen to find Ilima back at her computer. She told me that it was fighting cocks that I heard in the middle of the night. She said they had outlawed cockfighting over on Maui and even though Molokai is technically part of Maui county there was no way they’d ever try to enforce it over on Molokai, “Its too country over here, they never bother.”
I asked her if it was OK to make some coffee and she came over and took out a can of coffee she told me she mail ordered from the mainland. While I watched slightly horrified she opened the top of the coffee maker and spooned some fresh grounds in on top of the used grounds from the day before, added water and turned it on. Then she sliced a pomelo about the size of a basketball and gave me half. It was delicious.
I drank the icky coffee, ate the delicious fruit, and watched the local kids trudging up the hill in their flip flops and jackets over their t shirts and shorts on their way to school. I loaded all my rain gear and swim gear into the car and set off for the Cookhouse, a local diner where you can get teriyaki beef or pork with rice and tomatoes for breakfast, or an egg on rice with gravy, or a Spam omelet. I had homemade corned beef hash. The local radio station was playing some kind of Hawaiian reggae and the screen door slammed every time another customer came in, The island uniform seemed to be flip flops, board shorts and t shirts for the locals and impeccably draped rayon khakis and tasteful subdued Aloha shirts for a class of people I couldn’t quite place, the owners of the expensive condos up in the hills? They looked like people who join country clubs and appear in the style section of the NY Times, lightly tanned, perfectly coiffed. After breakfast I stocked up on provisions at a dusty little general store.
I got a factory sealed 8-ounce package of Kraft sharp cheddar, a box of multigrain crackers, two enormous juicy Fuji apples, a bottle of diet coke and a bottle of water. With the clerk’s approval of my “healthy snacks!” ringing smugly in my ears I headed out for Papohaku Beach, the longest beach in all of Hawaii which is three miles of reddish pink sand on the far west end of the island. I drove along the two-lane highway that rings the island; it swung out past the airport and cut up through the hills. It didn’t look terribly lush or tropical. There were wide swaths of dry grass, like someone had taken a piece of prairie and pleated it into steep sharp accordion folds. The dry yellow grass was cut through with bright red dirt roads. Occasionally there were fields of cattle or horses with the occasional flock of goats. I missed the turn off for the beach and wound up in Maunalua, a small cross roads with a Post Office and the Big Wind Kite Store and gallery. I went into the Gallery to ask directions, but looked over the wares first to be polite. It was three or four rooms crowded with stacks of sarongs, towels, racks of Aloha shirts and dresses and board shorts, and all sorts of Asian tchotkes. A Makaha Sons of Ni'ihau CD was playing in the background, I came across a stack of books and picked up one on Princess Ka’iulani, Queen Lili’uokalani’s heir. The book was full of gorgeous turn of the century photos of the Hawaiian court, so I bought it, along with a handful of vintage post cards, a paperback - Murder on Molokai, from the Surfing Detective series, and the Makaha Sons of Ni'ihau cd that was playing. I got directions to the beach and turned around and drove back through the strange volcanic prairie listening to Iz and his brother.
I changed into board shorts and a swim shirt in the rustic stone bathhouse and headed out across a field surrounded by a grove of twisty trees that looked like something out of a Van Gogh painting and was disappointed to see a sign that said WARNING DANGEROUS CONDITIONS INCLUDE with three graphics, a little silhouette of a person waving its arms rather helplessly with squiggly lines beneath it to indicate water and arrows, this was labeled “strong currents,” another tiny little figure was upside down and being pounded into the shore by a large wave, this was labeled “dangerous shorebreaks,” the last one was the little figure dwarfed by an enormous wave, labeled “high surf.” I stepped through a line of towering palm trees and found myself on the soft rusty colored beach. The breakers were enormous, and loud, a steady churning, crashing that was sporadically punctuated with a loud boom, like a canon shot, as a wave broke especially violently against the steep beach. As I stepped onto the beach a group of horseback riders appeared from the woods and loped across the beach for a mile or so before turning back into the woods. I followed them down the beach, listening to the surf crash and trying to splash ankle deep in the water, but the incline by the water was so steep and the sand was so soft and the force of the surf so strong when it did break over my feet that it was impossible to keep my balance so I had to walk way up in the dry sand at the top of the beach. This was some of the softest and deepest sand I have ever walked in, I sank nearly ankle deep with each step, and it was exhausting to walk on. Since I wasn’t quite acclimated to the tropic heat, it was now 80-ish in the blazing sun with no shade anywhere near the beach, I tired out very quickly.
