Waking Up In Eden Part 8

ALTHOUGH I HAD heard that the Allertons sometimes staged movie nights in the upstairs theater at the guesthouse, most of their film collection and home movies had been swept away by the hurricane. But when sorting through a file cabinet of Allerton doc.u.ments, I reached into the very back of a bottom drawer and found a bulky stack of three large manila envelopes, each folded around something circular. I opened them. Inside were old 16 mm film reels. G.o.d bless Rick Hanna, the pack rat; he'd saved everything he found. The tapes were so brittle, black, and twisted that they looked unsalvageable. I brought them next door into the frigid air-conditioning of the Garden library, where Rick sorted slides on a light table, using a magnifying loop. "Look what I found," I said, and held up the envelopes.

He moved over, and I unrolled a foot or two of the first one. "Adventures in New Caledonia," was the handwritten t.i.tle - obviously home movies from one of the Allerton trips. I put it away and turned to the envelope labeled "Slave." The film seemed in better condition, too. Peering through the photo loop, I could see that it was a professional film that the Allertons had purchased. I made out the words The Sultan and the Slave.

"Let's have a movie night!" I suggested.

It took a few phone calls to locate a vintage projector. To lend an authentic note of Allertonia to the atmosphere, I made curried duck baked in coconut sh.e.l.ls from a John Allerton favorite recipe that their housekeeper Sarah, James's wife, gave me. Rick set up the rented projector, threading the film leader into it. The t.i.tle image jumped up and down with the strain of disuse, but held. The story started with an image of the "Sultan" in brocade Arabian robe, a turban, and a fake goatee. "Slave" was naked, except for an itty-bitty triangle of shimmery cloth that covered an obviously generous endowment. All in campy pantomime, the handsome, young American actors enacted a story of the Slave stealing jewels and gold from his patron. Aside from lingering glances over alabaster bodies, no overt s.e.x occurred.

Rick and I nearly rolled on the floor in convulsions at the costumes and the corny, theatrical gestures of a silent gay B movie. It ended with a scene of remorse. Slave returned the stolen treasure and willingly locked himself in golden chains. A parable for John Allerton, perhaps?

"Gee, I hope their parties were better," Rick finally said, as the last frame faded to black. "This was so tame I could show it to my mother."

SARAH AND JAMES remembered the costume parties with fondness. The excitement started in the morning when John instructed Sarah to open the costume closets for airing and then selected the menu, most often his favorite roast lamb or a curry in a coconut. By the 1950s, Hollywood had discovered Kauai as a perfect jungle setting, a small island with epic locations. Sometimes the Allertons invited movie stars for dinner. Once, while serving dinner, James accidentally knocked off a bangled headpiece worn by the actor Joseph Cotten, who shot him a furious look while suppressing a laugh.

Guests were ushered upstairs into the guesthouse costume gallery to make their choices. Undoubtedly they ooohed and ahhed as they unfurled the silks and satins, twirling them in the sunlight to glimmer like giant b.u.t.terflies: lavender and pink silk kimonos from j.a.pan; gold-threaded cloaks from Indonesia; monks' robes from China; iridescent blue saris and scarlet pantaloons from India. Triangular corner cabinets held scores of hats and headdresses, everything from an opera top hat made of beaver to a Punjabi turban. Dozens of pointy shoes and glittery sandals lined the lower shelves, while shallow drawers held ropes of pearls, stagy rhinestone earrings, a hundred bracelet bangles, shiny buckles, and sparkly brooches.

Robert had begun the costume parties back at Allerton Park, his estate in central Illinois, where he scripted a transformation for arriving trainloads of weekend guests. He wanted them to leave behind their everyday life and proper city dress to a.s.sume a different persona when entering the garden. For Robert, the garden was an alchemist's stone that allowed him and his guests to discard societal conventions and become whoever, whatever, their fantasies could conjure. It was the place to converge foreign cultures and to mix up time and place, as in a dream, for a bright kaleidoscope of fancy. And for those who spent their whole lives in elaborate disguise, the costumes were a way to be themselves.

On Kauai, after guests had donned their finery, they were invited to pick up a lacquer box that held a picnic supper. As the sun descended in operatic splendor, torches lit the pathways and the plank bridge that spanned the Lawai Stream. Guests could wander as they wished, to find a ledge of trembling orchids or a glen of scented gra.s.ses.

