Waking Up In Eden Part 3

Bill functioned as the star, the front man who stroked the donors, while I cleaned up behind him as a glorified aide-de-camp. It fell to me to make rational sense of his grandiose projects, to put prices on them, then wrap them up in attractive packages. And I struggled. What could I say about the Garden, an inst.i.tution that had sold itself on its potential for thirty years? Other botanical gardens around the country operated as big businesses, with multimillion-dollar-per-year gift shops, rental fees for weddings, symphony evenings, lectures, and full education programs. We had none of those.

What is a botanical garden? The name has been applied to gardens ranging from extensive research facilities a.s.sociated with major universities and botanical inst.i.tutes to tiny munic.i.p.al parks that support little or no scientific activity. Many public and private "display gardens" - such as Allerton Garden - contain superb plant collections but do not provide labeling or maintain records on the plants in their collections.

The official definition comes from the Botanic Gardens Conservation Strategy, published in 1989 by the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. It states that a botanical garden contains "scientifically ordered and maintained collections of plants, usually doc.u.mented and labeled, and open to the public for the purposes of recreation, education and research."

NTBG didn't do well by those criteria either. Bill Klein had asked an old Air Force buddy and fellow botanist, Dr. Richard Mandell, to come out and survey the NTBG collections. He found that two-thirds of the plant holdings in the garden had lost their labels, had disappeared, and/or were of unknown provenance.

I flipped through a thick file. In 1989, the Garden won a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant to botanize the islands, that is, send field researchers out to find out what plants and how many grew there. Botanical records for Hawaii date back to 1779, when amateur botanist David Nelson sailed with Captain Cook and collected samples, which he took back to England. But for the next two hundred years, much of the islands' difficult terrain lay unexplored by botanists.

All of the Garden's five botanists and horticulturists in the Plant Science Department functioned as field collectors. Two of them, Steve Perlman and Ken Wood, used climbing equipment to scale vertical cliff ledges and rock columns, reaching habitats and ecosystems never examined before by any man, much less a botanist. The last of the completely untouched Hawaiian landscape survives only on these breathtakingly narrow snippets of land and ledges, undisturbed by encroaching agriculture or feral pigs or goats.

Perlman and Wood produced impressive results. They discovered twenty-nine new plant species and rediscovered another twenty-two thought to be extinct. At the bottom of a page summarizing the Garden's explorations, I found a short paragraph set off, in smaller, agate type: Since 1990, NTBG has conducted 893 field expeditions throughout the Hawaiian Islands, atolls, and promontories. This is the most comprehensive survey of the Hawaiian Islands ever undertaken.

Eureka!

As I dug further, I discovered another unheralded factoid buried in Garden reports: A part-time nursery worker named Kerin Lilleeng-Rosenberger had developed growing methods for more than 75 percent of all native Hawaiian plants, another feat never before accomplished.

I could see a narrative: The Garden's daring explorers climbed remote regions of Hawaii to search for plants once thought extinct. They discovered lost species and brought back rare seeds to the botanical garden. There, the pioneering horticulturist coaxed life from them in experimental growing techniques. In the botanical garden, rare plants flowered in protection, ready to repopulate the earth.

Our north sh.o.r.e garden, Limahuli, was already attracting attention for its conservation efforts. I had immediately liked its young director, Chipper Wichman, who envisioned that the entire one-thousand-acre Limahuli Valley could be protected in its nearly pristine state, then used as a repository for rare nursery seedlings. Chipper, a boyish, lanky man in his forties, had shown such promise that Bill Klein further encouraged him as his logical successor to the entire NTBG empire.

ONE PLANT IN PARTICULAR, Brighamia insignis, showed how a brave plant hunter could single-handedly save a species. Steve Perlman had rescued this strange-looking plant with its bulbous base sprouting an elephant-skinned pole topped by a cabbage-like burst of foliage. In order to flesh out my story line, I frequently walked down the lanai to the Science Building to catch Perlman. I learned to look for piles of mud-stained backpacks outside his office, indicating that he had returned from a collecting trip.

"To me, Brighamia is a world cla.s.slooking plant," Perlman enthused when I found him one day in the Garden's herbarium, the seed and dried specimen repository that always smelled of formaldehyde. "They get a huge water storage base. They're six feet tall. The leaves are nothing much, but the flowers are." The Brighamia insignis species on Kauai sends out waxy cl.u.s.ters of tubular flowers, lemon in color. On the sea cliffs of Molokai, its other primary habitat, another variety produces cream-colored flowers. "Put it all together, it's a really spectacular-looking plant," he said. "I really like it."