Just when I thought I couldn’t walk any further, I noticed two weather beaten wooden benches up where the dry scrubby lawns of the mansions tastefully tucked back in the hollow behind the beach met the shore. There was a wire fence separating a ranch, from the beach, but the benches were on the beach side so I climbed up to them and settled in. I stared out at the water, watching the waves break, for quite a while, then I noticed that what I had taken for odd waves breaking far out to sea were actually whales spouting, and if I watched carefully I could see them breaching. When the novelty of the whales wore off, which took quite some time, a couple of wild turkeys wandered past me. I sat there on the bench for a couple of hours, reapplying sun block every half hour in a failed attempt to keep my face and knees from turning purple with sunburn. The only other people I could see on the three miles of beach were two women, not together, walking slowly along looking for shells. Eventually I got back up and continued my trek down the beach, trying to make it to the rocks at the far end. After another mile of trudging trough the sticky sand, beaten down by the heat and the sun, I collapsed in a heap in the sand and dozed as I watched the waves pound the shore and felt hot and sleepy and desperately wished I could jump in the ocean and cool off. When I couldn’t take the heat any longer I trudged the two miles back down the beach, through the palms, back across the field, and went back into the bath house where the shower didn’t work, but the sink was on and splashed cold water on my face and down my legs to rinse off the sand that was so soft and sticky it felt like saw dust.
I headed back to my car just as a noisy tour group appeared and decided to set off in search of a swimming beach. I drove back through the dry grass hills and noticed that there were bright yellow fire hydrants every twenty feet along this road in the middle of nowhere with no buildings in sight for miles. A bright red fire engine with bright orange flames painted on the body passed me. I came to a line of cars stopped by a policeman. A bright yellow helicopter dragging a huge water bucket was flying up and down the hill, crossing the road; it would fill the bucket in the ocean, then fly up and dump it on a fire in the hills. I sat there in the line of cars watching the helicopter go back and forth, listening to music and munching on my cheese and crackers and apple. Finally they let us go and I drove back around the perimeter of the island heading east. I drove for about 30 miles, past the Royal Palm Grove of a thousand palms on the beach planted by King Kamehameha V in the 1860s. The road hugged the coast for the next 20 miles but I didn’t see anywhere to park and go into the water. I drove past the main town, really just an intersection with two or three blocks of stores. The further east I drove the lusher the foliage got. Along the beach were long stonewalls built in rings in the water forming large shallow ponds, seven or eight hundred years old aquaculture ponds, that had originally been built to raise fish. I finally passed a small beach with a couple of cars pulled up by the side of the road.
It was about 4:30 pm by then and when I stepped out of the car I was hit with a strong cold west wind. I started out to the beach but was shivering in the wind and the water looked all churned up. I decided against swimming and headed back to my car. There was a group of three people and a couple of dogs just heading back to their car. I waited for them to put their dogs in the car before I tried to back out onto the road. One of the women called over to me “Are those your dogs?” and I said no, I thought they were hers. Then she asked me if I was staying at HaleMalu, Ilima’s place, and I said yes and she introduced herself and her husband and adult daughter and told me they were staying in the cottage out behind her house. We chatted for a few minutes, the husband had gone to Divinity School in Boston. After they left I decided that since I had driven all this way out there I might as well at least take a walk on the beach even if it was too cold to swim.
I ran into another woman on the beach and we started chatting. I found out right away that she was originally from Connecticut, had lived on Molokai for 30 years, had two adult kids who were already out of college, had suffered a catastrophic injury to a nerve in her right arm from a blood draw gone horribly awry and was an artist. She asked me where I was staying and didn’t recognize HaleMalu, but when I told her I was also staying at A’ahi place she brightened up and said “With Steve? He’s such a sweet guy, tell him Barbara says ‘hi.’” After standing at the water’s edge talking, we decided that since we had both come to swim we should go in despite the wind and went back to our cars to retrieve goggles and towels.
