Mānoa Arcadia

The future, at least the sustainable one, the one in which we will survive, isn’t going to be invented by people who are happily surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound privilege. It’s going to be made by those who had all that taken away from them or never had it in the first place.

—Rebecca Solnit, “Detroit Arcadia” [1]

Fall 2015.

My foot slips on mossy asphalt as I run. I know it is not for me that this place grows as it does, suiting all the words we white people use for the tropics: lush luxurious exotic. Mānoa’s profusion is not mine. I move upon its surface like an insect. I am one component of an infestation. I shuffle up its hills and sweat bubbles between my breasts, drawn out by the unnatural heat forced upon this place, the heat everyone says is worse than it has ever been. Twenty, thirty years here, it’s never been this hot for so long. The people who tell me this are usually also white transplants. I think the trade winds make us feel welcome, well-adapted. The southeasterly Kona winds, humid and thick with volcanic fog, make no one feel welcome. If you know how to sit still when the Kona winds come, you sit still. If you don’t know how to sit still, you complain.

This year all we hear about is El Niño, the hurricanes it will bring. All summer and fall the oceans stir up storms that lumber north only to wobble to one side of the islands or the other. The biggest hurricane yet recorded stumbles into Mexico’s east coast, where, blessedly, it disintegrates. This kind of luck seems outlandish now, as if it cannot last.

Mānoa’s rains are not mine. They have their own names, which depend on where and how they fall in the valley. Kānaka maoli have composed mele to honor the rains, and these are not my songs; not my sharp-peaked mountains, not my plants. Mānoa is full of monstera, pomelo, puakenikeni—the ten cent flower, named for the price each blossom fetched when gathered for making lei in the early part of the twentieth century, when Hawai`i was still an American territory and had not yet been dragooned into statehood. Lei makers sold them on the steamboat docks. Now they sell in cramped storefronts tucked beside Fed-Ex franchises and Chinatown dress shops, or from refrigerated cases in the entrances of Safeways and Walgreens. In these places you smell condensation on plastic, Windex, urine heating on the sidewalk: then the clear sweetness of ginger, or puakenikeni’s soft perfume like jasmine and honeysuckle at once. What we do, as humans, is bring beauty into the ugliest of places and ugliness into the most beautiful.

Surely Mānoa is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Surely the Chinese Cemetery with its stone dragons occupies one of the grandest swells of soil on O`ahu—“the pulse of the watchful dragon of the valley,” reads the plaque at the sloping cemetery’s peak. Behind the monument honoring the Grand Ancestor Lum Ching, the man who chose the cemetery’s location based on its feng shui properties, stands the perfect banyan tree; it grows around a hollow space, it grows despite the marks of fires long burnt out between its many trunks. It has been growing in that place since 1914, says the plaque. Tentacular roots hang among its branches, always ready to slip into the earth again.

Surely the albizia trees at the back of the valley are among the most beautiful of all trees; their dappled impressionist branches float like horizontal gathers of cloud, span the air like lovely bridges. When the Mānoa breeze cries down the valley from the Ko`olau Mountains the albizias quiver on their wide shallow roots. They too are an infestation, crowding out native `ōhi`a forests already threatened by an aggressively spreading fungus. When albizia trees topple, like empires, they drag the surrounding vegetation down with them. The hurricanes of the previous year missed O`ahu but uprooted an invasive tracery of albizia across the Big Island. They grow faster than almost any other tree in the world, and they have grown in Puna, Pāhoa, near the path that Pele followed months later with her lava. They’ve grown so wildly in the Arboretum at the back of Mānoa valley that they must be cut up and removed and herbicide spread on their blunt stumps. Sometimes the albizia trees just shed their limbs without apparent cause. Sudden limb drop, it’s called. The fungus killing the `ōhi`a trees is called rapid `ōhi`a death. The trees are in extremity, just as we are. Everything seems to be happening at once.

Surely the damp scent of the valley, the fermented mash of strawberry guava underfoot, the brown gush of Mānoa stream should capture my heart. But this fall it feels like it is always raining. I ride my moped downtown and the rain stings my chin and sneaks down my belly under my raincoat and shirt. When it isn’t raining, a twenty-minute errand leaves my shoulders sunburnt, and Kona winds and vog give me headaches; I am not well-adapted to the island at all.

