Waking Up in Eden.

IN PURSUIT OF AN IMPa.s.sIONED LIFE ON AN IMPERILED ISLAND.

LUCINDA FLEESON.

Dedicated to gardeners everywhere who take these disasters and improve on them.

Kauai.

PART ONE.

Discovery.

CHAPTER ONE.

Solitary Expeditions.

SLOWLY I TURNED the corner onto my perfect little street of stone houses and picket fences already steeped in the long shadows of early evening. I parked my Toyota, then picked a path through the tricycle and other toys left on the sidewalk by the neighbors' children. There was no hurry. I had no plans.

Inside, my reading corner waited, a lady's wing chair in wool plaid pulled close to the white brick fireplace. Pa.s.sing into the narrow galley kitchen, I gathered the makings for a simple meal, a standard entry in my repertoire of Single Working Girl's Twenty-Minute Dinners. Green salad, leftover balsamic vinaigrette. I set a pot of water on to boil for angel-hair pasta, peeled garlic cloves, and chopped parsley. On second thought, I turned off the water and went upstairs. Blue and white toile papered the renovated bathroom and dressing room in an eighteenth-century pastoral scene. I switched on a bra.s.s student lamp in the darkened study. Twin green globes cast ponds of light on a wall of photographs: smiling family members and friends; vacation shots from hiking the Alps; skiing in Italy; watching the races at Saratoga Springs. All evidence of a full, happy life, right?

I kicked off high-heeled pumps and hung up my tailored suit while I drew a hot, foamy bath in the claw-footed tub, then got in for a soak. Even that didn't take the edge off an evening with too much free time. Wrapped in a silk dressing gown, I went back downstairs and launched a CD of John Coltrane's My Favorite Things. In a nightly ritual, I dared myself to light the fire with a single match, touching the flame to four corners of crumpled newspaper. Satisfied that it caught, I set a tray with cloth napkin and silver, then brought it back to the fireside. I studied the flames. My G.o.d, I'm going to spend the rest of my life here. Restoring this English-style ramshackle cottage until it was as trim as a sailboat had consumed nine years. But I had tired of playing house. A child of preppy, Connecticut suburbia, I had settled for more of the same in the happily-ever-afterdom of suburban Philadelphia. For most of my neighbors and peers, lawyer husbands and above-average children had replaced the circle pins and penny loafers we had worn with brutal conformity as teenagers.

While many women my age rushed about, drawn and quartered between big lives of child-rearing and high-powered jobs, I found myself underemployed and sliding into midlife with not much to show for it. Now forty-four, I'd been divorced for almost fifteen years. My last great love affair had died more than a year ago. I couldn't quite escape an ingrained sense that a solitary woman was a misfit, a dried-up celibate or eccentric, or worse yet, too unattractive to find a presentable mate.

I once deemed my work as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer the apogee of existence. Now corporate profiteering and betrayal had slithered into our midst. It no longer seemed fun or n.o.ble. Healthy, over forty, either single or with children who had flown the nest, many of my colleagues faced similar midlife angst, professional and personal. Our well-developed careers had gone flat. What to do now with our brightly educated minds, expensively toned bodies, and elongated life spans that promised another thirty or forty years of active life? Was plastic surgery to be the last frontier? Recently a recurring nightmare plagued me, waking me with a Delphic warning: You are doomed to a life of small luxuries. Not lavish, big spending bursts of vacation houses, big cars, and jewels, but just enough for comfort.

Roosters haunted me like the Ghost of Christmas Future. During the years when my girlfriends and I had hunted antiques stores and flea markets to fill up our newly purchased houses, we noticed rooster knickknacks everywhere. Rooster coffee mugs, rooster salt shakers, rooster napkin holders, rooster-anything-you-can-imagine. "Look, another item for the rooster shop we're going to open when we're old and retired," we'd joke. The roosters became emblematic of all the useless junk that Americans buy and all the wasted hours middle-aged women fill with aimless shopping for more useless stuff. Opening a rooster knick-knack shop was the last thing I'd ever do, I vowed.

