AWAYAWAYAWAY FROMFROMFROM
ITITIT ALLALLALL
A P O R T R A I T O F M O L O K A I 1 9 7 0
DON GRAY DON
Away from It All
Petronello Bicoy shows off one of his fighting cocks. (Pages 107-109)
A P O R T R A I T O F M O L O K A I 1 9 7 0
Don Graydon
Index, Washington Yellow Submarine Press
Away from It All
For Sharmen
This book was written in 1970.
First publication 2012.
Photographs by the author except for Sid Kent photos
where noted. All photos taken 1969–1970.
Topographic map by Andy Woodruff
www.andywoodruff.com
Aerial photo by Pete Mouginis-Mark, University of Hawaii
Virtually Hawaii: http://satftp.soest.hawaii.edu/space/hawaii
Book design: Don Graydon
Copyeditor: Jonelle Kemmerling
Yellow Submarine Press
PO Box 166
Index WA 98256
360.793.9148
www.graydonreserve.wordpress.com
PROLOGUE To a “shabby little island” 1
1. LANGUAGE Waiting for the subtitles 5
2. PINEAPPLETOWN Sundays by request 13
3. MOLOKAI RANCH ”What’s good for General Bullmoose . . .” 31
4. HOOLEHUA The world’s largest nylon-reinforced butyl rubber-lined reservoir 43
5. KALAUPAPA A rare lapse into humanity 59
6. KAUNAKAKAI Prettiest waiters on the island 75
7. EAST END (Part 1) Pounding poi at the Hilton 97
8. EAST END (Part 2) Battles in a horse pasture 111
9. HALAWA ”Sorry, but I thought you were a hippie.” 125
10. MOLOKAI How do you say “rush hour” in Hawaiian?” 139
Contents
The use of pronunciation marks with Hawaiian words has
become the rule, rather than the exception that it was in 1970
when I wrote this book. Printed communications at that time—
newspapers, books, maps, street signs, and so forth—generally
did without the ‘okina and the kahakō that are now nearly uni-
versal. The ‘okina usually indicates a break in the sound of a
word, thus telling us to pronounce Moloka‘i as mo-lo-ka-ee, not
mo-lo-kai. The kahakō indicates a subtle lengthening of the
vowel. In this book I retain the earlier form. I didn’t care to
tinker with what I wrote back then; it is what it was.
A note on pronunciation marks
Preface to the 2012 publication
I WROTE THIS BOOK forty-two years ago as my way of
remembering this rare and beautiful place where I lived with
my wife, Sharmen, for nine months—she as a schoolteacher, I
as a newspaper editor. The book sat on a shelf, as a typewritten
manuscript, for all these decades. Reading it now, I see that it
still has something to say about my life, something of interest to
those close to me, but also something to say about the life of
Molokai at an important moment in its history—that time when
it began its change from an island dominated by industrial
agriculture to a future that yet today is undecided.
I’ve made no attempt to bring the book into the twenty-first
century, when we no longer use “he” to stand for “he and she,”
when we tred lightly on use of the term “leprosy” in favor of the
more sanitized “Hansen’s disease.” The text is the 1970 original
and thus is not at all updated for changes in land ownership,
road directions, demographic data, and so on.
Dole and Del Monte have long since abandoned their
Molokai pineapple operations, but the island has resisted the
lure of tourism as a replacement, unlike nearby Maui. I’ve
watched since 1970 as Maui has grown like a brightly colored
weed, the population nearly quadrupling to a current total
approaching 150,000, the Nagata’s and Kitada’s and Ikeda’s
and Ooka stores morphing into Wal-Mart and Costco, easygoing
Lahaina converted into a tourist sideshow. Molokai, meanwhile,
has shunned the heavy hand of tourism, has held on to its
stamp of authenticity—rural, unhurried, neighborly. Today’s
population of about 7300 is an increase of a couple of thousand
in forty years.
My newspaper, the Molokai Reporter, wrote about plans to
bring hotels and big money to the west end, on lands of Molokai
Ranch. But this Kaluakoi fantasy has fizzled, ending up an
undernourished version of what I heard the developers of my day
propose. Same thing at Puaahala on the east end and Kaunakakai
in the middle: big plans, few results.
Activists mainly concerned with the soul of Molokai have put
the brakes on such ideas and they also resist other notions, like a
wind farm to create electricity for Honolulu. Residents of a more
practical bent see the economic upside of such plans. A Molokai
resident shouts “Go home!” to visitors arriving on a tour boat, while
a dear friend of his makes money as a van driver for the tourists,
on an island with double the unemployment rate of Maui.
When I was last on the island, in 2007, Hotel Molokai was still
the principal center of tourist activity in central Molokai, as it was
in 1970. The town of Maunaloa was cleaner than I remember it
when I lived there, and much quieter, the lively hubbub of a big
pineapple camp long muted. The little airport of 1970 was still a
little airport. Kaunakakai remained the island’s humble business
center. When I hiked down the pali trail to Kalaupapa, I was met
by Richard Marks of Damien Tours, the same Richard Marks who
led me four decades earlier on my first visit to the Hansen’s disease
settlement. Less than two years later, this brave man who lived as
a patient at Kalaupapa for more than fifty years was dead at the
age of seventy-nine.
After our stay on Molokai, Sharmen and I moved to Maui,
where she first taught at Kamehameha III school in Lahaina and I
started the Maui Sun newspaper. Our son, Andy, was born on
Maui. Sharmen and I later went our separate ways. She is now
retired from the Maui public schools and living well in her
upcountry home. With my partner, Jonelle, I live in Washington
state, in the Cascade Mountains, retired from a career of reporting
and editing.
But many years ago, Molokai became a part of me for a time.
This book is my report on that era. And now here it is, unvarnished
Molokai 1970.
Index, Washington June 2012
Preface to the original 1970 manuscript
THIS BOOK is intended for those who would like to learn a bit about
Molokai without having to work at it. It is short, nonscholarly, and
has lots of pictures. It is admittedly a hybrid: a cross-breeding of
history book, travel guide, and personal chronicle.
All in all, it is a sort of Molokai documentary—a portrait of
Molokai today. The book is the product of the nine months my wife
and I lived on Molokai during 1969 and 1970, when Sharmen
taught school and I published a twice-monthly newspaper.
I want to thank Sid Kent and Mark Slattery for their help in
preparing the photos for publication. I also am indebted to Violet
Meyer and Frances Manuel for all their willing assistance at the
Maui County Library in Kaunakakai.
I should mention that some of the photos have no particular
correlation to the text; they are in the book simply because I like
them.
Maunaloa, Molokai June 1970
Honorary mayor Mitchell Pauole greets Molokai airport visitors.
THE LETTER was from the Department of Education, State of
Hawaii. “Dear Miss Sterling,” it said. “We are happy to welcome
you as a member of Hawaii’s teaching staff.” It was June 12.
Sharmen and I would be married in three days.
“This is to notify you of your assignment to Maunaloa School
for the period September 1, 1969, to August 31,1970.”
In barely a month, Sharmen and I and Bill and Sally would
set sail in our new trimaran for the Hawaiian Islands. “Your
school is Maunaloa School, Maunaloa, Molokai, Hawaii.”
We looked at each other. Thank God, Sharmen had a job.
Now we could sail off to Hawaii without any worries. But Molo-
kai?
“Molokai? Isn’t that where, you know, Father Damien and
all that . . . ”
“That’s right. What else do you know about the place?”
“Nothing.”
We drove to the library. Would a northern California library
have anything to say about Molokai? Well, yes, but not much.
PROLOGUE
To a “shabby little island”
2 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Our most interesting informant was a fat little volume titled Bob
Krauss’ Travel Guide to the Hawaiian Islands.
From Mr. Krauss we learned that Molokai, a “shabby little
island,” has a fair number of mosquitoes and the “reddest, driest,
itchiest dust in the world.” On weekends, “Hawaiians trek out of
the back country” into the main village of Kaunakakai. The big
event of the year is the annual Molokai to Oahu Canoe Race, but
when the race is over, “Molokai goes to sleep for another year.”
Good grief. We had wanted to get away from it all. But if we had
wanted to be this drastic about it, we would have joined the
Peace Corps.
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
offered no real comfort. Its cryptic description of Molokai read:
“an island in central Hawaii: leper colony.”
Mr. Krauss neglected to include a map of Molokai with his
encouraging report, so we still didn't know where the town of
Maunaloa was. Eventually we discovered a map in another book
and located Maunaloa at the western end of the island, in the
heart of Molokai’s dry and dusty pineapple country.
We also ran across a few statistics on the island. Thirty-
eight miles long by 10 miles wide. An area of 260 square miles, or
about 168,000 acres. A coastline of 106 miles. Highest point at
the eastern end, Kamakou Peak, 4,970 feet; highest in the west,
Puu Nana, 1,381 feet. Situated in the Pacific Ocean some two
thousand miles west of San Francisco. Population around five or
six thousand. Industries: cattle ranching and pineapple, pine-
apple, pineapple.
We arrived in the islands August 8, after a sixteen-day
ocean crossing in the Yellow Submarine. It was a rugged trip,
especially for the seasick wives. We dropped anchor at Kahului
Harbor on the island of Maui and vacationed for twelve days.
Then Sharmen and I left Bill and Sally on Maui and flew to Mo-
lokai to find out the things the travel books couldn’t tell us.
Crossing the ocean by ourselves for the first time was, by
PROLOGUE 3
turns, an exhilarating adventure, a terrifying experience, a
crashing bore. So too, the life we found on Molokai. There seemed
no strange or fascinating or exasperating or beautiful facet of life
on the ocean that could not be matched by the world of Molokai
which, in many ways, was as alien to our experience as the sea.
Sharmen and I settled down in Maunaloa, along with hun-
dreds of pineapple workers, thousands of acres of pineapple land,
and millions of pineapples. At the other end of Molokai, at Hala-
wa Valley, was the home of Johnny Kainoa and his hippies. In
between, we found tourists and fishermen, hotels and hovels,
immense pineapple fields and tiny taro patches, slick mainland
speculators and illiterate Filipino pensioners, dusty dry cattle
ranges and tropical jungle, heathens and oh-so-Christian Chris-
tians, non-practicing radicals and oh-so-American Americans, hot
dogs and saimin, night clubs and luaus, American movies and
cockfights. And these are the things this book is about.
July 23, 1969: The Yellow Submarine sails
beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, bound for Hawaii
and a new life for Don and Sharmen Graydon on the
island of Molokai.
Alfred Palapala
LANGUAGE
Waiting for the subtitles
1
PEOPLE IN HAWAII speak differently than people in any other
part of America. I am no linguist, and I can’t describe the region-
al idiosyncrasies. But there are inflections, constructions,
phrases that immediately set apart a person from Hawaii. I
suppose these differences constitute what would be considered
the Hawaiian dialect of English, which seems to be used by a
majority of the people raised in the state whether or not they are
of Hawaiian racial ancestry. There are many widely educated,
professional people whose speaking manner immediately identi-
fies them as natives of Hawaii. Almost all natives of Molokai
speak this Hawaiian dialect.
Then there is pidgin. Pidgin is the Hawaiian dialect—
readily understood by any American—stretched way out of shape
to accommodate a lot of Hawaiian words and a whole bag of
sometimes incomprehensible English language constructions.
This is where you will run across sentences on the order of: “My
daddy no stay home.” (My father is not at home.) “No make mad
face.” (Don’t be angry.) “No can.” (I can’t do it.) “Git?” (Did you
6 AWAY FROM IT ALL
get it?) “Him no stop.” (He is not here.)
The most popular expression in pidgin is “da kine.” Literally
translated: the kind. This is one of those slippery all-purpose
expressions you might hear all your life, but never be able to
explain. “He’s da kine for her.” (He’s in love with her.) “She’s da
kine.” (She is having her period.) The meaning usually depends
on the context of the sentence. “Put him in da kine” would be an
order to put something in a closet or in a car or in a drawer; that
is, into whatever the speakers understand “da kine” to mean in
this sentence. Sometimes “da kine” seems to be used as a filler in
a sentence, a way to kill time while the speaker tries to decide
what he wants to say: “He say da kine Captain Cook first white
man come to Hawaii.” Or, “She gonna fix da kine mango pudding
for dessert.”
Pidgin, in varying degrees of strength, is a major tongue on
Molokai. You hear it everywhere you go. If you hang on long
enough, you will begin to understand it. When I first arrived on
Molokai—before I had any competence in understanding pidg-
in—I took a carpentry job at the Kaunakakai pier. The workmen
were all Hawaiian or Japanese-American. I could stand next to
two men and listen to them talking to each other and realize they
were speaking English. But I’d be damned if I knew what they
were saying. I was the only white man (or haole) on the job, and
the only person who used that strange version of English usually
spoken in California.
Because pidgin was foreign to me, I usually had to ask my
boss to repeat his orders two or three times. I felt a quick empa-
thy with the Mexican laborers I had worked with on construction
jobs in California. They rated about as much consideration on a
job as the shovels and wheelbarrows they used, and if they mis-
understood an order, it was their laziness or stupidity that was
blamed. Their very real problem in understanding English was
nonexistent to most of the bosses. “They understand what they
want to undestand,” these bosses would tell me. So on Molokai, I
LANGUAGE 7
could visualize my foreman telling the superintendent: “That
new boy not much good I think. I tell him, ‘Hey, you haole, come
here, plenty quick, do this job,’ he make like he no hear. Plenty
dumb I think.” I was fired after one week.
Some newcomers to Molokai try to overcome the language
problem by learning pidgin themselves. So you’ll run across
bright young mainland college graduates speaking pidgin. I don’t
dig this approach myself. It’s like saying to the fellow you’re
talking with: “You’re not bright enough to understand the stand-
ard English dialect, so I’ll pretend I speak your version of Eng-
lish.” This approach really isn’t necessary, because pidgin is
nothing but an offbeat style of English. People who speak hard-
core pidgin understand the type of English I speak. And I can
understand them (as long as they’re patient with me).
Sophie Cooke wrote a little book about her life on Molokai,
and in there she tells about a relative of hers who spoke to a
Hawaiian man working a taro patch in east Molokai.
“Eh! You think rain?” she asked him, affecting pidgin for his
benefit.
David Kalaau, the principal of Halawa School, looked up
Enthusiastic fans at a Little League ballgame.
8 AWAY FROM IT ALL
from his taro patch and replied, “I see no indication of it at pre-
sent, Madam.”
To get along on Molokai, there are a number of Hawaiian
words that must be learned because they are often used in every-
day speech. Everyone already is familiar with Hawaiian words
that have made their way into standard English: lei, luau, lanai,
muu muu, aloha, hula. Other Hawaiian words in common use on
Molokai are:
Alii (uh-LEE-ee) Hawaiian royalty; chiefs
Haole (HOW-lee) White person; Caucasian
Heiau (HEY-ee-ow) Temple; sacred place
Holo Holo (HO-lo HO-lo) Holiday; to play; have a good time
Kahuna (kuh-HOO-nuh) Priest; sorcerer
Kamaaina (kah-mah-EYE-nuh) Old-timer;
longtime resident
Kane (KAH-nay) Man or boy
Kapu (kah-POO) Forbidden; no trespassing
Kau Kau (COW COW) To eat
Kokua (ko-KOO-uh) Help; assistance
Limu (LEE-moo) Seaweed
Mahalo (mah-HAH-lo) Thank you
Makai (mah-KAI) Toward the ocean; on the ocean side
of something, such as the makai side of the road
Mauka (MAU-kuh) Toward the mountains; on the
inland side of something
Malihini (mah-lah-HEE-nee) Newcomer; stranger; visitor
Pali (PAH-lee) Cliff
Paniolo (pah-nee-O-lo) Cowboy
Pau (POW) Finished; completed
Pau Hana (pow HAH-na) End of the work day;
completion of work
Poi (POY) Paste-like food made from the taro root
Puka (POO-kuh) Hole
Pupus (POO-poos) Snacks; hors d’oeuvres
LANGUAGE 9
Taro (TARE-oh) Plant whose tuberous root is used in
making poi
Wahine (wah-HEE-nay) Woman or girl
The tortured attempts of tourists to say Hawaiian place names
are humorous proof that pronunciation doesn’t come easily, at
least not until you’ve lived here awhile. My uncle visited Hawaii
from California and told me this little experience:
“We were on Maui, and we were talking to this Hawaiian
girl. She asked us, ‘Did you go see the Iao Needle?’ When I heard
that, all I could think of to say was, ‘Is that how you pronounce
it?’ ” (The pronunciation of Iao is EE-ow.)
The longer place names often are lightly accented on the
next to last syllable. Some of the Molokai names that follow this
rule are Hoolehua, Maunaloa, Halawa, Kalaupapa, Kamiloloa,
Kalamaula, Puaahala. However, Kaunakakai and Kaluakoi are
two of the names that normally get a slight accent on the last
syllable. Molokai is most often pronounced MO-lo-kai, but there
are purists who will say mo-lo-KAI-ee.
Some words offer up twin vowels that seem a bit awkward
to say. Hoolehua is officially pronounced ho-oh-lay-HOO-uh;
Kualapuu is koo-ah-luh-POO-oo; Pukoo is poo-KO-oh. But you’ll
find even kamaainas slurring through these twin vowels, making
Hoolehua come out more like ho-lay-HOO-uh.
Another interesting situation comes up with pronunciation
of the W: should it sound like a W or a V? The W sound appears
to have won out in the word Hawaii, but you never hear anyone
on Molokai use anything but the V sound when pronouncing the
name of the beautiful valley at the eastern end of the island
known as Halawa.
Almost everyone on Molokai can get by in English, but
about 15 per cent of the people on the island speak either Filipi-
no or Japanese at home. Some dialect of Filipino is the most
common foreign tongue heard on Molokai, and the town of Mau-
10 AWAY FROM IT ALL
naloa is the place it is heard most often. About 85 per cent of the
heads of households in Maunaloa are Filipino. Most of these men
were born in the Philippines and continue to speak Filipino
whenever they can, which is often, because most of their fellow
workers also speak Filipino.
Union meetings in Maunaloa are conducted in Filipino. The
men speak their native language at home and in the fields and
around the town. I never quite grew accustomed to going to the
post office or the local market and hearing Filipino spoken all
around me. I think there were times I could easily have con-
vinced myself I was back at the Elmwood in Berkeley, watching a
foreign-language film and waiting for the subtitles to appear.
About half the adults in Maunaloa never reached high
school. So I don’t suspect they will ever be standing in line to
take courses in speaking English. Many of them will continue to
speak English only when they have to, and pass on to their chil-
dren a combination of Filipino, pidgin, and English.
Unfortunately, the Filipino background of these children
Sharmen teaches her class at Maunaloa School.
LANGUAGE 11
has been pretty much ignored at the elementary school in Mau-
naloa. While we were on Molokai, very few attempts were made
to help the Filipino-speaking children learn English or to incor-
porate Philippine arts or history or geography into the classroom
work.
Sharmen was involved in a team teaching arrangement in
which four teachers taught a class of seventy-five kindergarten,
first grade, and second grade children. Almost all the students
were Filipino. A dozen of them spoke virtually no English. But
there was no teacher or aide in the class who could speak Filipi-
no. And none of the classes that were taught took any advantage
of the children’s familiarity with Filipino culture. In fact, the kids
were not allowed to speak Filipino in class.
The Department of Education was more hip when it came to
dealing with children who spoke pidgin (meaning all the students
in Maunaloa). Sharmen’s team used an experimental language
arts program that helped show students the differences between
pidgin and standard English. On a card would be a drawing of a
little barefoot boy wearing short pants and an aloha shirt, repre-
senting a local boy, with a line in pidgin saying something like:
“He no can swim.” On another card would be a drawing of the
same boy dressed in more formal clothes, representing the
schoolboy, with the line: “He can’t swim.” The children were not
told there is something wrong with speaking pidgin. But they
were learning the differences between pidgin and standard Eng-
lish so they could use either of them properly.
As for me, I learned to adapt. Usually I managed to get by.
But there were times I wasn’t so sure. One day I was settling
down in the barber’s chair after asking the man at the shop to
take just a little off the sides; not too much, now, just a trim.
“Yes, yes,” the Filipino barber agreed, “nice day, very nice day.”
Cockfight at Maunaloa.
THE BIG DEAL on Molokai is pineapple. Seventeen thousand acres
of it. Hundreds of employees and an annual payroll in the neigh-
borhood of $5 million. Almost half the people employed on Molo-
kai work in agriculture. And when you say agriculture on Molo-
kai, you mean pineapple. No sugar cane is cultivated on the
island. There is a bit of vegetable gardening and two good-sized
seed corn outfits, but other than that, it’s all pineapple.
I don’t find pineapple itself a particularly interesting subject,
unless it happens to be right in front of me, incorporated into an
upside-down cake. But if you’re going to talk about Molokai,
you’re going to talk about pineapple.
First off, let me make it clear pineapples do not grow on
trees, smart aleck tour guides notwithstanding. There is a tree in
Hawaii known as the lauhala that is popularly palmed off as a
pineapple tree because of the large oval-shaped fruit it bears.
Don’t believe it.
Pineapples grow on plants. The plants, composed of clusters
of long, hardy blue-green leaves, grow to a height of about three
PINEAPPLETOWN
Sundays by request
2
14 AWAY FROM IT ALL
feet. Each plant produces one pineapple twenty months after it is
planted. About one year later, another pineapple matures on the
plant. The first pineapple is known as the plant crop; the second
is the ratoon crop. After the second fruit is picked, a field normal-
ly is burned and plowed under, then readied for a new planting.
Or as my mother-in-law explained it to her husband: “Did you
know that each pineapple plant has two babies, and they name
them both before they hack them up?”
The only way I enjoy looking at pineapple, other than on top
of that cake, is from the air. From two thousand feet up, the
fields exhibit perfect symmetry and a kind of geometric beauty.
Hundreds of red-earth roads slash through the fields, each field a
long rectangle with perfectly rounded corners. Occasionally you’ll
find an oddball road wandering eccentrically through several
fields, giving variety to the hypnotizing army of rectangular
fields marching by below.
On the ground, each field turns out to be composed of an
Pineapple harvest in the Maunaloa fields.
P INEAPPLETOWN 15
army of its own: an army of thorny, almost impenetrable pine-
apple plants. The long leaves on each plant are stiff and pointed;
portions of the edges of the tough leaves are serrated like a saw
blade. Whenever I borrowed pineapples from the fields, I did my
best to get fruit from rows alongside the road. This helped pre-
vent pineapple punctures, which really smart.
A good plant crop will yield forty tons of fruit from one acre
of land, with each pineapple weighing in at around five pounds or
better. When the pineapple is ripe, teams of Filipino field hands
wade through the densely planted fields, hand picking the fruit.
The pineapples are simply dropped onto a conveyor belt which,
supported on a long boom, moves just ahead of the pickers. The
belt carries the fruit to a waiting truck, which takes its cargo to a
loading depot where the bed of the truck is lifted off and stacked.
Large truck and trailer rigs then carry four of these remova-
ble beds at a time several miles down Kamehameha V Highway
to the pier at Kaunakakai. The fruit is loaded onto barges and
pulled by tugs to the neighboring island of Oahu, where it goes to
Honolulu canneries. Most fruit arrives at the cannery less than
twenty-four hours after picking.
It’s a sharp, fast, efficient operation, this pineapple harvest-
ing. It has to be, because Hawaii’s pineapple producers are com-
peting against pineapple from Taiwan, South Africa, Okinawa,
and other areas where labor is cheap. And the managers of
West Molokai and its seemingly endless fields of pineapple.
16 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Hawaii’s pineapple companies will be the first to tell you their
employees are the highest paid agricultural workers in the world.
Despite the high degree of mechanization of most pineapple
work—ground fumigation, fertilization, insect spraying, and so
forth—the basic jobs of planting and picking still are done by
hand. An official of one of Molokai’s two pineapple plantations
told me that his company spent $150,000 on an experimental
planting machine that doesn’t appear to work. “This thing is
supposed to have an automatic guidance system,” he said. “I’d
like to set the guidance system and let the damn thing guide
itself right across the pineapple fields and into the ocean.”
The heart of pineapple country on Molokai is the village of Mau-
naloa, where Sharmen and I lived during our nine months on the
island. Home to some nine hundred souls, Maunaloa owes its
existence to pineapple. Ninety-nine per cent of the employed
persons in the town work for the Dole pineapple company, sole
owner and proprietor of the dilapidated old village, most of which
was built in the 1930s.
