Freckled Page 4

  When we have to, we drive to Kapa`a, about forty-five minutes away, to use the Laundromat, buy groceries, and go to the library for books. Evenings, we join other haoles that gather on the sand in front of a big beach house at Tunnels owned by Howard Taylor, the movie star Elizabeth Taylor’s brother. The adults pass bottles and joints and there’s guitar playing and singing. We kids fall asleep on towels under the stars when we’re too tired to run around in the dark anymore.

  We live in the van for a long time—but winter always comes, and winter on the North Shore of Kauai means rain and huge surf.

  The van gets really small as rain pours down for days and days.

  Pop is grumpy from being closed in the van with no work and all of us scrunched in together. His black cloud is back, even with a lot of big surf to ride and doobies to smoke. He’s mean and scary, and there’s nowhere to get away from it. Everything I do makes him mad and yell, and he finally throws me out of the van one day when I take my Barbie from Bonny and she cries. “Go play outside!”

  Bonny gets to stay in because she’s little and mellow. I really wish I were mellow.

  I get out of the van, opening the door quickly into the rain, and run to hide in my fort under the ironwood roots on Tunnels Beach.

  The sand comes and goes on this beach too, and right now it’s mostly gone because it’s winter, leaving a cave-like place under the tree that’s fun to play in on a sunny day—but not today. The sand is wet even under the roots, and I’m too cold to do anything but huddle as far back as I can get, wrapped in my towel with my Barbie, trying to keep dry. The gray beast of the ocean, foaming at the jaws, gobbles away the summer’s piled-up sand and blasts me with its chilly salty breath, just like a monster in the book Where the Wild Things Are.

  Pop comes to get me after a while, angry because he had to get wet to fetch me. We don’t have an umbrella, just garbage bag ponchos. “We’re going to Kapa`a to the library to get out of the rain.”

  I step into the water bucket to wash my bare feet before getting in the van. The bucket has a lid and is also the pee bucket at night. Everything in the van has a purpose, usually more than one.

  I can’t wait to get to the library. At the library, we can be dry indoors, and I can escape into reading. I learned to read early, when I was four, and my mind sees the stories like watching a movie now that I’m six.

  I love everything about the library: the tidy stacks of books that take me away on adventures, the sourish smell of them, the carpet I can sit on to read, the water fountain with the rusty button, the flush toilets. Even Mrs. Rapozo, who sniffs when we return our piles of books and checks them for sand between the pages, is one of my favorite people: she stamps the books with a rubber stamper and makes them mine until the date on the little card inside the flap.

  But it’s a long, wet, grumpy drive to the library today, and sometimes I wish we were like the family in the Sears catalog. Girls with neat, shiny hair wearing pretty dresses sit on white carpets with curly-haired puppies, playing with toys while a mom with a plate of cookies looks on, and a dad holding a baby smiles.

  All good things come to us in Hawaii from the magical Sears Roebuck catalog, and I love the catalog even more than one of my picture books—because everything inside can be ordered. I’ve already worn the ink off the pages of the toy section, wishing and hoping for things like a plastic Barbie mansion and a stable for the Breyer horses I want to collect. The biggest stores on Kauai are Woolworth’s and Liberty House, an hour away in Lihue, and they hardly have any toys at all.

  I wonder where the Sears Roebuck family lives. Somewhere far from here.

  Mom and Pop’s surfer friend, Rusty Miller, is moving back to Australia and has promised my parents his rental cottage. The place is near Ke`e Beach, known as The End of the Road because the one road that goes around Kauai stops there, at the edge of the steep Na Pali Cliffs.

  Rusty is the first person to ever rent the cottage. He found it exploring the jungle after a surf session, tracked down who the owner was, and drove all the way to Lawai on the other side of the island to ask Mr. Allerton, the wealthy island philanthropist who owns the property, if he could rent it if he painted the place and kept it up. In the years he’s lived there, it’s become something of a legendary spot, with a steady stream of surfers from all over the world stopping in to crash at “Rusty’s cabin.” Getting the cottage is a big deal because there are so few houses of any kind on the North Shore.