I had read many of the writings of psychologist Carl Jung, who devoted much of his study to the midlife crisis. He felt the suffering at that age held potential for change. Adults dedicate the first half of life to building fortune, family, and career. Jung theorized that at midlife those pursuits lose their power of attraction, and personal values shift into reverse. What was once important dims, while new pursuits and a growing spirituality loom on the horizon. Fail to pay attention to the warning lights of depression and anxiety, and you risk sinking into a quagmire of regret and resentment. Thousands of us baby boomers are reinventing ourselves, we're told. But I had yet to find any instruction books. How to begin when you're frozen by inertia? When fear paralyzes? "We would rather be ruined than changed, We would rather die in our dread," wrote W. H. Auden.

The telephone ring interrupted my gloomy ruminations. I rushed to the kitchen wall phone and stood listening while Dr. William Klein cheerily announced that he was coming to Philadelphia for meetings. He invited me to dinner Sunday night. "We'll go someplace fancy," he promised. Bill Klein was an erudite botanist, one of my favorite sources. Over the years, I enjoyed our infrequent lunches that probed the realm of ideas.

I hung up the phone, went upstairs, and pulled on a pair of faded green Army fatigues and one of Dad's old sweaters with holes in the elbows. I rummaged under the sink for a flashlight, then escaped outside to the garden. With its damp scent of recent rain, the cold night air made me shiver. A nearly full moon washed the garden in light and shadow. I trained the light beam on top-heavy, wobbling daffodils. Every autumn I had dug in more bulbs, more varieties, until now hundreds lit the small yard: sunset oranges of the giant Fortissimo; creamy Ice Follies; a few collectors' pinks such as Salome, with its whisper white petals and apricot centers. I searched for perfect blooms. Not those past their prime, marred by creeping translucence along crinkling petals.

I carried an armload of flowers into the kitchen. A few dots of black dirt speckled an insouciant Las Vegas blossom. Once I watched champion daffodil grower Kathryn Andersen use the tip of her tongue to gently lap away splashes of dirt from prize entries. Anything stronger could nick or dent the flower. I tried it. The petals felt as soft as baby skin but had a crisp taste of celery. Gardening always cheered me up.

BUYING AN OLD HOUSE had unleashed a pent-up desire. That first winter I read garden books late into night. Weekends I haunted nurseries, just to look at the plants and smell loamy earth. I signed up for a night course in landscape design at the nearby Morris Arboretum. Although a novice, I chose one of the most difficult and labor-intensive projects: an English perennial border, to match my English cottage. I l.u.s.ted after towering blue delphiniums, pink snapdragons, lavenders, and heathers.

My small cottage garden occupied only about four hundred square feet. It begged to be called postage-stamp in size. Worse, a fortresslike hedge of arborvitae surrounded the perimeter. "Get rid of it," advised the landscape instructor. I looked at him as if he were an anarchist. But I came to realize that if I was to get anywhere, I had to clear-cut the whole yard, a.n.a.lyze the site for light and shade, drainage and soil conditions, and then start anew.

I chopped down each tree with a hatchet. Even with goatskin gloves, my thumbs ached. A dated gardening book, a gift from my mother, advised double-digging eighteen-inch trenches, English-style, then filling the furrows with cow manure. Two truckloads of organic humus and sand added height. I liked the physical work of bending muscles to the task and learning to use a shovel. Lured by the magical alchemy of the garden that transforms manure and garbage into roses, I saved coffee grounds and vegetable peels as precious nutrients for the compost heap. The mindless weeding and meditation on each task transformed my small plot into a place to forget daily cares. Minutes disappeared into hours without notice. Sometimes I'd garden as the moon came up, trying to squeeze in a few last tasks.

That first spring, every inch of the yard exploded into lavenders, nasturtiums, and lilies. Brooding, black-red Don Juan roses and nude-colored New Dawn pink climbers veiled the second-story balcony. A really good garden requires an almost religious adherence to its theme. I couldn't resist growing American-as-pie zinnias by the score or cramming dinner-plate-sized dahlias into the back of the border, ignoring one English garden writer's dismissal of dahlias as "so vulgar."

I cared not. The garden became a place of abandon for me, a joy of fantasies.

Dr. Klein had introduced me to the notion of the garden as an intellectual journey, a physical record of the history of civilization. From him I learned that medieval monks cultivated medicinal herbs in the first botanical gardens. For thirteen years, Dr. Klein had directed the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania, transforming it from a weedy and forgotten Victorian botanical garden into a thriving educational center with new buildings, explosive plans, and thousands of visitors. "If Bill Klein had been a plant, he would be a pachysandra," I had written in a profile of him for the Inquirer. "Invasive and slightly out of control." One of those rare scientists who knew how to spin a story, he enlisted people to his cause. Some found the ebullient, verbose botanist rather alarming. And like all visionaries who goad for more and more progress, he eventually found himself out on a limb. Just as university regents were about to impose budget controls to rein in his little Eden, he quit to become the director of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida.