Surely the Hawaiian sun is strong enough to save us. In Chinatown a few of us hold protest signs against a proposed takeover of the Hawaiian Energy Company by NextEra, a Florida giant that nominally supports solar but will not do what is necessary, not when there are profits to be made on natural gas and oil. Solar, say our signs, and local, and co-op. Vote NO on NEXTERA. My friend Jack holds a sign drawn by someone else that says There is no Planet B and hardly anyone gets it on the first read. People walk by, pause mid-step, read aloud to themselves. HECO workers in their aloha shirts and khaki pants and badges stand at the corner with us until the light changes. They walk around us to peer at our signs, but they don’t argue—they nod or raise their eyebrows, or stay stony-faced. They look unhappy, but it’s not easy to tell if our presence is the cause or if they feel the dull business-district unhappiness that underpins late-stage capitalism, that gray wall-to-wall carpet of the soul.

But the Ko`olaus rise so beautifully in the back of the valley. You can see them from Chinatown if you look between the right buildings. The rain on all our faces, when it begins to fall gently, feels warm.

*****

The coral surrounding O`ahu is a sad cardboard beige. Sunscreen in the water bleaches the coral, ever-higher temperatures bleach the coral. Microbeads sift through the currents. Pelicans collapse into feathered skeletons encasing plastic tangles. It is hard not to feel that around us everything is dying. That we are killing it even if some of us are trying not to. That it is fighting back.

In October in the islands the sharks began to bite with a frightening regularity. They are not actually targeting humans, behaviorists say. It’s been raining so often in this El Niño fall that the water along the beaches has grown heavy with silt and bacteria. In that dark water a hungry shark with its poor eyesight confuses a surfer’s dangling leg for a large fish. Another takes both a swimmer’s feet in its mouth and doesn’t let go until the swimmer reaches down and pries the shark’s eye from its socket.

So I got to the surface. I was holding his eyeball. So I let it go and was treading water. I could feel the blood leaving my body. [2]

A father and son pull the man onto one of their kayaks and paddle him to shore just in time to save his life. His blood fans out behind them in the water like a red curtain and when they drag him onto the beach it soaks the powdery Lanikai sand.

Lanikai is a pricey neighborhood jammed with swimming pools and gates. You can look down on the big houses from the old military pillboxes on the hill above. These concrete cubes, graffiti-splotched World War II gun turrets stripped of their armaments, host lounging teenagers whose phones blast Jawaiian music. #Hilife, their Instagram feeds say. #Luckywelivehawaii. And sometimes #hawaiiproblems.

From the pillboxes too you can almost see as far as an encampment of the houseless in Waimānalo. Many of those living in their tents or cars are Native Hawaiian, and if they aren’t Native Hawaiian they’re likely still local, that word freighted with responsibility and expectation here as it is not quite in the other 48 states. There are haoles—white people—living on the streets and beaches here, too. People still stumble into the state drawn by rumors of jobs and pakalōlō only to find the jobs vanished or severely underpaid and the pakalōlō no cheaper than mainland weed. The old men and women of continental America do not last well on the island streets, under the island sun. That crepey cooked skin white women sometimes bare between their breasts or on their dimpled shoulders—here it’s called “haole rot.” Everything rots faster here, even the hapless children of empire.

There is so much more to say about the history of land ownership in Hawai`i, and I am not the one to say it. Not my land, not my ancestors, not my loss. Not my right. But the houseless are everywhere in Hawai`i, more visible even than they were in Austin, where the winter is often similarly mild. They are our own refugees, whom we seem willing to support only when we fear other refugees more.

The Honolulu City Council enacted a sit-lie ban prohibiting anyone—one presumes not tourists—from sitting or reclining on a sidewalk between 9 am and 9 pm. At first it covered only Waikīkī, then Chinatown, then it flowed over the mountains to Kailua and Kane`ohe on the windward side. Now a state senator wants to ban all sitting or lying on state land; he says this is because the houseless have used state lands as a free space to avoid sweeps meant to clear them from city streets and parks. Now, he says to a reporter, those sweeps will function as they ought. It’s going to be seamless. They can’t jump over this imaginary line and say, “Hey, I’m on the state land now.” [3] No one likes an imaginary line drawn on the land if its meaning cannot be fixed by those who drew it. No one likes a border when indigenous people can employ it as protection.

