The far side of Paradise

Of course it had. Oprah Winfrey had acquired the coastline (or at least the most scenic 100 or so acres of it). Passport Resorts had purchased Hotel H¯ana-Maui, renovated it, and installed a stunning new spa. Park rangers had cracked down on illegal camping, and there was more traffic on the road. But as I pulled into town, everything appeared the same. Even the notices at Hasegawa’s General Store seemed as if they had been tacked there for a decade: Smoked Pork, $10 a Bag; Juggling Lessons, Tuesday at 7; UPS Pickups for…, and a list of ten names followed.

I checked into the hotel, made my way to the garden-front spa and, as

an attendant brushed a paste of spirulina and ‘awa (the narcotic known through much of the Pacific as kava) across my body, I began to think that maybe all was right with the world.

It could have been the lingering effects of the ‘awa, but I like to think it was H¯ana itself that set my mind at ease. There is nothing to do here—or at least nothing that must be done. The hotel has no TV and no newspaper on the doorstep. The town has no bars, no golf course, no parasailing. Each morning, I would wake at dawn, grind and brew the locally grown organic coffee the hotel genteelly provides, and then sit in the hot tub on my cottage deck watching the sun rise over the sea. Horses grazed in the fields beyond the lawn, and one day I rode along the craggy coast, crossing the land Oprah purchased from the H¯ana Ranch, including the sacred hilltop, Ka Iwi o Pele, where Pele the volcano goddess left her bones after she lost a fight with her sister, the water goddess, and her soul fled to the Big Island.

“How do Hawaiians feel about Oprah buying sacred land?” I had asked Eddie Pu, whose family once held large plots of land in Ki¯pahulu and who now lives on just two acres.

“Oprah came to me and to some of the elders and asked the same thing,” he said with a smile. “I told her, it is your land—you do as you see fit. So far, nothing has changed. Maybe it was good she bought it.” He shrugged. “But who am I to say? I am just a simple Hawaiian.”

Maybe it is luck, or maybe it is the long winding road with its one-lane bridges, or maybe it is the overpowering soul of the place that has kept anyone from developing H¯ana. In 1961, Laurance Rockefeller arrived with plans for building a resort. He bought 52 acres of Ki¯pahulu’s coastline and then, according to historian Russell Apple, decided that East Maui was “too beautiful and rural a community for commercial exploitation, with the social, economic, and environmental changes and other developments a major resort hotel would bring.” Later, he bought more land and raised money to protect the Ki¯pahulu Valley’s most important watershed. As a result, ‘Ohe‘o Gulch and its cascading pools, bamboo forests, and guava groves is now part of Haleakal¯a National Park and forms a crucial nature corridor to the volcano’s crater.

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