Maunaloa has a wee bit of free enterprise—a gas station,
general store, movie theater, cafe, pool hall, barber shop, and
launderette—but if you want to do any serious shopping, you
drive sixteen miles to Kaunakakai. Kaunakakai has fewer resi-
dents than Maunaloa, but it’s centrally located and is home to
most of the island’s businesses.
The biggest business in Maunaloa is the Friendly Market.
It’s small but full of hidden surprises. And I do mean hidden: it
takes a good guide to find what you want. But what you want
usually is somewhere around. Food, pet supplies, stationery,
gifts, liquor, candy, dry goods, household supplies, etc., etc. A
miniature department store. Sharmen claims they have one of
the nicest fabric selections anywhere.
One of the aisles in the grocery section was blocked all the
time we lived in Maunaloa with boxes of, well, something or
P INEAPPLETOWN 17
other. Small cardboard boxes filled with odds and ends of canned
foods were on the floor underneath the shelves throughout the
store. I don’t suppose anyone has looked in them for years. The
Friendly Market is open six days a week until 6 p.m. and on
Sundays by request.
Probably the nicest thing about Friendly is the girls who
work there. Rose is the owner’s wife; I wouldn’t recognize her
without her big eye-swallowing smile. Leo is a young salesgirl
who doesn’t seem to know she’s on a job, she’s always having so
much fun. Grace is a tall, dignified and gracious woman who
somehow strikes me as approximately the person I would conjure
up if asked to describe the perfect mother. Mrs. Espaniola is a
quiet one: one of those good, but colorless, persons it takes some
time to know. When my parents visited Maunaloa, Rose gave
them a box of Hawaiian candy as a little welcoming gift.
Sharmen and I lived in a drab two-bedroom teacher’s cottage
behind Maunaloa School, for which we faithfully paid nineteen
dollars and fifty cents each month to the Department of Educa-
tion. We shared the property with a reddish neighborhood dog
who lived under our house. We never learned whether his color-
ing was his own or the result of the fine waves of red dust that
blew on the trade winds into our yard each day from the pine-
apple fields. We shared the interior of the house with an occa-
sional cockroach and an inexhaustible company of immense,
giant-legged (but basically friendly) spiders.
The yard was in sad shape, but I fixed that by watering the
ground around the house every day until I had an enviable lawn
composed of various weeds. I installed a row of pineapple plants
on either side of the walkway to our front door in order to bright-
en up the yard. We put in a vegetable garden behind the house
but lost most of it to high winds and crawly things.
Three-quarters or better of Maunaloa’s population is Filipi-
no. The Filipinos began coming to Molokai in 1924, looking for
something a little better than they had in their homeland, as did
18 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Mariano Acoba: I don’t mean to say that I disgrace the way I was brought up and the way I lived in the Philippines. But when I compare my life back in the Philippines and my life here, I can say that I have better way of life now.
P INEAPPLETOWN 19
the Japanese and the Chinese and the Koreans and the Portu-
guese and their fellow countrymen who had come to Hawaii
before them. They were recruited by Hawaiian companies to fill
the state’s demand for dependable agricultural labor. The last big
recruitment drive to get new workers for Molokai took place in
1946. A majority of Dole’s Molokai workers are products of that
drive. So the labor force is not young. And the children of these
workers are not all that interested in getting out in the fields to
carry on the work of their fathers (and, in many cases, their
mothers).
One of those workers recruited in 1946 is Mariano Acoba.
You sometimes get the feeling he isn’t much older than the eight-
een-year-old boy he was when he arrived here from P.I., as the
Filipinos refer to their homeland. He doesn’t strictly look his age,
for one thing; but it’s really more a matter of a relaxed and confi-
dent manner that makes you think he has no problems or respon-
sibilities, and if he does, he’ll take care of them okay. He is mar-
ried, has four sons, drives a tractor for Dole, and also is the local
union leader, head of the ILWU unit in Maunaloa.
One thing you notice about Mariano: he always speaks posi-
tively. He’s happy with the way his men and the company are
getting along; he likes his job; he believes in his little town.
Mariano has a good life here. He is liked and respected. He
has his own garish yellow Corvair and a reasonably comfortable
little tin-roofed house with his favorite chair, a long-armed rock-
er, in the front room with the Hawaii banner and the Norman
Rockwellesque drawing of John and Robert Kennedy on the wall.
He pays twenty-four dollars a month to the company for his
house. He has been able to afford trips to the Philippines twice
since coming to Hawaii. He makes a decent living. He thanks his
union for helping get a reasonable wage for workers. But he does
not necessarily credit the union at the expense of the company.
Mariano was going to keep out of controversy when he first
got to Hawaii, and he decided he wouldn’t join any organization.
20 AWAY FROM IT ALL
But now he is a union leader. He vaguely remembers hearing
about a big strike in 1937. The ILWU successfully organized the
pineapple workers in 1946, the same year he arrived in Mauna-
loa. He was deeply involved in the 1968 strike that ran for two
months and resulted in a contract that was scheduled to expire
in the winter of 1972 (a great advantage for the company, since
the winter is a slack period in the pineapple industry.)
Nobody is getting rich here, picking pineapple or doing other
work for Dole. An average worker is making only $2.75 an hour
or so. But occasionally there is overtime; some jobs offer incentive
bonuses; some of the wives work during the busy summer season;
there are the usual medical benefits, and, of course, there’s that
low, low rent.
So most people are satisfied. Naturally, the trick in assessing
life in this village is to ask what the residents might have with-
out Maunaloa. Would they be better off elsewhere? In most cases,
the answer is no.
But I personally can’t help being from California and I can’t
help comparing Maunaloa to other places I’ve lived. Speaking for
myself, then, I know Maunaloa is an ugly town: tiny, shabby,
packed-together houses, red dust over everything, dry tired-
looking trees. I know the phone service varies from bad to worse.
I know the water is red when it is available, and awfully dry
when it isn’t. I know the town is plagued with pineapple bugs
and fruit flies. I know the roads are bad. I know there are no
good public beaches, although the ocean is only a few miles away
on three sides of the town. But the residents seem unaware of
these things. Or if they are, they don’t complain about them.
A young housewife stood up at a Maunaloa Community
Council meeting and meekly said that she thought the company
shouldn’t have its big loading yard right in front of a row of hous-
es. The loading yard and the immense trucks that drive through
it somehow didn’t seem compatible with the young kids who live
in the houses and play in the area, she suggested. The consensus
P INEAPPLETOWN 21
at the meeting seemed to be that it was up to the mothers to
watch the kids, not up to the company to move the yard. So much
for rural radicalism.
The Community Council is a sort of make-believe city coun-
cil—a group that exists pretty much at the pleasure of the com-
pany, but which performs the useful functions of coordinating
community activities and helping in small ways to improve the
town. The president of the council during most of the time Shar-
men and I lived there was Bernard Tokunaga, who, as principal
of the school, also was Sharmen’s boss.
Bernard happens to be one of those miraculous people, like
Mariano, who see the light side of everything in such a way that
you can’t ever get mad at them. Bernard was determined to get
his council members off their collective ass and into some serious
good works for their town. He had some fine plans, but we were
not around long enough to find out if they ever worked. It looked
like an uphill climb. I went to one council meeting where commu-
nity organizations were to submit their requests for council sub-
sidies for the coming year. The typical request went something
like this:
Bernard: How much money will the Dominoes Club need for
next year?
Club Rep: Well, the Dominoes Club need plenty money.
Bernard: And how much would that be?
C.R.: How much we get last year?
Bernard: One hundred and fifty dollars.
C.R.: Well, okay, uh, how about two hundred this year?
My finest memory of the council always will be the Naming
of the Streets episode, which took place before Bernard’s tenure.
The council had worked for years on a project to put up street
signs in the town. Finally, it was going to happen. Of course, part
of the project involved deciding what names to put on the signs,
as the streets never had been named.
“What,” I asked the president, “will the streets be named?”
22 AWAY FROM IT ALL
“Well,” he confided, “you know the main street going up
through town? That’s gonna be Main Street, and . . . ”
“Let me guess,” I said. “The first street going off Main will be
called First Street, and the second street will be called Second
Street and the third street . . . ”
“That’s right. We were going to name the streets for Ha-
waiian flowers, but we decided they’d be too hard to pronounce.”
I went to a cockfight one Saturday afternoon in Maunaloa. I
knew I wouldn’t like cockfighting, because I’ve always been a
pansy or a pacifist, depending on your point of view. I don’t like
blood. But cockfighting is to the Philippines what televised foot-
ball is to the U.S.A. And the men in Maunaloa are not Americans
by tradition: they are Filipinos. So I had to go to a cockfight. To
complete my education.
The cockfights took place in a dry, dusty, tree-shaded lot at
the edge of the village. It’s easy to find out where the cockfights
are. Just drive around the side streets on a Saturday or Sunday.
If there is a cockfight, you will see the cars lined up along the
road, and you are there.
If there are no fights in Maunaloa, you can try around the
area of the theater in Kualapuu, about fifteen miles east of Mau-
naloa. If it happens to be sometime during the last four months
of the year, there may be no action anywhere, since the chickens
are molting during that period and are not usually fought. Cock-
fights—or chicken fights, as a lot of people around here call
them—are illegal, of course. But company officials and the police
generally respect the sport as a legitimate expression of Filipino
culture.
An absolutely integral part of the sport is gambling. You will
not see a cockfighting arena without seeing men walking around
carrying sheaves of paper money, taking and placing bets. A lot
of money rides on these fights; money that is made even bigger
when you realize how little money most of these people have to
P INEAPPLETOWN 23
throw around. I know one old Filipino bachelor who sold a cow,
one of his most valuable possessions, in order to have gambling
money. He lost it all at the cockfights.
Outside the main area of chicken fighting are several tables
surrounded by avid bettors playing a game that uses black tiles
that look like dominoes. Twenty-dollar bills have lots of company
on these tables. In a final ring around the arena are little booths
operated by Filipino ladies selling sweets, soft drinks, and food.
A fellow named Agader sat on the ground next to me as I
fiddled with my camera, waiting for a fight to begin. He told me
that before each fight, a group of chicken owners get together
with their birds and match gladiators for the next event. When
two birds are chosen, a small razor-sharp curved knife is tied to
one of the feet on each chicken. With this blade—it is in a protec-
tive sheath for the moment—one chicken will very shortly hack
the other to death.
Gamblers leave their tables and gather outside the square
Gaming table at the Maunaloa cockfights.
24 AWAY FROM IT ALL
arena defined by a rope on posts. By some method I didn’t follow,
odds are announced and bets placed on the birds. The opponents
are experimentally shoved against each other to get them in a
fighting mood. The sheaths are removed from the knives and the
birds are loosed on each other.
Most of the action in a cockfight seems to take place in the
first thirty seconds. The neck feathers of these beautiful animals
flare out, as the hair on a dog’s back will bristle as it goes into a
fight. The birds charge and leap and pirouette like ballet danc-
ers. Very quickly, one of them is lying on the ground.
If the downed bird has any life left, his handler puts him on
his feet and forces him back into the fray. The birds literally
seem to lose interest sometimes after the first few charges. I
swear one chicken was wandering off, pecking in the dirt for
seeds, after he and another bird had tangled for a few seconds.
Loser at the
cockfights.
P INEAPPLETOWN 25
But there are people in the ring whose job it is to keep a fight
going until one bird is dead. Then the fight is over. Bets are paid
off; the knife leg of the losing bird is cut off and his body is car-
ried away. A circle of chicken fanciers begins forming to match
opponents for the next event.
After an hour or so at the cockfights, I drove over to the post
office. Next door, in the community meeting room, Mr. and Mrs.
Ramos were giving a party in celebration of the baptism and the
first birthday of their baby. A fellow came up and offered me a
Primo beer. I accepted.
Primo is the best beer brewed in Hawaii. In fact, the only
one. Everyone drinks it. On Molokai it is the ubiquitous bever-
age. The roads are lined with empty Primo bottles. Cases of full
ones are stacked in many garages. The young people who get
loaded on beer and then run around creating mischief are known
as Primo warriors. So I drank this famous brew, sitting on the
outside railing of the post office and watching the dancers inside
the meeting room and listening to the faltering old-fashioned
sounds of the little local band.
I could see Agader inside, slicked up and dancing. As soon as
I had finished my Primo, a young man came up and offered to
take me around to the beer cooler for another. We did this sever-
al times in the next hour, and by then I had decided this was a
very nice party indeed.
The best thing about it was that I had actually attended. I
mean, it’s pretty easy to stay away from parties where you don’t
know anyone, and the music and dancing is strange, and you
can’t understand the language of most of the people there, and
you have nothing in common with the guests. But you end up
going anyway, and these things turn out to not matter so much
after all.
Sharmen and I drove to Kalamaula that evening to attend a
retirement luau for a longtime plantation employee. A. C. Lum,
26 AWAY FROM IT ALL
the plantation’s office manager, was retiring after forty-seven
years in Maunaloa.
When Lum came to Molokai in 1923, there was nothing on
the western end of the island but dry cattle range. In that year,
Libby McNeill & Libby decided they could raise pineapples there,
and the company brought in crews of men to start a plantation.
The crews in those early years were composed almost entirely of
young and single Filipinos and Japanese. The men lived in tem-
porary work camps in the fields. For entertainment, they had
gambling and fighting. Family life consisted largely of visits from
troupes of whores on payday.
Lum lived through those days to see the early work camps
consolidate and develop into the quiet, stable, and family-
oriented Maunaloa of today. His career spanned the entire ten-
ure of the Libby company on Molokai. Libby sold its plantation to
Dole shortly before Lum’s retirement. Libby, a Chicago-based
food processing giant, was invited to contribute to the retirement
luau for A.C. Lum, the only man who had served the company
during its entire forty-seven years on Molokai. With a good bit of
harrumphing and throat clearing, the company explained this
would run counter to certain company policies. So something like
a thousand dollars was raised from plantation supervisors and
employees.
Mainlanders who have visited Hawaii may think luaus are
those nice parties that big hotels throw each night for their
guests, with lots of food and booze and Don Ho singing in the
background (or someone singing the same funky songs Don Ho
sings). But it turns out that, on Molokai at least, luaus still re-
main the property of the people.
Lum’s luau was one of the best. The food was delicious, and I
don’t even care much for Hawaiian food. The luau was the work
of Arthur Naehu, whose family and friends made the poi, caught
the crab, cooked the pig, picked the opihi, and prepared the long
rice and chicken, the limu, the sweet potatoes, the lomi salmon,
P INEAPPLETOWN 27
the creamed taro and squid, and everything else that goes onto a
luau menu.
I suppose several hundred guests were there for the luau at
Kalanianaole Hall, a ramshackle old building near the mud flats
a couple of miles west of Kaunakakai. The building, consisting of
a single large open room, is named for Prince Jonah Kuhio Kala-
nianaole, Hawaii Delegate to Congress for many years who
helped persuade the Territorial Legislature and the U.S. Con-
gress to pass the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920,
designed to turn large tracts of government land over to Hawai-
ian homesteaders.
During the luau, kids and dogs played in the shallow ocean
water. Outside the hall, the Maunaloa postmaster and other
amateur bartenders served beer and straight shots of whiskey.
Inside, Lum and his wife sat at the head table, swallowed up in
immense carnation leis. Ladies dashed around the room handing
out seconds of everything. Speeches were given. Presents were
presented. The Ebbtides played and sang. It was a good Molokai
day.
The phone rang one morning at home and I answered.
“Hi,” a bright, enthusiastic voice said. “This is Roger Hawley, the
Hawaii Hiker. I’m at the airport. I’m gonna be hiking around Molokai this
week, and I thought I’d tip you off so you can do a big story on me.”
“Oh yeah? What’s this all about?
“I’ll be doing just like on all the other islands, hiking just about every
place there is to hike. This should be one of my most spectacular hikes.
You’ve heard about me, haven’t you?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Gee, Mr. Graydon, I’ve been written up in all the papers and I’m on
TV all the time. I figured you’d be sure to want a big story for your paper
on Molokai, and maybe you could do a big spread for the Honolulu
Advertiser.”
He eventually convinced me I wanted to do a story on him, so we got
THE HAWAII HIKER
together for a few minutes before he took off on what was supposed
to be 110 miles worth of hiking in different areas of Molokai. The
Hawaii Hiker turned out to be a gaunt and gangly Californian, six and
a half feet high, twenty-one years old. He quickly assured me he was
a tremendous guy who had hiked more than three thousand miles in
Hawaii during the past two years. The Molokai hike would be the
latest in a long series of triumphs.
“I’m gonna write a fascinating story about this hike when it’s
over,” the Hawaii Hiker told me. “Then, for my birthday spectacular,
I’m gonna hike Niihau [a privately owned island in Hawaii that per-
mits no visitors]. I’m gonna sneak on Niihau and get some great color
shots. Life magazine will buy ’em for sure. Then I’m gonna write a
book about all my hiking in Hawaii. It oughta really sell good, don’t
you think?”
Then the Hawaii Hiker began his hike. But somehow he managed
to get back to a phone every evening to give me a progress report.
We went through a nightly ritual where I would answer the phone,
and he would say, “Well, guess who this is,” and I would reply, “Why,
it must be Roger Hawley, the Hawaii Hiker,” and he would say,
“Right, and just wait’ll you hear what I did today.” And then he would
tell me something like: “I walked down Papohaku Beach today in the
nude. Guess that oughta make a good angle to your story, huh?”
The Hawaii Hiker was such a confident lad, such an honest believ-
er in his work, that when he told me he had called off the rest of his
Molokai hike after only fifty miles, he did it with no trace of disap-
pointment or embarrassment. He was off to Honolulu for some rest
before his next spectacular.
The last I heard of the Hawaii Hiker, he had taken his old pair of
hiking shoes in to be bronzed. He also had a plaque made up com-
memorating one of his most spectacular hikes, and he had some
fantastic plans for these items. He wouldn’t say exactly what he had
in mind. But he assured one reporter that what he was planning to
do would make the papers all over the country.
Near Moomomi Beach
WESTERN MOLOKAI is not what a newcomer expects Hawaii to be.
You have to look hard for a coconut tree. There’s damn little
rainfall and no tropical vegetation. Dusty eroded gullies harbor-
ing colorless bushes and trees slash through the rolling hills. The
first time I drove the good paved road from the airport to Mauna-
loa, I could almost imagine myself back in the dry Altamont hills
near my hometown in northern California.
Most of the western quarter of the island is used for cattle
grazing. It requires about fifteen acres of this sparse country to
take care of just one cow. This also is pineapple country, because
pineapples can prosper without a lot of water.
The entire western end of the island is owned by an outfit
called Molokai Ranch, the biggest among a bevy of big land-
owners who control almost the entire island. Molokai Ranch
owns 75,000 acres—about 45 per cent of the 168,000 acres that
comprise Molokai. The State of Hawaii owns better than 50,000
acres; industrialist George Murphy owns about 15,000; Francis
Brown owns 6,000; the Bishop Estate owns 4,700; the Meyer
MOLOKAI RANCH
‘What’s good for General Bullmoose . . .’
3
32 AWAY FROM IT ALL
family owns 3,000. Smaller private owners hold what is left of
the island: only about 12,000 acres, or 7 per cent of the area of
Molokai.
The ranch has been owned since 1908 by the Cooke family of
Honolulu, which ties the ranch and Molokai to one of the oldest
and best known names in Hawaiian history. Amos Starr Cooke
came to Hawaii as a missionary in 1837, just seventeen years
after the first missionaries arrived in the islands. He and his wife
operated a school for the children of Hawaiian chiefs. Then he
went into business. He was a founder of Castle & Cooke, Ltd., an
agency that provided central services such as financing, market-
ing, accounting, and purchasing for the state’s sugar plantations.
The firm grew into one of the five big firms credited (or blamed)
with influencing most of the commercial and political life of the
islands for many decades.
Much of the land that makes up the present day Molokai
Ranch once belonged to the Hawaiian chief who became Kameha-
meha V, monarch of all the Hawaiian Islands, in 1863. At some
point, these lands went to Princess Ruth Keelikolani, who be-
queathed them on her death to Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop,
a descendant of Kamehameha I. When Princess Bernice died in
1884, the land went to her husband, Charles Reed Bishop, who
already had acquired a good deal of Molokai land in 1875. In
1893, Bishop turned over his Molokai property to the Bishop
Estate, an agency set up to provide financing for the Kameha-
meha Schools for Hawaiian children.
The land changed hands again in 1897 when Bishop con-
vinced the Bishop Estate trustees to sell the property because the
profit being earned from the land was “enormously small.” This
represented one of Bishop’s rare lapses of good business judg-
ment, for the ranch today is worth a lot of money. But the land
was sold—for a price variously reported as $150,000 or
$251,000—to a group that formed the Molokai Ranch.
The Cooke family came onto the Molokai scene shortly after
MOLOKAI RANCH 33
when Charles Montague Cooke, a son of Amos Starr Cooke, went
into partnership with four other men to form the American Sugar
Company on the former Bishop land. They planned to establish a
big sugar plantation in western Molokai. The plan failed for lack
of fresh water. In 1908, Cooke bought out his partners and
turned management of the ranch over to his son, George P.
Cooke. Cooke lived on Molokai with his wife, Sophie, and took
care of the ranch for forty years.
It seems that George and Sophie were hardworking, consci-
entious, and respected citizens of Molokai. Cooke prospected all
over his land for water; concentrated on cattle ranching while
phasing out the ranch’s sheep herd (there were seventeen thou-
sand sheep on the land in 1908, along with nine thousand cattle);
raised large amounts of honey for commercial sale; started a
dairy, and, in general, kept busy.
George Cooke served for many years in the Territorial Legis-
lature. He helped set up the Hawaiian homesteading program on
Molokai, despite the fact that the Territory of Hawaii had to
terminate the ranch’s lease on many thousands of acres of graz-
ing land in order to carry out the program. During World War II,
much of the ranch’s land was used for military training exercises,
and it was not uncommon for tanks to charge through ranch
fences on their way to a “battle.”
A startling incident in the ranch’s history occurred in 1923
when ranch manager E. E. Conant was killed by an explosion
when he tried to start his car. No one ever was tried for the mur-
der, and even today you can hear stories from people claiming to
know what really happened. The murder apparently was con-
nected with the suspension of open deer hunting on ranch land
after it was discovered that some hunters were taking their kill
to Maui and selling it.
The big man on the Molokai Ranch today is George P.
Cooke’s nephew, Harrison Cooke, a small old man who visits the
ranch about once a week from his home on the principal island of
34 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Oahu. When he visits Molokai to meet with ranch manager Aka
Hodgins, he dresses so simply and unobtrusively it’s hard to
impress anyone by pointing him out as a millionaire. That is, I
assume he’s a millionaire. He owns a bunch of sporting goods
stores in Honolulu, is president of Molokai Electric and Molokai
Ranch, chairman of the board of Bank of Hawaii, and I don’t
know what all.
Aka is a young, very competent man who is deadly serious
about his work. He is the kind of guy you wouldn’t dare offer a
beer to during working hours. I’ve talked with Aka a bit about
the ranch, and he once told me he hoped I wasn’t going to try
bringing up the history of the ranch again. I asked him why I
shouldn’t. He said he didn’t feel that talking about the past
helped anyone now; the past is past and needn’t be rehashed.
I didn’t bother to tell him how much a remark like that
would hurt the feelings of the nation’s history teachers. And I
didn’t point out the havoc it wreaked with America’s traditional
reverence for its own past. I simply determined to find out what
it was that Aka was determined to keep hidden. But Aka could
have saved his breath. If there are any skeletons in the Cooke
family closet, or any sinister mysteries in the ranch’s past, I did
not stumble across them.
The Molokai Ranch today is not universally loved, but nei-
ther is it scorned. You won’t hear many ill words on Molokai
about the ranch, and this is certainly something in the ranch’s
favor. It is difficult to convince everyone to love you when you
control nearly half the world. And that is about how much the
ranch controls of this little world called Molokai.
In many ways, Molokai Ranch is Molokai. Besides its vast
cattle ranges, the ranch owns most of the pineapple land operat-
ed by Dole, letting it out on long-term lease to the company. The
ranch owns most of the land in Kaunakakai, the island’s princi-
pal town. It owns a meat marketing company, a sand and rock
firm, the Standard Oil agency on the island, and part of a seed
MOLOKAI RANCH 35
corn operation. It leases business buildings in Kaunakakai and
sells some home lots. In fact, the ranch is so big and so important
to Molokai that it sometimes reminds me of the big, bluff, filthy-
rich character, in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, known as
General Bullmoose. The old general was so powerful and so rich
and so important that he could claim with confidence: “What’s
good for General Bullmoose is good for the country.”