I kept in touch after he left Philadelphia, and flew down to Miami to write a story for the newspaper shortly after Hurricane Andrew blew apart much of south Florida. The storm toppled Fairchild Garden's collection of rare palms and turned its manicured grounds into a snarl of overturned trees. Many staff members lost their own houses, yet they showed up to work long days for Dr. Klein. As he walked through the rubble, Dr. Klein promised, "Fairchild will rise again. It's the nature of gardeners to take these disasters and improve on them."

His garden reopened to the public in thirty days. "It was nothing that General Patton couldn't have done," he insisted. The performance earned him a reputation in the garden world as the hurricane-fixer. But he quarreled with Fairchild Garden's intrusive board of directors, complaining that they were always leaning over his shoulder, hampering his plans, restricting his vision. So he jumped at the chance to become executive director, CEO, and president of the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. "As soon as I heard that the board of trustees lived five thousand miles away and met only twice a year, I knew it was the place for me," he confided. Now aged sixty-two, he planned to stay until retirement, transforming his last garden inst.i.tution into his masterwork.

Sunday evening I studied my closet full of clothes, looking for something suitably dressy for a pricey dinner. I had a cla.s.sy wardrobe, thanks to hand-me-downs from my sister who lived in Milan with her Italian clothier husband. I chose a tailored navy blazer and slacks, with a silk top draped into a V-neck, a chunky gold ring set with an emerald-cut green tourmaline, flashy earrings to match, and navy heels.

I always enjoyed the sunset drive down to Center City along the Schuylkill. Rowing sculls skimmed the river, bathed in the same golden light Thomas Eakins painted more than a century ago. I regarded Philadelphia as just the right size. Big enough for a world-cla.s.s orchestra, great restaurants, and museums, small enough that I could drive home in thirty minutes.

When I entered the noisy lobby of the nondescript Hershey Hotel on South Broad Street, I did not see any sign of Dr. Klein. Finally he appeared, dressed in rumpled pants, wrinkled sweater, and a green baseball cap. He looked kind of schlumpy, balding with professorial wire-rim gla.s.ses and a girth of extra pounds he was always trying to lose. "Where should we go?" he asked. I groaned silently. He had forgotten his promise of an upscale meal. I slipped off my too-fancy earrings and hid them in a pocket, then suggested Upstares at Varalli, a casual Italian restaurant across the street. I tried to suppress my irritation. By the entree, I regained enough humor to ask about life in Hawaii. "Mah-velous, mah-velous," he said expansively. "You should see my office. I can see whales breaching in the distance out one window. The other looks out onto a hillside where cows graze."

"Sounds like the boondocks," I said. "What are you doing on the East Coast?"

"Looking to hire somebody to help me raise money, actually," he said. "Are you interested?" He threw it out so casually that I didn't see the barbed lure.

"Oh sure," I said. "It probably doesn't pay anything."

"Actually, it does."

I said quickly, "I'll never leave journalism."

He looked away, eyelids dropping over half-closed eyes.

TWO WEEKS LATER, I waited on the couch outside the executive editor's office, surveying the familiar newsroom landscape. I had spent years here on midnight deadlines and frenzied story chases. Cheap metal desks jammed against one another, cluttered with newspapers and file folders. A plastic shark head hung over one desk. The newsroom had served almost as a college dorm for my generation of journalists who spent most of their professional lives at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Truthfully, it was better than college - a couple hundred of the best young journalists in the country, all intensely inquisitive and engaged, had fought and schemed to get here. We were drawn by the newspaper's legendary editor, Eugene L. Roberts, Jr., who valued creative writing and investigative reporting and gave reporters enough time and money to pursue their best work. Despite the dedicated individualism of journalists, we all drank the same elixir, a heady promise that we were building a great newspaper. The stories produced in those years soared, uncovering police brutality, budget excesses at the Pentagon, chaos at the IRS, and deep narratives of ordinary lives made brilliant. Then the apparatchiks and bean counters took over and corporate greed became the dominant goal. Roberts couldn't fight off Knight Ridder, the newspaper chain owners, and even he left.