*****

What does it mean to live as a white settler in Hawai`i nei? It means that you should feel like an insect, and sometimes you do. Sometimes you forget—you’re at the beach, the sand cools under your feet, the water laps turquoise and not quite as warm as blood around your calves. For hours afterward your lips are salty and the skin between your toes, below your ankle bones, feels papery with the finest particles of sand. Drive home on the Pali highway over the Ko`olau mountains, counting the waterfalls. You’re not supposed to bring pork across the Pali—though some people say it was really the old Pali road that bore the prohibition, not the new highway, and others say it was dog meat anyway, in the old story, before the missionaries brought their distaste for eating dog to the islands. The pork represents the body of the pig god Kamapua`a (or perhaps the body of a dog), and it angers Pele (or the dog’s owner)—these tales that shape Hawai`i live in a quantum state of oral variation, like so many stories. You can’t pretend to know the world those stories arose in, as a white settler to the islands. But even after a few years of living here, a guest worker in an occupied land that nonetheless functions as an extension of your country, you can feel the changes as they happen, day by day and season by season. The sharks are biting, the babies in the apartments nearby are crying, crying. The birds of Mānoa seem too weary to call. Everyone is hot and sad.

Surely this sweat has meaning. In Protestant-inflected America we sweat for something, we don’t just sweat. We work and grow. We can hardly bear to admit that growth is killing us. We have gotten so used to one kind of struggle that we have forgotten other struggles, and worse, we’ve forgotten how to succor those they entangle. We want to ignore the houseless and block Muslims from our borders. No matter that in a few decades the Sinai peninsula will suffer heatwaves so extreme that to sit outside for several hours could endanger human life. (The dogs and cats and rats of Sinai go unmentioned in the news article; the birds disappear.) We can feel the blood leaving our bodies and we don’t know what is happening—what is this vicious tug upon our feet, this weight beneath the water?

The shark is one of nā `aumākua, the ancestors, the creatures, plants, rocks from which a kānaka maoli family might have descended. What does it mean to admit that we are the ones killing ourselves?

What does it mean to recognize that the earth was not created for us, but that it created us, haphazardly, unnecessarily, through chance and circumstance? To say to oneself: not for me, not for me, not for me. The world is not humanity’s great dominion; it is no holy gift. It is better and worse than that.

If we are desperate enough not to see, will we reach down to pluck out our own eyes?

Even in Mānoa, there am I, says death. There is no Planet B.

*****

An older woman named Twinkle manages an encampment called the Harbor in Waianae, on the leeward side of O`ahu. She chooses captains who oversee sections of the encampment, home to more than two hundred and fifty people. Her captains are mostly women. They resolve disputes, designate camping sites for new arrivals, bring leftovers to the hungry, help children with their homework. Between them the residents of the Harbor possess more than one hundred pets, a great deal of meth, and at least one karaoke machine. In the rain the place thickens with red mud and when it dries out the wind drives bits of rock and coral across the rough patch of land by the water.

In the Harbor every person has her duties. Rebuild the coral-rock wall, lay down the roll of carpet, push water from the tarp roof. Fill water jugs at the faucets in the boat harbor parking lot. Many of the younger residents walk just next door to their classes at Waianae High School. Twinkle houses children in her own several-room tent complex if their parents are struggling to care for them. She stepped into her role as matriarch of the camp not out of sheer altruism, but because the Harbor’s existence is always precarious, even after ten fairly well-managed years. Its campsites occupy beachfront public property that developers covet, even in a poorer area like Waianae. But Hawai`i’s developers and their shining towers are not the future of the islands or of the mainland, no matter how much we laud “sustainable” urban building and green density. The Harbor is a densely populated space, so intimate, writes Jessica Terrell of Civil Beat, author of several thoughtful profiles of Twinkle and her houseless `ohana, that “neighbors … can hear the pop of a soda can being opened in the tent next door.” [4] Billions of people live in this sort of density already; billions more will join them. We should see our future in the faces of Twinkle’s children.

In Waimānalo, in Kaka`ako, along the H-1 highway, encampments grow and are swept away. When the rains keep coming, when the temperature rises further, when waves submerge the Honolulu airport, those in the tents will not be surprised. They will be tired—they are already tired—but they will not be surprised.

In Mānoa, among single-family houses, it rains every day. On farms in the valleys the lettuce and watercress rot, but the papayas are delighted. The clouds hunch over the Ko`olaus, waiting. Sometimes a fine mist falls from what looks like a clear blue sky. I have not yet learned its name.