The biggest part of the ranch acreage is used for cattle
ranching or pineapple cultivation. Aka is in charge of a herd of
about 2,500 Santa Gertrudis breeding cows that graze on some
53,000 acres of land. Dole leases about 9,000 acres from the
ranch for its pineapple.
Some of the land out on the western tip of the island is
leased to Honolulu Construction and Draying Company, Ltd.,
which mines something like 200,000 yards of sand a year from
Papohaku Beach for shipment to Oahu for use in making con-
crete. For some reason that big island of Oahu—with a coastline
of 209 miles—cannot provide enough sand for the booming con-
struction industry of Honolulu.
The conservationist in me says HC&D can’t mine hundreds
of yards of sand off that beautiful beach every day for eleven
years, as it has done, without damaging the beach. But I’ve been
to the beach. It is the biggest, widest, most beautiful beach on
Molokai. Hidden away at one end of the mile-and-a-half-long
beach is the sand mining operation, in the same spot it has been
in for eleven years.
From the looks of things, it will take another century or so
before you will be able to tell that any sand has been removed. So
Papohaku Beach now remains virtually unspoiled, a virgin
stretch of gorgeous warm sand facing out toward Oahu, twenty-
five miles away across Kaiwi Channel.
Papohaku Beach is actually too unspoiled. I’d like to see it
stirred up a bit by visits from sunbathers and fishermen and
beachcombers. But there are none. For this beach, like almost
36 AWAY FROM IT ALL
every nice beach in western Molokai, is hidden away behind the
locked gates of Molokai Ranch. For nearly fifty years, there have
been hundreds of persons living in Maunaloa who have been
unable to visit the magnificent seaside areas that are only a few
miles away from their homes. The ranch has a lot of good reasons
for keeping visitors off its land. Brush fires, poachers, lost cattle,
accidents; that’s what would happen. And, after all, it is private
property. The ranch sometimes gives out passes to go on its
land—that’s how I got to see much of the ranch—but you really
have to know somebody to get one of these.
Fortunately, after all these years, changes seem to be coming
to the west end. The ranch may turn over a stretch of beach at
Halena to the County of Maui, and perhaps someday the county
will improve the road and put in picnic areas. The old Ilio Point
Coast Guard station is now owned by the state and is a potential
site for a state park. The ranch itself has big plans for tourist
development of its land. This would result in opening up many of
the now inaccessible west end beaches, including Papohaku.
Without waiting for these changes, there are two beach areas on
ranch land that people can get to, if they can find their way. One
area is the two-mile stretch of beach from Halena to the old Kolo
Wharf, on the southwest coast. To get there, drive up Maunaloa’s
main street to where the road branches to left. At this point, turn
right and drive past Maunaloa School and directly into the pine-
apple fields, where the dirt road begins. This road will dead-end
in a fence after a short distance. Turn right and follow the fence
for three miles or so.
The road eventually will pass through an opening in the
fence. Stay to the left where the road forks just past this point.
About two miles farther, and just a short distance from the
ocean, a road cuts off to the right and goes half a mile to the old
Halena Camp. The main road, however, continues another two
miles to Kolo Wharf, following fairly close to the ocean.
MOLOKAI RANCH 37
Due to an offshore reef that results in shallow water along
the shore, and a large number of volcanic rocks, there are almost
no good places to swim along this beach. Sharmen and I found
just one good spot: a wide, deep swimming hole with a sandy
bottom, located about a quarter-mile from the wharf in the direc-
tion of Halena. About the only way to find the spot is to walk
along the shore until you see a large area of water that is clear of
the dark areas indicating the presence of big rocks. During the
time we were on Molokai, this spot was marked for us by the
cabinet of an old television set that rested on the shore between
the ocean and the row of kiawe trees bordering the beach.
Although this is a perfectly nice beach, we rarely saw other
persons on the weekends we went swimming there. With the
calm water and the solitude, it’s a delightful spot to go skinny-
dipping. But if you happen to be a schoolteacher or a newspaper
editor or anyone else with some sort of public reputation to up-
hold, you should keep your eyes open for the occasional fisher-
man or tourist who will pass through.
Don plays with Tassa at the beach. Sharmen enjoys one of the isolated,
rarely used beaches of west Molokai.
38 AWAY FROM IT ALL
The other accessible area on ranch land is Moomomi Beach,
located on the northwest coast. Moomomi can be reached by
driving up State Highway 46 from Kaunakakai for about five
miles, to within two miles of the airport. At this point, turn right
on Highway 481, which goes to Hoolehua. About one mile up this
road, just past the post office, turn left on Highway 48
(Farrington Highway).
The paved portion of this road will end after three miles.
Just before the paving ends, the big FAA communications receiv-
ing station will be visible off to the right. At this point, the road
enters the pineapple fields. After a mile and a half of travel
through the dusty fields, the dirt road runs into a closed gate.
Visitors can open the gate, drive through, and then shut it again
behind them. The road then passes through cattle pasture for
another mile and a half before ending on the coast at an old
Hawaiian Homes picnic pavilion.
Below the pavilion is a miniscule beach guarded partially
from the ocean by a large area of rough black volcanic rock. It’s a
great spot to picnic and to go running around like a kid, chasing
crabs or looking for rocks and shells. You also can hike west
along the shore or on top of the seaside cliffs for about half a mile
to Moomomi Beach proper, a large clean crescent of sand brack-
eted by rock outcroppings. Swimming at Moomomi is not the best
because the waves usually are too heroic for amateur swimmers.
However, the swimming is good at Moomomi and in front of the
nearby pavilion on the occasional days when the sea is relatively
calm. The waves usually are too large for easy swimming at
Papohaku and most of the other northwestern and extreme west-
ern beaches.
Some very heady plans are being concocted by Harrison Cooke
and his ranch directors for many of these beaches and the land
behind them. They now envision nothing less than a $240 million
tourist development, including a permanent community of thirty
MOLOKAI RANCH 39
thousand persons. That’s mighty big talk on an island which now
has a total of less than six thousand residents. But that’s the way
developers are operating these days in Hawaii. If you’re not
talking 200 or 300 million dollars, you really don’t have much
going for you.
Molokai Ranch has gone into partnership with Louisiana
Land and Exploration Company to form the Kaluakoi Corpora-
tion, which will oversee the whole development. Hotels, golf
courses, roads, condominiums, retirement homes, employee hous-
ing, restaurants, shopping centers, schools, churches, beaches,
lagoons, and maybe even that pizza parlor I’ve missed ever since
I moved here from California.
It is to be what is known in the land development game as a
“complete tourist destination area.” Which means it will be a
world unto itself, and mainland tourists will be happy to spend
their entire two-week vacation at Kaluakoi on the island of Molo-
kai. Which is a startling thought, when you realize that most of
the tourists who make it to Molokai nowadays arrive on a morn-
ing flight, grab a quick bus tour, and are on their way to the next
island by 5 p.m.
Despite my natural aversion to land development schemes, I
think this particular project has a lot going for it. It has some
smart men and some big money behind it, so it shouldn’t falter
financially. The whole 6,800-acre project is under the control of a
single outfit, so the development need not be haphazard or un-
planned. It is being built on land that’s no good for agriculture
and only marginally useful for cattle ranching. And I mainly like
the idea that the project will open up those beautiful seashore
areas to the public.
There is another reason I have high hopes for the project.
This reason is Ted Watson. Ted is the man Kaluakoi has put in
charge of their development. He is short, sixtyish, articulate. But
he doesn’t hide behind his pretty words. He seems to pay atten-
tion to what you are saying to him. And he tries to answer the
40 AWAY FROM IT ALL
questions you are asking instead of insistently advancing the
words he thinks you ought to hear.
I talked with a fair number of developers during my stay on
Molokai. And how do you tell the legit operators from the quick-
buck artists? They all are official land developers. They all have
completed “beautiful” projects in Samoa or San Diego or some-
where. They all have money and land. They all intend to
“cooperate fully” with state and county agencies. They all prom-
ise to build lovely buildings that are compatible with “your lovely
island.” (Nobody is going to build one of those ugly old high-rises
that are spoiling all the other islands.) They all will hire employ-
ees locally. Etc., etc.
So, you check how they shake hands. You watch their eyes
when they answer a question. You make a note of the subjects
that seem to put them on the defensive. You look for clues to
their style, so you’ll have some key to decoding their plans.
Once in a while you run across a developer who is easy
game—someone with a project so blatantly wrong that he is
Developer Ted Watson points out potential resort sites on Molokai Ranch shore property to architect Charles Griggs.
MOLOKAI RANCH 41
easily defeated. You don’t like the guy, but you feel a bit in his
debt for helping you justify your cautious attitude toward other
developers. One of these fellows came up with a plan to build a
six-story, 200-room hotel on the Kaunakakai waterfront on land
leased from the Hawaiian Homes Commission. The project was
wrong for several reasons, not the least of which was his notion
of throwing up a six-story building in a rural area where nothing
else stood over two stories. Also, I didn’t like the developer. He
gave me a sore arm, hanging on to me and explaining the virtues
of his project. County planners turned him down cold. It was a
clear victory for the little people and for honest-to-goodness, as
opposed to dollars-and-cents, progress.
Which is all simply a long way of saying it’s hard to know
whether to trust a developer. But I trust Ted Watson. And I’m
looking for good things over the next ten or twenty years out on
west Molokai. Except for the natural grandeur of the coast, it’s a
bleak area today. But ten years from now I’m going to buy Ted a
drink on the lanai of one of his hotels, just back of the prettiest
little beach at Kaluakoi, and thank him for giving the people of
Molokai such a lovely spot to spend their Sunday afternoons.
Murphy Mersberg pulls lining into place at the Hoolehua reservoir.
Sid
Ken
t p
ho
to
A SEAWATER CHANNEL once separated the two halves of Molokai.
At that point in geological history, the big central Hoolehua Plain
wasn’t a plain at all, but simply a part of the Pacific Ocean. One
day the younger east Molokai volcano finally managed to pour
enough lava into the channel to build a bridge to the western
volcano. Eventually the channel was filled with lava, forming the
linking plain. The Hoolehua Plain was lost at sea at least once
when the level of the ocean rose hundreds of feet, but the seas
eventually receded and gave it back.
When you drive along Highway 46 from Kaunakakai and get
to within a couple of miles of the airport, you’ll come to a sign
that indicates Hoolehua is off to the right, one mile up Highway
481. That leads you to believe Hoolehua is a town. But all you
will find one mile up Highway 481 is a post office and a credit
union building.
Hoolehua is not a town, but rather a big, spread-out area of
homesteads and pineapple fields. Dozens of small, plain old
houses are spotted here and there. Most of the homesteads have
HOOLEHUA
The world’s largest . . . .
4
44 AWAY FROM IT ALL
nice big yards, and this space is used for any number of rural
endeavors: growing vegetables, storing junk cars, raising pigs
and chickens and cows and horses and kids.
A funny thing about the homesteads: they were given out by
the state in the 1920s as a method of rehabilitating the Hawaiian
race. The idea was to give the Hawaiians a chance to make their
living off the land. But the pineapple companies jumped in and
offered to sublease most of the property from the homesteaders.
Today most of the them live on a corner of their forty-acre home-
steads and rent out the rest to the pineapple companies for
ninety dollars a month, plus a bonus payment that has been
running about eight hundred dollars a year.
The homesteading program was a good idea, though. Because
God knows the Hawaiians needed rehabilitating. When Captain
Cook stumbled onto what he called the Sandwich Islands in
1778, an estimated 300,000 Hawaiians were living there. Cook
brought with him the white man’s civilization and, at no extra
charge, venereal disease, cholera, colds, pneumonia, alcohol,
tobacco, mosquitoes, influenza, smallpox, leprosy, measles,
diarrhea, whooping cough, scarlet fever, mumps, beriberi, diph-
theria, bronchitis, and bubonic plague.
In 1920, the year the Territorial Legislature passed the
Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, there were 24,000 Hawaiians
and 18,000 part Hawaiians left.
The Hawaiians that remained in 1920 were, in the words of a
report on the Hawaiian Homes program, “economically de-
pressed, internally disorganized, politically threatened.” It was
bad because (shades of the American Indians!) you had a group of
people who were virtual outcasts in their own homeland.
A big hang-up was that they had almost no land of their own.
When Kamehameha III agreed to give up his absolute hold on
the land of Hawaii in the mid-nineteenth century, almost all of
the state’s four million acres were divided up by Kamehameha
himself, his chiefs, and the government of the islands. The
HOOLEHUA 45
commoners of Hawaii came out of this division with a total of
thirty thousand acres, and a lot of this was swallowed up later by
the big sugar plantations.
The Hawaiian Homes program offered homesteads on a
ninety-nine-year lease, at one dollar a year, to anyone with 50
percent or more Hawaiian blood. On Molokai, homesteaders
moved onto land at Kalamaula, just west of Kaunakakai, and at
Kapaakea and One Alii, just east of Kaunakakai, in addition to
Hoolehua. Along with the land, the government provided loans
for houses. The program never measured up to its intention to
turn Hawaiians into self-sufficient farmers. But at least it suc-
ceeded in getting some of the land back to the Hawaiians.
There is a great deal of homestead land still available in
Hawaii—on Molokai alone, some twenty-five thousand acres. But
the Hawaiian Homes Commission is unable to put people on the
land, principally because the commission can’t afford to develop
the property for homes or to lend money for home building, and
the Hawaiians who want the property can’t afford to do this on
their own. So the land sits, or is leased out to ranches or commer-
cial users. Anyone who comes up with suggestions to raise more
money for the program is liable to be cut off with the admonition:
“Don’t rock the boat.” In other words, if you really insist on
pushing the issue, maybe we will just discover that this program
is not quite constitutional, since it singles out a particular racial
group for favoritism.
If you ask me, what the state really needs is a homestead
program for anyone and everyone. Land is too damned precious
around Hawaii. Sophie Duvauchelle, a Kaunakakai realtor, tells
me that home sites, when you can find them, go for up to one
dollar a square foot. That’s more than ten thousand dollars for a
quarter acre, on an isolated little island where there appears to
be an awful lot of land just sitting around doing nothing. But
that’s beside the point, because most of this property is controlled
by big landowners who don’t have to let go until they are ready.
46 AWAY FROM IT ALL
On Molokai now, no matter what the price, you are lucky to find
a lot or a house for sale, or a house or apartment for rent.
An illustrious visitor came to this area long before homesteaders
moved into Hoolehua and long before George Cooke grazed his
cattle on the plain. This was Kamehameha I, Kamehameha the
Great, who put his troops through their paces on the Hoolehua
Plain in 1795 in preparation for the invasion of Oahu.
This is the same Kamehameha the Great who lured his
cousin to a new heiau on the island of Hawaii and gave him the
honor of being the first human sacrifice for the temple; the same
Kamehameha the Great who had his eldest son executed for
messing around with one of his wives. Likewise the same
Kamehameha the Great who took his troops from Molokai to
Oahu, drove the defenders of Oahu off the Nuuanu cliffs, and
became the first man to unify the Hawaiian Islands. Today he is
revered as the father of modern Hawaii and as the man who gets
the state’s working people off work each year on Kamehameha
Day, June 11. Stories also say this Kamehameha found his
Boy Scouts rally to a good cause.
HOOLEHUA 47
“sacred wife,” the girl Keopuolani, on Molokai.
When the great warlord brought his troops to Molokai in
1795, there were an estimated eight to nine thousand residents
on the island. The population eventually dropped to an all-time
low of one thousand by 1910. With the advent of pineapple
cultivation and homesteading, the population began its growth
back to the present figure of more than five thousand.
It’s not much of a place, the little Molokai Airport that also
claims a site on the Hoolehua Plain. You’ll find a little building
next to one main runway. But it’s the heart of Molokai’s public
transportation system. In fact, it’s all of Molokai’s public trans-
portation system. There are no public buses to transport people
around the island; no passenger ferries to take residents to the
other islands. The airport is it.
The Dillingham Corporation is talking about running pas-
senger ferries between Molokai, Maui, and Lanai, the islands
that make up Maui County. If this works out, they want to
expand the service throughout the state. I hope for the success of
this project more than that of any other on Molokai. It would
break the sad stranglehold the airlines have on the people of the
islands. It costs about twenty-five dollars round trip to travel to
Honolulu. The average guy just can’t consider taking his family
to another island. And the wild thing is, you’re so close you can
see the lights of Honolulu from Maunaloa. It would be a four-bit
bus ride on the mainland.
The Molokai Airport is virtually a second home for a quiet,
courtly Hawaiian gentleman named Mitchell Pauole, a home-
steader, a lay preacher, and, at more than eighty years of age,
the Honorary Mayor of Molokai. Mitchell Pauole is that alert,
white-haired old man who will be standing with open arms,
waiting for you as you enter the terminal after your flight from
Maui or Honolulu.
He will give you a most sincere “Aloha, welcome to Molokai”
48 AWAY FROM IT ALL
and shake your hand. If he’s in the mood, he gives the women a
kiss on the cheek.
For the past several years, Mitchell Pauole has been chosen
Honorary Mayor of Molokai in an informal and unofficial commu-
nity election. He takes his job seriously. He greets everyone at
the airport, coming and going. He officiates at everything, in
English and Hawaiian. He always shakes hands. No matter if
you just shook five minutes ago. In my nine months on Molokai,
that man must have shook my hand a thousand times.
Mitchell Pauole was born on the island of Kauai. He came to
Molokai in 1923, in his mid-thirties, to homestead some land at
Hoolehua. He lived in a tent during his first three months on the
island, offering church services even then. He and his wife raised
nine children on Molokai. And he is without doubt the most
dependably kind, courteous, and gracious man I know.
Another person you want to see while you’re at the airport is
the Gray Line girl, for this may be your only chance on Molokai
to see a girl wearing a miniskirt. It was the idea of Jim McMah-
on, head of Gray Line Tours, to put miniskirts on his girls. This
was considered a radical idea on Molokai, but he got away with
it. Despite Jim’s forward thinking, any other girls you see wear-
ing miniskirts around the island are, as likely as not, wearing
short pants underneath them.
The future of the Molokai Airport is in doubt right now, with
state planners and various Molokai factions jockeying for posi-
tion while they begin work on plans for a new airport—one that
can accommodate a two-mile runway to handle big jets from the
mainland. The state is eyeing one site in west Molokai and
another potential site near the present airport. Ted Watson is
holding his breath, because a big jet field out near the immense
tourist development his company has in mind would be bad
news. No tourist likes a 747 skimming just above the roof of the
hotel where he’s trying to sleep in his sixty-dollar-a-day room.
And the homesteaders are up in arms over any site near the
HOOLEHUA 49
present field, because that would mean relocation of some of
their homes.
Quite a few people here believe arguments over the site for a
big jet field are academic, since Molokai doesn’t need an airport
that big anyway. They are saying that all the island will ever
need is a good airport that can handle interisland airplanes. I’m
pinning my hopes, but not my money, on this idea.
The pineapple village of Kualapuu is spotted along the eastern
edge of the Hoolehua Plain, at the other end from the airport.
Kualapuu is owned by the Del Monte Corporation, just as the
village of Maunaloa is owned by Dole. The Del Monte plantation
Travelers arriving at Molokai airport can count on a warm greeting from longtime honorary mayor Mitchell Pauole.
50 AWAY FROM IT ALL
is considerably smaller than Dole’s, and Kualapuu seems a more
attractive and better maintained town than Maunaloa. But in
most ways, the two operations are about the same. They grow
lots of pineapples, pick them, and ship them to Honolulu.
Kualapuu has a nice new grammar school, the usual sagging
old theater, a combination grocery store and gas station that may
or may not be open when you stop by, and a couple of other little
business places. Kualapuu seems to be best known these days at
the namesake of the new Kualapuu Reservoir, a big hole in the
ground that sits, in the pineapple fields, about a quarter-mile
from town. The reservoir is the largest nylon-reinforced butyl-
rubber-lined reservoir in the world, and I don’t know if this is
supposed to be a particularly notable distinction or not. Some
reservoirs are lined with concrete or asphalt or some other
material to keep the water from escaping into the ground. This
one happens to be lined with thin sheets of rubber. And it’s the
biggest of its kind in the world. The reservoir also is the largest
manmade reservoir in the state.
The Kualapuu Reservoir is one of the best things to come
Molokai’s way since the volcanos. Not because it is the world’s
biggest rubber-lined reservoir. But because, for the first time, it
provides a dependable, year-round supply of fresh water for the
western half of the island. Lack of water shot down plans at the
turn of the century for a big Molokai sugar cane plantation; lack
of water has hampered pineapple cultivation, since the fruit
grows more dependably when it can be irrigated; lack of water
has prevented any major diversification of agriculture in the
area; lack of water would have killed any designs on tourist
development of the west end.
The reservoir, completed in late 1969, is the last phase of the
$10 million Molokai Irrigation Project that was in people’s
minds, on the drawing boards, and in the works for fifty years.
Farmers and ranchers had been frustrated by the fact that
western Molokai was getting only about twenty-five inches of
HOOLEHUA 51
rainfall or less a year, while areas of the island’s northeastern
mountains were receiving two hundred inches. While western
Molokai went without rain, millions of gallons of water a day
poured onto the mountains, collected in streams, and shot down
deep valleys into the ocean.
Now, water that ends up in Waikolu Stream is diverted at an
elevation of nine hundred feet into an immense five-mile-long
tunnel, through an additional four miles of transmission pipeline,
and into the reservoir. The state already is looking toward
expanding the system by building a three-mile tunnel to link the
streams in Pelekunu Valley with the present tunnel.
The big disappointment with the reservoir, as far as I’m
concerned, is the fact it is not being used for fishing or swimming
or boating. It makes a great lake. If it ever gets full, you will
have a lake fifty feet deep, containing 1.4 billion gallons of water,
with a surface area of a hundred acres. But the only way into the
lake now is over a rather formidable chain-link and barbed wire
fence. The reason given for locking off the reservoir is that
recreational use would damage the rubber lining.
Grass grows through an abandoned car that kids now use for play.
52 AWAY FROM IT ALL
But, anyway, we had a lot of fun before the reservoir was
completed. Before Dave Wisdom and his crew put down all the
rubber sheeting, you could drive down the smooth sloping sides
of the reservoir in your car and tour the bottom of the big hole. I
even got a job there once, for three days. I was hired as general
flunky, at fifty dollars a day, by a film crew from Standard Oil
that was working up a television commercial featuring the
reservoir and Standard’s rubber sheeting. Standard sent a dozen
men out here for the filming, with most of them coming from
New York, Florida, and California. I had the feeling, watching
the camera helicopter (at $600 a day) flying around, packing its
$100,000 camera and its high-priced cameraman, that the com-
mercial probably was costing more than the reservoir.
Dave Wisdom, by his own admission a “fat old man,” cracked
the whip over his crew of fifty-seven local men and women as
they put the miles of rubber sheeting in place. He knew all his
people by name and, like an old mother hen, kept them in place
by constantly clucking at them from the comfort of the canopied
golf cart he used to get around the big project. He loved to remind
the men that his girls were more dependable workers than they
were. He and his golf cart were such fixtures at the reservoir that
you almost expected them to be there forever. But right after the
champagne bottles were broken over the valve, which was then
turned, thereby releasing water into Dave’s reservoir, he was
gone—to Tahiti, I think—to work on another one.
Two of Molokai’s best known clans left their imprint on the Kalae
area, just a few miles up Highway 47 from Kualapuu. Kalae is
now a residential section popular with some of the better educat-
ed and more affluent islanders.
George and Sophie Cooke lived at Kalae during the many
years they ran the Molokai Ranch and they are buried here at
the summit of Kauluwai Hill. Two tall chimneys, the ghostly
remains of their big Kalae home, can be seen off to the left of the
HOOLEHUA 53
main road. The house burned to the ground in late 1968.