A newspaper resembles a grand opera company, with its repertoire cast and fierce compet.i.tions, endless fallings-out and countless love affairs. Once it slips, it can never attain those high notes again, and you spend the rest of your life remembering.

Now, editors relegated more and more reporters to the s.h.i.t List. Including me, I feared. Whether covering New Jersey gambling, corruption at city hall, or cultural inst.i.tutions, I could dig out stories. But in the new era, support was vanishing for that kind of reporting. A couple of years ago I had volunteered to create the Home and Design section. An odd choice for a hard news and investigative reporter, but I saw it as a refuge that also offered a chance to write about architecture and gardening. It worked for a while. The new section editor didn't know anything about home or design but delivered pep rally speeches in Dale Carnegie plat.i.tudes: We're going to be number one in the country! We're building a team! Lately I had to fight off news-you-can-use stories. I got away with turning down an a.s.signment to write a shopper's guide to summer fans. But when I refused to write puff pieces promoting real estate for sale, I ventured into insubordination. I asked for a transfer, reactivated a campaign to go overseas, to cover science, to do anything to get out of Features.

The secretary signaled me to go into the executive editor's office. Max stood poised before an antique worktable, his carved mahogany desk and bookcase behind him. Its sumptuous decor had the odd style of a turn-of-the-century robber baron. Max's starched blue oxford shirt was rolled up to the elbows as he ruffled papers, ostensibly busy. He glanced sideways at me and said, "Sit down, Lucinda, this will only take a minute." He remained standing. Max was handsome, in a rich kid's preppy Harvard way, with dark hair curled over chiseled features. Charming and so fresh-faced that I instinctively smiled and forgot to be wary.

He never met my eyes and continued to leaf through papers. Okay, I would not have to write about real estate, but I could forget about going abroad. Or anywhere else. I wasn't going anywhere. He ran through a list of trumped-up offenses. "That's a bunch of c.r.a.p," I said. I may have sounded tough. But as I stood, I felt like I teetered on a tightrope. As I walked out the door I knew I had reached a dead end.

Enough of my friends had signed on to The New York Times and The Washington Post that I might be able to land at either one. Nausea swept over me, and an icy sweat slid down my spine and withered my spirit.

TEN DAYS LATER, I woke up at 3 a.m. and sat upright in bed. Why not take that job in Hawaii?

Why the h.e.l.l not?

I switched on the lamp and moved across the hall to the study. I pulled down an atlas and turned to the Hawaiian Islands. Dozens of tiny specks and dots of land formed a chain that started in the mid-Pacific and stretched northwest for 1,500 miles. The Hawaiian archipelago is the most isolated place on earth, in terms of distance from continents. Los Angeles lies 2,550 miles away; Tokyo 3,860, with nothing in between.

The southernmost Big Island (Hawaii) anchors the chain. Ovals and amoeba shapes of Maui, Lanai, Molokai, and Oahu bunch together like a closely strung necklace. Smaller, circular Kauai lies farther north and west, distanced from the rest.

As an adventure, it struck me as suitably remote and exotic, but not all that daring. My own grandmother, Otelia Breck, risked more when she traveled from Germany to Ellis Island in 1909 at age twenty-four, alone, unattached, with no English and little money. Plus, the top honeymoon destination in America couldn't be too wild and woolly. I feared drinks with umbrellas and tourist hulas. But I had dreamed of living in the pastoral countryside, with a pared-down life far from suburban materialism and out of reach from corporate America.

Nature - rugged, ferocious, and raw - always had a restorative effect on me and quieted my inner storms. Henry Beston, in the foreward to a new edition of his cla.s.sic book, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, wrote famously of our need to return to nature. "Nature is part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the gra.s.s are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity."

I wanted my journey to the outermost island to bring me closer to that divine mystery. A time for serious reflection, for stilling the unease over what I had not accomplished in the first half of life and for discovering what I wanted for the second half. A chance to revise my biography.

As I continued my research over the next few days, I discovered that Kauai was nicknamed "the Garden Island." Considered by many to be the most beautiful of the islands, it was also the greenest. A year-round population of fifty thousand barely filled its 550 square miles, much of it impenetrable jungle or sheer cliffs. The inaccessible Mount Waialeale, claimed to be the wettest spot on earth with 624 inches of rainfall per year, dominated the interior. Lavish amounts of water, sun, and fertile soil provided ideal growing conditions. Yet Hawaii was America's imperiled Eden. Called "the Extinction Capital of the World," Hawaii had lost more plant and animal species than any other place in America, with many more wavering on the brink. Five hundred and forty U.S. plant and animal species had now become extinct - almost half, or 250 of those, had occurred in Hawaii. I wanted to get there before the cosmic outlaws had taken them all.