Perlman had arrived on Kauai in the 1970s, drawn by the surfing, a sport that almost took his life. A monster wave at Polihale Beach broke his neck a couple of decades ago. He recovered, and although he has since broken other small parts - toes, fingers, and a cracked rib - it never deterred him from either riding waves or climbing treacherous slopes.

He first worked on Kauai as a nurseryman on a private estate, spending his spare time hiking the island and learning its terrain. As he became enamored of the native Hawaiian plant story, he studied horticulture at Kauai Community College and enrolled in the first cla.s.s of student interns at the Garden, then named the Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden. When the Garden hired him, he apprenticed himself to staff botanist Derral Herbst for field collecting trips. Herbst, more stout, didn't like to climb trees or cliffs, so Perlman scrambled up them. Fashioning a homemade harness and knotted ropes, he would attach one end to a st.u.r.dy tree at the top of a cliff, then rappel down. As he became more skilled and learned to use professional climbing gear, he embarked on his own field investigations, employing mules, boats, and helicopters to drop him off on islets and rock pinnacles to reach those inaccessible nether regions.

Now in his forties, Perlman had grown only more impa.s.sioned, if possible, about his mission to botanize the untrammeled islands of the Pacific. Sun had bleached his fringe of blond hair to almost white, in sharp contrast to a tan that seemed to seep down to the bone, making his blue eyes appear the color of lake ice. If he could choose, he'd spend most of his time in the field. Few can keep up with him on his explorations, or want to, as many trips involve weeks of rough camping. "A lot of people can hike two or three days, but it's the fourth or fifth day on a trip that is the tough one," he says.

I remembered my first botanizing trip, to the New Jersey Pine Barrens with Philadelphia botanist Ernest Schuyler, to research a story about a rare disappearing but nondescript gra.s.s. We tramped for hours through a hot haze of golden gra.s.s marshes, discovering sundews - insect-catching bog plants - and a myriad of gra.s.s sedges that all looked alike to my novice eye. After hours we sat down in the shade to rest, me fidgeting all the while. "You're going to have to learn patience," Schuyler told me.

Perlman first saw Brighamia insignis through binoculars as he stood, looking up, from the bottom of vertical sea cliffs on Kauai's Na Pali Coast. Two thousand feet above him, at the very edge of a rock ledge, a magnificent six-foot-tall specimen swayed back and forth on its bowling-pin-shaped base. Excited, Perlman shared his discovery with Harold St. John, chief botanist at Honolulu's Bernice P. Bishop Museum. St. John suggested trying to grow it, so in order to collect seeds, Perlman scrambled up the cliff and rappelled down into a drift of more than one hundred Brighamia plants. An intimate love affair began.

Throughout his career, Perlman regularly visited Brighamia populations. A few developed seeds, which Perlman collected and sent to botanists at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew; to Rancho Santa Anna Botanic Garden in California; and to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Florida. The botanists wrote back that they were successfully growing Brighamia.

But Perlman noticed that many of the Brighamia plants growing in the wild never produced seeds. They flowered, then the blossoms seemed to melt away without a trace. Fortunately, the plants were able to produce stamen heavy with golden pollen. So Perlman stepped in as surrogate father. He used a paintbrush, an old breeder's trick, to transfer pollen from the stamen on some plants into waiting pistils of others. A month later, he returned. It had worked. The plants developed fruit that ripened to seeds, giving him more to collect. He brought them back to the botanical garden.

FRENCH COLLECTOR JULES REMY first doc.u.mented the genus Brighamia in 1851 on the islands of Niihau, Kauai, Molokai, and Maui and named it after William Tufts Brigham (1841 1926), a geologist and early collector of Hawaiian plants. Although one of the large Lobeliaceae family in Hawaii, Brighamia is the only lobelia with a succulent stem and ancillary inflorescences, or soft branches, that carry erect flowers. The weighty base allows it to rock in the wind. The succulent green leaves feel somewhat rubbery and store water during drought. Horizontal roots can penetrate deep creva.s.ses in a sheer rock face.

The mere sight of a tall Brighamia can inspire awe but also a smile, because of its almost comical swollen base. In 1919, the botanist Joseph Rock recorded some specimens growing fifteen feet tall. More commonly it reaches three to six feet.