To me, the whole Allerton story seemed a little too pat. Rich gentlemen stumble on paradise and move lock, stock, and barrel to a remote island. I had a hunch that something must have been going on in Chicago that would precipitate such a break. People seldom travel to such extremes unless they are escaping something. So on a visit to relatives outside of Chicago, I drove downtown to the University of Chicago's Joseph Regenstein Library. A historian of gay culture had pointed me to the archives of sociologist Ernest W. Burgess. Predating Alfred Kinsey's work at Indiana University by a decade, Burgess led the earliest extensive studies of American h.o.m.os.e.xual life. He a.s.signed dozens of his students to take notes at nightclubs, interview gay men and a few women, and write term papers on the subject.

To my astonishment, I found that Burgess and his students recorded in detail a growing gay underworld culture, which peaked in the late 1920s and early 1930s in what came to be known as Chicago's Pansy Craze. Gay cabarets, drag shows, and nightclubs openly proliferated throughout the Near North and South Side neighborhoods, a Chicago version of what was also happening in New York City. Annual Halloween b.a.l.l.s drew hundreds of men in drag and women in tuxedos. The nighttime entertainments did not just attract the "queers," as they were then called. High society and the middle cla.s.s flocked to the cabarets for the prurient thrill of dancing with one of the "h.o.m.os," or just to gawk.

There's no record that either of the Allertons went slumming at the drag shows along with others of their wealthy cla.s.s. It's hard to conceive that they would not, though perhaps they preferred their own, private entertainments. Years later when John Allerton was alone and elderly on Kauai, he described to a young botanist over late-night c.o.c.ktails how he and Robert had consorted with their own kind among the Illinois elite at carefully arranged and clandestine male-only dinner parties. A neighbor had outfitted his Chicago mansion dining room with a hydraulic lift to raise the dining table from the kitchen already laid with food, to keep the servants away. That was important, because all the guests were naked.

The Pansy Craze and the accompanying voyeuristic tolerance by the straight world didn't last long. By the Roaring Twenties, Chicago had descended deeply into its reputation as Sin City. Gangsters declared an open season and profited by flouting Prohibition. In 1933, as all of Chicago prepared for the Century of Progress International Exposition, fair organizers, criminals, and social reformers geared up for what turned out to be a last blowout. City leaders legalized beer again. Dozens more cabarets opened on the South Side.

Then the full weight of the Great Depression descended. The tourist trade evaporated. Reformers demanded that newly elected mayor Edward J. Kelly clean up nightlife and campaigned against strippers and female impersonators. By 1935 Kelly had eliminated queer nightlife. Chicago and the rest of the nation then hurtled into a full-scale s.e.x panic over what was named "the Moron Menace." A series of crimes, both petty and heinous, by peeping toms, rapists, child molesters, and murderers surged onto tabloid front pages. h.o.m.os.e.xuality was seen as a mental aberration and its pract.i.tioners equated with psychopaths and child molesters, all of them declared "s.e.x morons" and "s.e.x fiends." There was some legitimate concern - more than two dozen women and children were attacked over two years. But few by h.o.m.os.e.xuals. That didn't stop police from stepping up their surveillance of theaters and cruising spots, including the popular stretch of South State Street. Reformers pressed for a law to castrate s.e.x criminals.

In early 1937, Michigan pa.s.sed the nation's first s.e.xual psychopath law, allowing anyone even suspected of deviance to be sent away for an indeterminate length of time to a psychiatric hospital or penitentiary. Illinois legislators agitated loudly for similar measures. The following year, just as the Illinois legislature prepared to enact a bill to lock up h.o.m.os.e.xuals, Robert Allerton and John Gregg sailed to Australia for an extended vacation.

REAL LIFE IS MESSY and full of mixed motives. The increasing hostility toward h.o.m.os.e.xuals may well have provided the needed push for them to escape from the social restrictions of conventional Illinois in favor of the more accepting - and private - Kauai.