All these troubles made Hawaii a botanist's paradise, a microcosm for carrying out important, planet-saving work. If we can't save 550 miles, how can we save the rest of the earth?

Dr. Klein's National Tropical Botanical Garden was grander and more extensive than I had realized. An empire. On the island of Kauai, there were two NTBG jewels: the imposing Allerton Garden, one of the great garden estates of the world; and the Limahuli Garden and Preserve, a one-thousand-acre treasure of native species and ancient remnants of a Hawaiian settlement. On the tip of Maui, the NTBG managed the most sacred site in all of Polynesia, Piilanihale heiau - a sixteenth-century war temple where human sacrifices were thought to have occurred. Two preserves on the Big Island were untouched expanses of open territory. On the mainland, the NTBG owned the elegant Kampong in Coconut Grove, Florida, home and estate of plant explorer David Fairchild.

Granted a rare charter by the United States Congress in 1964, the Garden's mission was to serve as a national resource to preserve Hawaii's threatened tropical flora. Yet Dr. Klein sketched a portrait of a closed, reclusive inst.i.tution. For several years as a cultural reporter, I had chronicled the transformation of the quirky Barnes Foundation, the repository of the world's foremost collection of French impressionist and postimpressionist art. It was preposterously located in a mansion just outside of Philadelphia. Founded by eccentric Dr. Albert Barnes, whose prescient collecting taste was unfortunately accompanied by bombastic ravings about art education, his foundation was run by cultlike followers who operated it like a private club. From what I learned through Bill Klein, Allerton Garden might rival the Barnes Foundation in its determination to remain hidden. His mission to turn Allerton and the other sites into true public gardens appealed to me. It might be fun to work from the inside for once, instead of trying to burrow my way in as a journalist. Dr. Klein didn't resemble a fairy G.o.dmother, but perhaps he was.

I had never seriously contemplated leaving journalism or the Inquirer; I imagined I would grow old there, perhaps die with a half-written story still in the computer. But now that I had made the decision to leave I saw it as inevitable. James Michener in Hawaii, his wonderful if sometimes fictionalized history of the islands, concocted what to me was an entirely believable tale of why natives of Bora-Bora left their home around A.D. 800 to sail five thousand miles north, thrusting into the unknown, eventually landing in Hawaii as the first settlers. Michener wrote that powerful and greedy high priests imposed worship of a new G.o.d on the Bora-Bora populace as a thinly disguised grab for political power. The priests killed anyone who questioned the new order. The rebellious King Tamatoa watched with horror as his best warriors were slain. He realized he had to leave. Michener wrote, "He saw, as if in a revealing vision, how foolish he had been to combat the will of the inevitable. New G.o.ds were being born, and new G.o.ds conquer; but what Tamatoa did not realize was that the contentment of soul which his confession induced was merely the prerequisite for a decision toward which he had been fumbling for some months."

Journalism as I knew it would not recover for at least another generation or two. A vast bloodletting had just begun. News chain owners and their bean counters and finance directors triumphed in ascendancy, looting news outlets for greater and greater profits. Perhaps worse, during these fat times while newspapers were making a killing, no serious research or development was undertaken to plot the future of what we'd soon be calling "dead-tree journalism." As the newfangled Internet came barreling down the track, our leaders' solution was to give its news away on free Web sites. And once that happened, they couldn't figure out a way to get it all back, even to save their skins. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Yet leaving brought a sense of failure. I felt akin to Michener's Tamatoa as he led his people into exile: "No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure; but having failed in one location and having been ejected, it is possible that in the next he will be a little wiser. . . .

"Only if they had been craven could they have swallowed their humiliation and remained on Bora Bora; this they would not do. It is true that they fled into the dark, but each man carried as his most prized possession his own personal G.o.d of courage."

Circ.u.mstances have to pile on top of one another, pushing us out from the comfortable heap and forcing us either to act decisively, or quietly accept what is unacceptable and slowly fade away. Moving to another place would not be enough. I needed a new vocation, one that would capture me as fiercely as journalism once had. Perhaps the garden would become my calling. If not, I sensed it would at least provide a place to heal.