Kalae was also home to the Meyer family. Rudolph Wilhelm
Meyer came to Molokai in the mid-1800s after, according to one
account, being shipwrecked at both Tahiti and at Lahaina, Maui,
while trying to reach California. Meyer settled at Kalae, married
the High Chiefess Kalama, raised five sons and four daughters,
managed the lands that later became Molokai Ranch, ran his
own three-thousand-acre cattle ranch, and started a dairy, coffee
mill, and a small sugar plantation. He died in 1897, presumably
of exhaustion. Meyer’s original home still is standing at Kalae
and is the oldest existing wood frame building on Molokai.
Meyer had a role in one of the best stories to come out of
nineteenth-century Molokai: the disappearance of the village of
Palaau. Meyer went into partnership in the cattle business with
The remains of two historic island resi-dences: the Meyer home (below) and
the Cooke home (at right).
54 AWAY FROM IT ALL
a fellow named Oramel Gulick. After a while, Meyer and Gulick
began noticing large shortages in their herd. The culprits turned
out to be nearly all the adult males of Palaau, working together
on wholesale cattle rustling. The men were convicted and sent to
Honolulu to serve prison terms. They were followed by their
families. By the time they were released, the men decided to stay
in Honolulu. The village of Palaau, on the southern coast several
miles west of Kaunakakai, was abandoned.
Meyer also is remembered as the man who planted the first
kiawe tree on Molokai. This is no small distinction. This tree
proliferated to such a prodigious extent that it is perhaps only by
luck that Molokai today is not one huge kiawe forest. You will
find these stark, dark-limbed trees with the tiny leaves in most
places around Molokai. The branches on many of these trees are
so black and withered-looking that it’s hard to tell if they are
dead or alive. Some of the kiawe thickets along the southwest
coast look like perfect habitats for the terrible headless horseman
who pursued Ichabod Crane in legend. The beans of the kiawe
tree are good for feeding cattle; the tree itself is good for making
into charcoal; the tree’s wicked thorns are famous for puncturing
tires and bare feet.
You will run into Meyers all over the island today. Meyer’s
Kalae ranch is owned now by a family corporation, which has
leased the land to various people for grazing dairy cattle and
horses, for home sites, and for pineapple cultivation.
The settlement of Kipu offers an interesting side trip in the
Kualapuu–Kalae area. To get to Kipu, now a little residential
area for Del Monte employees, drive from Kualapuu for less than
one mile up Highway 47.
A paved road branches to the left here and winds for about
half a mile through a lovely wooded gully before reaching Kipu.
The settlement sits in the hills behind Kualapuu and just in
front of Del Monte’s nine-hole golf course.
HOOLEHUA 55
I suppose the most noteworthy fact about Kipu, other than
its picturesque isolation, is that it seems to have the highest per
capita collection of junked cars on the island. That’s saying a lot
for any Hawaiian rural area, where the preservation and public
display of useless, rusted, four-wheeled relics is a sort of fetish. I
don’t know if it’s high camp or low taste, but there they are.
At almost the very end of Highway 47, a couple of miles after
the paved part of the highway ends, is Palaau State Park. There
are two items of interest in the park for visitors: the phallic rock
and the Kalaupapa lookout. To get to both these places, turn left
into the park and drive for half a mile down the rutted park road
to where the road ends at a turnaround.
Beginning here is an older, narrower road, usually blocked
by a heavy piece of wire rope. Hike down this road for about two
hundred yards to a sign that indicates the phallic rock is off to
the right. A short, steep trail goes from here to a tiny nearby
clearing. In the center of the clearing is the phallic rock, a hunk
of stone that stands about seven feet high. It’s really not much to
see, if you want to know the truth. The sexual symbolism of the
rock will be obvious to you, as it was to Hawaiian women in
ancient times who came to the rock in hopes of receiving help in
conceiving children.
The lookout can be reached by returning to the turnaround
and then hiking off into the woods, directly toward the ocean. As
is common on Molokai, there will be no signs to help a newcomer.
But there is a path of sorts that has been worn between the
trees. The short trail leads to a maintained grassy area bounded
on the makai side by a metal railing. Beyond the railing, a green
cliff plummets down for some sixteen hundred feet, disappearing
into the deep blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. Off to the right is
the Kalawao Peninsula, the flat four-thousand-acre appendage to
the north coast of Molokai that is the home to the island’s famous
leprosy settlement. The village of Kalaupapa is visible along the
western coast of the peninsula.
56 AWAY FROM IT ALL
There is another magnificent view of the Kalaupapa area
from the very end of Highway 47. When we were living on Molo-
kai, the Navy and the LTV Corporation of Dallas were busily
working on some sort of secret project at this spot. There was a
twenty-four-hour security guard at the site, and the men working
there definitely were keeping their secret project secret. I once
saw them aiming a large, very James Bondish device in the
general direction of the U.S. mainland from the back of a big van.
It looked like the nose cone of a small bomb, painted gray, with a
telescope or telephoto lens mounted on either side. The word
“video” was muttered by the men.
I finally gave up trying to crack the secret. A friend of mine
insisted it had something to do with submarine detection. Anoth-
er fellow said they were testing long-distance radar. But who
knows?
Right next to where the Navy spies were located is a viewing
area built out on the edge of the cliff. To the right of this area, a
steep trail descends down the face of the cliff and leads to Ka-
laupapa. From the lookout, there is a sharp view of the entire
peninsula, with the town of Kalaupapa in the foreground.
Approximately in the center of the peninsula, back toward
the cliffs, is the extinct crater of the small volcano that formed
the Kalawao Peninsula. This peninsula is a geological after-
thought, a piece of real estate formed by lava bursting from the
foot of the great northern Molokai sea cliffs long after the rest of
the island was formed. The result is a flat peninsula bounded on
three sides by ocean and on the fourth by vertical cliffs that
isolate it from the rest of Molokai.
It was this natural geographical isolation that led Kame-
hameha V and his government to choose the Kalawao Peninsula
as the logical dumping ground for the hundreds of leprosy vic-
tims in Hawaii who were endangering the health of people
around them. In 1866 the first lepers were abandoned on the
shores of Kalawao.
HOOLEHUA 57
This was the beginning of an amazing story of misery and of
courage that made the name of Molokai synonymous, in the
minds of people all over the world, with one of the most dreaded
of diseases, leprosy. This remains true to a great extent even
today, although leprosy has been virtually eliminated from
Hawaii and there is no longer any reason to fear the disease.
St. Philomena Church on the Kalawao Peninsula near Kalaupapa.
ON A BLUSTERY SUNDAY with the weather clearly out of sorts,
Sharmen and I visited Kalaupapa for the first time. The wind
blew all day, as if this were its last chance, and the rain chased
us off the peninsula that evening. But looking back, it was one of
the finest days we spent on Molokai.
We hiked to Kalaupapa over the old trail that switchbacks
down the cliff from the Kalaupapa lookout at the very end of
Highway 47. Of course, you can fly into Kalaupapa from Honolu-
lu Airport or from the Molokai Airport. However, the nicest way
to get to Kalaupapa is down that lovely three-mile trail. It’s steep
and sometimes slippery, but the beautiful hiking through fern
groves, and the views of the peninsula as you walk down the
trail, make it worth the trouble. Visitors who want to compro-
mise can arrange to hike in and then fly out on the daily sched-
uled airline or on the chartered airplane operated by Timmy
Cooke of Molokai Aviation Corporation.
Because the entire peninsula is controlled by the State
Health Department, and because it still is used for the treatment
KALAUPAPA
A rare lapse into humanity
5
60 AWAY FROM IT ALL
of leprosy, tourists must make arrangements before visiting. The
easiest way to do this is to call one of the two tour companies at
Kalaupapa, Damien Tours or Kalaupapa–Kalawao Tours. Visi-
tors are allowed on the peninsula only during the daytime and
must be accompanied by an authorized tour guide. They also
The village of Kalaupapa sits on the flat Kalawao Peninsula at the base of Molokai’s precipitous northern cliffs.
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KALAUPAPA 61
must bring their own lunches, since there are no stores or cafes
open to the public.
The tour operator may ask prospective visitors to call the
office of the Kalaupapa superintendent to let the people there
know they are coming down. This is just a formality. But persons
who are middle-aged or older and plan to hike in should make it
clear to the people in the office that they are not over thirty years
old. In other words, they had better lie. It seems that Elmer
Wilson, the superintendent of the peninsula, has a thing about
older hikers. He’s afraid they are going to break their necks
coming down his trail, and he will do his best to keep them out if
he thinks they are not young enough to suit him. My sixty-year-
old mother hiked down to Kalaupapa and back again without
missing a step, but I made sure to break the news to Elmer only
after it was all over.
Before Sharmen and I set off down the trail that first time, I
had been somewhat startled to learn that the man who would be
our guide for the day had an active case of leprosy. The only
reason I was surprised was that I knew next to nothing about the
disease. Or about sulfone. So I was cautious, when I need not
have been.
Richard Marks, owner and operator of Damien Tours, met us
at the bottom of the trail and immediately gave us a cold Coke
from an ice chest in his car. He didn’t offer to shake hands with
me, and I didn’t offer to shake hands with him. Richard was a big
man, lightly bearded, fortyish. He didn’t look like he had leprosy,
though I’m not sure what he would have had to look like to fulfill
my apprehensions. Richard explained that health department
rules didn’t allow him to ride in the same car with us. His wife
was ill and couldn’t perform her usual duties as tour driver. So
he gave us the keys to a rattley old Chevy station wagon while he
climbed into an immense battered and rusted Chrysler eight-
door limousine. He was alone, except for his three dogs, who rode
in the trunk with the lid up.
62 AWAY FROM IT ALL
We rattled through the little town of Kalaupapa, stopping at
points of interest: a monument to Father Damien donated by
British schoolchildren; the grave of Mother Marianne, the first
nun to aid Father Damien in his work with the lepers; the
“downtown” section of town with its new library, post office, and
administration buildings and its aged firehouse and community
hall. At each of our stops, Richard got together with us and
talked quietly and knowledgeably about Kalaupapa, as his dogs
romped in the streets.
The next stop on the tour turned out to be Richard’s own
home, a neat bungalow on one of Kalaupapa’s quiet side streets
where he lives with his wife, Gloria, a former patient. Richard’s
home happens to be a bit of a museum. A big pyramid of glass
fishing floats stands in the front yard; beautiful old bottles in a
hundred colors and shapes are on haphazard display around the
yard; vintage cars and aging tour limousines in varying stages of
reconstruction or disrepair dominate the backyard.
Richard Marks has been a patient at Kalaupapa since the
mid-1950s. His father also is a patient here, as is a brother of his.
Richard and Gloria’s five children live in Honolulu with Gloria’s
parents. No children are permitted at Kalaupapa. Richard sees
his children from time to time, when he visits the state leprosy
hospital at Honolulu.
Before settling permanently at Kalaupapa, Richard was a
patient for a time at the federal leprosarium at Carville, Louisi-
ana. At Carville, he got an initiation into some of the modern
approaches to treatment of leprosy. This helped turn him into a
quiet sort of troublemaker when he came to Kalaupapa and had
to face Hawaii’s outmoded and sometimes inhumane policies.
The times are changing, and Hawaii now is coming more into
step with the successful and liberal policies on the mainland. Yet
Richard still is exiled to his own car, apart from his visitors.
There is no medical justification for this, since sulfone.
Richard speaks soberly and sincerely (and at length) about
KALAUPAPA 63
Kalaupapa and about leprosy. He doesn’t come on strong, and I
like that. He is the sort of man I feel compelled to believe. By the
way, he does refer to the disease as leprosy, not Hansen’s disease.
Apparently there was quite a movement some time back to use
only the term Hansen’s disease, named for the Norwegian physi-
cian who first identified the bacteria that causes leprosy. The
idea was to help defuse the connotative dynamite surrounding
the word leprosy by simply dropping the word.
Richard doesn’t buy this approach. He reasons that changing
the name ignores the basic problem. And that is that many peo-
ple don’t realize that leprosy in America is no longer a disease to
be dreaded.
It has been whipped by sulfone. Simple as that.
Richard parked his limousine at the base of the peninsula’s vol-
canic crater. I drove the station wagon up to the lip of the crater
while Richard rode on the hood. (“If they caught me inside the
car, I’d lose my license for the tour company.”) The inside of the
crater is overgrown with shrubs and trees. A brackish pool fills
the very bottom of the crater, several hundred feet below.
There is a small graveyard near the crater rim where several
of the alii—Hawaiian royalty—are buried. A white cross, a very
big and boxy white cross, stands in the graveyard. It is fairly
new, and it was placed here in the midst of these subdued, crum-
bling, stony graves for some very good reason, I’m sure. You can
see it for miles.
Next stop was just down the road from the crater. Richard
showed us a good vantage point to view the stern Molokai cliffs
trailing away to the east. We leaned into the wind to keep from
being blown over, and exclaimed at the forbidding beauty of the
miles of two-thousand-foot cliffs plunging into the ocean. Break-
ing up this line of cliffs that runs from the peninsula to the east-
ern end of the island are a number of deep valleys: Pelekunu,
Waikolu, Wailau, and others. A hundred years ago and more,
64 AWAY FROM IT ALL
these valleys were home to Hawaiian fishermen and farmers and
their families. Today they are deserted.
We continued driving away from Kalaupapa and toward the
eastern side of the peninsula, where the first group of persons
with leprosy were abandoned in 1866. To the left of the dirt road
we came upon a fragile, beautifully restored chapel. This is Si-
loama Church, founded in that same year by thirty-five of the
leprosy victims. The church is named for the Biblical Pool of
Siloam, where sufferers were cured of illness and disease.
According to one account, the persons who were sent to Kala-
wao received a cash allowance of twenty-five cents per week,
presumably from the government of the islands. From this, the
church members managed to save $125.50 toward construction of
the first chapel at the leprosy settlement. With the aid of supple-
mentary donations, materials were purchased and the chapel
was built in 1871.
A short distance down the road from Siloama is St. Philo-
mena, Father Damien’s church. The first wing of the church was
built in 1873, shortly before Father Damien arrived on Molokai.
The present structure was fully completed just after his death in
1889.
The historic old building is owned by the state, and this is
one of Richard’s gripes about Kalaupapa. The state is not main-
taining St. Philomena and other historic buildings and sites on
the peninsula, he told us. St. Philomena has a shiny new paint
job now, but it’s due to the volunteer work of Marines from Oahu.
“The Marines did more in six or seven weekends than has been
done here in forty years,” he said.
Graves are spotted all over the lawn on the right side of the
church. Father Damien’s original grave site is there. The body of
the priest was returned to his homeland of Belgium many years
ago at the request of the Belgian government.
Sharmen and Richard and I went into St. Philomena and sat
near the altar on unsteady old wooden benches. Richard told us
KALAUPAPA 65
about Damien. When the priest arrived in 1873, Kalawao was a
place of despair. The eight hundred people living there had an
incurable disease. They had been virtually forgotten by the out-
side world.
The inmates of this hell accepted one axiom: “There is no law
here.” The stronger men lived under no constraint. Some of them
robbed their weaker neighbors of food, clothing, and shelter and
kidnapped and raped the more desirable women. The people
lived in makeshift shacks or out in the open. They had to walk
long distances to find fresh water. They depended for food on
unreliable shipments from Oahu, which sometimes were merely
dumped from a ship and left to float ashore.
Unbelievably, one of the government’s theories in sending
the lepers to Kalawao was that these sick and dying individuals
would farm and homestead the land. They were supposed to be
colonists. They would develop a selfsufficient community. This
didn’t happen.
Richard Marks, a patient at Kalaupapa, leads tours of the settlement.
66 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Kalawao was a rocky, barren, undeveloped wasteland when
they arrived. The people were too sick and dispirited to do any-
thing. When the rougher inmates began a reign of terror, sporad-
ic attempts were made by government officials to keep them
under control. But the outlaws knew how to get rid of meddling
officials. They would simply crowd around the visitor, grinning at
him from their collapsed, disease-ravaged faces and touching him
with the open, leprous sores on their bodies.
Richard Marks gives some attention to the three dogs that ride in the
open trunk of his battered old Chrysler limousine.
KALAUPAPA 67
Damien walked into this mess and took over. He was thirty-
three years old, hardworking and in perfect health. When the
men crowded around him, touching him, he touched them back.
He ate with them. He let them smoke from his pipe. He helped
them to become human beings again. He gave them sixteen years
of his life before he died, a leper.
Although no one denies Damien was a martyr, you still can
get into a bit of controversy around Kalaupapa if you overpraise
him. After all, Damien wasn’t the only person to help the people
of Kalawao. There were brave unselfish helpers before him, and
after him. But I think Richard came right to the point when he
said, “Damien wasn’t the first person to come to help the people
here, but he was the first person to stay and to live permanently
with the people.” Damien was the one person who really made a
difference. He brought hope to the hopeless. From all accounts,
he was a crusty, disagreeable old bastard, and perhaps he had to
be to work the miracles he did.
Damien helped the lepers get materials and put up homes.
He came up with pipe to build a water supply line. He fought a
running battle with the Department of Health for more help,
more food, more medical supplies. He also realized his people
were starved for diversions and entertainment. So into his
church services in the little chapel went all the ritual and pomp
he could muster. One story says he even had St. Philomena
painted in bright, gaudy colors to cheer up his people.
Damien was the only priest on the entire island of Molokai,
and somehow he also found time occasionally to go “topside”—to
the main part of Molokai where most of the island’s population
lived. He founded and helped build two churches in east Molokai:
Our Lady of Sorrows in 1874 and St. Joseph in 1876.
Despite all his work, Damien’s hopes for improvements at
Kalawao were continually frustrated. Perhaps this is why, as the
years went on, he became more and more abrupt and disagreea-
ble and offensive to any persons but lepers.
68 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Priests were sent to help Damien two different times, but
they soon left. They couldn’t stand to work for him.
In 1885, when he was forty-five, leprosy broke out on the
priest’s body. And one Sunday during that year, Damien stopped
using the expression “my brethren” in addressing his congrega-
tion. Now it was “we lepers.” He was a wasted, feeble old man by
the time he died in 1889 at the age of forty-nine.
Twelve-hundred lepers were living on the peninsula when
Damien died. Luckily, there were some good people to step into
his shoes. Joseph Dutton, a Catholic layman from Vermont, had
worked with Damien and gained his confidence during the last
years of the priest’s life. Brother Dutton stayed at Kalawao for
forty-four years. Shortly before Damien died, the first nuns, led
by Mother Marianne, arrived at Kalaupapa and began the work
which Franciscan Sisters still carry on today.
I returned to Kalaupapa several months after that first day, once
again hiking down the trail. I had an appointment with Elmer
Wilson and some other people at the settlement. I started with
Ed Bell, the assistant administrator. Ed is skinny, gray-haired,
pleasant and likable. His face and hands show the ravaging
effects of the leprosy bacillus that was alive in his body from
1936 to 1952. He was cured by sulfone. We shook hands, he sat
me down, and he told me a bit about himself and about the little
town he helps administer.
After medical treatment killed the leprosy in Ed Bell, he
went to the University of Hawaii and got a degree in public ad-
ministration. He attended graduate school at Syracuse for a
while before returning to Kalaupapa, where he took the job of
assistant superintendent. He is one of 129 people at Kalaupapa
who used to have leprosy. They are now cured, and free to go
home if they wish. But for most of these former patients, Ka-
laupapa is home. So they stay.
In what a nasty person might term a rare lapse into humani-
KALAUPAPA 69
ty at Kalaupapa, the state permits the former patients to stay
and to enjoy a host of benefits: free housing, food and clothing
allowances, no state taxes, and so forth. The state pays for all
utilities and maintains the houses, but the residents take care of
their own yards. They do a beautiful job of it. Kalaupapa is a
very pretty, very pleasant little town.
When Ed came to Kalaupapa, it still was a place of wide-
spread suffering. There were four hundred active patients. The
sixty-bed hospital was always full. Then sulfone came into use.
Ed and many others were cured. There are now only thirty-six
active leprosy patients at Kalaupapa. There are only about two
hundred residents on the entire peninsula, including the non-
patient civil service employees.
Elmer Wilson, the big boss at Kalaupapa, is a hearty, jovial
sort, open and cooperative. He went out of his way to make me
feel at home and to show me around. We stopped at his home for
a drink, then walked next door for lunch at the settlement’s
cafeteria. Wilson is a builder, not a medical man. He came to
Kalaupapa for the first time in 1946 to rebuild the settlement’s
water pipeline, destroyed by the big tidal wave that hit that year.
He stayed until 1953, working on a number of building projects
on the peninsula. He came back in 1968 as administrator for the
settlement.
Although he has no hand in setting medical policy, he per-
sonally believes some people are trying to move too fast toward
revising outmoded policies regarding leprosy. He wants the state
to move cautiously. I suppose you can afford to be cautious and
conservative when you don’t have the disease.
Sister Richard Marie is the supervisor of the Franciscan
nuns at the state hospital in Kalaupapa. She struck me as sort of
what you always expect a nun to be: sweet and soft and kind and
good. She enjoys helping the people at the hospital because
“they’re the happiest patients I’ve ever worked with.” She is at
Kalaupapa because of the example of Mother Marianne. Sister
70 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Richard Marie joined a convent in New York for the sole purpose
of someday going to Kalaupapa. She was a nun for twenty-two
years before she got the assignment.
The day I visited the hospital, the regular doctor was on
vacation. Dr. Lee, a little Chinese lady from Honolulu, was tem-
porarily in charge. We walked through the hospital, visiting the
patients. There were only a dozen or so, although the hospital
can accommodate about thirty-five. She had cheerful words for
everyone, and she took advantage of my visit to introduce me to a
couple of the older female patients as her boyfriend.
As we walked around, Dr. Lee offered some beautifully indis-
creet remarks about Kalaupapa and some of its residents. These
remarks would be followed by, “You won’t write a word of what I
have said, will you?” I assured her that I would not.
Out on the streets of Kalaupapa, I saw many persons whose
deteriorated faces and hands showed the effects of leprosy. The
men and women I saw in the hospital had suffered even more
severe damage. One old woman had been blinded. There was an
incredibly withered, ancient-looking Chinese lady whose face was
so ravaged by the disease that it appeared little more than a sad
caricature of a human face.
Most of the patients at Kalaupapa now are being treated
with one of the sulfone drugs, which first came into use in Ha-
waii for the treatment of leprosy in 1946. These drugs, taken
regularly in pill form, can cure leprosy. They kill the bacteria
that cause the disease. Sometimes the cure takes many years.
But it works. Victims of leprosy now know there is a good chance
they will be cured, that they can avoid serious disfigurement,
that they can go home again. What a magnificent change from
the days in the nineteenth century when Hawaii’s solution to the
leprosy problem was announced on handbills posted in villages:
“All lepers are required to report themselves to the government
health authorities within fourteen days from this date for inspec-
tion and final banishment to Molokai .”
KALAUPAPA 71
We now know that leprosy is not a particularly contagious
disease. It’s contagious, but only mildly so. And only for some
people, and only under certain conditions. It’s believed that most
of the people of the world could not contract leprosy even if they
tried. It also is believed that a majority of the people with leprosy
have a noncontagious variety of the disease.
A lot of old wives’ tales about leprosy have gone out the win-
dow. At least, I hope they have. People used to consider leprosy a
punishment for moral wrongdoing. You don’t hear that one any-
more. Leprosy no longer is incurable, of course. Leprosy is not a
venereal disease. And leprosy is not inherited, although a suscep-
tibility to the disease can be.
Medically, leprosy is a bacteria that usually grows in the
skin, affecting the nerves of the skin, face, arms, and legs. The
result can be a loss of sensation in the extremities, resulting in
insensitivity to the pain that normally warns a person he is being
burned or otherwise injured. Eyes and eyelids can be damaged
and blindness sometimes occurs. Leprosy also can result in loss
of hair, skin eruptions, collapse of the nasal bridge, and resorp-
tion of bones so that the bones of the fingers and toes waste
Cattle roam the beach outside Kalaupapa, near the foot of the three-mile-long trail from topside Molokai down to the village.
72 AWAY FROM IT ALL
away. Despite the advances in knowledge and treatment of the
disease—and its virtual disappearance from Hawaii—there still
are an estimated ten million persons in the world with leprosy.
The State Department of Health named a Citizens Commit-
tee on Leprosy in late 1968 to review Hawaii’s program of treat-
ment. Its enlightened conclusions and recommendations may
have startled some people. But they were accepted by the state
and are slowly being put into practice.
