Paradise Park (2 page)

We bummed around Oregon for a while and did some contra dancing in Portland. First I waitressed, and then I got a job cleaning rooms at a seniors residence—two twin towers with distant views of the Willamette River—and we lived there in some cement-block staff quarters in the back. I really really wanted to get to Berkeley, but Gary was going house to house for the Sierra Club. It was actually very old fashioned in a way, me scrubbing floors, and Gary like the Fuller brush man going door to door, peddling clean air and meadows blossoming with wildflowers. I started thinking it wasn’t just a figure of speech, that you could die of loneliness.

Finally, after eight months or so, I convinced Gary to drive down to Berkeley and check out how activist the campus really was, and if the place was all it was cracked up to be. I was sure once he got there he’d want to stay, because it would all be so much his thing. I was just bereft of my bookstores and my coffeehouses and the folk dance club and little twisted streets in Boston, and I thought in his heart Gary was too.

We drove south, not right along the coast, but through the mountains on I-5, to take the faster route. We’d poured so much money into the Fury it was running for days without trouble, but we knew it was just a matter of time before that car broke down again. Mountains towered over us, all covered with pine trees, and desolate ranches came up, yellow bluffs and only cattle. Not a single rancher in sight. Then trucks would thunder down on either side of us and wall off the view. We broke the trip into two days and spent the night at a camping ground just outside Yreka, and then we drove through that little town, and past all the roadside dealerships for farm equipment, new and used. We drove all the next day, down, down, down, till the land was flat and we got to Vallejo, which was so flat it seemed to seep right into a blue haze at the edges, and then we got tangled in those steel bridges and highways that shoot out all over the bay.

What a relief! There was dancing every night in Berkeley, in the churches and the classrooms; and, since it was spring now, we’d dance practically all night in the parks on the grass. Gary and I danced until
we hurt. We took razor blades to slit the blisters on our feet. The two of us showed off East Coast Israeli dances, steps Berkeley had never seen before. Everyone was talking about us. Everyone was gathering in circles in the evenings to watch us dance in Cedar Rose Park.

I spent my days working in Moe’s, where the books were piled up on musty shelves and orange crates. I combed through the library close-outs, when the public libraries would dump books by the box load. Books in library bindings, all sensible colors like for ladies’ winter purses: crimson, forest green, and navy blue. Between customers I used to stand around and read old tomes about Nature and Art. Books on microbes with black-and-white photographs, art-history textbooks with color plates—dark prints of oil paintings veiled with tissue-paper pages to protect them. Evenings, Gary and I went home to a vegetarian cooperative house of environmental people in South Berkeley where we slept on a futon high up under the roof. We had some silly weekends there in the house, dropping acid in the common room on these big vinyl sofas. But really mainly we were dedicated to turning people on to the plight of the marshlands around the bay. We had a ditto machine we had liberated from a basement office in Tollman Hall and we were busy putting out newsletters with that wavy lavender printing and trippy inky smell that dittos have.

Still, Gary had that traveling bug. “I want to go out and see some islands,” he told me one night in bed.

And I said, “What kind of islands?”

“In the Pacific,” he said. “I want to get out there before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?” I said, being kind of sleepy.

“Before they’re spoiled.”

“I thought they already are spoiled.”

“Did you know,” he said, “that almost half of Hawaii’s endemic birds are now extinct?” And he told me how forty percent of the known native bird species were now wiped out, and sixty percent, which I guess was all the rest, were on the endangered species list. And he told me how he wanted to go out there and see those birds, and work on saving them.

I lay there, my head in the hollow right beneath his shoulder. He was so big his whole body warmed me easily from head to foot. Being twenty, I figured I was past the escapades of my teenage years, and now
settling down. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was something of a homebody for an activist.