Perlman theorizes that very large moths once penetrated the six- to eight-inch-long flowers to serve as pollinators. Large sphinx moths - similar to those I thought were hummingbirds in my first days on Kauai - are likely candidates. Collectors used to commonly net Kauai's legendary green sphinx moth as it fluttered along the Na Pali Coast and across the high forests of Kokee State Park. But in the last fifty years, only twenty or so have been caught. Perlman believes that as Brighamia retreated to cliff edges, sphinx moths no longer ventured into the unprotected open where they could be s.n.a.t.c.hed by aggressive cardinals or white-eyes. Without its natural pollinator, the Brighamia withered away.

By this time Perlman had tracked Brighamia onto the highest sea cliffs in the world, on the smaller island of Molokai, home of the infamous Kalaupapa leper colony. There he found the Brighamia rockii (named after Dr. Rock) species. Again he used his paintbrush.

Perlman had seen reports by botanists working in the early 1900s that Brighamia also grew on Haupu, the mountain hump that looms over Kauai's south sh.o.r.e. For six years, he looked for them without success, hiking all around its foothills, even hiring a helicopter to drop him off at the summit.

One Sunday in the early 1980s, he attended a party at the Lihue home of Chipper Wichman's grandmother Juliet Rice Wichman, one of the early Garden trustees and an avid plants-woman. Perlman confided to her his quest to find the lost Brighamia on Haupu. She remembered a long-ago party held near the canoe club on the Huleia River, in 1917. A couple of boys from the Lydgate family paddled directly across the river and hiked partway up Mount Haupu. After about an hour, they returned holding big poles of plants - Brighamia!

Perlman immediately decided to retrace their route. He went to the canoe club, paddled a straight line across the river, and headed up a mountain gorge. Half an hour from the river, he approached a cliff, hiked around a corner, and found a small grove of Brighamia. That's how botanists work. Like detectives, they pore over the field notes of other botanists and herbarium records and pursue oral histories in order to track down plant populations.

Year after year, Perlman returned to the Haupu Brighamia drift of about a dozen plants. They served as the breeding stock for our botanical garden. Hurricane Iniki wiped them all out. One small plant survived alone in the Haupu gorge for a few years, but then it died. He used to get seeds from a few plants on Kauai near the ridge above Mahaulepu and the Kipu Kai gap, also on the south sh.o.r.e, but those plants also vanished after the hurricane.

Brighamia colonies are crashing all over Hawaii.

Perlman is the first to admit that it's an uphill battle to convince people of the need to save rare and nearly extinguished plants. His local friends look at the Kauai jungles and don't see that the island's plants are in danger. It's all green, they say, not realizing that most of it nowadays is alien scheffleras, guavas, and other imports. In frustration, Perlman finally started to tell his friends that the native Hawaiian plants taste good in stir-fry, like bok choy. Only that convinced them that the plants were worth saving.

Selling the public on conservation of endangered species has never been easy - that's why a big mammal like a whale or giant panda gets to be the poster child for such campaigns. The plant people have tried to construct a worldwide database for tracking plant populations and storing seeds, but not much has been done for Hawaii, where scientific collaboration seems almost nonexistent and tropical seeds are too pulpy to last very long. Botanists in general have typically been a timid lot, usually confined to their dusty herbariums. That was the beauty of Bill Klein - he realized that only by engaging a wider public would anything really be accomplished. He saw the botanical garden's real role as education. "People only will make an effort to save something they care about, and to care about it, they have to know about it," he'd say.

Plants provide everything we humans need - the oxygen to breathe, crops to eat, grain to feed animals, even the fossil fuels we so greedily consume. There are many examples of obscure tropical rain forest plants that have proved to contain ingredients for valuable medicines or other uses. A native Hawaiian cotton plant, for instance, can't be spun into cloth, but was so disease resistant that commercial growers hybridized it to produce a stronger cotton.

The need to preserve the inhabitants, plant or animal, on Earth should be obvious enough; they exist, whether we humans have use for them or not. Who knows what we'll discover about them in the future? When tinkering with the machinery, don't throw any pieces away.

In my mind, just the very beauty of each species demands divine protection. We probably wouldn't miss the elimination of a trombone or two in a two-hundred-piece orchestra. But if you take away the oboes, then lose the violas, misplace the winds, and remove the cymbals, you begin to hear a meager, dull band instead of a symphony.

Over the last twenty years, Perlman has pollinated by brush at least one hundred Brighamia plants. His collected seed yielded thousands of plants grown in the Garden nursery that have been sent to other Hawaiian botanical gardens.

A lot of people became familiar with Brighamia's dramatic story thanks to the film Hidden Hawaii, which played at the Waikiki IMAX theater in Honolulu for more than a decade. The filmmakers pushed Perlman to exaggerate his cliff climbing, portraying him stretched spread-eagle across rocks and dangling more precariously from precipices than his usual cautious style. Now you can buy a T-shirt with a picture of the semi-ugly little cabbage plant, a symbol of plant rescue.