The most important finding of the committee was that once a
patient is underway on a program of sulfone treatment, he can
no longer transmit the disease. So the committee, under Thomas
K. Hitch, senior vice president of First Hawaiian Bank, told the
state that it is no longer necessary to isolate leprosy patients for
long periods of time. The committee said patients needing hospi-
talization should be treated voluntarily at general hospitals and
not special leprosariums. After treatment is well underway, they
should be returned to their homes and their regular lives while
continuing to take sulfone.
Bernard Punikaia, a former patient and still a resident of
Kalaupapa, was a member of that committee. I spent the rest of
that afternoon with Bernard and three of his friends, drinking
beer at the one little bar in town (beer only; closing time 8 p.m.).
We talked a bit about the committee’s work but spent most of the
time just rapping about life on Molokai: how they spend their
time in Kalaupapa and how I spend mine topside. By the time I
left at 4:30, full of Primo and potato chips, I felt the same way
most of the people at Kalaupapa appear to feel: comfortable and
happy—even though it was beginning to rain, and I still had a
three-mile uphill hike ahead of me.
I made it home and went right to bed. In the middle of the
night, I woke up, itching. Somehow, in my half-awake condition,
the itching had something to do with the fact I had not taken a
bath after returning from Kalaupapa. From Kalaupapa. Where
people have leprosy. In the morning, when I thought about it, I
KALAUPAPA 73
realized it takes more than facts to kill a myth. And that there is
some part of the average human being that feeds off superstition
and fear. I felt like apologizing to someone.
The day is coming when there will be no patients at Ka-
laupapa. No new patients are being sent there, and the settle-
ment will remain open only as long as the present residents are
living. Someday the settlement will be closed. And Hawaii will
have to decide what to do with the peninsula that constitutes one
of the most scenic and historic pieces of land in the state.
You watch. There will be real estate men and land promoters
and hotel operators from forty-nine states casing the peninsula
over the next few years. They will want it. Someone is going to
suggest building a Hawaiian Disneyland there. Someone else will
visualize a “model city.” They all will be visualizing money. Rich-
ard Marks would like to see the whole peninsula turned into a
state or national park. Ed Bell agrees. I hope the state agrees.
Hawaii made a big mistake at Kalawao in 1866. It needn’t make
another one now.
Outside a Kaunakakai store.
KAUNAKAKAI
Prettiest waiters on the island
6
KAUNAKAKAI IS NOT the most beautiful little town in the world.
Maui County paid for a beautification study of Molokai, and this
is how the report describes the drive from the airport into Kau-
nakakai: “The visual experience, like the change in elevation,
diminishes until the traveler is welcomed at sea level to the
town—through a rubbish dump and an auto wrecking yard.”
But personally, I like the town (though, as with New York, I
don’t think I’d want to live there.) Much of it is cluttered and
sagging and raunchy, but that just makes it picturesque. It looks
rather like an old western cow town, with Fords and Datsuns
parked in the street instead of horses. But don’t get me wrong.
Kaunakakai has paved streets, electric lights, and flush toilets,
just like your hometown.
Ed Shima, the postmaster, has a wonderful plan to spruce up
the town without altering its basic character. He wants all the
businessmen to cooperate in repainting every single building in
Kaunakakai. It seems like a good way to brighten up a very nice
little town. But the last time I saw it, most of the buildings still
76 AWAY FROM IT ALL
looked like they were in the last stages of a very painful sunburn,
tattered and peeling.
If the repainting idea works, Ed and his helpers have hopes
for other beautification plans: underground electric wires, water
fountains, pedestrian benches, sign controls, and the like. But I
know Ed’s philosophy hasn’t filtered down to everyone yet. I was
speaking with the minister of a Kaunakakai church, and he
seemed actually proud of the fact his church building carries the
first and only neon sign on Molokai—one of those “Jesus Coming
Soon” signs.
Kaunakakai is the commercial, social, cultural, and political
hub of Molokai. Which is to say, it’s all we’ve got. This is where
you come to do your shopping and pay your taxes and have your
fun. It has one each of a lot of things: drugstore, post office,
hospital, community center, library, bakery, variety store, dentist
office, bank, travel agency, furniture store. And more than one
each of some other things: grocery stores, cafes, gas stations,
movie houses, barbershops, launderettes.
Prices for goods in Kaunakakai, and throughout the island,
are high. Molokai prices are supposed to be the highest anywhere
in Hawaii. Regular gasoline costs forty-five cents a gallon and
ethyl is fifty. Milk goes for around eighty-five cents for half a
gallon, and anything under a dollar for a dozen large eggs is
considered reasonable.
Richard Misaki, owner of the busiest grocery store on the
island, has a number of reasons why prices are high. In the first
place, goods that have been shipped from the mainland to Hono-
lulu must then be reshipped to Molokai. In the second place,
business on Molokai is small time: local businessmen don’t have
the quick turnover and don’t get the discounts of large chain
stores. And in the third place, prices aren’t so high, anyway. He
says he personally compared everyday shelf prices in Honolulu
with those on Molokai, and found that prices were comparable in
80 per cent of the cases.
KAUNAKAKAI 77
Misaki is almost a Molokai native. He came to the island
with his parents in 1922, when he was one year old. His father,
like tens of thousands of his Japanese countrymen, had come to
Hawaii originally to work in the sugar plantations. He arrived in
Hawaii when he was sixteen, planning to make some money and
return home. But he married, and stayed.
Misaki’s father worked on Maui for a number of years before
Richard Misaki: I can remember back to about 1926–27. Not too
accurate, maybe, but I can recall the number of stores we had here.
Where Mayo Kikukawa’s old store is, it used to be Toguri’s store.
Where Mrs. Ito has her shop, that used to be a pool hall run by Mrs.
Nishimura’s brother, the contractor Nishimura. Francis Takata’s dad
had a service station where Araki’s store is right now. Right where
Dr. Chu’s office is used to be a market run by Nohara; he used to
have a piggery; he had a meat market, and that was the only meat
market on the island. And of course Chang Tung’s store was here.
Kaunakakai Bakery—Kanemitsu—used to have a shop right in the
same area there, so all the shops were from Chang Tung’s down this
way. We used to have a poi shop in the back here. Kim’s Service used
to be an old theater. Yoshinaga’s store used to be used by Mrs. Kiku-
kawa, the Midnite Inn Kikukawas; she had a dress shop there.
78 AWAY FROM IT ALL
taking his family to Molokai, where he did some fishing and
carpentry for a living. His mother, just to keep busy, started a
sweets shop. And that was the beginning of Misaki’s store, which
today handles groceries and dry goods in a good-sized pink block
building on Kaunakakai’s main street, Ala Malama. The store is
easy to spot—it’s the one with the big garish yellow plastic sign
out front.
Misaki wants to expand his operation but hasn’t decided the
best way to do this. He could lease more land from Molokai
Ranch, but it is expensive. The ranch owns the land on which
Misaki’s store is located; in fact, it owns the whole side of the
street the store is on. Misaki also could wait until a shopping
center is built in Kaunakakai, but that’s too uncertain. And the
shopping center, too, depends on a lease from Molokai Ranch.
Across the street from Misaki’s, Harry Chung also has a
grocery store. Harry’s Market is a sort of hole-inthe-wall opera-
Harry's Market in Kaunakakai. Headline in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports problems aboard Apollo 13, the spaceship that aborted a moon landing and returned to Earth on April 17, 1970.
KAUNAKAKAI 79
tion, and he acknowledges that the store barely breaks even. But
in the past, it was enough to take care of the Chung family, and
to put five of his six children through college.
Harry’s parents also were immigrants to Hawaii; both his
mother and father were from China. His father ran a poi factory
at Lahaina on the island of Maui and raised taro in a valley
north of town. When Harry was still a child, his mother decided
she wished to return to her home country to live out the rest of
her life. The entire family went to China, where Harry lived for
several years. His mother died, and he returned to Hawaii. His
father never came back. Harry came to Molokai with his wife in
1933 to work as a butcher for Y. K. Yuen, then the biggest grocer
on Molokai. He said he came here despite the fear that many
people, particularly the Chinese, had of Molokai because of its
association with leprosy.
Harry’s Market is like most of the business establishments in
Kaunakakai: small, homey, personal. Visitors from mainland
cities, accustomed to plastic courtesy and computerized efficien-
cy, are sometimes a bit startled by the way things are run here.
The pace is slow and comfortable; too damn slow for me, some-
times, with my big-city metabolism. The stores are small and
don’t always carry what you think they ought to carry. The
grocery stores still offer direct credit to their customers, and
credit customers actually get a receipt on which every item
purchased, and its price, is laboriously handwritten.
But after a while, you find it’s handy to use this personal
credit, and you soon learn which stores have what, and when. I
sometimes fear for the local businesspeople, however, when I
think about the slick mainland operators who will someday be
moving onto the island. With them, these sharpies will bring
paved parking lots, late hours, discount prices, big sales, trading
stamps, shiny new stores, hustle-hustle service, and all the other
things the highly noncompetitive businesspeople on Molokai
don’t have to provide right now.
80 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Take the locally owned Dairy Queen, for example. I dig the
Dairy Queen, because I like their chocolate milk shakes. But
you’d get your order faster if you mailed away for it. And with its
devil-may-care landscaping and decor, it has about as much class
as my back yard. But McDonald’s will come in, slap up one of
their bright new hamburger stands, plant a few trees, train their
people to be sharp, and steal Dairy Queen blind.
For the moment, however, they needn’t worry. Business is so
slow right now that many people get involved in two or three
different operations. Mits Watanabe works for Molokai Electric
and also owns part of a launderette. Nobu Shimizu is in charge of
the Peace Corps training camp on Molokai and is a partner in the
Dairy Queen. Marybeth Maul, in addition to being the only judge
on Molokai, has interests in the Kualapuu Market and a Chinese
restaurant in Kaunakakai. Sophie Duvauchelle runs a furniture
store and a real estate office. Charley Kawano works for Aloha
Airlines and sells insurance. Henrietta Aki sells insurance and is
the island’s only travel agent. And so on.
Ala Malama is Kaunakakai’s main street and commercial center.
Sid
Ken
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KAUNAKAKAI 81
Among the fixtures of Kaunakakai, along with the old build-
ings and the dogs and the plumeria bushes, is Coconut Harold.
Coconut Harold is a haole, perhaps in his late twenties, quiet and
harmless, who lives on the lawn in front of the library. That is, I
presume he lives on the lawn in front of the library. I rarely saw
him anyplace else during my nine months on Molokai.
He was a strange cat, always barefoot and dressed in the
same brown pants and faded sport shirt, always packing the
same battered flight bag in which he carried the plastic bucket
that he poured the coconut milk into. He ate a lot of coconuts. I
would have found out the story behind Coconut Harold, except
that I always felt vaguely nervous when I talked with him, so I
never stayed with him long. He didn’t do any work that I know
of. But one day I did see this sign on a bulletin board in town:
“I’ll make round trips to Honolulu for you in exchange for expens-
es only (for purchasing. etc.) Coconut Harold.”
The first advice I would give to anyone moving to Molokai is: Get
a TV set. Molokai is a quiet place, and you can go stir crazy
without a simple diversion now and then. Night life on Molokai is
limited, to say the least. However, the island does offer some
nighttime entertainment, mainly in the Kaunakakai area.
First of all, there are the theaters. In common with rural
areas throughout the state, Molokai boasts some of the oldest,
saggiest, most weather-beaten movie houses in the nation. Our
very favorite is the Kukui, an outdoor walk-in theater on a
Kaunakakai back street. You’ll never find the Kukui on your
own, so ask directions. If you want to find out what’s playing,
check the bulletin board across the main street from Misaki’s.
We have seen some good movies there, such as Easy Rider,
The Fixer, and The Seagull. The price is right. Most movies cost
seventy-five cents a seat, although somehow we saw 2001: A
Space Odyssey for sixty-five cents. We paid something like three
dollars apiece when we saw it in California. The best thing is
82 AWAY FROM IT ALL
that it is outside. When we go to the Kukui, we usually take
along potato chips and a six-pack of Primo, stretch out comforta-
bly on a big bench, and take life easy.
Kaunakakai has another theater of sorts, the Kamoi. This
dark, dirty cavern is normally worth avoiding at all costs, unless
the movie happens to be something special. I must thank the
Kamoi for bringing such movies as Romeo and Juliet, Medium
Cool, and Monterey Pop to Molokai. But, on the other hand, what
The Kamoi Theater in Kaunakakai. Movies stay at Molokai’s four
theaters for one night only. Most of the movie houses alternate be-
tween American, Japanese, and Filipino movies, with the prices for
foreign films usually higher than for American. Adult movies—skin
flicks—are shown at all the theaters but the Kukui in Kaunakakai. An
enterprising voyeur can catch girlie movies four nights a week on
Molokai: Tuesdays and Wednesdays at Kualapuu, Thursdays at the
Kamoi, and Fridays at Maunaloa. Premium prices, of course.
KAUNAKAKAI 83
good are the movies if you can’t hear them because of the rotten
sound system and the noisy kids. Once again, you can’t complain
about the price; usually seventy-five cents.
Bring mosquito repellent with you to the Kukui; bring flea
powder to the Kamoi.
Molokai theaters have a mystifying reluctance to reveal what
movies are showing. You rather suspect them of being operated
as tax write-offs, with the goal being to lose money. None of the
island’s four theaters-—two in Kaunakakai, one in Kualapuu,
one in Maunaloa—have phones. Only two of them post announce-
ments of coming attractions that can be read from the road. At
the other two, you have to park your car and walk up to the
entrance of the theater to see what is playing.
None of the theaters make any attempts to advertise. When
I was publishing my little newspaper, which was received by
every postal patron on the island, all of the theaters declined to
advertise.
One manager quaintly explained his decision this way: “We
can’t afford to advertise because we don’t get enough business.”
The island offers a few nightclubs, with Kane’s being the number
one attraction. Kane’s, in the center of Kaunakakai, is a big,
dark, low-ceilinged room partitioned off into semi-autonomous
sections. The result is a hideaway that would not be out of place
in Bogart’s Casablanca. To enter Kane’s, a guest must walk into
the Kaunakakai Bakery, past the household goods department,
past the coffee shop area, past the row of plastic flowers, turn
right before the meat department, walk past the kitchen, and
turn left into the nightclub. When the bakery is closed, Kane’s is
entered through the nearby alley.
Kane’s has the best band, the most varied entertainment,
and the prettiest waiters on the island. The Kane’s Trio plays a
good variety of conservative rock and roll along with Hawaiian
songs. The trio is composed of three local boys: a skinny drum-
84 AWAY FROM IT ALL
mer and two guitarists who have got to be the biggest Hawaiians
in the world. Kane’s brings in outside entertainers once a month
or so, including an occasional stripper or belly dancer.
The waiters are pretty; among them are some very pretty
boys who apparently enjoy looking like girls. There are a number
of these obvious mahus on the island. However, they are not
considered objects of curiosity except to newcomers to Molokai.
Everyone else here accepts them for what they are: honest and
average boys—the sons of local families—who happen to have
acquired a slight quirk in their sex lives.
Across the street and a block east of Kane’s is the Midnite
Inn, which runs a nightclub in a big back room. It is just that, a
big room, with little atmosphere. There is no sign on the Midnite
Inn, a pink stucco building on the corner of Ala Malama and
Kamoi. The nightclub is entered via a little side door on Kamoi.
Midnite can be fun, and the Ebbtides are a good group. Just
count on it being rather sedate compared with Kane’s.
The Seaside Inn at the east edge of Kaunakakai also offers
entertainment and dancing. The Seaside has seen better days,
but then so have I, so I like the rundown old hotel sometimes.
Everything takes place out of doors on a patio surrounded on one
side by the shabby, single-story buildings of the hotel and on the
other by the ocean.
Bob Krauss, in his travel guide to Hawaii, had told us about
Seaside before we even left California. “To watch Molokai at
play,” he wrote, “go dancing under the banyan tree at the Seaside
Inn of a weekend. It’s as riotous an evening as you’ll find in the
50th State.” The night we treated two friends from California to
the Seaside, an enthusiastic fight broke out at 2 a.m. that provid-
ed a sparkling end to the evening and chased everyone home.
The last of the island’s night spots is the Hotel Molokai,
about two miles east of Kaunakakai. The hotel provides good
Hawaiian music on the weekends in a very comfortable and
attractive shoreside restaurant and lounge.
KAUNAKAKAI 85
Occasionally there are other types of entertainment, but not
often. There are even some sporadic attempts to introduce formal
“culture” to Molokai via plays and concerts and so forth. The
most ambitious project along this line while we were on Molokai
was a series of programs sponsored by the University of Hawaii.
We were enthusiastic over the idea of the series but lost most of
our enthusiasm after the first couple of programs.
The first offering was a comedy presented by several compe-
tent but unexciting actors. The second was a mixed-media mess
purporting to be a hip history of music, presented by a longhaired
group of young men organized into something called the Theater
of Madness. The production needed people who knew how to act,
and the Theater of Madness didn’t. The series was a big disap-
pointment to me because I was very hot to see good theater and
The Honolulu Symphony brings its music to the schoolchildren of Molokai.
86 AWAY FROM IT ALL
art and music come to Molokai. When the productions turned out
to be second- and third-rate, they just scared me away. The worst
thing is that people on Molokai who have never seen many plays
or concerts also may be turned off to the whole scene and never
realize how beautiful this type of entertainment can be. Why
should they keep returning to programs of dubious quality, at
$1.25 a seat, when they can stay home and see something better
on TV, for free?
The entire Honolulu Symphony actually visited Molokai
while we were here, but the orchestra came to perform only for
the island’s schoolchildren. The orchestra had discovered in the
past that very few adults will attend a concert on Molokai.
Sports are a popular form of entertainment here, as elsewhere.
High school teams, the men’s senior basketball league, Little
League teams, and so forth, all have a healthy following. Outdoor
sports, particularly hunting and fishing, are a way of life on
Molokai. The open season is not very long each year for the
thousands of axis deer. But poaching is also a popular pastime,
so it’s open season year-round for many hunters. In addition to
deer, hunters go after pheasant, turkey, wild goats, and boar.
The ocean seems to be a second home for a lot of people, who
spend their time pole fishing from boats or from shore, spearfish-
ing, net fishing on the shore, or setting traps and nets out in the
ocean. I’m a lousy fisherman, but I assumed that because of all
the fishing done here, we could always find fresh fish in the
markets. Wrong again. Fresh fish is very hard to come by, since
most people get their own by fishing for it, and the markets,
therefore, see no need to carry it.
The biggest event of the year on Molokai is a sports event:
the annual Molokai to Oahu Canoe Race. Nine-man teams of
young men race long outrigger canoes for thirty-eight miles
across the ocean from Molokai’s west end to Waikiki Beach at
Honolulu. I rode along on an escort boat for the 1969 race, and I
KAUNAKAKAI 87
got tired just watching the men paddling for hour after hour
through the ocean swells. Molokai’s entry in the race finished
ninth out of twelve canoes, so I assume they did a good deal of
their training at Kane’s. The coach mentioned something about a
“Primo diet.”
Campers on Molokai have lots of places to throw down their
sleeping bags and put up their tents. Many of the most popular
spots, however, are not officially open to the general public for
camping. So it’s best for visiting campers to use some discretion
in where they spend the night, to be unobtrusive, and to leave a
clean campsite.
The best places for camping are these: along the beach
between Halena and Kolo Wharf on the southwest coast; at the
Moomomi park pavilion on the northwest coast; at Palaau State
Park near the Kalaupapa lookout; at the Hawaiian Homes park
pavilion next to the Royal Coconut Grove about one mile west of
Kaunakakai; at One Alii County Park several miles east of
Friends and family cheer as the Little Leaguers play.
88 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Kaunakakai; anywhere along the southeastern shore beginning
at Waialua (where the paved portion of the road ends, about 18
miles east of Kaunakakai); and at the little county park in
Halawa Valley.
Campers are supposed to have permits for camping at the
two county parks. However, the county overseer in Kaunakakai
wasn’t giving permits to just anybody when I was on Molokai. I
got the feeling that longhaired campers ought to resign them-
selves to camping without the comfort of a permit.
The island’s one fire station and its only police station are in
Kaunakakai, the center of government services. There’s also a
decrepit old jail, a courthouse, library, county overseer’s office,
and a state building with several different offices: social service,
fish and game department, tax collector, employment office,
agricultural services, health department.
The federal government is represented on Molokai by the
Soil Conservation Service, an important agency in a rural area
like this, and by the Community Action Program. The CAP
seemed to be doing some good work in developing a certain
amount of community activism—getting residents, particularly
the poorer ones, to realize they can work together to improve
things. Fred Bicoy, a Molokai native and former schoolteacher,
directs the CAP. Fred and his people are involved in programs
for the elderly, a community bus service, preschool education, a
community-owned shrimp industry, and other projects.
Molokai has no official legislative body of its own; nothing
comparable to a city council or board of supervisors. The island is
a part of Maui county, which is dominated by the island of Maui.
The county also includes the small pineapple island of Lanai. The
county is run by an elected mayor and a nine-member county
council with seven members from Maui, one from Lanai and one
from Molokai.
When I was on Molokai, the island’s representative to the
KAUNAKAKAI 89
county council was Loy Cluney, a competent Democrat who
formerly was chief of police for Molokai. He was Molokai’s one
and only elected government official. Even this one guaranteed
voice for the people of Molokai is not elected exclusively by
Molokai voters. All candidates run at large in the county, so even
the Molokai politicians must campaign for votes on the island of
Maui. Molokai is lumped together with Lanai and Maui for state
legislative elections, so the odds of a Molokai candidate ever
reaching the state capitol at Honolulu are not very good.
There are reasonably active Democratic and Republican
parties on the island. But residents and organizations here rarely
seem to get wrapped up in political issues. Hot and emotional
topics that would cause all sorts of controversy most places on
the mainland are virtually ignored on Molokai. This makes for a
lot of peace and quiet. But I also like to see people holler once in
a while. Sometimes it’s the only way you know whether or not
they’re alive.
For all you heard about it on Molokai, the war in Vietnam
might as well not have existed. The only time the war entered
into the life of the island was one day in December 1969, when a
big crew of Molokai reservists returned from active duty in
Vietnam. They were praised as defenders of freedom, given a
party, welcomed back into Molokai life, and once again the war
was forgotten.
The war clearly was viewed on Molokai as something to be
accepted. It required no discussion and no defense, because no
one was criticizing it. The one exception was the ILWU, the
pineapple workers’ union on Molokai. The ILWU leaders staged a
big picnic next to the Royal Coconut Grove for its members and
told them flat out that the war is wrong.
Water fluoridation and abortion law reform were two other
issues stirring in the state at that time. But not too much of the
stirring took place on Molokai. When Maui County was consider-
ing the fluoridation of all its public drinking water, I worked up a
90 AWAY FROM IT ALL
story for the newspaper I was then publishing on Molokai. None
of the civic organizations on the island had discussed the issue,
and it was only after my urging that they took positions on
fluoridation.
As I said, Molokai doesn’t have much direct representation
in government. But it seemed that once a month or so, some
high-powered committee or other from the state legislature
would visit Molokai on a fact-finding tour. Whether the legisla-
tors were interested in Molokai, or merely in a little vacation,
I’m not sure. But at least they came, and people here had a
chance to tell them about Molokai.
A favorite interest of the legislators was the schools, and
there were days when there appeared to be more senators than
students in Sharmen’s class. State legislators spend time
visiting local schools on Molokai because they are responsible
for appropriating money for all the public schools in the state.
There are no local school districts, as there are in most states.
This turns out to be quite an advantage for a small, rela-
tively poor area like Molokai. It’s not likely the island, on its
own, could pay for the schools and programs the state provides.
This really paid off in Sharmen’s classroom, where there were
thousands of dollars worth of tape recorders, electric typewrit-
ers, movie projectors, and other gadgets for use in operating an
experimental language arts program created by the state.
This particular program is beautiful, simply because it
attempts to treat children as individuals instead of faceless
automatons. The program is based on the theory that each child
has his own interests, his own capabilities, and his own rate of
learning. So, within the framework of the program, each stu-
dent decides what he wants to do and when he wants to do it.
He keeps track of his own progress. He helps students who are
behind him, and gets help from those ahead.
Walk into Sharmen’s classroom during the language arts
period, and it looks like a madhouse. All seventy-five kids are
KAUNAKAKAI 91
off doing their own thing while Sharmen and her three fellow
teachers wander around offering help where it’s needed. It looks
like a madhouse, but it’s controlled chaos. One child is reading;
another is practicing penmanship; another is helping a friend
with reading cards; another is practicing on one of the electric
typewriters; another is receiving instructions from a tape
recorder. Suddenly you realize these children are learning. And
craziest of all, they seem to be enjoying it.