  On the day we get the house, we drive to the gap in the trees right after Limahuli Stream, but just before the dirt parking area that marks Taylor Camp, a hippie camp spot. We park the van on the side of the road under dripping guava trees. A path leads down into the jungle, studded with rocks too big for the van to get over. Mom puts our garbage bag ponchos on Bonny and me, and our rubber slippers because of the rocks. We walk down a long muddy trail, through dripping Java plum, mango, rose apple, and kukui nut trees draped in dangling vines like mermaid hair.

  Rusty meets us at the empty cottage. He’s a wiry man with a head of thick, tufty, sun-bleached surfer hair, bright blue eyes, and a red-and-blond beard. He opens the rickety screen door wide. “Welcome to your new home.”

  Perfectly square, the house is dark green with white trim and a rust-red tin roof. Inside, the walls are silvery cedarwood planks that Rusty tells us were floated down the coast in the ocean from Hanalei. “Ocean-treated wood becomes resistant to termites. The house was built in the nineteen twenties by a Boy Scout troop for their campouts.” Rusty shows us around with his crackling energy. Two tiny bedrooms, a front room, and kitchen make up the layout. There’s no plumbing, bathroom, or electricity. Rusty ran a pipe to the stream, though, so there’s water to the kitchen sink. We drink it straight from there, so cold it makes my teeth hurt.

  Rusty hacked the jungle back with a machete to make the yard, and there’s a central patch of sunlight in front of the house. A Hawaiian orange tree grows beside the house, along with papaya and a patch of bananas. Rusty leaves behind a fruit picker made of a bleach bottle tied to a bamboo pole. Right away we pick the sour, juicy oranges, with their yellow, mottled skins—so different from bright Mainland oranges.

  My parents are thrilled to get the cottage, and after bidding Rusty a grateful goodbye, we promptly rename it the Forest House.

  Lantana, bamboo grasses, and wild roses overflow an area that Mom stakes out for the garden, and she strings up a clothesline for drying our towels and laundry. We wash at the Laundromat in Hanalei, half an hour away, but dry our clothes here in the clearing to save money.

  Weeding out the grass and shrubs for her garden, Mom finds the mounds of three graves under antique lokelani rosebushes. We leave them alone after just a little weeding and trimming. I like the thought of someone loving this place so much they never wanted to leave it.

  We have one of the only gas refrigerators I’ve ever seen, a small rusty white box whose pilot light blows out a lot. We have a gas stove, too, and shelves where everything is stored. After the van, it seems like so much room. Mom’s careful to keep all the food in big glass mayonnaise jars against the rats and cockroaches that come in from the jungle.

  Breakfast is oatmeal cooked on the stove with the squishy goodness of raisins popping on my tongue and local honey drizzled over it. Mom has found a co-op in California, and with the money Pop has from his trust fund, she has big boxes of food shipped each month to Hanalei, the closest town. Lentils, garbanzos, alfalfa, mung beans, dried figs, dates, apricots, oats, and flour so brown it looks speckled, fill the jars on the built-in shelf in the kitchen area, along with honey in a can and peanut butter separating into golden oil and sludgy goodness.

  Pop builds me a raised wooden bed frame right next to the screened window in the tiny bedroom I share with Bonny. She sleeps on a foam futon underneath mine, like a bunk bed. The window has trouble closing—damp has warped it, and nighttime rain blows in—but I love that window. From my perch in bed I can watch the leaves at the tops
of the Java plum trees fluttering in the wind, and listen to the watery hum of Limahuli Stream, the creek that runs past the house. I read in swishing sunlight that falls in over my books.

  There’s no electricity, so no radio or records like Mom and Pop used to play on Oahu. Just Pop playing his guitar, and the stream singing its song.

  A friendly Hawaiian guy in a brown uniform with his name on the pocket brings our tank of propane to the house on a dolly, bumping it carefully down the boulder-strewn path. Mom gives him a bag of oranges and papayas for “going the extra mile” as she calls it, and she makes him blush and duck his head. She’s beautiful, with her big smile, long tanned legs, and ripple of brown hair. People say she looks like the actress Ali McGraw.

  Eventually, I explore down the rocky trail leading away from the house all the way to the beach, where there’s a shallow, protected swimming hole in the ocean on the inside of the reef. Naked grownups are bathing, washing dishes, and lying in the sun; they’re from the village of homemade houses in a grove of kamani trees next to us.