But they had also gotten bored. Sifting through another cache of doc.u.ments, I began to think that these refined men of movie-star appeal must have felt confined in their baronial mansion surrounded by a sea of cornfields. Allerton Park, Robert's Monticello property, was a gift from his famously rich father, Samuel. Perhaps it was a form of banishment as well. As I dug deeper, I sensed an estrangement between the artistic Robert Allerton and his bullish, gauche, and utterly nouveau-riche father. Yet I also laughed over their so-American story of a fortune built on pigs funding a heavenly Hawaiian garden. From stockyard to paradise, all in one generation. And when I finally visited Robert's Allerton Park in Illinois, I saw how its creation had served as a rehearsal for his masterpiece, Lawai-Kai.

Samuel W. Allerton was nicknamed "Farmer Sam," for his habit of expounding on the importance of working the land, an occupation that he actually didn't do much himself. Born in upstate New York, Samuel inherited a lofty lineage as a descendent of a Mayflower pa.s.senger, but it was of dubious worth - the early Pilgrims blamed Isaac Allerton, a former a.s.sistant governor of Plymouth Colony, for its mounting debts and mismanagement of the books, and possibly even embezzlement.

Sam Allerton's genius for making money lay in his ability to use the railroads to transport livestock. When he moved his operations to Chicago in 1860, he located his Allerton Swine Yards strategically at the terminus of the Hudson River Railroad, entry point for most of the hogs coming into the city. According to legend, when the price of pigs dropped to as little as one cent a pound, Sam borrowed eighty thousand dollars, bought every hog in Chicago, and cornered the market for a day and a half. He rail-shipped them to Ohio and Pennsylvania to fatten up before selling them to the Union Army, which was so desperate for provisions it was paying sixty cents a pound. It wasn't pretty - the livestock traveled without water or food, sometimes arriving half-dead.

Sam was a key partner in founding the Pittsburgh stockyards in 1864. He pushed hard for Chicago to create similar stockyards, which opened on Christmas Day 1865 and were ten times bigger than Pittsburgh's. Although their historical role has been overlooked, Samuel Allerton and his family built a livestock empire that enabled them to dominate and influence shipping costs from the Midwest to New York City.

He was so successful that he bought his own Pullman car so he could live in luxury while overseeing his far-flung operations, which soon stretched from New York to Wyoming. He made so much money he had to establish his own bank. Sam Allerton and nine friends founded the First National Bank of Chicago to fuel their enterprises, which became the source of more Allerton wealth.

The Chicago Tribune ranked Allerton as the city's third wealthiest man, right behind the retail magnate Marshall Field and meat packer Jonathan Armour. To survive and triumph in Chicago's commodities market required the ruthlessness of a bandit and the ethics of a horse trader. A pirate's glint gleamed in Allerton's dark eyes.

His money allowed him to marry well - to Pamilla Thompson, the daughter of a wealthy Peoria cattle farmer. She bore a daughter, Priscilla, in 1871, and two years later, a son, Robert. The slender, willowy Pamilla contracted scarlet fever and died. Robert, then six, also caught the fever, which left him nearly deaf, motherless, and lonely. Sam quickly married again, to his wife's sister, Agnes. Sensitive and gentle, Agnes shone a light into her isolated nephew's life. She encouraged him to enroll in art lessons at the new Art Inst.i.tute of Chicago, and successfully lobbied Sam when Robert wanted to go to Europe at age nineteen to pursue painting.

When Robert returned to Chicago after his five-year European adventure studying in Munich, Paris, and London, he declared his painting career a fiasco and set fire to all of his canvases. For the next two years, he did very little. Unlike his ambitious and sometimes uncouth father, Robert would never work a day in his life, distinguishing himself in Chicago society columns as a "club man and philanthropist" who appeared at the opera or gave parties and dinners. At his father's pressing suggestion, Robert agreed to try to make a go of it on the Piatt County farmland that Sam had deeded to him at birth. Robert employed experienced farm managers who actually grew the corn and wheat crops that covered his twelve thousand acres, while he maintained a posh apartment in Chicago and quickly departed for England to find a model for the grand country house he planned to build. As became his habit, he took a young male protege in tow, Ralph Borie, an architect from Philadelphia. They spent an entire year looking at castles and baronial halls before settling on the Stuart-styled Ham House in Surrey as a suitable design. Robert directed Borie to build a near copy along the banks of the Saginaw River near the tiny Illinois town of Monticello.

