New Wave Luau

NOTHING BUT MILES of cane fields lined Route 50 as it wound through the dry west side. But I had learned to recognize that a line of parked cars along the roadside was a sure sign of a trail to one of Kauai's surfing haunts. As my interest in surf culture grew after meeting Cal, I sometimes stopped at Pakalas, the break also known as "Infinities," to watch him or others ride the long pipeline curl. Some call it the best wave in the world.

I hiked through a shaded forest to the beach. Until the 1980s there was no public access to Pakalas. Surfers had to sneak through two miles of broken-gla.s.s fields, risking arrest for trespa.s.sing on private property.

"After a good day at Infinities you'll brainstorm for any implausible scheme to raise the cash to purchase a piece of property nearby. Failing that, you'll commit every waking second on Kauai to planning another session here and wonder why anyone would ever want to surf anywhere else," writes Greg Ambrose in his Surfer's Guide to Hawaii. He also warns of Pakalas's dangers. In wipeouts, surfers can land on the shallow reef, turning their backs or other body parts into raw hamburger.

Today, monster swells radiating from a recent far-off tropical storm in the South Pacific had arrived, washing up on Kauai in ten- to twelve-foot waves. No Cal, but plenty of other surfing demiG.o.ds ducked and shot through walls of water with balletic grace powered by brute strength. I could never watch without awe, laughing in remembrance of the Beach Boys song "Little Surfer Girl." Every American female growing up in the 1960s must have harbored a desire to be somebody's Surfer Girl.

My one surf lesson gave me an understanding of the appeal. The instructor - a young dude named Lance - stood in the water, held the back of the board, and gave it a push so that I could experience the surge of catching a wave. Although I stood for only seconds, I felt the ocean momentum and the wish to do it again and again. I emerged from the lesson beat and b.l.o.o.d.y, my ankles sc.r.a.ped by reef rocks. It's a sport for those who still feel young and immortal.

And Cal and I were riding our own waves.

DR. KLEIN AND I often had meetings in Honolulu, the New York City of the Pacific, and would either fly over for the day or spend the night. Bill introduced me to Alan Wong's, arguably the best restaurant in Hawaii. Neither the location nor ambiance was particularly fancy with its plain dining room in an unfashionable section of Honolulu. Oh, but the food!

As late as the 1970s, the joke used to be that the best food in Hawaii was what you got on the plane coming over. European-trained chefs at the big resorts shipped in all their food - even frozen fish - for cla.s.sic continental menus. Tourists tasted local cuisine only if they went to one of the commercial luaus or ventured into hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Wong, along with a new generation of Hawaiian-born chefs, began to explore local fish markets, exulting in their bounty. They searched out island farmers to grow specialty vegetables and ripe fruit - not the green pineapples or papayas picked for export. The chefs contracted with cattleman to raise island-grown beef and lamb. Lychee and macadamia nuts, coconuts and local fruits such as the soursweet lilikoi (pa.s.sion fruit), mangos and guava soon appeared prominently on menus.

Fossils and electron microscopes aren't the only way to decipher Hawaiian history. Food historians study the ethnic origins of food for what it says anthropologically about the people and evolution of multicultural societies. Sociologists have focused on Hawaii because of its large range of ethnic groups, no majority, and a 50 percent intermarriage rate. Like everything in Hawaii, food underwent a constant melding of outside influences as people arrived, improvised, and adapted.

Nowhere but in Hawaii did Pacific, Asian, and Western food traditions meet in such close proximity. Few other places can date so precisely the arrival of different cuisines. The Polynesians found the islands bereft of carbohydrates, so they packed their voyaging canoes with slips and roots of taro - a sustaining carbohydrate - and dozens of varieties of breadfruit, yams, coconut, and bananas. The first Hawaiian food was eaten raw, or cooked in imus - fires burned down to coals to heat rocks, then covered with fragrant leaves, similar to cooking methods found throughout the South Pacific. Chinese laborers started arriving in 1852, most from the culinary-supreme Kw.a.n.gtung Province with its black bean and oyster sauces. j.a.panese workers landed in 1868 with soybean products of soy sauce, miso, and tofu, as well as dried seaweed and pickles. Portuguese, primarily from the Madeira Islands and Azores, came in 1878, bringing spicy sausages. Koreans imported pungent pickled cabbage and marinated beef starting in 1903, followed by Filipinos in 1909, with their peas, beans, and adobe style of vinegar- and garlic-flavored dishes. The last great Asian cooking influence flooded Hawaii in the 1970s when Thai and Vietnamese immigrants opened dozens of restaurants.