Was this not destiny, after all, that my path that had begun in a garden of English perennials should lead to the Garden Isle?

DESPITE MY GROWING EXCITEMENT, preparations for leaving Philadelphia plunged me into deep anxiety. Job, career, house, comfortable niche of friends - I had put them all on the line. I comforted myself that true adventures come without safety nets. "If not now, when?" was a question that we women of a certain age use to justify an extravagant purchase. Not many role models stood out for me to follow. In her revelatory book, Writing a Woman's Life, Barnard professor Carolyn Heilbrun traced how many women of accomplishment - Virginia Woolf and Colette, for example - did not come to their most serious endeavors, their awakening to their true selves and voices, until after they turned fifty. Those late bloomers also had to forge ahead into terra incognita, avoiding the only real narratives society offered them - either the marriage story that ends when the prince and princess walk down the aisle, or the erotic tale, in which characters like Madame Bovary flout social conventions for pa.s.sionate affairs, only to be punished by early death, ostracism, or suicide. Not much of a choice. Even now, in twenty-first century America, we are still trying to figure out our own narratives for aging. Heilbrun wrote about the challenge. "As we age, many of us who are privileged . . . those with some a.s.sured place and pattern in their lives, with some financial security - are in danger of choosing to stay right where we are, to undertake each day's routine, and to listen to our arteries hardening. . . . Instead, we should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular."

I remembered an old garden proverb: Why not go out on a limb? That's where the fruit is.

As I packed, I heard warnings. There's nothing to do in Hawaii. It's a place where you turn on the television and watch basketball in the afternoon. Food is bad. Architecture uninteresting. No suitable men.

It may be good for the soul to dispossess every few years, but it takes fort.i.tude to dismantle a house and confront your unfilled hopes and intentions, a.s.signing them destinations: Put into storage on the East Coast; pack for Hawaii; discard.

Waterford crystal I'd received as wedding presents and used once a year. Good riddance!

The canning jars bought at the height of vegetable production in my garden. Never again. Out!

The plaid wool armchair next to the fire. Storage.

The embroidered baby's quilt I st.i.tched in college, so sure then that I would have a babe in arms of my own someday. Someday hadn't come and I had never gotten around to finishing it. Storage.

I felt as if I were throwing out a hope chest.

Friends threw a good-bye luau, complete with roast pig. Girlfriends danced a hula enacting the story of Lucinderella as she bid Aloha Oe to traffic jams and meddlesome editors. They prepared the traditional send-off gift, a mock front page. Headlines read WHIRLWIND LUCINDA KAUAI BOUND; ISLANDERS BEWARE, FLEESON EN ROUTE.

My charming little house sold after only one day on the market. The small profit paid off all my credit card debt. I had no mortgage, no bills, no husband, no reason to stay. The question became not how could I leave, but why had I remained so long? I didn't fit, never had, and more important, didn't want to anymore. I was a woman who lived alone although I wasn't sure that was a choice made by inclination or fate. I was going to a Pacific island to start all over again.

CHAPTER TWO.

Treasure Island

FOR THE LAST twelve hundred years, the small Hawaiian Island of Kauai has been luring adventurers to its crystalline bays and rain-forested mountains. It was the first of the islands settled by voyaging Polynesians, and the first landfall of Captain James Cook. Called "the Separate Kingdom" by the Hawaiians because a treacherous one-hundred-mile channel protected it from invasion by King Kamehameha's canoeing warriors, Kauai has kept this discrete status. Commuter jets from Honolulu make the trip in twenty minutes. As my plane pa.s.sed over the white-flicked channel below, the Garden Island rose sharply from the waves, a fertile universe, primordial and undisturbed. Towering green sugarloaf mountains loomed over the rocky southern sh.o.r.e, indented here and there with crescents of pure white sand. Mist shrouded higher peaks in the distance. I sensed the quickening of pulse, the leap of spirit that comes with the beginning of an adventure. It would be impossible for anyone to approach a small island from the air without feeling its call of mystery, perhaps risk and danger. Or treasure.

As we neared, the plane banked around a mountain hump, so close I felt I could reach out and touch its sharp cliffs, defined like a contour map that fell off sharply without mercy into the turmoil of crashing waves. We approached a toy-sized harbor surrounded by a rolling carpet of a seaside golf course and a patchwork quilt of agricultural fields.