But the publicity hasn't helped save the plant.

"Pretty soon, all Brighamia will die out," says Perlman. "They are going very quickly and probably will be extinct in the wild in twenty years."

PART TWO.

Digging In.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Chicken Skin.

NIGHTS IN THE Kleins' ohana, I delved into the literature of Hawaiiana. I plowed through the journals of Captain Cook's voyages aboard his ships, Discovery and Resolution, then attacked Jack London. London first visited Hawaii in 1904, then returned several times with his second wife, Charmian. They frequented Waikiki, where London learned to surf. Incongruously, he lived on Oahu when he wrote "To Build a Fire," his most famous short story about death in Alaska's Arctic tundra. Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii recounted his own travels throughout the islands in 1866. Writing dispatches for The Sacramento Union, Twain bought a sorry-looking horse to ride up the volcanoes, tried his hand at surfing, and ate poi at luaus. Back then, Hawaii was a mythic land, occupying a position in the American conscious as a faraway paradise of savages and bare-breasted beauties.

But it was Isabella Lucy Bird to whom I kept returning. Bird grew up a semi-invalid and amateur botanist, the spinster daughter of an English clergyman. A spinal deformity required her to lie down much of the time, and depression sometimes kept her in bed all day. In 1872, the year she turned forty, she sailed on a recuperative cruise to the South Seas. A typhoon damaged her ship, and it limped into Honolulu Harbor. While the ship underwent repairs, so did she. For six months she explored the islands on horseback in what became a life-changing experience, then a book published under the t.i.tle Six Months in the Sandwich Islands. Throwing off the restraints of a refined Victorian lady, Bird trekked by mule up the icy mountainside of Mauna Loa on the Big Island. She galloped the coast of Kauai at midnight, alone, and visited its enchanted rain forests. No camping in huts or long rides were too rough.

Many of her detailed accounts describing the Hawaiian flora and its lush jungle landscapes rent with pouring waterfalls were still accurate more than one hundred years later. Her writing helped me imagine nineteenth-century Hawaii, as well as understand it today. But it was her life story that intrigued me. I had only its briefest outlines. She never returned to Hawaii but went on to travel through Korea, Persia, j.a.pan, and elsewhere, becoming the foremost British woman travel writer of her era.

"Her last years were sad, indeed," wrote Terence Barrow, Ph.D., in the foreword to a 1974 paperback edition of her Hawaii book. Barrow recounted how Bird had married after Hawaii, but her husband died within five years. She lived out the next decades in loneliness, he said. Even with this sketchy information, I questioned whether we were hearing Barrow's personal views on the suitable life for ladies, or Isabella's own a.s.sessment. Any woman who had thrown off the shackles of convention, galloped alone at midnight through jungle ravines, and then went on to travel for the next thirty years on the back of yak, pony, mule, or stallion did not strike me as a woman paralyzed by early widowhood and sentenced to bleak loneliness.

Sad, indeed, eh? I rankled at this presumption that the most celebrated female travel writer of the nineteenth century lived unfulfilled, despite her unorthodox success. Or was it precisely because of her unorthodox life you drew this conclusion, Mr. Terence Barrow, Ph.D.?

Isabella herself gave no hint of self-a.n.a.lysis in her writing; self-disclosure was not the Victorian style. Perhaps because of this lack of information, my imagination filled in the blanks. Here was a woman in profound midlife crisis who, after forty years of refinement, abandoned her corsets and petticoats to plunge headfirst into the tropics. She had not chosen an easy path, or one free from conflict and ambiguity. What made her take such a leap? It became my habit to pick up Six Months in the Sandwich Islands and read Isabella's description of each place I visited. I found myself comparing then and now. While she described Hawaii of a century ago, I wanted to report on its contrasts, the modern next to the archaic.

I kept wondering, Isabella, what happened to you?

DAVID CHANG WAITED in the Koloa library parking lot, his face tight with irritation, almost tapping his foot because I was ten minutes late. About my age and graying at the temples, he was collecting an oral history of Koloa, so I wanted to consult him about Isabella Bird's sojourn in the area. Trying to conscript him as an ally, I pulled out a photocopy of an 1868 map I had found at the Kauai Historical Society. "I'm trying to figure out exactly where Isabella Bird traveled during her four weeks on Kauai," I ventured. "She sailed in at Koloa Landing in 1873 and was met by Dr. James Smith."