Alan Wong was ill.u.s.trative of yet another social upheaval in Hawaii - the emergence of a generation who came of age in the 1970s, determined to reject mainland influences as the only valid culture. They were intent on rediscovering and reviving what it meant to be Hawaiian. It was a trend evidenced in the new wave of Hawaiian music stars such as Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, in the revival of water sports, in a growing insistence on inserting diacritical marks into Hawaiian printed words, and on the menus of restaurants, from gourmet temples to the lowest vendor of plate lunches. Isabella Bird and Mark Twain had both reported on the local people of Hawaii, but, it must be said, were racist in describing the "natives" as curiosities p.r.o.ne to stupidity. Now Hawaiian residents frequently boast of bloodlines from all parts of the world, and their polyglot rules the islands.

ONE NIGHT ALAN let me watch him cook. As I arrived in the kitchen at 5 p.m., one food preparer held open a stiffly starched white double-breasted chef's jacket and eased it over my shoulders. Another tied an ankle-length ap.r.o.n around my waist. At that hour the restaurant held an expectant air of a stage before the curtain rises. Already in place at one of three cooking stations, Alan relaxed liked an athlete stretching before the race. The kitchen's 1,300 square feet is generous by some restaurant standards, but each cook has only three feet of counter works.p.a.ce, an amount that any amateur cook would deplore. Behind Alan a bank of blazing burners already shot up six- to eight-inch flames, and an aroma of garlic and ginger sizzled into the air.

In his forties, Alan conveyed the ease and confidence of a successful man, the self-awareness of a celebrated artist. His face has a smooth, creaseless blend of Hawaiian, Chinese, and j.a.panese features and a thick thatch of shiny blue-black hair. His low-riding girth under his white jacket gives him a wrestler's centered power. Alan's facial expressions are hard to read. But when he uses an unusual term, he scans your eyes, as if looking to see if the information arrived. It's a listener's trait, rare in successful men and indicative of a great teacher. When he reverts back to his local pidgin, you get a glimpse of the boy in him. But there is no question that he is the boss.

Alan squatted to open one of the refrigerated cases below the counter containing vats of organic greens and plates already made up with portions of lobster tails and shrimp, ready for searing. He pulled out a long onaga fish for his signature dish and started to fillet it with a razor-like blade. As he butchered fish with both hands, Alan signaled Wade, the starch preparer, to spoon mashed potatoes directly into his mouth, then silently circled a finger in the air, indicating a need for more b.u.t.ter.

Finished with filleting, Alan squeezed a teaspoon full of dark sauce from the first of a dozen plastic squeeze bottles aligned on his counter like surgeon's instruments. Methodically, he did the same with each bottle. Each evening, about two hundred different sauces and components make up the night's forty or so entrees and starters. He works on the theory that if the components are good, his staff can compose them, so he tastes the sauces instead of the finished dishes. Wade returned with another spoonful of mashed potatoes. More salt, Alan mouthed. Wade returns four times before Alan is satisfied.

Already the heat at the chefs' stations grows intense, smoky with aromas of grilled meat and fish seared to a flaky crust. "Oh, it gets very hot," says Lance, one of the entree chefs. "But Alan likes it that way. Keeps him on edge." Alan serves as expeditor, calling to the other chefs to hurry an order, or to a waiter to pick it up while it's hot. "This kitchen is a well-oiled machine," he says with pride. "When it's performing well, it's humming. It's a piece of art. This place has mana."

Alan grew up in Waipio, a small plantation town on Oahu's north sh.o.r.e, in the 1950s, when you could pick ripe pineapple out the back door. The food his mother served was simple but typically Hawaiian in its ethnic mixtures - rice on the table every day, as well as Portuguese, Filipino, and Korean dishes. After a year at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, the chronic lack of dorm s.p.a.ce forced him to find an apartment. To pay the rent he went to work as a dishwasher at Don the Beachcomber Restaurant.

"You're talking about someone from the country. My pidgin English was atrocious," he told me with a look of red embarra.s.sment briefly flushing his features. Methodically, Alan studied each job, figuring out what would be required to progress from dishwasher to busboy, cashier, hotel front-desk clerk, and night manager. After the last promotion, he wondered, What next? and enrolled in food-service management at Kapiolani Community College. The cla.s.ses dazzled him. "When I made my first loaf of French bread, I never realized I would get turned on," he says.

Alan won a coveted apprenticeship at the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia. Then he secured a prized spot at the foodies' mecca, Lutece in New York City, working three years for Chef Andre Soltner. When Alan wanted to go home, he landed a big job at the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel and Bungalows on the Big Island, often ranked by travel guides as the most luxurious hotel in all the islands.