As we disembarked into a hick-town terminal, languid slackkey guitar music tw.a.n.ged over the airport PA system. Resort employees in gaily printed aloha shirts hung purple orchid leis on many pa.s.sengers.

No one greeted me. My arms felt heavy, as if swimming through the moist air laden with thick, pungent scents of tropical flowers. Five minutes, and I felt sticky with perspiration. A sullen driver appeared, the husband of a Garden employee pressed into duty to drop me at my new house. He walked ahead of me to the car, reluctantly carrying one of my three heavy suitcases. Dr. Klein had gone to San Francisco for meetings but had sent ahead house keys to the cottage where I could live, rent-free. Unexpectedly, he had thrown in a company car as part of the deal.

We drove without conversation through the county seat of Lihue, now a dilapidated main street with more than half of its businesses empty or boarded up. Three years earlier, the worst recorded hurricane in Hawaiian history had swept over the island. Recovery from Hurricane Iniki was obviously incomplete. We headed west on the two-lane Route 50, the island's one and only highway. Banks of silver and green sugarcane waved on either side of the road.

After about thirty minutes we pa.s.sed a century-old factory building, whose roof had caved into a tawdry ruin. "Old pineapple cannery," the surly driver ex plained. Huge, towering trees draped with thick jungle vines blocked the late-afternoon sun. As we turned onto a narrow, serpentine road, a curtain of vines parted to reveal a cemetery of junked cars and washing machines corroded by rust. After another sharp curve, we pulled into a dirt driveway to begin a long, slow uphill climb. Giant feathery bamboo trees enclosed the drive, their soaring branches meeting to form a Gothic tunnel. As the car ascended through the bam boo arches, I felt as if I were entering the nave of a filigreed green cathedral. So perfect was the Gothic illusion that I found myself listening for anthems and the crescendo of organs.

We burst from the tunnel's cloistered light into the hot tropical sun onto an immense open plateau of green lawn. Bent palm trees dotted the verdant expanse like hoops on a giant croquet field. I glimpsed a one-story cottage at the far end, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. As we neared I saw that the house perched on stilts, one edge overlooking a jungle ravine, so that a wide expanse of windows opened straight into treetops. It had a childlike appeal, like a grownup's tree house. Spiky bromeliads, staghorn ferns, and orchids sprouted from forks in surrounding trees, casting the house in calming shade.

The driver set my bags on the front porch and sped off. I unlocked the gla.s.s door and stepped in. A rush of musty overheated air enveloped me. As I struggled to open a locked window, a flesh-colored lizard dropped onto my head.

Eeek! It fell to the floor and slithered away. Gecko.

The cottage's main room was a huge expanse walled with banks of windows, although dirt filmed the panes. Scratches in the black-painted wood floors revealed under coats of many colors, like a Jackson Pollock canvas. A sagging couch and a couple of rickety tables seemed sad and forlorn. In the kitchen, rust spots erupted on the door of an old refrigerator. Inside, an a.s.sortment of jars and bottles looked ancient and moldy. Ugh. I pulled open a creaky drawer to find silverware, rusty from tropical moisture.

Down the hall in the bathroom, two mouse-sized roaches skittered across the floor. A pile of unsavory-looking sheets and towels lay crumpled on a bottom shelf. I turned on the faucet in a plastic lavender-tinted tub. A trickle of brown water dribbled out, accompanied by a loud clanging and knocking.

Get out! Run! Get some cleaning supplies, some new sheets, some air!

Outside, an old rusty Volkswagen Golf sat parked in the dirt drive. So this is the promised company car. No air-conditioning, I discerned with disappointment. As I reached up to adjust the rearview mirror, it came off in my hand like a cheap toy. Someday this might seem funny, I thought. At the moment, though, I felt trapped in a Goldie Hawn movie.

Dr. Klein had frankly described the house as unoccupied for two years, and promised the Garden would fix it up. But the damage looked too extensive. And expensive.

Hoping to get some immediate supplies, I drove to the nearest supermarket, Sueoka's in Old Koloa Town, which sent me further into shock. A bewildering mishmash of goods, many labeled in foreign languages, were piled high along crowded aisles of Korean, j.a.panese, Chinese, and Filipino foods. An incongruous selection of Portuguese delicacies was tucked amid large shelves of Polynesian and Hawaiian specialties. What strange land had I fallen into?