Although he named it "The Farms," there was nothing farm-like or modest about the house, with its ninety-foot entrance hall opening into a two-story library and a music room with twenty-two-foot ceilings. He concocted another European grand tour to fill up the house. With another young artistic companion, Russell Hewitt, Robert stormed through Europe, shipping back spoils by the ton. To landscape new gardens to surround his Monticello manor, Allerton again turned to English design, copying its rectilinear angles, walled gardens, and straight allees. His vision soared ambitiously large: He treated the entire 1,500 acres of his estate as a garden. He built a parterre maze of clipped boxwood hedges and laid squared brick beds for spring bulbs and a collection of two hundred peony varieties. Robert conceived of "garden rooms" - the Sunken Garden, the Lost Garden - as s.p.a.ces carved from the forest, the surrounding vegetation creating natural walls.

Chicago society eagerly sought invitations to The Farms. The Chicago Tribune chronicled Robert's weekend parties attended by the Marshall Fields, the McCormicks, debutantes, and matrons. The newspaper p.r.o.nounced Robert as the "Most Eligible Bachelor in Chicago." One young woman visited so often that she and Robert became engaged to be married. The engagement was soon broken off. There were limits to his endurance. Gentlemen suitors also came calling, attracted to the uncommonly handsome young millionaire.

As he glided into middle age, Robert sponsored activities for the nearby University of Illinois School of Architecture at Urbana-Champaign. John liked to tell the story of how Robert had been invited to attend a "Dad's Day" football game and dinner at the U of I Zeta Psi fraternity house in the fall of 1922. The childless older man was paired with an orphaned student, handsome John Wyatt Gregg.

Then twenty-two, John was older than most other students. And broke. To earn free room and board, he worked as the steward for the fraternity. His mother, Kate, had died of cancer in 1918. His father, James, a traveling salesmen, had died of pneumonia in one of the killing epidemics that swept the country in 1921. They had raised John in a roomy boarding house two blocks from Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, endowing him with good manners that complemented his natural charm. Tall and slim, with a high brow and clear eyes, he was good-looking, open, and friendly. He sang in the Glee Club and signed up for membership in the Architecture Society. The Ku Klux Klan attracted wide membership in the Midwest in the 1920s, and John Gregg joined the campus chapter, perhaps an early sign of the self-loathing he would later exhibit when he called h.o.m.os.e.xuals "queers" and "fairies."

After John graduated in 1926, he spent weekends at The Farms as Robert's companion. Robert introduced him as his foster son and took him everywhere - to parties, to the opera, on travels. Some called John Gregg an opportunist. Others, a captive bird in a silken net. Robert arranged for John to work for society architect David Adler, designing big houses, mostly English in inspiration, for the wealthy. John lived in Robert's Astor Street apartment during the week, until Adler's wealthy clientele could no longer afford grand mansions after the 1929 stock market crash, and the architect nearly closed his practice. John moved full-time down to Monticello, becoming Robert's secretary, in-house architect, landscape draftsman to design a garden folly or a flimsy gazebo, shopping companion with an educated eye, and general dogsbody.

With John now free for winter travels, Robert's itineraries grew more elaborate. Something reminded them of a favorite restaurant in Paris? They flew over for a meal. They wanted inspiration for building a new garden room? They booked two weeks to wander the gardens of Italy. The shopping became frenzied. Robert now bought gifts for the Art Inst.i.tute, bestowing on the museum six Rodin sculptures and a Pica.s.so drawing. He built a wing for the museum, named in honor of his gentle stepmother, the Agnes Allerton Textile Wing (now subsumed into the Decorative Arts galleries), and set out with determination to fill it. Toward the end of his life, Robert was surprised when told by a Chicago Tribune reporter that he was the biggest donor in the history of the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute. Today Robert's extraordinary gifts to the Art Inst.i.tute are only minimally remembered. A plaque hangs near the main entrance, unnoticed by museum goers streaming past it.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

A Kapu on the Garden

LUXURY HOTELS, SHOPPING malls, fast-food chains, and movie theaters glut the western lobe of the figure-eight-shaped island of Maui. Mount Haleakala, the 10,023-foot-high dormant volcano, dominates the eastern half of the island with its cinder-dry moonscape, studded in spots by the giant silversword plant.

