Hawaii 5 O.M.G. Part 2: Taste the rainbow

Our 3 months on Kaua’i were an exercise in participant observation, yet we still try to come to grips with this place and its people knowing that description will, at best, fall short and, at worst, generalize in the broadest strokes.  We stayed long enough to grow familiar, to make friends, to become a regular at the Farmer’s Market, to know the best happy hour specials, but not long enough to begin to take life here at face value.  Though, how locals remain peaceful when confronted by the price of olive oil and coffee I may never understand.  

Among our small band of farm volunteers we've created a little ex-pat mainland community.  We are not “from here” nor have we yet fully shed our mainland ethic, nor embraced / been embraced by the island.  Despite residency status, property ownership and more surfboards than teeth, many locals will never be “from here,” they will never be a “Kaua’ian” unless they can somehow change the conditions of their birth.  They move here from somewhere else, leaving behind their mainland ways (or not?) and embracing everything which makes this sub-culture unique.  We joke among ourselves that in order to remain here you have to “drink the Kool-aid.”  Indeed, it appears as if those who stay here for a year or longer have gone through some sort of transformation marking them as locals to locals.  This rite of passage is only a metaphor but it could look a lot like the South Park episode dedicated to Kaua’i as only those writes can.  http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s16e11-going-native

Like many insider jokes, it’s an Aloha thang.    

“I think he makes the Kool-aid,” our dear friend and co-conspirator, Chandley, said as she described her encounter with Jonas, a day laborer who works with our farm’s owner once in a while.  During their brief hello, Jonas described his personal perspective on the universe with her – bear in mind he’s just met her.  Meet Jonas, for the last 5 years he and any hair trimming implements have not known each other – imagine a large bushy humanlike head with teeth.  His smile is the most genuine and distinguishing feature amidst all that hair which, like roots from a tree, searches the cosmos for purchase.  His enthusiasm and white trustafarian vibe is rather endearing except that he takes it all kind of seriously.  

Not unlike the ocean floor just a few miles away, things in Kauai go deep rather quickly.  People don’t stand on a lot of ceremony before telling you that the wavelength they’re on is more in the moment and in harmony with mother nature than ever before.  No telling where the baseline is for that sort of thing.  Folks with whom I’ve just had a brief exchange will give me their deepest insights and pull back the curtain on their innermost struggles.  They embody the ebullient passion of the newly converted or they’ve just done a major bong rip.  It’s a toss-up on that one really. 

Of the many strains of Kool-aid on the island, the most introductory level is tourist.  These 1-weekers are the not-so-secret key to the economy on Kaua’i.  The old economic engine of exporting sugar 2400 miles to the nearest continent became too costly, and the island began importing people.  Everyone who makes their living here, each man, woman and child, is in some way deeply connected to the tourist, yet everyone hates them on some level.

Okay, perhaps hate is too strong a word; it might be more complete to say that the locals just “don’t” tourists.  They don’t see them, they don’t recognize them, they don’t make casual conversation in the grocery store, they don’t nod at them in the surf lineup, and they don’t make a personal connection – mixing with them is purely transactional.  Because the tourist only comes to the island on a surface level, going to a new beach each day, falling under the spell of this beautiful, green and vibrant place, he or she doesn’t invest more of themselves than personal cash and time away from home.   So who can blame the locals for keeping it within the family and faces they recognize when this small place is overrun with almost 1.5 million tourists last year?

Tourists leave their busy lives, schedules, and stress “somewhere else.”  They visit, fall in love and happily drink their Kool-aid – taken with a little island rum or vodka.   This is harmless because their brew isn’t too strong; they have return tickets and a, “real bitch of a meeting with those new clients on Tuesday.”  The affects of the drink won’t last and as soon as they are back “anywhere else” they’ll forget their island crush.  They gaze fondly from time to time at their pictures thinking, “I need to get back there someday…” but never will. 

Those that do make it back have been slipped a little more concentrated form of the bright blue stuff.  According to the Hawaiian Tourism Authority preliminary figures, last year approximately 65% of the visitors were repeaters, returning for the 5^th time.  So, clearly they like this drink, and find their mainland lives lacking in color, shoe-lessness and sun.  With this winter, I’m sure most mainlanders would agree. These folks were tourists once but now have returned in a more serious and serial way – as investors.  Trying to grab a little bit of paradise they put some cold cash into time-shares, condos, real-estate, mansions, plantations, or whatever.  Once these folks arrive with their first piece of extra baggage, they are goners and begin to take their Kool-aid on an IV drip. 

Locals use a Hawaiian name to describe folks from somewhere else -- haoles (how leeys)*.  Though the non-Kauaian locals rarely use it to describe themselves, haoles have bought up, inhabited, “improved” or otherwise developed most of this small island according to their own tropical esthetic ideal.  While this is not all gated communities and bulldozed archeological sites, of course, it’s had a pretty big impact on the place.  What is left remains so through the protection of state or federal mandate, the benevolent stewardship of agribusiness, or the absolute reality of no way to get there.  There really is only one road from one side of the island to the other.  Of course, this is only the latest wave of folks to come to the island, make a new life, create new industries, and take full advantage of the environment, the people -- and damn the consequences.  This story repeats itself throughout history and all over the world as I write… but that’s another blog topic.

Capturing the complex mix of global forces affecting Kaua’i over the last 236 years since Captain James Cook’s landing (1778) ought to be an easy enough job – it’s not like we’re talking millennia?  But, where to begin with such a tale?   James Mitchner, I’m told, gives an exhaustive attempt with his historic fictional epic, Hawaii, first published in 1959.  It’s a little dated of course and I’m not sure that all of his assumptions hold water – however I aim to take a crack at all 937 pages.  Could it be a tougher read than The Deathly Hallows?

Of course every type of belief system comes with its own Kool-aid and in this the cultures of Kaua’i are no different than any other place.  Perhaps it is the intimate nature of this small island, the inability to escape easily, or the fact that it has only one road which forces people to wear their identities on their sleeve.  However, I’ve never felt more like a stranger in a strange land than here.   

Next up – Love bomb?  

*haole means “without breath” which refers to western European’s non-participation in the traditional Polynesian greeting of touching foreheads and noses together to share in the breath of life – beginning with Cook.  It remains a description of those people who have come to Kauai and remain outsiders.