Born to the Land

We meet KB, the caretaker of the property where we’re staying. In his mid-fifties, KB won’t tell me his real name, which somehow seems befitting his immigrant status – anonymity is what a lot of outsiders come looking for. “I’m originally from the San Francisco Bay area and I came here four years ago to build some cabinets,” he says. “Shortly after arriving I felt that I had to stay here. I didn’t want to leave.”

As it starts to rain, we move under the covered veranda of the main beach house and settle on two sofas. The sound of the rain beating down on the roof is soothing. I ask KB why he wanted to stay. “The people, the weather, the quiet solitude, the slow pace, the…”—he hesitates before finishing the thought—”the swimming.” He laughs. “I like to swim. I like the island style. Things go easily and people are intent on preserving their traditions, and I respect that. And I think that they’ll be successful. It’s an island, so it’s a place where you can keep the world at bay if you want to.”

In the distance a rainbow starts to form, framing our view of neighbouring Maui.

“Molokai has a chance of succeeding,” he continues, “because on this island there aren’t the natural wonders that tend to attract tourists and make it a mecca for tourist games. It’s beautiful in its own way, but it’s not beautiful in the way that the other Hawaiian islands are. So, hopefully, it will remain Molokai.”

The island has already withstood one invasion and stayed true to itself. KB points out that the introduction of plantation agriculture on the west end of the island is responsible for its barrenness today. “The growers have come and gone and changed the west end of the island to meet their need,” he says. “It’s been messed about by the corporations and it survived. I think that is one of the main attractions, that it survived all these privations by outsiders, which means that it has an inner strength that will make it stay itself.”

I go into the kitchen to grab a couple of beers and when I walk back onto the porch a wild hen with her chicks following darts out from a thicket of bushes and scurries across the yard in front of us. This shifts our conversation to the island’s idiosyncrasies.

“People do things the Molokai way. They don’t approve of the way people do things on other islands or continents.” KB’s referring primarily to hunting, small-scale farming, fishing and boat building, but also rituals around celebrations and food.

“If you come from another place, that means that there is plenty to learn here, and it’s good to learn from people who, know how to be on their own portion of the Earth.”

Four-wheel-drive jeep is the only way to travel into Kamakou Preserve—2,774 acres of lush rainforest that scales the slopes of 5,000-ft Mt. Kamakou. At Cory’s Lunch Wagon in town we rendezvous with our guide, Bob Livingston of the Nature Conservancy of Hawaii. Livingston transfers his sleeping four-year-old daughter to our jeep and we begin the hard drive along a double track dirt road.

During our stay on Molokai we’ve already experienced the hard rains the island typically receives, and this happens to be the wettest spring in 20 years. But the precipitation is even heavier at Kamakou, at the summit of which it’s almost always raining. It’s the wettest and wildest region of Molokai and the only road through it is the one we’re on, which is flooded in many parts and barely safe. But the moisture is what makes this place so rich—of the roughly 250 plants found here, 219 of them are endemic.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.