The water was much warmer than the air and pretty clear despite the wind coming in from the west so we swam carefully over the coral reef and watched angelfish. Barbara saw a turtle but it was gone by the time she called out to me. After half an hour or so in the water we wrapped ourselves in towels and sweatshirts and stood on the beach talking. Barbara told me that a friend of hers was coming in from Maui in a couple of weeks and it was too bad I was leaving because she and I would really get along. Then she told me that there was Hawaiian music at the Molokai Hotel the next day and if I wanted I could meet her there at 5:30. I mentioned that I wanted to hike out to the waterfall in the Halawa valley and wondered if I would need a map or a guide or something and she immediately said that if I wanted to go Saturday she would take me if I would drive. She asked me where I lived, where I worked, what I did for a living, how much vacation time I had. She seemed wistful and lonely and told me I had such a good thing going. She had been on Molokai since 1976. Before that she lived in Connecticut and Cape Cod. She wound up pregnant on Molokai and stayed for the kids. “But I had to get rid of the father, he didn’t want to work.” Both her kids were through with college and off the island. Her daughter was about to start a master’s program at the University of Honolulu. Barbara told me that in addition to printmaking she used to work taking care of tourist’s homes but since her injury she was just focused on getting better. As she was pulling off her bikini top to put her sweatshirt on she showed me the concave space between her armpit and breast where the big muscle that works your shoulder and arm should be. The muscle was dead and atrophied on her, there was just a hollow where it should have been. She said she was doing lots of exercises trying to get full use of her arm back,. She said a friend of hers in town had just opened a gallery and she was selling some stuff there, trying to get back on her feet. We exchanged phone numbers and I got back in the car and headed back towards the little town.
I took a right at the Molokai fine arts gallery and found Dave’s Hawaiian Ice Cream right where the people from my B&B said it would be. I got a scoop of orange sherbet with hot fudge sauce and took my change in a handful of reeses peanut butter cups. Two white guys came in, one wearing a shirt that had a paragraph and a half of Blah blah blah JESUS written on it. He asked me where I was from, told me he was from Chicago, and then asked me what I had gotten. I told him and he asked, “Are you going to mush the peanut butter cups on your Sundae?” and I said, “No, those are for later.” He howled with laugher and high fived me and then said to his friend, “This is the lady to go home with, she has all those peanut butter cups for later!”
I walked out of the store and wandered down the street eating my ice cream, feeling my board shorts dry against my legs, feeling the tight hot sunburn on my face, it felt just like being at the cape in the summer. When I finished my ice cream I went back to my car and as I backed out of my parking spot Blah blah JESUS drove by and yelled out something about my peanut butter cups. It was dark by now and I drove slowly around the block looking for someplace to get dinner. The only thing I could find was a pizza place on the other side of the highway. I pulled in and clicked the key tag to lock my car as I walked across the parking lot, a car drove past me and Blah blah Jesus shouted out the window “You better lock those peanut butter cups up!” And I laughed a little nervously and said “You’re following me!” and he said “No, we were here first, you’re following us.” Ha ha ha, boy those missionaries are hilarious. And weird.
I grabbed a salad and a couple of slices to go, and it only took about 45 minutes to get, then drove back to Ilima’s in the dark trying to figure out how to work the high beams, nearly hitting one of the tiny barking deer from India that roam the island in wild herds, and managing to miss my turn twice and thus drive the cars behind me batshit with my sudden, erratic U turns.. The house was quiet and empty when I got home so I sat at the kitchen table wolfing down my pizza and salad. Ilima and her husband Richard got home just as I was getting out of the shower. Everyone went to their rooms before nine pm. That night it was the torrential rain that woke me up at 3 am, instead of the fighting cocks, they didn’t go off until nearly 6 am.
The next morning I left the house just as it was getting light and drove up to the overlook over the colony, walked out to phallic rock which had a basket of flowers and piles of money, bills weighted down with a rock and a big pile of change left as offerings.
While I was having a leisurely espresso on the lanai at the coffee plantation the other family staying in Ilima’s cottage arrived. They were doing the hour long, $35 a head donkey cart tour of the coffee plantation. I waved them off, bought a bag of coffee at the plantation store and headed over for breakfast at the Cookhouse. When I went back to Ilima’s I found her making cards out of her watercolors. She scans them and has prints made on snapfish then trims them and glues them to blank cards. It costs her 50 cents a piece to make and she sells them for two dollars. I looked through her cards and picked out a couple to buy. She told me that someone on line told her that the painted cats weren’t real, they were photoshopped, so we closely examined a couple and found evidence of photoshopping and she was relieved to think that no one had been painting cats. She told me about a sign in Denmark she had read about online with naked girls on it to get people to slow down on the highway and showed me a picture her daughter had emailed her of her lovebirds.