Only the more adventurous tourists drive to the tiny town of Hana on Maui's remote eastern tip, following a swerving two-lane road that zigzags through 617 curves, crosses 54 rickety bridges, and threads through jungle terrain that becomes increasingly empty of human habitation. The small settlement of Hana at the end of the road offers little to do but buy an ice cream at the old Hasegawa General Store. The largest remaining population of pure-blood Hawaiians sc.r.a.pe out a meager living here, many on welfare, housed in modern subdivisions that are a world away from the wealthy tourists luxuriating in the nearby five-star Hotel Hana-Maui. Movie stars, moguls, and other millionaires fly into the tiny airport to avoid the drive, then bunker down in mansions tucked in the surrounding hills. A little further out of town, a quiet cemetery holds the unadorned grave of aviator Charles Lindbergh, who ended his days nearby, seeking privacy and peace in a location as far from American society as he could go and still remain on U.S. soil.

If you know where to look, a narrow dirt lane leads to Kahanu Garden, one of the five satellite sites managed by the National Tropical Botanical Garden. The Garden closed it to tours along with its other facilities after Hurricane Iniki. Kahanu doesn't offer much as a botanical garden. Its lonely peninsula is surrounded by jagged lava rocks and crashing waves. A virus-infected palm collection slowly rots away. In one corner, a collection of breadfruit grows in rows.

But all the local residents know about Kahanu and its vast, ancient Hawaiian temple. Elders stay away. The younger Hawaiians creep in after dark, on dares. Locals whisper tales of full-moon animal sacrifices and ghostly sounds of drumbeats emanating from thin air. Former Kauai mayor Maryanne Kusaka swears that when she was a young girl growing up in Hana, she and friends would sneak up to the temple steps and take photographs that, when developed, came out blank.

The great Pi'ilanihale Heiau rises ninety feet from the flatlands, at once dark, brooding, heroic, Mayan in scale, intimidating, and amazing as an engineering feat. It is the largest temple ever built in Hawaii, perhaps in all of Polynesia. The Hawaiian equivalent of Chartres Cathedral. Begun in the fifteenth century, construction spanned two centuries. The structure consists entirely of serrated lava bits and pieces, all fitted together without mortar, like a jigsaw puzzle. When I visited Kahanu early in my tour of Garden properties, I ignored warnings not to walk on the immense platform, the size of two football fields. I carefully picked my way across it, imagining what it would look like filled with platoons of Hawaiian warriors, each a thousand strong. Archeologists say there is no real evidence that Hawaiians made human sacrifices here, but legends stubbornly persist. I believed them.

And so when the kapu - Hawaiian for taboo - sticks appeared, they were just one more addition to a long history of strange doings at Kahanu Garden.

That early summer day, the garden crew drove up to the gates and discovered two bamboo spears sunk savagely into the ground, blocking their way. Each spear bore an ominous head-sized ball, one covered with red cloth, the other black. Taller than a man, they leered threateningly. A sign in uneven hand lettering proclaimed:

THIS SITE, PI'ILANIHALE HEIAU, IS TEMPORARILY CLOSED UNTIL PROTOCOLS ARE ESTABLISHED. SIGNED, ERIC KANAKOLE, HIGH CHIEF, HIGH PRIEST, KAHANU

"Does this mean that the garden's closed, or just that we can't go through the gate?" asked Adam Rose, the newly hired director of Kahanu Garden as he nervously eyed the spears. Scrawny, bearded, and trained in English horticulture, Rose was only twenty-seven and in his second week on the job. He was hired to open up the site to visitors.

"Kapu sticks," p.r.o.nounced Francis Lono, who along with his son, Arnold Lono, made up the rest of Kahanu's workforce. "Taboo," Francis explained, as the three men puzzled over what they should do. Francis shook his head. "Probably means don't go in," he said. Eric Kanakole had put up kapu sticks before. Francis knew all about Eric, his cousin, as many of the residents of Hana were related to one another.

Arnold didn't say a word. Like most of the young men of Hana, Arnold had warrior tattoos circling his biceps, and a long braid spilled down his back, almost to his waist. He merely nodded.