"Back then Koloa Landing was the third largest whaling port in all of Hawaii," offered Chang, warming up. Now only a concrete boat ramp remains, where outrigger canoe clubs put their crafts into the water and snorkelers dive in the thirty-five-foot-deep water.

"Dr. Smith must have brought her to Koloa on the old Hapa Road," I said, tracing on the map the route of a now unused dirt track. Dr. Smith lived up the road in what Isabella described as a large adobe structure with a heavy thatched roof next to the old Koloa Church. The doctor put her up in a white thatched guest cottage overlooking Waikomo Stream.

Chang pondered, "The church has been rebuilt, but it's been on the same spot since 1835." We walked up the road and crossed the street to the church grounds to find the bend in the stream she had described. No solid evidence of a cottage. But we rummaged through dead leaves and found a pile of broken bricks, stucco, and stones of an old hearth. It could easily date to the 1870s.

One local history book a.s.serted that Isabella rode through the lands now owned by the botanical garden. On another trip, she trekked west to the town of Hanapepe. Chang provided confirmation. "Back in the old days," he said, "Koloa Road and Route 50 didn't exist. Only one road traveled to the west side. Lauoho," he said, running his finger on the map along the snake-curved road I knew well.

"You're kidding. Lauoho? That means she rode right by the property where my cottage is now?"

"Yeah, that was the only way she could go," he said. I shivered in eerie delight. Hawaiians have a name for the goose-b.u.mply reaction to strange and beautiful events that seem to have been divined by unseen forces.

Chicken skin, they call it.

WHEN HE HEARS ME honk the horn, he usually comes running out of the brush and races to the pasture gate as if he were Secretariat, snorting and stamping and showing off. But today he doesn't appear, nor his girlfriend, Zealy, a mare from New Zealand. I open the old metal refrigerator lying on its side that we use as a feed locker, and scoop out pellets of compressed alfalfa. And although I keep whistling, still no Bo.

I start the long hike back through the brush, along narrow horse trails, up a rock pile, and through a scrub forest. Fresh droppings. Evidence that they've been down this way recently. Air plants fill the field with tall stems shooting up to waist height with thousands of lanternlike translucent pods that dance in the bright morning light.

Silent beehives lean at angles, remnants of a long ago plantation house. Wild cane and gra.s.s grows higher and higher, until it closes over my head. I seem to shrink smaller and smaller, as if going back to my childhood wanderings in Minnesota, where parents allowed their children to roam out of sight without fear. My friends and I would go miles into what we called "the Secret Woods," far from adult supervision and into a fantasy of adventures and dangers, of deep glens haunted by witches and winged horses named Pegasus.

With slight apprehension, I enter the horses' private realm as if finding myself inside the zoo cage with the animals. Nests of beaten-down brush form their private rooms of tall gra.s.s. A rustling of leaves and thud of hooves announce their approach. Suddenly, Bo towers before me, head thrown back and nostrils flaring. The sun burnishes his dark brown coat to a shiny copper. He lumbers over at a slow walk, lowering his head shyly and preening. He noses behind my back for a carrot. I let him take it in his mouth, but don't let go, so he'll bite off a big chunk. I give the other half to Zealy, close on his heels. Bo nuzzles my hand, and I pat his neck then reach up to give him a hug, which he tolerates for a few seconds.

As I head back to the front pasture, Bo follows me, his nose too close, b.u.mping me on the shoulder. Then both he and Zealy simultaneously remember that I usually leave grain in their feed pans. They p.r.i.c.k their ears up, look forward, then rush off in an almost silent run, weaving through the trees. It takes me longer. I find the two of them with their heads down in the feed. I easily slip a halter over Bo's neck and wait for Val to show up.

I was surprised that horses were such a ubiquitous part of the Hawaiian landscape, and have been for a long time. After English and American colonists arrived with bulls and cows in the early 1800s, so many cattle escaped that they bred into dangerous herds stampeding over several islands. Finally King Kamehameha III imported Spanish vaqueros from Mexico to teach Hawaiians how to rope and ride. The Hawaiians coined the word paniolo, from the Spanish word espanol, for these island cowboys. Riding, roping, and rodeos remain an important part of rural Hawaiian life. Declare any day a holiday, and Hawaiians hold rodeos and parades that may have few partic.i.p.ants or spectators, but always attract paniolos astride their horses, festooned with leis.