Ilima noticed my sunburn from the day before and told me to help myself to some aloe from the plant in the front yard. I gave her $60 for the room and the cards and the food and she gave me a pompello and directions to Steve’s. “It’s nice,” she assured me, “Well its like a little jail cell, but the view is nice.” I stopped at the aloe plant in the yard and picked up a large spear that had been knocked off by the ATV parked next to it.
I found Steve’s place with no trouble and was stunned at how beautiful it is. It’s on a steep hill a couple of blocks from town. It is a large house built into the side of the cliff. His parents live in the upper level, the main house, under the house, serving as supports, are two large rooms on either end of the lanai, with my room by itself on one side and a large studio apartment and office on the other side where Steve lives. A gravel road winds down the hill through a dense forest of beautiful palm trees, mango trees, breadfruit trees, and a riot of tropical flowers leading to an old trailer rotting gently in the steaming tropical sun (“Backpacker’s Special, $35 a night) and a large wooden cottage ($80 per night, sleeps four, private kitchen and bath). My room was small, with two single beds, but clean and bright, painted light blue. It had a little table and a couple of chairs, clean crisp quilts on the bed, and like the porch and the outdoor shower, killer views of the ocean at the bottom of the hill. A scraggly, long skinny gray cat dozed on the lanai railing. Steve picked him up; he was lazy and limp in his hands. “I could swing him around by his tail, he’d let me,” Steve said, draping the half asleep cat around his neck like a stoll.
Steve showed me around and explained that the solar shower was actually just a long pipe heating in the sun, so if I wanted hot water I would have to take a shower while it was sunny out because the water cools off as soon as the sun goes away.
“How did you like it up at Ilima’s place?” He asked,
I shrugged, “its kind of, intimate. Like staying with relatives.”
He nodded and staggered a little, “I know,” he said. “Richard comes down here and says ‘There are all these people in my house’. He hates it. He’s only half Illima’s age, I thought he was her son at first. But he says, ‘She paid for the house…’”
He asked me where I was from and wandered off before I was done answering. I dragged my suitcase out of the car and was out behind the house hanging my wet towel and suit from the day before on the clothes line when I heard him on the phone screaming “That’s right, come fucking arrest me you bastards!” He was coming back out to the porch when I came around the corner and apologized for his “coarse language” and explained that he calls George Bush two or three times a day to scream at him because Steve’s Brazilian wife is stuck in Brazil “starving to death” because Homeland Security won’t give her a visa to get back in the country.
It was about then that I realized what I had taken for general hippie burnout was actually blind hammered at 11 in the morning. He showed me where the snorkeling gear was for the third time, asked me where I was from for the second time, and gave me directions to the beach I had been to the day before for the fifth time. Then he told me he couldn’t get any good dope on Molokai until harvest time but a friend of his had some stuff from New Jersey. When I left for the beach he was back on the phone screaming “That’s right! Come arrest me you fucking bastards!”
I spent the afternoon at the beach snorkeling and playing with the dog who lived across the street and seemed to spend most of his days lounging on the beach. He demanded a couple of rounds of fetch with a piece of driftwood he dragged up from the water. Then he shoved his head under my hand to get me to pet him and collapsed in a warm furry heap in my lap and took a nap.
I got back to the B&B at around 4:30 and tried out the outdoor solar shower with the spectacular view and was surprised that the warm water lasted long enough for a decent shower. I put on the fanciest clothes I had with me, a silk tunic and khakis and headed down to the Hula Shores lounge at the Hotel Molokai to meet Barbara, who had left me a voicemail that afternoon.
The parking lot to the hotel was overflowing, there were cars parked on both sides of the road for half a mile in either direction. As I was pulling into the lot a car was pulling out, the other family from Ilima’s. We waved and chatted through the open car windows. I found a spot in the lot and walked towards the music. It was on a huge lanai right on the beach, an open air restaurant and bar with a pool in the middle. I picked my way through the packed tables looking for Barbara. There was a large table in the middle of the room with a group of Hawaiian and white musicians sitting at the table playing guitars and ukeles and singing while a few women stood next to them swaying in a hula. I found a table with one woman sitting alone amid several empty chairs and asked if I could join her. She told me she was waiting for friends so I moved to the next table where another woman sat alone, she told me she was waiting for her husband. Just then Barbara tugged my sleeve and said “Hi! Here we are!”