The three men decided to go to work anyway. They simply went around the gate and jumped the fence. But Adam's bewilderment began to intensify. Black magic, he thought. Island voodoo. What was supposed to be kapu - him? Or Dr. Klein's idea of opening Kahanu to public tours?

Later that day, Adam peeked under the cloth of the kapu sticks and saw that they were only coconuts wrapped in ordinary T-shirts. But he grew unnerved when he learned that in Hawaiian ancient ritual, red signified blood; black, death. His unease escalated into panic when he discovered more about Eric Kanakole, known more commonly as Ricky Waikiki before he started styling himself as a leader in the Hawaiian activist movement. Eric was a dark figure with tattoos, a long ponytail, and fierce knitted eyebrows. He and other activists harbored deep grievances about what they called a "government seizure" of family land that dated back to the bloodless coup, arranged in 1898 by the Big Five sugar company planters. The wealthy oligarchy ushered in U.S. troops to depose the last of the Hawaiian monarchy and annex the islands as a U.S. territory. They appropriated most of the native lands as well. During a 1970s renaissance of Hawaiian native music, hula, and other traditions, activists began talking about seceding from the United States and reinst.i.tuting the monarchy. The movement had no apparent leader nor stated goals, except for demanding some sort of reparations, and appeared to be going nowhere - Hawaii was so Americanized that it was doubtful that the population would ever forgo U.S. citizenship.

All we knew at Garden headquarters was that somehow this century-old discontent was erupting at Kahanu Garden.

We received bulletins from Adam in increasingly frantic phone calls. He pleaded for reinforcements. "The kapu sticks could be a precursor to more overt actions, perhaps violence," Adam warned in a squeaky voice. "This guy Eric Kanakole is big and scary! We're sitting on a bombsh.e.l.l that traditionally would have been resolved with physical force."

Dr. Klein promised he would fly over the next Sat.u.r.day.

No other Garden site would so test Dr. Klein's diplomatic ability. Reviving a closed botanical inst.i.tution in the middle of nowhere presented difficult, if somewhat graspable, problems. But walking into a blood feud and the wrath of Hawaiian activists demanded another set of solutions. He was a stranger in a strange land.

LITTLE BY LITTLE, we untangled the brewing forces of revenge and anger that erupted in the kapu sticks. The story was as old as Cain and Abel. By the mid-1400s, King Pi'ilani had united all the warring tribes of Maui under his rule and began construction of his royal war heiau, a temple large enough to hold troops from the entire island. At old age and near death, he summoned his two sons to rule in peace, together as partners. One son, Kiha, did not arrive in time, so the king granted the kingdom to his other son, Lono. Inevitably, the brothers quarreled after a few years and went to war. Ever since, the descendants of Kiha and Lono have been enemies.

The garden's caretaker Francis Lono descended from the Lono line. His cousin, Eric Kanakole, the self-proclaimed high priest of Kahanu, descended from the Kiha side. They might live in modern-day subdivisions in Hana, but the native Hawaiians still knew their bloodlines. They were still fighting fourteenth-century feuds.

The Garden had inherited the temple because no one else really wanted it. It lay abandoned and near ruin, all but disappearing under encroaching jungle. The death of King Kamehameha in 1819 had plunged Hawaii into spiritual turmoil. The king's many wives seized the opportunity to turn their backs on his elaborate kapu system that had forbidden women from eating pig and bananas, among other privileges. In one of the weird confluences of history, at almost the very moment that Hawaiians rejected their faith, New England missionaries arrived, preaching Christianity and rapidly converting the natives. All the heiaus were abandoned. Sections of walls crumbled at the great Pi'ilanihale structure. Cows from the neighboring Hana Ranch grazed on its platforms.

The Kahanu family of Hana eventually acquired the property, but donated it in 1972 to the newly formed Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden. The Hana Ranch donated another fifty acres adjacent to the temple. The Garden bought another fifty, promising to all that it would restore the heiau to full glory.

Regally tall, with mahogany skin and snowy white hair and muttonchops, Francis Lono seemed the perfect man to hire as caretaker. Everybody in Hana knew that Francis descended directly from King Pi'ilani. His father had been the last Hawaiian to live in a traditional gra.s.s hut. His royal bloodlines earned him the nickname Blue.