Molokai has three elementary schools in addition to the one
at Maunaloa. The island has just a single high school. This is
Molokai High and Intermediate School, which handles most of
the seventh and eighth graders on Molokai and all the students
from the ninth to twelfth grades.
A phenomenon of public school life here is that about 20
percent of the high school age population of Molokai goes to
high school off the island. This represents as many as a hun-
dred students going to school elsewhere, principally to private
schools on Oahu or to the public boarding school on Maui. This
is a practice that may have had some justification years ago,
when it was a big jump from Molokai High to college. There
doesn’t seem to be much point to it now, unless it has something
to do with the prestige of a private school.
Molokai High has an approved and reasonably complete
academic program and it offers guidance to all its students on
preparing for college. A Molokai High graduate can go directly
to a four-year college if he is qualified and ready. If not, he can
start in first at one of Hawaii’s two-year community colleges,
which accept any and all high school graduates. And plans are
in the works now for a start on a modest community college
program on Molokai itself.
The main highway from the airport to Kaunakakai offers some
good opportunities for sightseeing. About halfway between the
airport and the town is the turnoff for one of the prettiest drives
92 AWAY FROM IT ALL
on the island, up to the Waikolu Valley lookout. As usual, there’s
no sign for the turnoff and a visitor simply has to keep his eyes
open. Coming from the airport area, the road is situated just to
the left immediately after a large bridge, which is located about
half a mile down the highway from the turnoff to Highway 47
and Kualapuu. (Coming from Kaunakakai, a visitor must look for
this big bridge and turn right immediately in front of it.) The
Pacific Concrete and Rock Company is located just across the
highway from this road. The last time I was there, a small sign
that said “Molokai Forestry Camp” pointed up the road to the
Waikolu lookout.
The road is unpaved, but passenger cars can make it up here
with no trouble in good weather. If there’s been a lot of rain,
visitors ought to think twice before taking off on the ten-mile
drive to the lookout. To get there, you must stay to the left at a
fork in the dirt road, two miles from the main highway, and also
keep left at a second fork one mile farther on. Soon the road will
pass the abandoned forestry camp and enter a beautifully deep
and dark forested area. Along the way, a number of jeep trails
take off into the forest.
About nine miles up the road, off to the left side, is a serene,
grass-carpeted depression in the ground marked by a sign that
says “Sandalwood measuring pit.” The pit is a scenic reminder of
some rather bad times in the early nineteenth century, when Ha-
waiian chiefs ordered their people into the hills to gather the
precious sandalwood for them.
The wood was stacked in the pit, which approximates the
size of the hold in merchant vessels of that day. When the pit was
full, the wood was laboriously hauled out of the hills to be loaded
on ships that carried it to China. From the sandalwood, the
Chinese got oil for medicines and perfume, and wood for religious
carvings, incense sticks, and other objects.
At one time, the sandalwood trade in the islands was the
main source of revenue for King Kamehameha I. But it was hell
KAUNAKAKAI 93
on the working men, who began pulling up the young sandalwood
trees in order to kill off the supply and end their labors. This
tactic, plus reckless exploitation of the existing trees, put an end
to the sandalwood trade in Hawaii before the mid-1800s.
Up the road one mile from the pit is the lookout, at an eleva-
tion of about 3,500 feet. From the lovely grassy area at the
lookout is a magnificent view deep into Waikolu Valley and off to
the ocean in the distance. Several tall, thin waterfalls pour down
the face of the valley’s steep green cliffs. The road continues
beyond this point, but it shouldn’t be attempted without a four-
wheel-drive vehicle.
It’s possible to hike from the Waikolu Valley lookout to the
rim of nearby Pelekunu Valley for another fantastic view into an
immense mountain valley with the ocean in the background. I’ve
never tried the trail, but I understand from friends that it can be
hiked in two hours or so. The directions for finding the trail get
rather complicated, however, and hikers probably should seek
directions through the fish and game office at the state building
in Kaunakakai.
A pretty inland fishpond is located off the main highway,
closer in toward Kaunakakai. To reach it, travel about one mile
down the highway from the big bridge where the dirt road cuts
off to the Waikolu lookout. To the left, the Friendly Isle Dairy
can be seen. Take the road that branches to the right here. A
couple of hundred yards down this road are two dirt side roads in
succession, off to the right. Take the second road, and drive down
it for about two miles to the fishpond, which will be on the left.
Many years ago, the fishponds built all along Molokai’s south
coast were a principal source of food for the islanders. This old
pond is one of the few built inland instead of directly on the
ocean shore.
A little farther down the main highway, and about one mile
west of Kaunakakai, is the Kalamaula area with its homesteads,
long row of churches, and the Royal Coconut Grove. The grove,
94 AWAY FROM IT ALL
with about a thousand trees spread over ten acres along the
waterfront, was planted at the order of Kamehameha V some-
time in the 1860s. The row of churches blossomed somewhat
later, during the period in the 1920s when the homesteading
program was getting underway in the area.
The Royal Coconut Grove on the waterfront near Kaunakakai.
KAUNAKAKAI 95
I don’t know anything about the churches, but I did learn
something about a variety of Christian evangelism from one of
the members of one of the churches. He was a well-dressed, well-
mannered, quiet-spoken teenage boy, driving a big new car. I was
hitchhiking and he picked me up. I make it a practice, when I
hitchhike, to be considerate to my benefactor. I mean, if he wants
to talk, I let him. If he asks questions, I answer. If he wants to be
quiet, I shut up.
So this quiet-spoken young man asked some quiet questions
about myself, which I answered, quietly. Then he reached inside
the briefcase next to him and quietly offered me two pamphlets
about his church. I accepted because, after all, he was doing me a
favor. Then he cleared his throat a bit and told me the pamphlets
cost a dime. I paid up. I mean, it was still cheaper than cab fare.
But I got even with him. I never read them.
East Molokai family: Diane and Moki with Moki Jr. and Lanny.
TO MY WAY OF THINKING, the real Molokai doesn’t begin until you
get a few miles east of Kaunakakai. This is the east end, the seat
of Molokai’s history, the home of its legends and its native peo-
ple. The west end is terribly dull, dry, and colorless when it is
measured against the variety of scenery and people and activities
in the east.
In the mid-1800s, virtually all of the people on Molokai lived
on the eastern half of the island. This includes those who lived in
the now deserted northeastern Molokai valleys. So the east end
is where you will find the pre-Christian places of worship, the
fishponds, the homes of gods and sorcerers, the later Christian
churches, the outlines of old taro patches, and all the other
reminders and remainders of old Hawaii.
The east end lost population steadily after the mid-
nineteenth century. Rev. H. R. Hitchcock, the Protestant minis-
ter who built the first Christian church on Molokai, estimates
there were 6,000 people on Molokai in 1834—roughly the same
number as in 1970. Residents later began deserting Molokai for
EAST END (part 1)
Pounding poi at the Hilton
7
98 AWAY FROM IT ALL
more prosperous islands, and nobody from the other islands saw
any reason to come to Molokai.
By 1860, Molokai had fewer than 2,900 people. The popula-
tion dropped to 1,700 ten years later. Total population hovered
just above the 1,000 mark during the early twentieth century,
but dramatically jumped to almost 5,700 by 1935 with the advent
of pineapple cultivation and homesteading. The population then
included many Japanese and Filipinos, imported to work in the
pineapple fields, and Hawaiians from other islands who wished
to take advantage of the homesteading program. And almost
three-quarters of the population lived on the west end, almost a
complete reversal from a hundred years earlier. The population
distribution now remains approximately the same.
Today, the east end is to some degree unchanged from the
last century. Old-time residents of the area often still live very
simply, depending on nature to help provide the necessities of
life. Many people fish and hunt and raise livestock and grow
vegetable gardens; there still are a few taro patches.
As a matter of fact, the east end is a travel writer’s dream. It
provides a great opportunity to paint glowing word pictures of
the brown-skinned natives happily pounding poi and throwing
their nets into the foaming sea and strumming their ukuleles
under the palm trees on moonlit nights, etc. In other words, the
east end is a very easy place to over-romanticize. Because it is,
really, a part of old Hawaii; one of the last places where you can
hope to get some feel of what Hawaii used to be.
Part of the reason for this is that Molokai has the highest
percentage of Hawaiian and part Hawaiian people of any of the
state’s major islands, and the east end is where you will find the
many Hawaiians who are not living on homestead land.
Although the east end looks like old Hawaii in some respects,
it’s good to keep in mind that we actually are well into the second
half of the twentieth century. What we really find on the east end
is an old Hawaii that is turning into new, modern Hawaii fairly
EAST END 99
rapidly. And the travel writers and other east-end glorifiers are
bringing this change about as quickly as anyone. The more
people who read about the native, traditional, unspoiled places
on Molokai, the less native and traditional and unspoiled these
places are going to be. An article in Holiday magazine is good for
a thousand more tourists a year, thereby diminishing by some
simple ratio the very delights that drew the people there in the
first place.
Today on Molokai, you will hear scheme after scheme for
hotels and resort developments on the east end, which will mean
more and more people, bigger and better roads, higher prices,
new buildings, and all the folderol of modern resort living. And
what will happen to the “real Hawaii?” I imagine it will still be
there, sandwiched between the high-rises. And the natives will
continue to make poi, throw their nets, and have their luaus.
Only they won’t be doing these things at home. They’ll be doing
them on the lanai of the Molokai Hilton every night at 8 and 10
p.m., with matinees on the weekends.
Hotels mean jobs and money for the east enders who are interest-
ed in jobs and money. Right now the east end has a high rate of
male unemployment. It is a poor area, according to the custom-
ary standards of personal income, education, job skills, and so
forth. Lots of couples raise large families, and I don’t really
understand how they manage to do it, but they do. Many of the
homes in which families live are beyond hope; they are little
more than shacks and I fear for their survival in anything above
a moderate breeze.
But somehow I can’t feel sorry for the so-called poor people
on the east end. I think it must be easier to be poor on Molokai
than in many places; certainly it’s easier to be poor in the coun-
try than in the city. I hope I’m not merely being glib; I’m not
poor, so I really couldn’t say what it is like. But I do know that
while some of the east enders live in shacks, these shacks sit on
100 AWAY FROM IT ALL
pieces of oceanside land that would be the envy of any California
millionaire. I know they don’t have much money, but they know
how to live from the land and from the sea. I know they are
blessed with a climate that makes a lot of clothes and elaborate
houses superfluous.
For the moment, at least, the east end has undeniable charm
and beauty. I always feel I can count on visiting the east end and
having something nice happen. Something nice and simple and
human like helping some boys launch their fishing boat or
watching an old woman pick limu from shallow water or talking
with a kamaaina about the 1946 tidal wave or helping a Filipino
fisherman clean his nets or talking to some young people bicy-
cling to Halawa Valley or learning about fighting cocks from an
east-end chicken raiser.
People out here seem to take the time to be human. East-end
An east-end home.
EAST END 101
old-timers always seem to be ready to put down whatever they
are doing in order to help someone else or to simply pass the time
of day. I felt downright guilty sometimes out on the east end
when I would go hustling through the area, snapping pictures
and interviewing, allowing myself half an hour here and fifteen
minutes there. The people I visited were invariably warm and
wonderful to me, forcing me to condemn myself for putting
friendship on a time schedule as I kept one eye on the people I
was visiting and the other on my watch.
The east end may have only one quarter of the people, but it
has three quarters of the scenery. This half of the island, formed
by the younger east Molokai volcano, reaches a maximum alti-
tude of nearly five thousand feet. Much of the mountainous area
appears dry from the road, but there are vantage points along
the highway where tall green mountains and thin wispy water-
falls can be seen.
For the time being, the east-end road is appropriately narrow
and winding, giving a person a chance to drive slowly and enjoy
the scenery. The road parallels the coast from Kaunakakai to
Waialua, a distance of about eighteen miles, but is set back
several hundred yards from the water along almost this whole
stretch. A number of old Hawaiian fishponds, some in excellent
condition, are visible along the way. Beyond Waialua, the road
loses its paving, and then begins to follow the shoreline.
Unfortunately, there’s no good swimming beach on the entire
south coast of Molokai, with the exception of the small swimming
area Sharmen and I found near Kolo Wharf on the southwestern
end of the island. I have never found any others. For perhaps ten
or fifteen miles on both sides of Kaunakakai, the water is very
shallow and it is possible in spots to wade out into the ocean for
hundreds of yards. Coral reefs half a mile or so off shore prevent
the ocean waves from reaching land. Dirt from the mountains
has washed into the ocean along much of the island’s south coast,
creating mucky mudflats.
102 AWAY FROM IT ALL
The reefs begin giving way past Waialua, and ocean waves
are free to crash onto the shore. However, there are no good
swimming beaches in this area, either. Out here, Molokai comes
within about eight miles of the western tip of Maui. Lanai can
still be seen off to the right of Maui.
Part of the scenery on the east end are the animals you will
run into—perhaps literally—all along the road. The most com-
mon are pigs, dogs, horses, cattle, chickens, mongooses, frogs,
and mynah birds. Everyone raises one or more varieties of the
domestic animals. The big frogs are the ancestors of frogs first
brought to Hawaii from Puerto Rico in 1932 to kill insects,
scorpions, and centipedes. The mongooses—the weasel-like
creatures that will slink across the road in front of your car—
were imported from the East Indies in 1883 to kill rats, but they
have since decided they prefer chicken eggs. As in the rest of
Slopping the hogs at an east-end farm
EAST END 103
Hawaii, there are no snakes.
Much of the history of the east end, and of the entire island,
is told in the histories of Molokai’s old-time families. Families
like the Cookes, the Meyers, the Duvauchelles, the McCorristons,
the Dudoits; names that you will run across again and again.
Take the Duvauchelles, an old east-end family. According to
Zelie Sherwood, her grandfather, Edward Henry Duvauchelle,
came to Molokai from his home in France, after stopping for a
time in New Zealand. Edward Duvauchelle lived at Kaunakakai
and used to cook for Kamehameha V when he was on Molokai.
Duvauchelle got on the bad side of Kamehameha V once
when he shot one of the king’s deer. Axis deer from India had
been imported to Molokai in 1867 and the king had forbidden
any hunting of the animals. According to Zelie Sherwood: “My
grandfather’s the one who shot the first deer on Molokai. It ate
his potatoes, so he shot it. Kamehameha didn’t talk to him for
three months.”
Duvauchelle married a woman on Maui. After her death, he
married a part English-part Hawaiian girl from Molokai and
they raised four sons. One of these sons became Zelie’s father.
Zelie lived in Honolulu as a young child, where her father worked
for the government. In the early part of this century, when she
was four years old, she moved with her family to Molokai and
has lived here ever since.
Another of the strange stories in Molokai history involved
her father. He served on Molokai as district overseer, an im-
portant government position. Sometime around 1916, a Chinese
fisherman was murdered out on the east end. Seven years went
by before charges were brought. At that time, Duvauchelle and
two of his sons were charged with the murder. They were convict-
ed and spent ten years in prison. According to Zelie, her father
and two brothers were innocent because no murder ever took
place. The Chinese fisherman actually had returned to his home
in China, she said, but there was no way to prove this.
104 AWAY FROM IT ALL
If there is a family name you will run across more frequently
than any other on the east end, it probably is the Dudoit family.
The Dudoit (doo-doo-wah) clan, another French-Hawaiian family,
got its start on Molokai in the mid-nineteenth century. According
to one history of Hawaii, Jules Dudoit came to Hawaii in 1837 as
the owner of a ship transporting two banished Catholic priests
back to Honolulu from the mainland. The priests had been
kicked out of Hawaii, apparently as an act of simple discrimina-
tion against Catholics. Due partly to Dudoit’s efforts, the priests
eventually were allowed to go ashore. Dudoit later was one of the
persons who complained to a French Navy captain about the
persecution of Catholic priests in Hawaii. This captain immedi-
ately threatened to open fire on Honolulu unless Kamehameha
III and his government stopped their discrimination against
Catholics. Kamehameha agreed.
Dudoit later became the French consul to Hawaii. He met a
tragic end, however, when his cook came into his bedroom one
night and murdered him with a carving knife. Dudoit’s sons,
Jules and Charles, attended the private Punahou prep school in
Honolulu and later owned and operated an interisland freight
schooner. Jules married a Hawaiian woman, settled on Molokai,
and raised a large family.
I tried to get some information on the family from one of the
older Dudoits on Molokai
“Can you give me some information about the history of the
Dudoit family?”
“Yes, but I don’t know. You can ask the Bishop Museum.”
“But you’re the Dudoit.”
“Yeah, but, but . . .”
“You see, I keep running across the name of your family in
the history books, but I don’t really know much about the fami-
ly.”
“Yeah, I know. Grandfather, great grandfather, and all that,
and so on so on so on, but I don’t like to think about it or talk
EAST END 105
about it. Goddamit, they were somebody in their days, and when
they come here, they leave us poor. And we gotta struggle. They
were rich people. My grandfather; my great grandfather; they
were somebody. Sometimes I wish my last name wasn’t a
Dudoit.”
“How come?”
“Well, goddam, it’s Dudoits Dudoits Dudoits; always some
kind of trouble, you know what I mean?”
So all I gathered from this conversation was that the Dudoits
are not generally the richest people on Molokai, and that some of
them have modest reputations as hell-raisers. I had heard these
things before. But then the Dudoits are a big family, and I
suspect there are all types within the membership. At any rate,
the Dudoits are an important kamaaina family, and the descend-
ants of the early Dudoits are settled all over the east end today.
Jesse Dudoit is one of these descendants. I met Jesse on the
third and final day of the hike that Sid Kent and I took along the
length of Molokai’s south coast. Sid and I were tired and sore,
hobbling along on blister-covered feet after having walked about
thirty-five miles in the previous two days. We figured we had
another seven or eight miles to go that day in order to reach the
end of the road at Halawa Valley. Then, thank God, we came
across Jesse’s refreshment stand.
Jesse has a little shack on the ocean, just a short distance
beyond the start of the dirt road (about a mile past the Waialua
Bridge). From the shack he sells glass fishing floats, colored
coral, and other souvenirs, plus cold Cokes. This is Jesse’s Coral
Shack. We bought the Cokes. I took off my boots and sympa-
thized with my feet while Jesse talked about life on the east end.
Jesse used to work for the county on Molokai, but he is
retired now. He spends his time minding his shop, smoking his
pipe, and occasionally fishing. He lives alone in the nearby old
house where his father and mother raised most of their eighteen
children. Jesse is one of those who remember the giant tidal
106 AWAY FROM IT ALL
wave of April 1, 1946, that struck the Hawaiian Islands. On
Molokai, the wave destroyed the water pipeline and caused other
damage at Kalaupapa, washed half a mile inland over uninhabit-
ed land on the west end of Molokai, and destroyed valuable taro
patches and a number of buildings out on the east end. Jesse
particularly remembers the day because he was working for the
county and had to gather a crew of men from Kaunakakai to
repair damage out on the east end. He had difficulty rounding up
the crew, because the men thought he was kidding. After all, why
should they believe him? They knew it was April Fool’s Day.
One of the more amazing persons on the east end is Petronello
Bicoy, an old Filipino gentleman who managed to raise a hand-
some family of seven sons and five daughters from his earnings
as a fisherman. He doesn’t seem to think he is all that amazing,
although he is obviously proud of his children. One son, Fred, a
former schoolteacher, is the manager of the federal Community
Action Program on Molokai. Another son is a Honolulu attorney.
Jesse Dudoit offers Cokes and souvenirs at Jesse’s Coral Shack.
EAST END 107
All his sons, and all his daughters’ husbands, have good trades or
professions. And they have given Bicoy and his very sweet wife a
total (at last count) of sixty-two grandchildren and seven great
grandchildren.
Bicoy first came to Hawaii from the Philippines in 1919,
when he was fourteen years old. He was “smuggled” into Hawaii,
he says, by an old man who let him pretend to be his son. He
says it was common in those days for Filipinos to take false
names in order to get around the rules that might have kept
them from coming to Hawaii. Bicoy was lured to Hawaii by the
words of a sugar company recruiter who told Filipinos: “If you
people go Hawaii, you can find gold on the highway.”
Needless to say, Bicoy did not find gold on the highway. He
arrived on the island of Maui and went to work on the sugar
plantation for thirty-five cents a day. After a while, his situation
improved, and he was making as much as a dollar a day. By
1923, Bicoy had enough of Maui and decided to move to Molokai.
He says he is the very first Filipino to settle on Molokai. He
arrived on June 16, 1923. Shortly afterward, Libby started its
pineapple operation on west Molokai and began importing a lot
of Filipinos. For a time, Bicoy was the only Filipino on the island,
and he says the natives took some time to get accustomed to him.
Despite the fact he has lived in Hawaii since 1919—and in
the same spot next door to Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church
since 1929—I swear he had to think it over a moment before he
confessed to me that, “Now I consider Molokai my home.” It must
have taken many long years before Bicoy decided he would never
return to the Philippines to live. He has never lost his attach-
ment to the country he left when he was fourteen years old, and
he has not become a U.S. citizen. You know for sure he is a real
Filipino when you see the rows of chicken coops in his back yard,
where he keeps the fighting cocks he raises.
I asked Bicoy how he managed to make enough money from
his small-scale fishing operation to raise a dozen children. He
108 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Petronello Bicoy: In the month of July 1923 I go down Halawa
Valley. I like play baseball with those Hawaiian people. But those
Hawaiian people never see no Filipino. They only see about Filipi-
no in the newspaper; they only see article that say the Filipino is a
killer. That’s right, a killer. So, I get down the baseball grounds,
and then everybody is scared, because I’m a Filipino. They think I
went down there to kill them. But after I stay a little longer here,
all those people, they know me well, and we all good friends.
EAST END 109
explained it to me, but I’m not sure I understood his formula. But
it obviously worked:
“Well, before was very cheap the stuff, you know. Rice is
cheap; everything is cheap. You can provide yourself.
“Those people from the government always come see me
before, because I got lotta children. They say, ‘Mr. Bicoy, I think
you need help.’ Well, sure I need help, but you know who help
me. Only God could help me; people won’t help me.
“ ‘No, no, no, our government help you. You got plenty kids.’
Yeah, I know I got plenty kids. I gotta go struggle myself.
“So those wahine from the government, they always come
check up on me. But my idea is, I don’t raise a lotta kids and ask
for help. I can manage myself.”
Swinging high at Kilohana School, east Molokai.
THE EAST-END ROAD is loaded with sites of interest. I just don’t
see any way out of listing them all and talking a bit about each
one. Many of these places are indicated by Hawaii Visitors
Bureau markers (metal poles that support the colorful picture of
a Hawaiian chief along with the name of the site). For some
perverse reason the Visitors Bureau sees fit to put up these
markers all over the state without ever telling anything about
the places they mark.
For instance, imagine a newcomer to Hawaii driving down
Molokai’s east-end highway and coming to the marker that says:
Ililiopoe Heiau. What is this poor stranger to make of this cryptic
message? Ililiopoe Heiau. Well, let’s see. Could it be a girl’s
name? Is it the name of the chief in the picture? Is there perhaps
a thing known as a heiau, and is the sign indicating the presence
of a heiau with the name of Ililiopoe? If so, what is a heiau? What
is the Ililiopoe Heiau? Where did it come from? Where is it? Who
took it? On one side of the road is a cow pasture; on the other,
masses of trees. Is a heiau perhaps another name for a cow
EAST END (part 2)
Battles in a horse pasture
8
112 AWAY FROM IT ALL
pasture? Or for a grove of trees? Or did the Visitors Bureau, busy
with many other projects, just put up the sign in the wrong
place? You see the problem.
If the Visitors Bureau had any cool, it would include a brief
description of each site along with the marker. Or it would
publish a pamphlet for each island explaining all the markers
and make these pamphlets available without charge at the
various airports.
The sites I’ll talk about begin with the Hotel Molokai,
located a couple of miles east of Kaunakakai, and continue along
a stretch of some twenty-two miles to the headquarters of George
Murphy’s Puu o Hoku Ranch. The sites are listed in geographical
order and should be easy to find if they are looked for in relation
to other sites. Sites marked with a Visitors Bureau sign are
indicated by the initials HVB in parentheses after the name.