She was sitting at a table with an older couple who wore matching Aloha shirts, they were in their 60s and had tanned leathery skin, the woman wore thick expensive jewelry and had a flower pinned to her shirt. Across the table was a couple of cute, red heads. One wore a Habitat for Humanity baseball cap. They looked so much alike I couldn’t tell if they were sisters or a couple. A waitress came by and gave me a glass of wine. The six of us chatted over the sound of the music, overlapping inconsequential conversations of people who were never going to see each other again. The matching Aloha shirt couple was from Texas, retired. The Habitat for Humanity woman was from San Francisco and also retired and had been living on Molokai for two years, the other woman was visiting her from San Francisco. They were planning an ATV tour up into the rain forest. Richard Davis was bringing them. “Richard?” I asked, “Is his wife Ilima?” Yes, it was the same Richard. I had been in the place for less then 48 hours and had already met half a dozen people who were all interrelated.
The band was finishing up and everyone stood and held hands for “Aloha 'Oe.” I left my wallet on the table with my back to it. Barbara picked it up and handed it to me. Everyone swayed and sang. "Aloha 'Oe" ended and the musicians launched into “God Bless America.” Everyone stayed on their feet and sang along.
The Texas couple left and the woman who had been waiting for friends came by alone, Barbara, who had just met her that evening, greeted her like a long lost cousin and offered her a vacant chair. She sat and introduced herself as Kathy.
Rosemarie and Emma, the San Francisco people were still talking about their ATV tour. Kathy asked if they minded if she came along, after an almost imperceptible hesitation they said yes. Kathy picked up the hint and asked me if I was interested. I was. Barbara said she would like to come along too. Rosemarie and Emma said good night and drifted off. The sun set over the water. Tiki torches were lit along the edge of the beach. A different Hawaiian band set up their instruments on the stage in the corner behind the pool and began to play. Bright stars started to appear on the horizon. We ordered calamari and seared ahi. Kathy and Barbara and I exchanged phone numbers fumbling with our cell phones in the dark.
Kathy told us she was on the island for a month doing a poetry workshop for people with physical illness. She had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She asked Barbara if she knew someone named Lawrence Aki .
“Yes,” Barbara said. “Stay away from him. He’s an asshole.”
“Hey,” I said. “Is he the guy who does the hikes?”
“Yes,” Barbara said. “He’s a jerk; he thinks he owns the waterfalls. I was hiking up there last week with some other friends and he accosted us on the trail. We got into a big fight right in front of his whole group of tourists. He was trying to tell me I have to pay him if I want to hike there. I stood my ground and told him to go to hell and then he was saying I didn’t have to pay him but I have to call and tell him if I want to hike up there.”
“That’s the second person who has said that about him,” I said.
Kathy was a little embarrassed. She said she had been asking around the island for healers and tour guides and she found him. She had pizza with him one night and it was weird. He kept claiming he could help her with her illness but never said how. Then his wife discovered them having pizza together and it was a very awkward and ugly scene.
“Would you go off with a stranger back home on Long Island?” Barbara asked.
“Of course not,” Kathy said a bit stiffly.
“Then don’t do it here either,” Barbara said. There ensued a long confusing conversation of Kathy trying to defend herself and show she was not a naïve idiot and Barbara lecturing her on the island men.
After a while Barbara excused herself to speak to a friend across the room.
“I’m not an idiot, you know,” Kathy said, still smarting from Barbara’s lecture.
“I know,” I said. “And it’s not like you were walking up to strangers on the street, the man runs a business, he has a website and flyers and if you go to Molokai Outdoors or Molokai Fish and Dive and ask for a tour, he’s the guy who shows up.”
“It gets worse,” Kathy whispered. “Please don’t tell Barbara.” I wondered if she was going to confess to sleeping with him or something.
“I paid for the pizza,” she said. That was it, the big reveal. “It was weird, he asked me to have pizza, and then he asked me to pay for it. And I mean he Talks Story for a living and I was taking up his time, talking to him… really, I’m not an idiot. But God, his wife was so mad. And he was so weird. I’ve been to all kinds of new agey healers for my symptoms but they all have a price, and they can tell you how much it costs and what they will do, but this was just strange, like he was making it up as he went along. And then is wife showed up screaming…”
I looked across the pool and saw Steve in the flickering torchlight, swaying, his long scraggly graying hair fluttering in the strong west wind. I waved but he didn’t see me.
Barbara came back. I insisted on paying for the fish since I had eaten most of it. We all said goodbye and I headed back to my car and drove back up the hill to A’ahi Place. A boisterous couple from British Columbia who had just arrived were talking excitedly to Steve and poring over the large laminated island map.
“Hey Steve,” I said, “Did I just see you down at the Molokai Hotel?
TO BE CONTINUED