Mark Twain and Isabella Bird both noted in their Hawaiian journals how much the Hawaiians loved to ride. Nineteenth-century ladies dressed up in long Victorian gowns, donned leis of crimson ohia flowers, and galloped in packs down the streets of Honolulu. Bird wrote, "The women seemed perfectly at home in their gay, bra.s.s-embossed, high peaked saddles flying along astride, bare-footed, with their orange and scarlet riding dresses streaming on each side beyond their horses' tails, a bright kaleidoscopic flash of bright eyes, white teeth, shining hair, garlands of flowers and many colored dresses."

Isabella herself concocted an island riding outfit that must have startled the natives. She donned Turkish-style bloomer pants, New Zealand boots, Mexican spurs, and a flannel riding coat.

I HAD FOUND Bo by chance. I often spent Sat.u.r.days or Sundays in the office, but one late Friday afternoon, hungry for a change of routine, I impulsively booked a weekend trail ride at Silver Falls Ranch on the north sh.o.r.e.

That day I joined a group of six, all tourists I presumed, and followed a guide on a rather tame, flat trail. We stopped at a waterfall tumbling into a dark green pool, and some of us plunged in for a swim. One of the other riders, a woman named Val Pilari, accompanied her ten-year-old granddaughter on the ride. As water cascaded over our heads, I learned that Val, too, was a resident, and lived near Poipu Beach on the south sh.o.r.e. She already owned one horse, but wanted another so she could ride with her grandchildren or husband. It all seemed natural and plausible when she asked if I'd be interested in going halves on a horse. Sure, I said offhandedly. Although I had some riding experience, owning a horse in Philadelphia had cost too much to contemplate. I had fantasized about trying to re-create Isabella Bird's horseback adventures. Unexpectedly, I was presented with the means to realize that dream.

When Val telephoned a few weeks later to report that she had found a horse, I was skeptical of entering such a partnership with someone I had met only once. Yet I instinctively sensed honesty in Val. She had owned horses all her life, for which I would be immeasurably grateful when she schooled me on the particulars of feed and the treatment for rain rot, a fungus that appeared on Bo's hindquarters during the rainy season.

We drove together to the Anini Beach polo grounds on the north sh.o.r.e where weekly games are held, a vestige of the old plantation elite's pastimes. A grizzled, not particularly trustworthy-appearing polo wrangler wanted to unload a six-year-old islandbred mix of quarter horse and thoroughbred. The horse, named Bo, hadn't taken to the fast pace of polo. An excellent recommendation in my mind.

The man easily roped and saddled a dark brown horse so skinny his ribs showed. Val elected to watch while I mounted and trotted around the polo field, gratified when the gelding responded to my commands to turn, slow, and halt. I reined in, reporting that Bo appeared well trained.

We paid, the wrangler threw in an old, broken-in saddle and some sorry-looking tack, worn and stiff with disuse, and we had our horse. Later, when Bo showed himself difficult to handle, Val would say, "That guy drugged Bo the day you tried him."

For an unbelievably low price, Val rented a five-acre fenced pasture near Poipu. Tall gra.s.s grew so deep that the horses could eat themselves fat, eliminating the need for daily feeding. Best of all, riding on Kauai meant saddling up and riding cross-country in whatever direction we pleased. We spurned the Western saddles used by most riders in Hawaii in favor of English, and were among the few who wore safety helmets. I, the greenhorn, followed Val, her long blond ponytail bobbing ahead of me with insouciant confidence, as she led us on canehaul roads up into the hills, canters around the Waita Reservoir, and along spots of deserted coastline. My hands scrabbled desperately to cling to Bo's mane as we galloped the dirt road that circled a long-dead volcano cone like a racetrack.

One day, as we broke from the cool shade of feathery ironwood trees, the horses' hooves clattered on hard lava rock. As always, I thrilled at the deserted beauty of Mahaulepu Beach's two miles of uninhabited sh.o.r.e stretching below us, while fighting terror at how close we pranced near a cliff edge over unforgiving waves and rocks forty feet below. Bo contentedly followed Val on Zealy and we turned onto a narrow trail that disappeared into a forest of ironwood pine. Down, down we lurched until we reached a small stream. "Wait, wait, not so fast. I have trouble holding him downhill," I called in panic.

Bo had quickly fattened up and now snorted full of life, stubborn and resistant. I could barely hold him back from a run. We reached the stream delta as it emptied into the sunstruck ocean, wading into the water, the horses wet up to their girths. Zealy splashed, kicking up sparkles of water. It's against the law to ride on the beach in Hawaii, but n.o.body saw us in the early morning or at twilight. Bo ventured only a few feet into the swirling waves. I turned him toward land, into a slow canter along the hard sand at water's edge. His legs stretched out further and further as we flew, seemingly afloat a few feet above the ground. We followed a path along cane fields and out to a small cove where a half dozen Hawaiian fishermen camped for the weekend. We cantered up dunes, then out to a headland peninsula, surrounded by the warmth of the sea breezes and the sunny azure of the Pacific.