Back in the early 1970s, Blue Lono set to clearing the heiau. Reports of it spread all the way to the western end of Maui's gold coast of hotels and condos. Buzzing tour helicopters landed on the temple for champagne picnics, leaving behind corks and trash. The Garden Club of Honolulu donated funds to build a wood pavilion for visitors. Several wealthy Hana residents donated a new pickup truck. Another funded a restroom. In one of its worst public relations blunders, the Garden hierarchy shipped the spanking new truck to Kauai for use at Garden headquarters, and returned a clunker by barge to Maui. Garden leaders ordered a latrine hole dug but never installed the toilet. Although these insults had occurred more than two decades ago, the people of Hana still remembered. Bitterly.

In Dr. Klein's first step as the new NTBG director, he drafted conceptual plans for all of the Garden's sites, including Kahanu. He hired well-known landscape architect Geoffrey Rausch of Pittsburgh for the job, and the two of them devised a plan to catapult the site from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century in one leap.

General Pattonstyle, Dr. Klein unveiled his plan for Kahanu with a flourish at a Hana community meeting. He ticked off planned amenities: ocean-view cottages, swimming pools, and tennis courts. "If there was one plan guaranteed to unite the community against the Garden, this is it," warned one speaker.

Klein and Rausch deflated like p.r.i.c.ked balloons. "We thought of everything but the people we were supposed to be thinking about, which was the community," Rausch admitted. Never to be deterred, Dr. Klein warmed to the challenge. If told that something couldn't be done, he rallied with a war cry: Why not?

Dr. Klein decided to try a Hawaiian approach. This time, Dr. Klein and Rausch planned discreet locations, away from the heiau, for a traditional, thatched gra.s.s hut meeting pavilion, offices, exhibit s.p.a.ce, cla.s.sroom, and modest apartments for interns and visiting scientists. Dr. Klein waxed large: Kahanu Garden would serve as a gathering spot, bringing together heads of Pacific states for an agriculture conference to study traditional uses of plants for food, clothing, and shelter.

To soften the blow that he was appointing a young haole, Adam Rose, to director, Dr. Klein decided to confer the ceremonial t.i.tle of kahu, or spiritual caretaker, on Blue Lono. Dr. Klein gathered guests on the gra.s.s at the Maui property and pa.s.sed coconut sh.e.l.ls of fermented 'awa - a traditional numbing liquor made from ti roots. The ceremony attracted coverage by local newspapers, causing Eric Kanakole, perpetrator of the kapu sticks, to seethe. As a descendent of the Pi'ilani family, he exercised his rights to visit the temple, often escorting groups of kids there to explain ancient traditions. Several times Eric had asked Dr. Klein for a job at Kahanu Gardens, maybe as a tour guide. Dr. Klein had not responded.

Then the organizers of an annual hula festival in Hana asked Dr. Klein for permission to use Kahanu Garden as the site for their opening ceremony. Adam Rose warned, Don't do it! Hana's Hawaiian traditionalists scorned the hula festival as a haole event. One of the Hawaiians wrote a letter of protest to Dr. Klein, a.s.serting that the town's Hawaiian elders would have to give permission to use the temple site.

General Patton fired back: I don't need your permission to do anything. The hula festival was on!

And so, a few weeks later, a hundred guests, mostly haoles, gathered at the heiau at dawn as drums beat. The Hawaiians of Hana boycotted the event. A martial arts troop of out-of-towners who had come for the hula fest emerged silently from the jungle. Garbed in loose white loin cloths, they solemnly danced to the sunrise.

ADAM ROSE WOULD call it "the Great Standoff."

Early the Sat.u.r.day after the kapu sticks appeared, Dr. Klein flew to the tiny Hana Airport, then paced impatiently for several hours at Adam Rose's cottage, waiting for Eric Kanakole to telephone and name a meeting place. Finally someone called. Everyone was waiting for them down at the heiau. Adam worried that the meeting had turned into a group confrontation, out of town and out of sight. Adam's young wife, Lianne, dashed outside and quickly gathered bunches of shiny green ti leaves - the plant used traditionally to ward off evil spirits - and tied them to the four corners of Adam's blue pickup truck.

With the truck festooned like a parade vehicle, Adam and Dr. Klein drove down the dirt road to Kahanu Garden. The gate stood wide open - already an unusual sign. A ma.s.sive Hawaiian woman, her black hair flowing like Medusa, stood sentry, as if she had reclaimed the property already. "Who are you?" she demanded.