But Gary had got started with this reading group from the geography department at the university. It was a very small odd radical group of graduate students. They didn’t just study maps and charts. They were into geopolitics and the history of colonialism, and invading peoples warping ecosystems, and that’s where Gary got this bee in his bonnet about going out into the Pacific and trying to do some good in Hawaii. There was this guy who was a legend to the reading group, this guy out in Hawaii, named Brian Andrew Williamson, who was saving endangered birds. He was the world authority on some of the rare species, and had actually seen a pair of elusive vermillion iiwi birds that had been thought at one time to be entirely extinct. Gary went and read all Williamson’s papers in Doe Library, which he got access to as a “visiting scholar” from Harvard. He got hold of everything by Williamson in
Pacific Science
, all his articles in
Atoll Research Bulletin.
“Birds,” Gary said. “They’re like a key to the whole ecosystem. They’re the bellwether, did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

He looked at me as if I lacked feeling. “When the birds go, it’s symptomatic of the whole habitat’s decay!”

Gary was already starting to get this Gauguin thing going. He was obsessed with seeing the birds of the Pacific. He got antsy; he gave me grief—which at the time I didn’t really understand, since we’d been through that big journey west, and all that time in Oregon. I thought all that had brought us closer together, all that history between us. But Gary was getting quieter and moodier and full of plans.

Inspired by the ornithologist, Williamson, Gary got an idea he would go out and work on saving the endangered bird species in what was left of the jungles in Hawaii. He talked all the time about goats eroding the hillsides and wild boars uprooting trees, and the invasion of the white-eyes, these little green finches from Japan wiping out the native honey-creepers, which were Hawaiian finches. He just had to fly out there; he just had to see those raped islands for himself and do something about them. For money he was going to sell the Plymouth. He was going to find some guy, some automotive virgin, and sell him the Fury from hell. Then Gary would take off. So, of course, I said I would go out to
Honolulu with him. I figured I’d go see the place too; and I cared about the native finches. And I think somewhere in me I knew that if I hadn’t gone with him he would have gone anyway.

H
ERE’S
what I took to Hawaii: my guitar, and my backpack with my name on it in black laundry marker. In the backpack: six panties, and a bra. Five T-shirts of different colors, a pair of shorts (I wore my jeans), two Indian gauze skirts wadded up in little balls, and a macramé bikini. A notebook and a ballpoint pen to write down my feelings. My wallet, my hairbrush, and toothbrush, and, from the free clinic, a good supply of the pill. I had a watch, a big silver man’s watch that had been my grandfather’s. Grandpa Irving’s watch had a creamy face and bold black roman numerals. The crystal was scratched, and when you opened up the watch-case there were pawn marks inside, stamped in the silver. The watch was battered up, but lucky. Grandpa had kept it during the flu epidemic of 1918, when he holed up in his room for two weeks with a bottle of wicked germ-killing brandy, and he’d carried it through all his union organizing. It was his talisman—at least that’s how it was told to me. He even brought it down to Mexico, when he’d tried to organize the tobacco workers in Yucatán. So of things of value I had that watch and my guitar.

It was raining when we got to Oahu. Everything was gray and white and windy, like an old movie as we came down closer and closer, and out the airplane window I could see these little palm trees waving around hysterically by the tarmac. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. My face was just pressed against that cold airplane glass. In the airport there was slack key guitar music and such a strong sweet scent of flowers I thought at first that everyone was smoking weed. There were servicemen, and tourists and honeymooners, who you could tell right away because they were all dressed up, everything about them new. And then there were scraggly folk like us, some with hiking gear. We all got free paper cups of pineapple juice.

The two of us piled into a station wagon taxi—which wasn’t really necessary, considering how little luggage we had, but we laid our backpacks and my guitar in the back and we got in. All the car’s windows were open in the rain, and I couldn’t believe it, the air was so warm and
soft and damp. We drove on the shortest freeway I’d ever seen. It was like it was foreshortened, and there was Honolulu coming up so fast, just a few tall white buildings, a little clump right in front of Diamond Head. We’d got a two-week deal in Waikiki. Our hotel was not on the beach; it did not have views, its rooms were not equipped with many towels, but it was cheap. We figured it would be our launching pad.