I had become determined to know the island, and Bo allowed me to trek further into its depths. I'd never cover it entirely, nor lose the fear of getting lost. The jungle greens run together as endless camouflage, and you often can't tell whether you're up or down, much less east, west, north, or south. In the islands there are only two useful directions, makai - toward the ocean, and mauka - toward the mountains. Although the island was only thirty miles in diameter, hikers and hunters often became disoriented, sometimes wandering without food or water for three days or more before stumbling on other hikers or search parties. Some people never get found. They step closer to a cliff's edge for the view, not realizing until too late that the greenery underfoot grew over air, not terra firma.

I had an urge to replicate Isabella Bird's three-day trek on horseback from Koloa to the homestead of Mrs. Eliza Sinclair in the hills above Hanapepe on the west side. In the early 1800s, the Sinclairs had emigrated from Scotland to New Zealand, where they ama.s.sed a shipping fortune. When her sea captain husband died, Eliza loaded up her large family onto a sailing vessel and set out in search of a Utopia. She bought the small island of Niihau, seventeen miles northwest of Kauai, but later moved the family over to the more populated Kauai. Her descendents, the Robinson family, still owned one-third of the Garden Island. About twenty Robinsons remained on the island, holding shares of an estimated one hundred thousand acres, worth more than half a billion dollars. Patriarch Warren Robinson appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine in an article that described the family as one of the five hundred wealthiest in America but cash poor, crippled by inheritance and property taxes. Another cousin, Bruce Robinson, told the magazine that he was so poor that he ate in a restaurant only three times a year and subsisted on meat hunted in the mountains.

Isabella Bird had set out from the Sinclair mountain homestead for Hanapepe Falls, a perilous journey that required crossing and recrossing a boulder-strewn stream until she reached the sheer drop of water over green walls into a mist-shrouded pool. Now everybody calls them Jura.s.sic Park Falls, because they formed a backdrop for a dramatic shot by director Steven Spielberg for his movie of that name. Because the Robinsons employ armed workers to protect against trespa.s.sing, about the only way to see the falls now is from a tourist helicopter ride.

One Sinclair descendent, the eccentric Keith Robinson, tended what he called his "Outlaw Preserve" in the inaccessible hills. Forget it, everybody told me; you'll never get in. He hates the National Tropical Botanical Garden and everybody in it. Unless by some miracle I could sweeten up the Robinsons, I would have to give up on re-creating Isabella's ride to the falls.

Yet I couldn't shake the desire to live Isabella's experience. As she pierced the fern-shrouded Kauai forest and climbed higher on that trail one hundred years ago, she reached a high meadow. All around them soared knife-edge peaks covered in velvet green. She reveled in a day as brilliant and as cool as an English June, writing: "The sweet, joyous trade wind could not be brewed elsewhere than on the Pacific. The scenery was glorious, and mountains, trees, frolicsome water, and scarlet birds, all rioted as if in conscious happiness. Existence was luxury and reckless riding a mere outcome of the animal spirits of horses and riders, and the thud of the shoeless feet as the horses galloped over the soft gra.s.s was sweeter than music. If happiness is atmosphere, we were happy."

AFTER A RIDE, I would hose down Bo, rinse my own arms, streaked with sweat, horse smell, and red dust, and, alone at my car, I might wiggle into a swimsuit and drive down to Poipu Beach, only five minutes away, to fall into the ocean. Although my stiff and bruised limbs protested at the initial plunge into cold salt water, I did it just because I could.

Now I regularly kept my saddle in the trunk and snorkel gear in the backseat.

When I moved to Hawaii, I was conscious that I followed in a long tradition of lady writers retreating to pastoral countryside to write, to observe nature, to face solitude, to lick our wounds.

There was Annie Dillard and her astonishing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Who could forget her account of watching an insect suck the innards out of a frog, or her other quiet observations of the natural world? She wrote it at twenty-five and promptly thereafter won the Pulitzer Prize.

But while admiring her, I was more interested in middleaged women like myself, who faced adversity. Their country retreats became do-or-die missions. They were determined to write truth, find peace, and live fully. I needed to know how they survived and triumphed over all the slings and arrows that the world had flung and still got up and lived with joy.