Hotel Molokai. The Hotel Molokai is just what hotels on small
palm-covered Pacific Islands are supposed to look like. The small
guest buildings, each only two stories high, are dotted around
beautifully landscaped grounds next to the ocean. It is a very
tastefully designed setup and something islanders can use in
measuring the appearance of new hotels that come Molokai’s
way. I’m afraid it’s not the Hotel Molokai that will be found
lacking. Right now, the hotel is the only public place on Molokai
where you can hope to find dinners that are anything out of the
ordinary. Prices are in line with the quality.
Alii Fishpond. Look first for a couple of fairly new and attrac-
tive rustic wood cabins off to the right, about a mile down the
road from Hotel Molokai. Behind the cabins is the thirty-seven-
acre Alii Fishpond, which is being used for fisheries research by
the Oceanic Institute. It’s okay to take a look around. Alii Fish-
pond is a good example of the fifty-eight fishponds that once
existed along Molokai’s south shore. There were variations in the
EAST END 113
ponds, but most of them were like this one: a piece of ocean boxed
in by a low wall of volcanic rock or coral, with one or more open-
ings in the wall barred by narrow grills. Young fish could pass
through the grills and into the fishpond. When they had grown a
bit, they were no longer small enough to fit through the grill, and
thus became trapped in the pond.
The grills kept the eating fish in, kept the predators out, and
permitted water to circulate through the pond. The fish were
harvested from the ponds with nets.
Fishponds have been in use in Hawaii for hundreds of years,
and several of the ones on Molokai are still being used to a small
extent today. The ponds were built by the commoners upon the
orders of the alii, and a large pond could take as long as a year to
complete. The Oceanic Institute is using this pond for research
into ways people throughout the Pacific can raise mullet, shrimp,
lobster, and other seafood. You can locate fishponds in various
degrees of preservation or decay at several spots along the coast.
One Alii Park (oh-nay uh-LEE-ee). This spacious county park
offers a large grass playing field, covered picnic benches, a
barbecue pit, wading pool, showers. The ocean here is too shallow
for swimming.
Kawela City of Refuge and Kawela Battlefield (HVB).
These two neighboring historic sites are mysteries to me. The
best I can find out is that the City of Refuge was a location where
persons fled either to avoid injury during battle or to escape
prosecution for crimes. The battlefield apparently was the site of
one of Kamehameha the Great’s military engagements. To my
untrained eye, it looks like a horse pasture.
Kamalo Harbor. Four miles or so beyond the battlefield, the
road makes an abrupt 90-degree left turn just past a road sign
that warns: Slow-Bad Curves. Turn right, instead of following
114 AWAY FROM IT ALL
the road to the left, to take the short dirt road that goes out to
the old Kamalo Pier. A number of local fishermen still keep their
boats just off shore here, and a cluster of shacks used by Filipino
fishermen is located near the shore. Occasionally a good-sized
fishing boat or sailboat will pull through the break in the reefs
and into Kamalo Harbor and tie up at the collapsing pier. But
not often. Back up the main road, a hundred yards or so toward
Kaunakakai, another dirt road travels toward the mountains
through the old Kamalo village area. The road winds around in
the trees for about half a mile before returning to the main road.
St. Joseph Church. This shabby little church, founded by
Father Damien in 1876, is hard to miss. This is literally true,
since it sits almost on the highway just down the road from
Kamalo. It is a tiny, quaint wooden structure resting on a foun-
dation of rocks. It is now in the process of restoration, and not a
minute too soon. There is one of those picturesque old graveyards
alongside the church, with some not very picturesque plastic
flowers symbolizing, I suppose, someone’s undying love for the
deceased.
Puaahala. This is it! The first major tourist development on
Molokai. Hotel Molokai has fewer than one hundred rooms.
Puaahala, when its projected seven hotels are completed, will
have about fifteen hundred. Plus a shopping area, marina,
homes, apartment houses, etc. Though it is the newest of the
sightseeing sights of east Molokai, it may turn out to be more
important and historic than any of the rest.
I can visualize two possible inscriptions for the historic
plaque that will be placed at Puaahala in 2000 AD. The first
reads: “On this hallowed spot, in the year 1970, a band of brave
men began laying the foundation for the visitor industry which
has made possible the happiness and prosperity of Molokai
today.” The alternate plaque reads: “Here lies Molokai—
EAST END 115
daughter of the Goddess Hina, home of contentment and simplic-
ity—killed by greed. On this spot, in the year 1970, were diag-
nosed the first symptoms of this incurable cancer.”
Smith–Bronte landing spot. On July 15, 1927, Ernest L.
Smith, pilot, and Emory B. Bronte, navigator, landed their small
plane in a kiawe tree along the shore in east Molokai. So ended
the first successful civilian flight from the mainland to Hawaii,
just sixteen days after a pair of military flyers had completed the
very first Pacific crossing. Smith and Bronte flew from Oakland
to Molokai in twenty-five hours and two minutes. They had not
intended to land in a kiawe tree. They had not even intended to
land on Molokai. But apparently a fuel pump failed, or they ran
East-end scene.
Sid
Ken
t p
ho
to
116 AWAY FROM IT ALL
out of gas, so they had no choice. The landing spot is marked by
an inadequate little memorial stuck off in the bushes to the side
of the road. Fortunately, the state is buying the site and there
should be improvements to the area some day.
Mary McCorriston tells this story about the unexpected
conclusion to the flight:
“I heard they were coming, so I went to Honolulu to meet
them. I was down at Wheeler Field waiting for them when they
were landing back on Molokai. My cousin called me up in Hono-
lulu and said, ‘What were you doing down at Wheeler Field?’ And
I said, ‘Waiting for Smith and Bronte.’ And he said, ‘Eddie
[Mary’s husband] is entertaining them at your house on Molokai
right now.’ Eddie [a judge] was holding court, where the Kilo-
hana School is now. And he had a radio, listening; he was a great
one for that, you know. Then what happened was, he saw the
plane coming overhead, circling over the air, so he says, ‘Let’s
close court. I want to see what’s happening to those two guys.’
“When he got to the spot where they landed, these two
fellows were sitting up on a tree in their little plane. So he
stopped and looked and says, ‘Are you Smith and Bronte?’ They
said, ‘Yes, we are.’ He said, ‘Are you hurt?’ and they said, ‘No.’ So
he waited there and took them down to our house, and he was
there entertaining them while I was down at Wheeler Field
waiting for their plane to land.”
Keawanui Fishpond. Keawanui was built by the ancient
Hawaiians before Columbus arrived in America. It is the oldest
known fishpond on the island, and it was still in use up until a
few years ago. The pond can be reached through the Diamond J
Ranch, just up the road from the Smith-Bronte landing spot.
Visitors should ask permission at the ranch to take a look.
Loipunawai Mystic Spring (HVB). The sign for the spring is
located on the left side of the road just past Kilohana School. Off
EAST END 117
in the bushes on the makai side of the road from this sign is a
tiny pool of still water. This may or may not be the spring that
the sign mentions. Zelie Sherwood tells me that at one point in
Molokai history, invading soldiers cut off the islanders’ supply of
fresh water. The residents then discovered this freshwater
spring, which at that time was bubbling up under the salt water
in the nearby fishpond. They were able to dive into the pond and
collect enough fresh water from the spring to survive.
Ah Ping Store. Ah Ping offers the one and only chance on the
east end to buy gas. That is, if the store is open, and if the at-
tendant is in the mood to wait on customers. Sid Kent and I went
to Ah Ping’s once to get gas for his car and found the fat young
storekeeper asleep on a bench. He sort of woke up.
“Do ya want something?”
“Yes, some gas.”
“Can ya come back in an hour?”
“Yeah, okay.”
Ah Ping sells beer and soft drinks and cigarettes and a few
of the other necessities of life. The selection reminds me of the
grocery stores I ran across in some of the poorer areas of Italy.
You know, a few shelves full of pasta, some laundry soap, and
cigarettes, and that’s about it. I’m not sure who runs Ah Ping’s
these days. The original Ah Ping died in 1948. According to
George Cooke, Ah Ping formerly owned a Maui sugar plantation,
which he sold for “a considerable sum of money.” Cooke says that
when Ah Ping was fined twenty thousand dollars by the feds for
dealing in opium, he paid them immediately in cash. At any rate,
Ah Ping’s isn’t much. But it’s the only store on the east end, with
the exception of a fruit stand a few miles farther on, and Jesse
Dudoit’s curio and refreshment stand a few miles beyond that.
Kaluaaha Church. This is the oldest church on Molokai, a
Protestant church built in 1835 under the direction of the Rev. H.
118 AWAY FROM IT ALL
R. Hitchcock. This large stone-walled church was built to accom-
modate twelve-hundred worshippers. The building originally had
a roof thatched with leaves. It now has a tin roof, and it has lost
its steeple, so it looks like a big cow barn as much as anything
else. The supporting buttresses were added to the building about
1917. This historic structure is being restored. The church is a
short distance back from the road, on the left, and is unmarked.
Our Lady of Sorrows Church. This church, about one mile
past Ah Ping’s, is the first of the two churches founded by Father
Damien on the main portion of Molokai. It was built in 1874. The
small wooden building was restored a few years back and is in
beautiful condition. An excellent life-sized statue of Father
Damien is on display in a shelter near the church.
Keanaohina (Cave of Hina) (HVB). This is the birthplace of
Hina, legendary mother of Molokai. The cave supposedly is
located in the nearby hills, but nobody seems to know exactly
where. The Visitors Bureau marker is located in Queenie’s front
yard. Queenie is an old Filipino man who fishes, raises cows,
fights chickens, lives in the collapsing old structure you’ll see
there, and speaks the damndest pidgin I’ve ever heard. I can’t
understand him, but I enjoy visiting with him. I’m sure Queenie
is far more interesting than the cave.
Wailau trail. There is, or used to be, a trail that proceeded from
the southern coast, over the mountains, and down into Wailau
Valley on the island’s north coast. There is a Visitors Bureau
marker near the beginning of the trail, but the portion of the
marker that used to say “Wailau Trail” is missing. This is just as
well, since the trail doesn’t really exist anymore either. I spoke to
a fellow who managed to hike into the valley with a friend of his.
The trail was gone, they said; destroyed by landslides and by
years of unchallenged jungle growth. This young man and his
EAST END 119
friend were taken out of the valley by Coast Guard helicopter
when they failed to return after a week. When they were picked
up, they were building a raft to use in an attempt to sail out of
the valley. “Maybe we could have banged our way out the way we
came in,” he said, “but we didn’t want to try.”
Ililiopoe Heiau (HVB). A heiau is a sacred worshipping place of
the ancient Hawaiians. Ililiopoe Heiau is the second-largest
heiau in the Hawaiian islands and, like many other heiaus, was
a site for human sacrifices. It is believed to be as much as six
hundred years old.
A legend tells of a man, Umoikikaua, who lost nine sons as
sacrifices at this heiau. He asked the god Kauhuhu for revenge,
and this god sent a terrible flood that washed out parts of the
heiau and carried its priests out to sea. The heiau is essentially
an immense flat pile of rocks, about the size of a football field.
The terraced walls of the structure reach a height of about
twenty feet at one end. As with fishponds, heiaus were built by
the common people at the command of the royalty. Mark Twain
had some sharp words about a sacrificial heiau he saw on Oahu,
and they are pertinent to Ililiopoe:
“Those were savage times when this old slaughterhouse was
in its prime. The king and the chiefs ruled the common herd with
a rod of iron; made them gather all the provisions the masters
needed; build all the houses and temples; stand all the expenses,
of whatever kind; take kicks and cuffs for thanks; drag out lives
well flavored with misery, and then suffer death for trifling
offenses or yield up their lives on the sacrificial altars to pur-
chase favors from the gods for their hard rulers.”
The state also plans to buy the Ililiopoe Heiau, so one day it
will be easily accessible. For now, it cannot be seen from the
road, but it can be reached through a bit of hiking. Drive down
the road about a hundred yards past the Visitors Bureau marker,
until you cross a small bridge. Then walk for a quarter-mile or so
120 AWAY FROM IT ALL
up a dirt road that takes off into the hills from the main road.
There is a gate at the beginning of this road, but it should be
unlocked. At the end of the dirt road (there will be a house here),
turn to the left for about a hundred yards. Directly ahead will be
the high terraced wall of the heiau. I understand the heiau
property belongs now to Pearl Friel, manager of the Bank of
Hawaii in Kaunakakai. Visitors might want to ask her permis-
sion before going up there.
Paikalani Taro Patch (HVB). The road travels past a fruit
stand and another old fishpond before reaching this site. The
open piece of land across the road from the marker is the location
of the former taro patch. This apparently was a taro patch set
aside for the use of Hawaiian royalty.
Puu Mano (Shark God Hill) (HVB). The shark god Nanaue
was dragged up this hill and killed, according to Hawaiian
legend. There is a road up this hill, but it is blocked by a locked
gate. Zelie Sherwood told me the story of Nanaue and, considera-
bly boiled down, it goes like this: A shark god on the island of
Kauai got married and his wife gave birth to a son, who was
Nanaue. The shark god warned his wife that the boy would
become a shark if he received any meat to eat. Unfortunately, the
woman’s father fed meat to the boy. Soon Nanaue began to crave
human flesh. A shark’s head and teeth developed on Nanaue’s
back, and he began picking off local fishermen and eating them.
He was discreet about the whole thing and ordinarily wore a
cloak to hide his shark’s head when he was out in public. But his
secret was eventually discovered, and he had to run for his life to
Maui. He was also found out there and went to Molokai, where
he again took up his habit of eating fishermen. His neighbors
eventually discovered he was a shark god. They trussed him up
in nets and ropes, dragged him up Shark God Hill, cut him up
into small pieces with bamboo knives, and cremated him.
EAST END 121
Old Sugar Mill (HVB). This is the site of a sugar mill operated
by a fellow from Norway from 1870 to 1900. It is located two
miles beyond Puu Mano, shortly after the end of the paving on
the main road.
Mokuhooniki Island. This tiny piece of land one mile off the
eastern end of Molokai was formed much later than Molokai. It
was created when hot lava from the east Molokai volcano shot up
from beneath the sea and solidified. The tiny island was used for
many years as a military target.
Puu o Hoku Ranch. This fifteen-thousand-acre cattle ranch
encompasses some of the most beautiful land on Molokai, includ-
ing most of Halawa Valley. Headquarters for the ranch is located
some four or five miles past the old sugar mill site. Industrialist
George Murphy (not the dancerpolitician with the same name)
bought the ranch in 1955 for something like three hundred
George Murphy relaxes at his Puu o Hoku Ranch home.
Sid
Ken
t p
ho
to
122 AWAY FROM IT ALL
thousand dollars. Since then he has spent many times that
amount developing the property. There is even talk now of
putting up some hotels on the land. Murphy is a big, frank man,
and it’s easy to visualize him presiding at board meetings. He
runs Murphy Industries, an international outfit involved in a lot
of activities, including major drilling projects and the manufac-
ture of drilling equipment and portable electric tools. He also
owns several automobile dealerships in Honolulu. When I saw
him, he was lamenting the fact he was unable to sell his big,
beautiful Charolais breeding stock and beef because of various
marketing problems. He finally had to ship most of his large
Charolais herd to the mainland for sale. “A cattleman just can’t
make a dime these days,” he told me.
Sacred Kukui Grove. This kukui grove, located on Puu o Hoku
Ranch property near the edge of Halawa Valley, was considered
one of the most sacred spots in the islands by ancient Hawaiians.
Round-up time at Puu o Hoku Ranch.
EAST END 123
Once again, Zelie Sherwood told me the story.
Molokai was conceded to have the most powerful kahunas,
or sorcerers, in Hawaii. Of the kahunas on Molokai, Lanikaula
was the most powerful. A kahuna on Lanai wanted to get rid of
Lanikaula, so he came to Molokai, feigning friendship, to live
with him. His real aim was to get some of Lanikaula’s feces,
because this is the best ingredient to use when you’re working
bad magic on someone. He finally got what he came for and
returned to Lanai to do his dirty work. The kahuna put a curse
on Lanikaula, resulting in his death. Lanikaula’s three sons
buried him and planted kukui trees around his grave. They grew
into the immense grove of trees considered sacred by the old
Hawaiians.
According to Zelie, some Japanese farmers cut down half of
the grove about 1910 in order to clear the land to raise crops. As
they were working, one of the men became paralyzed and re-
mained that way the rest of his life. After the land was cleared,
crops refused to grow on it. What remains of this grove of light
green trees can be seen on a plateau to the right of the main
road, about a quarter-mile away, just before the road dips down
into Halawa Valley.
Patty and James pose at their camp in Halawa Valley.
I SAW THE BOY AND GIRL sitting along the side of the road. They
looked like they could use a ride, so I picked them up. James was
young; it appeared he had slept in his clothes for the past month
or so; his blond hair hung to his shoulders. Summer also was
young, maybe nineteen, skinny and pretty. Carrying makeshift
packs, they were planning to camp at Halawa Valley. They had
no money, so I took them into Kaunakakai and provided them
with the most important ingredients for a happy life at Halawa:
cigarettes and mosquito repellent. I took them back out to the
main road and they continued hitching to Halawa.
As it turned out, James and Summer were the advance
guard for quite a crew of longhaired young men and women from
the mainland who eventually gathered to live in the beautiful
isolated valley at the eastern tip of Molokai. I began hearing
more and more about the new visitors. Word seemed to be going
around: “The hippies are coming. The hippies are coming.” I was
publishing my newspaper on Molokai, so Sid Kent and his wife
and I drove to the valley to take some pictures and get a story.
HALAWA VALLEY
’Sorry, but I thought you were a hippie.’
9
126 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Our car bounced down the steep, narrow dirt road into the
valley. We marveled, as usual, at the view of Hipuapua Falls at
the head of the valley; of the stream meandering through the
valley before emptying into the bay; of the lush greenness of the
valley floor. We parked near the mouth of the stream and began
looking for James and Summer. We spotted them just across the
stream, sunbathing on the beach. Summer was sitting on a blan-
ket, naked as the day she was born, and looking fine. The regula-
tions probably would have called it indecent exposure. But on
Summer it looked as decent as anything I’ve seen in years.
Summer threw on a shift—James was already presenta-
ble—and we walked over to their campsite. I had brought along
two loaves of bread, some cigarettes, and a six-pack of Primo as
housewarming gifts. Several other longhairs were sitting around
the camp and we were introduced. Right off, we learned that life
was not all sweetness and light at Halawa. A fellow named John
was talking to me:
“We were just camped in this old shack across the river the
other night. We were fixing dinner over a campfire and somebody
started shooting at us.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Somebody was shooting from up on the side
of the valley; up on the road, I guess. We just ran off where it was
dark and they stopped shooting. The next day, when we were
gone, somebody burned down the shack. They left our stuff out-
side, so we just packed up and moved over here.”
“Who did it?”
“I don’t know. Somebody from the ranch, I guess. They don’t
want us around.”
“Was the shack on their property?”
“I didn’t think it was. It was right down along the beach,
and you’re supposed to be able to go anywhere you want along
the beaches.”
“Is this camp here on ranch property?”
HALAWA 127
“Hell no. It belongs to this guy named Johnny. He’s a Ha-
waiian and he lives over there, just a little ways away. He gave
us this piece of canvas for a tent, and he told us we could stay
here.”
We met the Hawaiian named Johnny that same day. John-
ny Kainoa and his wife, along with two of Johnny’s young daugh-
ters from a previous marriage, are the only year-round residents
of the valley. Halawa used to be home for hundreds of Hawai-
ians, but the population declined over many years as more and
more people decided to leave. Most of the remaining families left
after the 1946 tidal wave destroyed the valley’s taro patches.
Now Johnny and his family, living in a decaying little house
partway up the valley, are the only ones left. Johnny is in his
mid fifties, very dark skinned, missing lots of teeth. He spends
his time fishing, picking opihi (small, edible limpets) from the
rocks along the shore, taking care of things around the valley,
and during the summer working for the Del Monte pineapple
plantation.
Johnny welcomed the longhairs to Halawa Valley. He likes
them and treats them right. Johnny said he never had any trou-
ble with his young mainland visitors, although quite a number of
them had visited the valley during the previous year or two.
I was curious about the shooting and the burning of the
shack, so I stopped in to see Fred DeMello, manager of Puu o
Hoku Ranch. The ranch owns most of the land in Halawa Valley.
Fred is a short, muscular cowhand. He lives with his family in
one of the attractive old wood-shingled buildings dotted around
the headquarters of the Murphy ranch. He speaks quietly and is
direct and to the point. He doesn’t like hippies.
“They make a hell of a mess down there in the county park,
you know. We had to go down there, few days ago, and make
them clean up the pavilion. It was a real mess. They were all just
sitting around. They didn’t say nothing. I couldn’t tell if they
were high from dope, or drunk on beer. This one girl, she had a
When nice people come here to Halawa, and they think they
willing to stay and keep the place clean, I say,
“Okay, but don’t plant weeds [marijuana] around there.”
I tell my boys that.
“Don’t do that kinda stuff. If you do that in Mama’s land, I find
out, I’ll have to put you out of the land. You gotta ’scuse me that. I
don’t want you do something to break the law. But you want to
stay, you think you wanta have nice place, go ahead, you stay, you
welcome to do so.”
You see these boys, when they come down here, they got lotta
JOHNNY
Johnny Kainoa sees the good in the longhaired visitors who accept his hospitality in Halawa Valley.
“They all my hippies,” he says.
tension. In the Big Island they got plenty trouble. That’s why a lot of
tension. In the mainland, the same thing. Now these boys come over
here, they really good, I can control them real nice. They listen.
Anytime I want any help like this, they glad to do it. Sometimes they
run short of food. I tell them, “Here, tomorrow, the water’s good. I
want a couple you boys go with me, make opihi, come on.”
You see all that food in there now? Two boxes of food there. That
for the boys that go with me, make opihi [collect edible limpets]. You
know that boy come over here with you? Well, he the one make opihi
with me. He’s a good opihi picker; I teach him.
These boys got too much tension. Now you get somebody help
them, you could put them right on the nose. We not perfect, you know.
We could help one another. All they need is help, is all. Somebody can
love them. I don’t care if you hippie, no hippie; don’t make no differ-
ence to me. I’ll help you the best I know how. That’s what I like. That’s
why I helping these boys out.
Plenty people don’t like them. They don’t like them, that’s their
business. The people across, they don’t want the hippie. But I tell them,
“Look, this hippie do you any wrong?” And he say, “No, but I don’t trust
this kind of people.” So I tell him,
“But did they do you wrong? They never go in your yard, destroy
your place. Who the one destroying your place? Our local people. And
you know who come steal our net? Our local people. These haole boys
don’t do that. They walk up, with a pack. And they don’t do anything
like that. That’s why I like these boys. They one of the best people to
help. They need help. Help them; not to destroy them. Love them.”
These boys work hard. I make them learn how to work. They gotta
learn for their own good. They pick opihi, make their own money. Now
they go outside, buy food. When I see people, I tell them.
“See my haole boys? They all my hippies. They plantin’ their
own food. They make it good. They all my hippies, and they
doin’ good.”
130 AWAY FROM IT ALL
minidress up to here, and no pants. You could see her ass and
everything.”
“What sort of mess did they make at the pavilion?”
“Just a big mess. They always eat there, and they don’t
clean up the place after. My wife cleans up the pavilion for the
county, and we don’t want these people down there messing it
up. They build fires right in the goddam pavilion. Why don’t they
use the barbecue? They even piss in the wash basins.”
“Is that the main problem you’ve been having with them?
Down at the pavilion?”
“No. They trespass on ranch property. They go in that
church, the one by the pavilion, and take out the benches and
leave them outside. We caught some of them up on our land a
while back, poaching, and we took their guns away. They’re dirty
and they stink.”
“Hippies with guns? They don’t usually . . . ”
Johnny Kainoa looks out from the porch of his Halawa home.
HALAWA 131
“Yeah. They were poaching, so we took their guns away.”
“Okay. Well, I wanted to ask you if you knew anything
about a shack being burned down in the valley. One of the guys
staying down there said he was staying in the shack, and when
he was gone . . . ”
“I burned the shack down. It was an old shack made out of
driftwood. It was on ranch property.”
“This guy also told me someone took some shots at him
when he was camped by the shack.”
“I don’t know nothing about that. I don’t need no gun to
chase off any goddam hippies.”