  When I get back, I ask Mom how come there’s a community right next to us made out of plastic, bamboo, and trash-picked wood.

  “Howard Taylor, the guy whose house we liked to hang out at over at Tunnels Beach, is a very rich man. He is the brother of Liz Taylor, the star of my favorite movie, National Velvet. Taylor felt sorry for the hippies camping in the parks on the North Shore and getting hassled by the locals and locked up for vagrancy. They were even sentenced to hard labor for being homeless! Taylor bailed them out and let them live on his land, and that’s why it’s called Taylor Camp.”

  I think this over. “But we aren’t a part of Taylor Camp?”

  “No. Mr. Allerton owns this land and rents this house to us,” Mom says. “We’re doing our own thing. We’re surfers, not Taylor Campers.”

  I take this bit of information and tuck it away. If you look at us, it’s hard to tell that we’re different than the Taylor Camp people, but we live in Rusty’s cabin, own a car that works, and my dad has a job. He’s now cooking at a restaurant called The Anchorage halfway to Hanalei, and takes the van there most days, or Mom drives him if she needs to use it.

  I make some friends at the Camp where there are a few other kids.

  Minka’s taller than I am, with eyes the color of faded blue jeans, skin like a lion’s coat, and blonde hair bleached to the texture of rope by a thousand days in the ocean. Her teeth are overlarge and list about. Minka’s happy to have a friend her age to play with, and she takes me to see where she lives in Taylor Camp.

  The wind sighs and squeaks in the kamani trees that the plastic, bamboo, and plywood houses of the Camp are built of, as I climb a wooden ladder into Minka’s tree house.

  Their house is one of several actually up in the trees. Minka, her sister Alpin, and their parents are some of the founding members of the Camp. Her mom, Bobo, is a strong woman with a leathery face and long braids who surfs and swims the Na Pali Coast naked and has a surf break named after her. Her dad, Hawk, is a small sturdy man with a straggly beard and is sort of the chief of the Camp.

  The people at the Camp don’t wear many clothes. There’s a lot of sitting around, strumming guitars, working in the garden, rolling joints, and lying on the beach naked. Pakalolo, or marijuana it’s called, is a constant blue smoke in the air. I’m not sure I like the sweetish smell, the way it tickles the back of my throat and seems to have a texture.

  I’m curious about the nakedness of the Taylor Campers. The men’s penises remind me of sea cucumbers in limu seaweed nests. Sometimes, when they wear shorts that are too small, their balls leak out like hairy brown potatoes. The women have water-balloon breasts with nipples like raisins, or small ones like cupcakes with a stub of candle on top. Several of the ladies have tiger-stripe marks on their bellies and hips. I ask about them and am told, “they’re stretch marks from babies.”

  I picture babies taking hold of the skin and pulling it in their little hands and wonder how that happened.

  Nakedness looks a lot of different ways, but it all kind of smells the same to me—like garlicky sweat, yeast, and sometimes patchouli or sandalwood oil. I get used to it. Minka’s mom, Bobo, looks just right naked, like a sea otter with braids.

  We mostly wear clothes at our house, and our family doesn’t smell because we bathe in the stream and use soap every day. Mom wants me to at least have panties on most of the time, and that’s another way I know we aren’t like the Taylor Campers, even though the locals think we are.

  The first time I see the toilet at Taylor Camp it’s because I have to use it. I’d forgotten to use our tidy outhouse at home and have to go poo. Pee is easy, any bush will do—but poo, Mom told me, needs to go somewhere particular so germs don’t spread around.

  Minka leads me to a raised, completely open wooden structure in the middle of a field with a toilet seat on it about five feet above a hole in the ground. Flies buzz around, and the smell makes my eyes water and my tummy tighten up.

  “I can’t go here,” I tell Minka. I run away into the jungle toward home. I run and run, missing the trail between our house and the Camp, making my way through thick stands of trees and bamboo grass frantically until I find our cottage and the small, dank outhouse in our yard.

  It smells like poop here, too, but not in a bad way—kind of sourish, like mushrooms growing, a live smell I don’t mind. I lower my butt over the splintery hole in the plywood and sigh with relief to be home. Afterward, I wipe with leaves from the leaf bucket that help keep the poop compost down.

