We signed up for a snorkeling excursion on the south side of Maui. We left the cruise ship and walked through a cavernous warehouse on the pier and out into the parking lot. A bus was waiting to take us to the snorkeling boat.1
As we left Kahului, the big modern town on Maui, the driver pointed out a housing development on our right. He told us that at one time this had been housing for the sugar cane plantation employees. In the nineteen fifties the company had sold the houses to the workers. Since then the residents had been busily adding on to the original structures. Adding bedrooms and bathrooms and kitchens all with little regard to the requirements of the building inspector. “They put the plumbing in the wall and as soon as the inspector goes away out comes a bathroom or a kitchen. Some of these places have eight or ten families living in them.”2
On the left he pointed out the last operating sugar mill in the islands. A plume of black smoke was rising from the tall stack. The driver said that black smoke was illegal. It should be white but perhaps they hadn’t gotten the fuel mixture right yet.3
Once we got out of town we were driving through the cane fields. To our right in the distance the steep canyons of Mauna Kahalawai opened to our gaze one after another. The driver explained that four rivers flowed out of the mountains, that these four rivers had been the pride of the kings of Maui. There were ancient temples in the valleys and taro had been cultivated there in times past. He began to sing a song in Hawaiian about the four rivers. He explained that the song told how the wind at the headwaters of the rivers, high on the mountain “bite your flesh, niki niki.” As he drove he sang, as he sang his right hand kept time to the music. 4
He told us that there was a marine museum near where we were going. He said that twenty-five percent of the fish we would see snorkeling would be native to the islands and could be found nowhere else. He said that there was a serious problem with exotic fish being captured an exported on the black market to the mainland. And than as the bus driver put it, “the fish look out and see that they are not in Hawaii anymore and die.”
He was quiet for a moment.5
Than he said,6
“My uncle he liked to fish. He raised me. He worked when he had to but he fished every chance he could. This was long ago. The wind is always blowing on Maui. When I was a boy uncle would take me with him fishing. We would load his car with the fishing gear and drive out toward Lahina. After he came over the last rise in the road he would stop the car shut off the engine open all the doors and let the wind blow him into town. That was long ago.”7
“The whale watching season has started early this year.” he says after a bit. He talks about how the whales come to Hawaiian waters from the Gulf of Alaska to breed and have their calves. He starts to sing, in English this time, about a group of male whales that are deciding what they will do. “Tomorrow I’m going to Maui. To Maui to Marry I go. Yes tomorrow I’m going to Maui to marry unless I get lucky tonight.” We pull into a parking lot and the show is over. 8
On the return trip we get a middle age white guy who speaks to no one and plays metal rock on the way home. As we pass the sugar plantation black smoke is still pouring out of the stack.9
10
Bud
200811
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