The rain cleared up by the next morning, and we hopped a city bus, which was painted turquoise and had turquoise seats too. The windows were half open, and outside the colors were spectacular. I couldn’t get over it. The greens were so green, the blue sky so blue. The leaves, the clouds, even the mock orange bushes. It was like everything on that island had just come out of the wash; it was like the trees were hanging out to dry. I just wanted to ride around all day. I just wanted to go out to a park bench with my guitar and write a song. But Gary had a look of disgust on his face. He hadn’t come to ride buses and feel like he was still in the United States. He never said anything to me unless it was some kind of critical comment about tourist traps and raped ecosystems and the scummy bars in Waikiki.

We got off at the university, which was full of trees. There were trees that launched these seeds just like brown golf balls, dimples and all. And there were trees with big saggy phallic seed pods hanging down, just obscene looking. The buildings were all a mishmash, lots of dirty cement and glass. There was a tubular sculpture, bright orange, house high, with enameled pieces of metal bent into cones and big pointy curves. The top looked like lipstick scaled for a giantess. I loved all this. I was gawking at everything, but Gary just strode over to the zoology department. He was focused on digging up that ornithologist, the hero he had come all this way to meet and work with and learn from and basically get involved with his cause. There was real drama about it, the way Gary walked into Spaulding Hall. It was like it was going to be: Dr. Williamson, I presume? And Gary would be Stanley.

Well, as it turned out, Brian was a very down to earth feet-on-the-desk type guy. He was about Gary’s age, mid-thirties, but shorter than Gary, and stockier. He had a lot of sandy blond hair and a beard, and basically looked like a mountain man. His eyes were dark and steady, his nose was peeling. His arms were thick and freckled, and his shoulders broad, as opposed to Gary, who was so tall and sinewy and fleeting. At
the time I just thought Brian looked bluff and bland, and not as sharp as Gary. I thought Brian didn’t have a lot of rhythm to him. Still, when it came to birds, he seemed to know his stuff. He thought it was cool Gary had read his articles. He said why don’t we all have lunch. So we went to a lunch wagon on the street and bought big white dumplings with pork called
manapua
, and meat sticks, and that sweet cold
inari
sushi in a brown sugary-vinegary cone.

We sat out on the grass and Brian talked about his new project that he’d just got funded. It was a study of red-footed boobies, which were a very gentle lovely bird that traveled all through the Hawaiian Islands to breed, even to certain tiny islands way northwest. They were one of those species that were indigenous to Hawaii and they weren’t used to having any predators. They had no idea how to protect themselves against goats or pigs or mongooses. On Tern Island and various atolls they were being slaughtered by the jeeps and machinery the military was bringing in. They were flying into guy wires, and being sucked up the intakes of jet engines, which tended to crash the Air Force’s precious fighter-bombers. Naturally, grunts had no sensitivity to this rare bird. In fact they liked driving around mowing boobies down when they stood in the middle of the road. Brian had been ridiculed by the Coast Guard when he’d gone out to defend the birds on island bases and installations. The government’s official position was that the birds were dumb for getting in their way, while in fact it was the boobies’ innocence and trust that was getting them killed. But now the Coast Guard was pulling back from a lot of places in the northwest, so Brian had a grant to sail out there and take a census of the boobies and other seabirds that were nesting happily on the islands the military had left. In particular, he was making plans to go out for three months to observe a bunch of red-footed boobies that he’d banded on Kauai when they were just chicks.

Gary listened closely all during lunch, but he didn’t say much. I think maybe the Berkeleyites had made Brian out a little larger than life. Gary was becoming a little bit downcast.

After lunch when Brian went back to his office, Gary and I walked through campus.

“Where are you going?” I asked. “Isn’t the bus the other way?”

Gary kept his eyes on the ground. He just kept walking. I looked over
at him. He was making me nervous. What should I say to him? That I was having a great time? That those meat sticks and pork dumplings had made my day? It had been months since I’d had meat, and I wasn’t exactly a vegetarian, even though in Berkeley I’d been living in a vegetarian co-op house. I just walked and walked along. It was hard to keep up, Gary’s legs were so long, and he was so deep in thought. Finally I said, “Gary, could you just stop for a minute?”