The next time I got to Halawa was a couple of weeks later when
Sid and I walked into the valley at the end of our three-day hike
along the south coast of Molokai. We staggered into the pavilion,
where James took a victory picture of us. He told us the situation
hadn’t changed much in the valley, except that a few new people
had arrived.
It turned out that Fred DeMello was partly right about the
longhairs: they actually were eating their meals at the pavilion.
He also was partly wrong: they did not leave a mess behind
them. I saw these young people prepare meals several times at
the park, and I also saw them wash their dishes and clean up the
area afterward. It eventually struck me that most of DeMello’s
criticisms had to spring less from fact than from simple prejudice
against freaky looking kids.
Thanks to our hike, Sid and I learned something about the
general attitude of other Molokai people toward the longhairs. I
wrote a piece about the hike for the Honolulu Advertiser. In the
article I commented on the fact that no one ever offered us a ride,
although much of our hike took us along the main Molokai high-
way. Later, five different persons told me, in essentially identical
words: “I’m awfully sorry. I would have offered you a ride, but I
thought you were a hippie.”
132 AWAY FROM IT ALL
This sort of mild aversion to the new visitors is pretty popu-
lar around the island. A little girl in Sharmen’s class came up to
her one day and, apropos of nothing, informed her: “Do ya know
what? Hippies eat cowshit.”
I told one longtime Molokai resident that the Halawa
longhairs appeared to be reasonably well-behaved individuals.
“Oh,” he replied matter of factly, “then they’re not hippies.” Some
of my acquaintances in the Kaunakakai business community felt
it was humorous to point out a passing hippie and then tell me
(who happens to have a beard), “Look, Don, there goes one of
your friends.” (More often than not, it was.)
But for every person on Molokai who feels this way, I think
there is another person who is willing to give the longhairs a
chance. Happily, the police seemed to be in the latter category.
They seemed notably unconcerned about the longhairs. The
police dutifully sent a squad car into Halawa Valley whenever
the ranch felt like complaining, but almost invariably they found
nothing wrong. One policeman told me the only thing he fears
from the hippies is that they will introduce drugs to the island.
Some of the Halawa longhairs use drugs, but they’re gener-
ally cool about it. About the only thing you’re ever going to find
down there is marijuana—a drug that is definitely harmful to
human beings because it can get them thrown in jail. A young
man named Jimmy found this out one day after he made the
stupid mistake of planting a little grass garden in the valley;
someone tipped off the police and he was arrested.
The only other incident involving drugs in Halawa Valley
that I ever heard of involved a Hawaii state senator. This gentle-
man—who, I know, would prefer to remain anonymous—came to
Molokai one day on official business. He paid a visit to the valley
and for some reason rifled through the belongings of one of the
longhairs. He found a small amount of marijuana and hashish
(the more potent resin of the marijuana plant) and took it with
him. The good senator never officially reported his find. I assume
HALAWA 133
he either realized he could be prosecuted for theft or decided to
use the stuff for himself. Or both.
One of the more dedicated opponents of the hippies is a
fellow from Michigan who owns a cabin in Halawa Valley. This is
Mr. Koonmen, who normally comes to Halawa with his wife
during the winter months. Mr. Koonmen is a retired business-
man. (“A very big businessman,” his sister assured me.)
I had a word with Mr. Koonmen one day in order to find out
what he had against the hippies. Just about everything, as it
turned out. They are dirty and lazy and they set a bad example
for kids and they use bad language and they don’t respect their
parents and they sleep with people they aren’t married to and
they use drugs and they are unpatriotic and they don’t have jobs
and so forth through the usual anti-hippie litany you can hear
anywhere in the country. At one point, he asked me a question
that went something like this:
“Do you think it’s right for these kids to steal things that
don’t belong to them, to spread disease, to lead innocent children
into using dangerous drugs, to cause a young girl to get pregnant
due to their bad example, and to contribute nothing to society?”
Well, what could I say? That question topped even the old
familiar, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”
“No,” I replied.
He smiled triumphantly. I knew it was time to leave. As I
was walking away, he said, “Tell those people they have my
sympathy.”
“They don’t want it,” I told him.
The situation in the valley got worse. Fred DeMello and a couple
of his men visited the valley and had words with the campers.
The men from the ranch carried firearms, a gesture the longhairs
took as something less than friendly. Johnny said he joined the
discussion and soon ended up in an argument with the ranch
foreman. Johnny related the incident: DeMello told him to keep
134 AWAY FROM IT ALL
his dog off ranch property or he would shoot the animal. The dog,
DeMello said, had been chasing deer and bulls on the ranch.
Johnny challenged DeMello to carry out the threat. Apparently
afraid of being caught in a bluff, DeMello shot the dog in the hip.
A few weeks later I got my first look at this dangerous ani-
mal that had been terrorizing helpless deer and livestock on the
ranch. The dog was still alive; in very good spirits, as a matter of
fact, despite the big chunk of meat shot out of his hip. The dog
was a little black and white mongrel; he weighed perhaps ten
pounds and appeared about as vicious as Bing Crosby.
Johnny was mad that day. He was still mad about his dog.
And now he was mad because the ranch had fenced off an area
down near the beach where visitors to the valley formerly had
been able to camp. The ranch was within its rights; it owned the
property. But this petty action by the ranch only helped drama-
tize how little public land there really is in Halawa Valley, the
most beautiful single accessible spot on Molokai.
Johnny was working on an idea. The county park is on a
small site several hundred yards back from the ocean. Johnny
was trying to figure out how to convince the state to take over the
park and extend it all the way to the ocean. The extra land would
have to be purchased from the ranch. This would guarantee the
public permanent access to the ocean here, which is one of the
very very few decent places to swim on the whole island. It also
would provide a park big enough to handle the crowds who will
be coming to the valley as soon as the island’s tourist develop-
ments materialize and as soon as the state goes ahead with its
plans to pave the road all the way into the valley.
While the state is at it, I hope it also makes sure the public
always has a way to get to the two beautiful waterfalls—
Hipuapua and Moaula—at the head of Halawa Valley. There is a
lovely trail to the falls that travels through deep forest and past
crumbling stone walls built by the old residents of the valley. It
takes about an hour to hike from the county pavilion to either of
HALAWA 135
the falls, which plummet into large freshwater pools that are
great for swimming.
To get onto this trail, start from the pavilion and head away
from the ocean. Stay to the right at a fork in the road about two
hundred yards from the pavilion. Stay on this road until it ends
at a house after about half a mile. The trail begins along the
right side of the house. The trail is fairly easy to follow, except for
one place where it turns to the right and crosses over the river.
Be prepared to do some wading.
After I left Johnny that day, I walked next door to take a look at
the little community the longhairs had built up over the past few
months. Johnny’s wife owns several acres in the valley and he
had turned over portions of the land to his visitors for their use.
Four or five campsites were spotted here and there on the land.
In Halawa Valley: Moaula Falls, and a
daughter of Johnny Kainoa.
136 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Because of the dense vegetation in the valley, the campsites
weren’t visible from the road.
James was living in a comfortable little shack consisting of a
wooden floor topped by a log framework covered with canvas.
(Summer had left for another island.) Cary and Lois were living
under a big shelter built around the removable box from the back
of a camper truck. Len and David and Tom had pitched two tents
along the edge of a large clearing, and the open space had been
turned over to a vegetable garden. Everyone seemed settled in
some sort of neat, though primitive, dwelling. Each site had its
flourishing garden. James and his friends also got food by help-
ing Johnny fish and pick opihi. Some of the men were planning to
pick pineapple that summer for Del Monte. All in all, they
seemed to be doing well.
A couple of months later when I saw Easy Rider in Kau-
nakakai, a remark in the movie brought me right back to this
Halawa Valley family in their makeshift home.
HALAWA 137
little village at Halawa. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper were
riding across the country in their big flashy motorcycles. They
had gone through any number of adventures, and Hopper was
digging it. But Fonda knew this wasn’t what he really wanted,
and one night he told Hopper, “We blew it.”
“What?”
“We blew it,” Fonda repeated.
And nothing more was said. But you knew he was thinking
back a thousand miles to the quiet New Mexico commune where
he had almost decided to stay. A peaceful, pretty spot where
people lived humbly and without pretense; where they made
their living off the land and found their enjoyment in people
rather than in things.
Smiling faces in Sharmen’s Maunaloa classroom.
OLD-TIME RESIDENTS of the island would often ask me, “How do
you like living on Molokai?” Now there’s a dangerous question. I
can’t explain my mixed feelings about Molokai in a quick com-
ment, and my interrogators weren’t interested in speeches. So I
usually passed off the question with a brief and diplomatic reply:
“It’s just great. The people here have really made me feel at
home.” Or, “I like it very much, although I have to admit that
sometimes I get lonely for the big city.” These replies are true as
far as they go, but they don’t go far enough.
A little disclaimer before I try to answer the question at
length: you must keep in mind that every newcomer’s impres-
sions of Molokai will be different. Every person will filter what he
sees through his own particular set of beliefs and prejudices and
experiences and come up with his own particular view of the
place—not the right view or the wrong view, but simply his own
view.
This is what Sharmen and I have done. We are city people.
We have spent much of our adult lives in the San Francisco area.
MOLOKAI
How do you say ‘rush hour’ in Hawaiian?
10
140 AWAY FROM IT ALL
The things we learned there about life are the things that influ-
ence our thinking about Molokai. When we find something on
Molokai that we consider unusual—whether it’s a scene of
extraordinary beauty or ugliness, an act of kindness or stupidity,
or whatever—it most often derives its unusual nature from
comparison with our former life in California.
First of all, I was bothered by a notable lack of imagination
in many people and organizations. When a chance came along on
Molokai to inject a little life or variety into an event, imagination
usually lost out to conformity and routine. How else do you
explain the nonsensical decision to make a drab village even
drabber by numbering the streets of Maunaloa instead of giving
them pretty Hawaiian names? We saw this type of thing around
us every day, and we began to wonder if people were walking in
their sleep.
A community organization holds a luau in a sterile school
cafetorium, ignoring the limitless number of lovely outdoor
locations. Theater owners make no attempt to let you know what
movies are showing. A civic group opens a meeting with some
community singing, and the favorite song—I’ll never know why—
seems to be, “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl that Married Dear
Old Dad.” Another group presents leis to island newcomers; they
are made of plastic.
The big event of the year is the Molokai to Oahu Canoe
Race—and the road to the takeoff point is impassable, the over-
night campsite for spectators has no water, and the pre-race
entertainment is as exciting as a sixty-year-old stripper. Some
kids taking part in a Christmas program, on an island that has
never seen snow, sing an old American standby, “I’m Dreaming
of a White Christmas, Just Like the Ones I Used to Know.”
These are all small things, I suppose, but multiplied a
hundred times they become important. When it comes time to do
something on Molokai, the first and last question asked is, “How
did they do it last year?” I’m not particularly interested in how
MOLOKAI 141
they did it last year. I want to think about how we are going to do
it this year.
Along with this lack of imagination comes a rather preva-
lent sort of unthinking Americanism; a rote patriotism that
doesn’t leave room for many questions. Everything gets under-
way with the pledge of allegiance and a “patriotic” song. I heard
it every morning from Sharmen’s classroom across the road, as I
sat at my typewriter. The children don’t have any idea what they
are saying-—it’s obvious in the way the words stumble all over
each other at the end of the pledge—but this doesn’t really
matter because they are doing the patriotic thing. It may come as
a shock to some of these children one day when they learn that
the whole nation, for years, has been stumbling over those last
few words.
The quiet patriotic ardor found on Molokai may simply be a
phenomenon typical of unsophisticated rural America. But I’m
inclined to think it has something to do with the fact the people
of Molokai, and of the entire state, are relatively new Americans.
A great many of Molokai’s people are from foreign countries—or
their parents or grandparents are from other countries—and
they are acutely aware of the good things America has done for
them. They see the many wonderful aspects of life in America
through new eyes, and they see no reason to question their good
fortune. Like the man with a new car, they will be inclined to
admire the chrome and the beautiful upholstery for a long time
before noticing that little knock in the engine.
This patriotic patina that covers a good deal of the island
results in the creation of some rather holy cows. The Boy Scouts,
a good God-fearing, patriotic organization if there ever was one,
is a prime example. Somewhere around 75 or 80 per cent of the
eligible boys on Molokai belong to the Boy Scouts. It’s like buying
savings bonds when you’re in the Army. It’s not required, but you
better have a pretty good reason if you don’t.
A fellow who works for a Molokai company was telling me
142 AWAY FROM IT ALL
about the company’s policy on use of its little park down by the
ocean. “We have quite a liberal policy, but we expect people to
ask us for permission. If somebody asks us—like if the Boy
Scouts want to use the place for a day or so—we usually tell
them to go ahead.” Now that’s hilarious. Because being good to
the Boy Scouts on Molokai is about as liberal as rescuing your
drowning mother. It’s not liberal. It’s expected. I receive solace in
the knowledge that Jerry Rubin once was a Boy Scout.
But if life on Molokai sometimes seemed more difficult than
in California, it was usually for reasons far more mundane than
any supposed lack of creativity or excess of patriotism. Mainly,
there just wasn’t much to do. We had grown spoiled in California
on a social menu consisting of visits with old and dear friends
and excursions to San Francisco or Berkeley for samples of those
cities’ delights. Suddenly our old friends had our favorite cities,
and our favorite cities had our friends. And we had neither.
On Molokai, we were conveniently lumped with a group
consisting of mainland haoles who were teaching school. Now,
the problem with being a member of an expatriate group in a
small town is that the group tends to turn into a sort of small
town within a small town. Small towns aren’t really my bag in
the first place, and two at one time is difficult.
The teachers are banded loosely together by common occu-
pation and some common backgrounds and interests. There were
only twenty-five or so members of this sub-community, and the
usual topic of discussion when any two got together would be the
other twenty-three. A British visitor to Hawaii in the 1870s,
Isabella Bishop, commented that gossip was the canker of foreign
society on the islands. She may have spent some time with the
teachers on Molokai.
“By gossip,” she wrote, “I don’t mean scandal or malignant
misrepresentations, or reports of petty strifes, intrigues and
jealousies, such as are common in all cliques and communities,
but nuhou, mere tattle, the perpetual talking about people, and
MOLOKAI 143
the picking to tatters of every item of personal detail, whether
garnered from fact or imagination.”
Molokai offers the usual technical difficulties of small,
isolated areas. Our car sat on blocks once for two weeks while we
waited for auto parts from Honolulu. We never knew from one
moment to the next if our phone was going to work. Our bill for
electric service ran as high as twenty-five dollars a month for a
small apartment. And we had to be prepared to spend fifty
dollars on air fares if we wanted to get away from Molokai for a
while to visit one of the other islands.
Then there’s the good side. Along with the inherent difficulties of
life in the backwoods came the undeniable advantages. The first
and most important advantage of living where there aren’t too
many people is that there aren’t too many people. In simple
mathematical terms, you become more important. Where you
constitute one three-millionth of the population around San
A little shopper at a Kaunakakai market.
144 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Francisco, you suddenly constitute a massive one six-thousandth
on Molokai. With this immense increase in personal stature come
a host of marvelous privileges: the use of uncrowded highways,
the sight of star-spangled skies through a smog-free atmosphere,
free access to virtually unused beaches, peace and quiet for your
nights and simplicity and beauty for your days.
I can’t thank Molokai enough for these advantages. I have
spent too many years commuting on freeways to ever forget the
experience or to ever fail to be grateful when I set off down a
Molokai highway and find I am alone. And there are no traffic
signals on Molokai. You can actually take off from Point A in
your car on Molokai and expect to reach Point B in about the
same amount of time it took you last time. Since I have moved to
Hawaii, I have not once heard the expression “rush hour.” I am
sure there is no equivalent in Hawaiian.
I’ve grown accustomed to going to the beach or to the Ka-
laupapa lookout or to the falls at Halawa or the extreme east-end
highway or most any other of the lovely spots on Molokai and
having it to myself. When we have visitors from the mainland,
we learn again, through their eyes, just how lucky we are. A
mainland newcomer can’t escape a mild feeling of furtiveness as
he sits alone on the guardrail at the Kalaupapa lookout, taking
in the magnificent view. There’s nobody around; the place must
be closed; surely the guard is going to show up any second and
throw me out.
Do you know there hasn’t been a robbery on Molokai for
fifteen years? Maybe never. Certainly, there are burglaries now
and again. The island is not without crime. But no one is going to
accost you and take something from you; that’s robbery. This
may seem like God’s ordained pattern to a longtime resident of
the island, but it’s pure miracle to a city person. Sharmen
dropped her wallet once, without realizing it, on the main street
in Maunaloa. It was immediately returned by the finder. After
we finally caught on to this scene, we hardly ever had occasion to
MOLOKAI 145
lock the door on our house or on our car. The few exceptions were
primarily for the peace of mind of our visitors from the mainland.
These people should read the following remarks from the
report of Hawaii’s Chief Justice William Lee for 1852. They are
appropriate to Molokai today:
“In no part of the world is life and property more safe than
in these islands. Murders, robberies and the higher class of
felonies are quite unknown here, and in city and country we
retire to our sleep conscious of the most entire security. The
stranger may travel from one end of the group to the other, over
mountains and through woods, sleeping in grass huts, unarmed,
alone, and unprotected, with any amount of treasure on his
person, and, with a tithe of the vigilance required in older and
more civilized countries, go unrobbed of a penny and unharmed
in a hair.”
For me, Molokai has been a land of opportunity. Molokai is
still frontier territory. Just about everything has been tried back
where I come from. The only thing you can do is go to work for
somebody else, do things his way, and end up in the old 8-to-5.
But Molokai, as a frontier, has nothing but room for new people
and projects. That’s why I was able to start my newspaper, a
project that brought me more satisfaction and good times (and
less money) than any job I ever had.
One of the things you have to admire about Molokai, and
the whole state of Hawaii, is its peaceful mixture of so many
cultures. Forty-five per cent of the people on Molokai are Hawai-
ian or part Hawaiian and another 35 per cent are Filipino. The
Japanese account for 9 per cent, Caucasians for 6 per cent, and
other groups, including Chinese, for 5 per cent. The blacks are
just barely represented, with one man on the entire island. I
won’t say all these groups hit it off like brothers all of the time.
But there is a climate of mutual respect that keeps the peace
nicely. There’s a tall, lanky and likable corn farmer from Iowa
named Kaye Waldorf who lives on Molokai now. He told me that
146 AWAY FROM IT ALL
one of the reasons he decided to come to Molokai was to give his
kids a chance to experience just this sort of racial and cultural
cooperation.
This was a good experience for a white man like me—to be
in the minority for a change. To get a chance, for once, to be on
the receiving end of a few pious platitudes about racial coopera-
tion. To be able to sit in on the meeting of a Molokai club and
hear the Japanese-American official tell the new Caucasian
members: “We accept people no matter what race, religion, or
creed.”
What I probably like best about Molokai is the way its
people seem to accept strangers. The people have not yet con-
tracted that favorite disease of civilized nations, fear of the
stranger. Molokai is officially nicknamed the “friendly isle” and it
sounds like a real PR shuck. But it turns out to have a good deal
of truth.
You might think the aversion of a lot of islanders to the
hippies belies their friendly reputation. But not necessarily. I
think a lot of the people on Molokai are nervous because of the
longhairs’ reputation and because of the thought of being invad-
ed by a horde of these unknown creatures. But there are plenty
of indications that individual longhairs—as individuals, not
hippies—are being accepted without question by many local
people, just as they accept everyone else. And the island’s non-
chalant acceptance of its homegrown mahus indicates that social
deviance is not necessarily a sin or a crime on Molokai.
I feel I can always go anywhere on Molokai and find beauti-
ful people. Like the fellow who waved at me when I crossed his
land to get to the beach, instead of cussing me out. Like Jesse
Dudoit, who sat down and talked with us for an hour the first
time we met him at his refreshment stand; or the fisherman who
spontaneously offered to let me use his net whenever I wished; or
the man who asked me in to the birthday party for the Filipino
baby. Like a hundred other people who did not know me, and
MOLOKAI 147
who had no reason to do anything but ignore me. These are
Molokai people.
But no matter how many people I meet on Molokai, and how
nice they may be to me, Molokai could never be my home. I might
live here for fifty years, but—like Petronello Bicoy on the east
end—I would always have that feeling that my home is back
where I was raised, back in California. I was always very con-
scious both of being a part of, and at the same time apart from,
Fun in the calm waters of Kaunakakai Harbor.
148 AWAY FROM IT ALL
Molokai. Even in the moments that I felt a great love for the
island, I realized it could never be my island. It belongs to those
who understand and accept its quiet, sometimes exasperating,
old-fashioned and mysterious ways. I’ll always be a stranger
here.
As I knew they would, my nostalgic feelings for Molokai began
the minute my newspaper folded and we knew we would be
leaving. Technically, nostalgia is a longing for things of the past.
But I swear you can be nostalgic about an event even while it
occurs. When you are talking with someone you realize you may
never see again; when you are doing something you know you
may never do again—these are the times you suddenly see what
is happening through the eyes of the future. As things happen,
they are taking their place in the context of your life.
Even as I am riding home with Mariano Acoba and his
friends from the Peace Picnic, drinking a warm beer, I am re-
membering how much fun the ride was; as I sit on the grass at
Halawa Valley, talking with James and Summer and Bill and
Vicky and Johnny, I am recalling what a beautiful day it was.
Sharmen and I are building a pyramid of sand on a big beach
that is ours alone, and a nostalgia for this moment comes over
me because I know the moment will never come again. We are
drinking a beer on the lawn in front of Richard Marks’ home at
Kalaupapa, and I am watching us in my dreams. Even as I am
exchanging pleasantries with the girls at the Friendly Market, I
am looking at them in memory.
Sharmen and I are walking through the pineapple fields
behind our house. Thirty miles to the west, Diamond Head
stands out clearly, bathed in the quiet, diffused light from a low-
hanging sun hidden behind clouds. The sun sets, but continues to
send its rays out into the sky all about us. The sky above Oahu
turns slowly to yellow. Behind us, in the east, a rainbow has
formed, framing the islands of Lanai and Maui. The sky is alive
MOLOKAI 149
with clouds, yellow nearest to the sun and ten shades of pastel
pink near the rainbow. It is a fairy tale sky, rosy, demure, trans-
lucent. From both sides of the sky, mysterious objects made of
cloud—spaceships, mythical beasts—chase lazily after the sun. A
thin horizontal patch of turquoise persists in the yellow-turning-
gold-turning-red sky above Diamond Head. The rainbow disap-
pears, and the colors in the east turn uniformly blue, then darker
blue, then dark. In the west, the atmosphere reflects redder and
redder and redder.
The sunset is blood brother to our Molokai. The sunset, too,
has a startling beauty; a beauty marred for us by telephone poles
standing like sentries between us and this loveliness, like memo-
ries of yesterday and far away keeping us from enjoying the here
and now. The sunset, too, has the look of illusion, of magic, for it
is quite outside our experience. Peopled by strange shapes,
exciting to the senses, hypnotic, mysterious, ephemeral: we are
standing in the middle of all this. But we never forget we are
merely spectators.
The last horizontal stretch of color above Diamond Head
turns blood red and is extinguished.
Index, Washington
Yellow Submarine Press
Don Graydon on Molokai, 1970. Graydon ran the short-lived Molokai Reporter newspaper and then founded the Maui Sun, published through the 1970s. He later took up reporting and book editing in Seattle—but nothing has ever compared with the adventure of newspapering in Hawaii.
FRESH OFF THE BOAT after a s ixteen-day sai l
f rom San Francisco to Hawai i , Don and Sharmen
Graydon sett le in for a n ine -month stay on the
is land o f Molokai. Thus the p lo t of this breezy
nonf ic t ion report : a c i ty boy goes to the country
and is var iously charmed and exasperated by what
he f inds. Certain th ings are d i f ferent : for starters ,
the language , the c l imate , the food , the culture .
Don trades misunderstandings with a Fi l ip ino
barber , wrest les with p idg in , hobnobs with h ippies ,
i s labe led a “dumb hao le” ; he learns with a laugh
or a gr imace to accept the many versions o f the
“real” Molokai . Written in 1970, Away f rom I t All
i s one young man’s take on a rare and spec ial p lace
in a t ime long past . Jo in h im for the fun.
On the cover: Girls at play, east Molokai
Photo by Don Graydon, 1970