  We use a plastic lidded bucket to pee in at night because the outhouse is too far away and it’s often raining, which is why it’s so green and lush here. Mom dumps the bucket on the banana trees and buries the composted poop for fertilizer. It seems to work because all the trees start growing and making even more fruit after we move in.

  I’m going to begin school now that we have a house, a little late in the year because of all our moving. Mom takes me in to register in Hanalei and leaves Pop and Bonny at home. Going anywhere alone with her is a big deal, and I bounce with excitement in the front seat as we drive along the winding, two-lane road with its steep cliffs falling off the side of the island into black rocks and crashing waves.

  The school building is a long, low wooden L shape just outside of Hanalei, with a covered porch that wraps around for the rain and red ginger planted all around the edges. The Hawaiian flag, bright with its Union Jack and American stripes, flaps proudly from a tall silver flagpole, and when we arrive some older kids are securing it. I want to help clip that flag on and pull on the ropes until it’s at the top and snaps in the breeze.

  At the tiny office, Mom has to produce my birth certificate and immunization record, which she fortunately kept up on Oahu.

  “You’re young to be reading, but it’s a good thing since you’re skipping kindergarten,” the office lady, Miss Inouye, says. Her eyes almost disappear when she smiles, and her face is round and soft, the color of Mom’s rising whole wheat bread dough. She reminds me of my preschool teacher and I’m excited, even though I know I’m going to have to take the bus and it’s a long way.

  “Thought you could learn a little more about our area,” Miss Inouye says, and hands Mom a sheet titled Hanalei School Information in purple ink.

  Out at the van, Mom asks me to read it to her as she drives to Ching Young Store where we have to pick up a few things. I read about the school, and then the town, sounding out when I don’t know the words: “Hanalei Bay is the largest bay on Kauai. The town of Hanalei (population 160) is at the midpoint of the bay and contains Hanalei School, the Wai`oli Hui`ia Church, Ching Young Store and Post Office, the Hanalei Liquor Store, the Rice Mill, the Tahiti Nui Bar, and the Trader mercantile for dry goods. According to Census figures for 1970, there are eleven hundred residents from Ke`e Beach (where the road ends on the Na Pali Coast) to Kilauea fifteen miles to the south.

  Hanalei’s wetlands were cultivated by native
Hawaiians until the introduction of rice as a staple food crop in the 1830s. Hanalei Pier was constructed to assist in transporting the rice to other locations. Taro has returned to Hanalei and is farmed by several families.”

  “Why do they grow the taro in water?” I gesture to the field we’re passing. Heart-shaped, big green leaves of evenly spaced kalo plants rise in pairs from tea-colored liquid, held in by low grassy barriers like quilt squares.

  “I think the plants just like it that way.” Mom angles the van into the unpaved, muddy parking area next to the Ching Young Store. Hau bush and pili grass rise up behind it in a wall broken by a potholed mud road leading to some shacks. “Kalo can grow in the ground too, but grows bigger and faster in the water. Kalo is the Hawaiians’ main food crop, and they know how to get the most out of the land.”

  Flavorless, sticky purple poi is the Hawaiians’ main food? It’s okay with fish and rice, but I like kalo best boiled and fried, like a potato chip or hash browns.

  “Why don’t you get the mail, big first-grader?” Mom smiles, and hands me the keys to open our post office box. Both the little brass key and the van’s key are kept on a great big nickel-plated safety pin that my parents clip onto their swimsuits when surfing.

  Getting the mail is my favorite thing to do in Hanalei because there are always interesting things that come to our little post office box.

  While Mom gets her quilted homemade purse, I skip up the creaky, well-worn porch of the store. The main entrance of Ching Young Store is on the right, and the post office is a half-door on the left, followed by a solid wall of brass-fronted post office boxes in between.

  When we first got to Kauai, we had to stand in line with everyone and ask for “general delivery,” but now that we have a house and our own post office box, it feels like we really live here. I can reach the fancy brass door of the box myself by standing on my tiptoes in my rubber slippers. A warm draft of air from the street blows up the skirt of the halter-backed dress covered in daisies that Mom sewed for me. Inside the box is a pink package slip. I go to the half-door in the counter and reach my hand up to tap the bell, but Clorinda Murioka, the postmistress, is already waiting in the window because she likes to hang out and talk story with people as they come and go.