He responded with a booming voice, "I'm Dr. William Klein and I'm trying to find out what's going on."

She said nothing but gave him the stink eye as they drove past. Heavy gra.s.s brushed the underside of the truck like cloying fingers. A plume of dust stretched out behind them as they pa.s.sed a grove of breadfruit trees. Scattered fruit rotted on the ground, some with exposed white flesh that looked like spilled brains. A putrid smell of decay settled over everything. As the pickup rounded a bend, Adam and Dr. Klein could see ahead to a wide plain leading down to the peninsula. A dozen or so men lounged against their trucks, their backs to the heiau. They wore T-shirts, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, and most had long braids and tattoos. They looked p.i.s.sed off.

"Carry on, Adam," Dr. Klein urged. "I'm here to find out what the h.e.l.l is going on."

From out of nowhere, a pickup pulled out behind them. Then another. And another. Soon Adam led eight or nine big, high-rigged Chevys and GMC models that made Adam's Toyota feel like a Tinkertoy. Adam looked over his shoulder and saw that the trucks, crowded with Hawaiians, had cut off their exit. He swallowed hard and started sweating. Dr. Klein looked ahead, seemingly unperturbed.

Adam stopped with great trepidation. The Hawaiian brigade fanned out in a line behind the Toyota, blocking the road. Adam calculated how fast he could run but looked at Dr. Klein's girth and worried that he couldn't move very fast. The Hawaiians got out of their trucks and started toward them.

Dr. Klein clapped Adam around the shoulders encouragingly and said, "Well, Adam, you may be the first Englishman since Cook to be eaten alive." Then he swung open the truck door and bulled his way out, his chest and belly extending over his belt. He wore one of his green botanical print Aloha shirts and a wide white panama straw hat banded with iridescent pheasant feathers that gave him a slightly goofy look. With his wirerimmed gla.s.ses and fair complexion, Dr. Klein appeared very much the professor. He started toward the group, his face neither grim nor smiling, but seriously peering over his trifocals as if approaching a crowd of rare insects. Then he went face-first right into the bees' nest.

A big Hawaiian guy stuck a whirling video camera under Dr. Klein's nose and demanded: "Did you or did you not see the sign at the entrance?"

"Yes, I did," Dr. Klein answered matter-of-factly.

"Do you know what it means?"

"No, I don't, and that's what I'm here to find out."

Taki Matsuda, a member of the Kahanu family that had donated the site to the Garden more than twenty years ago, waited at the head of the group. Adam recognized the other men as Eric Kanakole's hui, or gang. The high priest himself was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, everyone shouted and talked at once, waving their arms. "Whose place is this? What's going to happen here? Who's protecting the heiau ? What are you gonna do about it?"

Dr. Klein calmly repeated, "We're from NTBG. I'm the executive director. I want to make things right. I want to involve you. Look, this is our place now. I understand you have cultural issues. I'm not trying to become involved with Hawaiian issues. I'm here to talk about what we're going to do here. I'm open-minded to any possibility. Let's talk about anything."

After thirty minutes of confusion, they all ran out of steam. Even the video man got tired and switched off his camera. No one seemed to know anything about the kapu sticks, what Eric wanted, or even where he was. Adam and Dr. Klein got back into their truck and followed a Hawaiian to a phone booth. The man made a phone call, then reported that Eric had left for Honolulu.

The Great Standoff ended in a draw, although Adam declared it a triumph for Dr. Klein. "We didn't get killed. We didn't get lynched, so he did a good job."

THE KAPU STICKS remained standing all through the summer and into the fall.

At night in their cottage, Adam and Lianne Rose peeked out through closed blinds to watch meetings convened in the Hana Cultural Center and Museum across the street. They could see Francis Lono and other elders seated on the floor of the traditional Hawaiian gra.s.s-roofed hut. Adam never learned directly what was said, but he knew that the kapu on Kahanu was under discussion.

Meanwhile, Adam implemented his own measures of cultural glasnost. He grew his dark hair down his back and began braiding it, in the style of young Lono and other Hawaiians. "Adapt and survive," he explained.

CHAPTER TWENTY.