When digging my first garden in Philadelphia, a friend gave me a copy of May Sarton's Plant Dreaming Deep. Like so many other women, I was enchanted by the sensitive poet's account of moving, in her late forties, to her first house, a dilapidated eighteenth-century New Hampshire farmhouse which she renovated into a cozy nest. She dug out the surrounding land to build gardens. The book turned Sarton into a cult object, an early icon of feminine independence, particularly among young female undergraduates.

With some eagerness I plowed through some of Sarton's later journals, written at age seventy, eighty, and eighty-two, to find clues about how a woman alone faced old age. She continued to create, particularly the poems that const.i.tute her best work. She wrote frankly of struggling to garden at age eighty, missing it when she couldn't plunge her hands into dirt. I picked up her journal about how she eventually left New Hampshire to occupy a rented house on the coast of Maine. In it she confessed continuing doubts from which I'd like to be free. "Thinking so much these days about what it is to be a woman. I wonder whether an ingrained sense of guilt is not one feminine characteristic," she wrote. "A man who has no children may feel personally deprived but he does not feel guilty, I suspect. A woman who has no children is always a little on the defensive."

I learned from a later journal that her Nelson, New Hampshire, house had not been terribly isolated, and in fact fronted on the town green. The first biography of May Sarton, by noted literary biographer Margot Peters, further destroyed my enchantment. Peters revealed Sarton as often hysterical and selfdelusional, p.r.o.ne to martini-fueled rages. Even her romance of life alone at the Nelson house was semi-fake, mere s.n.a.t.c.hes between hectic, frenzied activity and multiple visits from various lesbian girlfriends. Worse, she desperately stalked some targets of her frantic, unrequited l.u.s.t.

Of course, many of our most famous solitaires were not as sequestered as they let on. A modern examination of Th.o.r.eau's letters and notes show that he frequently forsook the quiet of Walden Pond to run off for dinner with friends in Cambridge, a distance of fourteen miles. I abandoned May Sarton as a role model, repelled by her looniness, and turned to Sue Hubbell's cla.s.sic, A Country Year: Living the Questions. Her story is irresistible. When a thirty-year marriage ends, she is alone and broke, making a living by keeping bees and selling the honey. Hubbell writes more knowledgably about her natural surroundings than Sarton ever could, and she emanates a rock-solid common sense. Perhaps more important for any memoirist, she abhorred the confessional, writing more as an astute reporter.

My own observations of the natural world began early. Shortly after my birth, my parents moved west from a small house in Minneapolis to the more countrified suburb of Hopkins. They expanded a big house to fit what eventually became a family of five children, in a charmed setting called Sherwood Forest. While my parents joined the other adults for entertainments, we children formed our own pack to climb trees, build forts, and wade for tadpoles and frogs in ponds and streams.

When I was four a new girl named Laurie Shepherd moved close by, and the two of us became best friends. We prided ourselves on running barefoot and bare-chested, pretending to be boys or Indians or Huck Finn. In truth, Laurie was more of a free spirit than I. She took our games more seriously, and even then I sensed she pushed the boundaries more than I dared. By junior high, we drifted apart; then at age thirteen, my family moved to Connecticut. I never saw Laurie again. I heard that she was building her own log cabin in the deep woods of northern Minnesota and was writing a book about it.

For decades, I avoided finding that book, A Dreamer's Log Cabin: A Woman's Walden, most likely out of jealousy. When I finally hunted it down, it brought tears to my eyes to read her remembrances of playing Robin Hood and Peter Pan in Sherwood Forest. I learned that after graduating from the University of Minnesota, she taught art in the small-town public school of Wabasha in southern Minnesota. She never let go of an ambition to live in a log cabin. To save for land and logs, Laurie quit teaching, sold her house, and worked almost around the clock as an insurance agent, bus driver, dishwasher, janitor, Army reservist, chimney sweep, and piano tuner. At age twenty-eight, she lived in a tent with her Siberian Husky and two cats and began constructing her dream house.

Laurie peeled bark from felled trees, bathed in the river, and fashioned a boom to lift her logs into place at the same time that I was married, living in a Manhattan apartment, and commuting to The Record newspaper in Bergen County, New Jersey. My foes were not large logs, but a newsroom full of aggressive reporters competing for good a.s.signments.

Often when people speak of searing childhood memories, they refer to mean poverty or abuse. Our adventures in the woods branded Laurie and me not only with a desire and need to forge strong friendships, but to run free in wild places. She still lives in her cabin, now with a husband and two children. And two decades behind her, I was soon going to inhabit a secluded cottage surrounded by empty Hawaiian valleys.