With the same careful methodical research that marked his first restaurant jobs, Alan a.n.a.lyzed Hawaiian cuisine. He and other young Hawaiian chefs developed an haute cuisine of Asian Pacific fusion. Chef Roy Yamaguchi dared to open in Waikiki, the graveyard of restaurants, and was so successful he opened branches on outer islands. Sam Choy was equally prolific. On Kauai, Jean-Marie Josselin opened his Pacific Cafe with a French twist.

No one drew from the local style as much as Alan Wong. At the Mauna Lani, Alan set up the network of local agriculture producers that he still uses today. Much of the time he had to tell growers what to grow and how to grow it - the perfect vine-ripened tomato still eludes him, but he now features lettuce from a Hilo farmer, lamb from a Big Island ranch, farm-raised shrimp, and vintage estate-grown chocolate from the Kona Coast, the only chocolate grown in America.

He scrutinized the local dishes of his boyhood, taking each dish apart, a.n.a.lyzing each ingredient, then rea.s.sembling them in different combinations. One of this evening's special appetizers is "Laulau Lumpia" - kalua pig and salted b.u.t.terfish on luau leaves with a lumpia wrapper (a wonton), fried crisp and drizzled with poi vinaigrette. On the side is a relish of lomi-lomi salmon. Voila! The local plate lunch, dressed up.

When asked to partic.i.p.ate in a "New Wave Luau Festival" a few years ago, Alan figured he needed to research the cla.s.sic luau, not the tourist monstrosity that I had learned to avoid. How did it come about? He learned from a historian that poke originally meant cubed. In the old days, fishermen didn't go out in big boats, so the original poke was made from small reef fish. Hawaiians used very crude instruments made of sh.e.l.ls to roughly cut the small fish, then sprinkled them with Hawaiian salt that had been evaporated in fields that imbued it with a red-dirt hue.

The happy result of Alan's research was presented to me tonight: a " poke -pine." I bit tentatively into a crispy wonton ball to find cool, red, translucent flesh of sushi-quality yellowfin ahi, set off by a swish of wasabi, the nose-snorting Asian horseradish sauce.

Alan had hated poi when growing up. But after his scholarly study, he decided that the essential ingredient of taro was good but over the years had been trans.m.u.ted into a lavender library-paste goo. Now his starch chef, Wade, boils taro cubes, puts them through a ricer, and produces a grainy, thick, raspberry-colored taffy, all within a couple of hours.

At 8:30 p.m. Alan looked out onto a sea of diners, tapping a Sabatier knife like a tuning fork on the marble cutting block. "Oh ho, see the storm brewing? All those people? When they all order it's going to be madness," he said happily. Alan called to the chefs and nods in the direction of the crowd, "See you at the finish line, boys."

By 10:15 p.m., the wave had crashed, spent. The bar was finally empty, and the remaining diners lingered over dessert and estate-grown Kona coffee.

Two of the entree chefs brought me a final appetizer: a liquor gla.s.s of roasted tomato pesto soup. Layered like a parfait, pale green, orange, and yellow translucent liquids each contained the essence of ripened tomato, warm as if from sun. A miniature grilled sandwich of foie gras, Kalua pig, and Monterey Jack cheese accompanied the soup. I ate slowly, to savor each bite.

I SOMETIMES LEFT Kauai to go farther than Honolulu on fund-raising missions. For months I had been working on campaign preparations. I wrote a case statement, the official plan that laid out a ten-million-dollar goal with descriptions of proposed building projects, architectural renderings, cost estimates, and lists of donor prospects. Still, the campaign lacked a centerpiece, a spark. Unexpectedly, the sugar company Alexander & Baldwin announced the sale of all its holdings on Kauai, including an old plantation camp of worker houses. We found an abandoned little plantation cottage that still had enough salvageable features that we could fairly easily move and renovate it into a full-fledged visitor center for Allerton Garden. The plan provided the romance we needed to reel in big bucks.

Now we were ready for The Ask. If our target was a big gun on Wall Street, the trick was to find another big gun to bring with us. Better yet if they belonged to the same club or went to the same school or served on the same opera board. I went along to provide details, figures, the timing of the gift, the follow-up, the closing. Doug Kinney, the Garden chairman of the board of trustees, appointed himself as campaign chairman. He warmed to the asking but preferred to make his own deals without consulting anyone. Disastrous. Once he sold board members on a student internship program that wasn't part of the campaign because it was loathed by Bill and the rest of the staff. Fire, load, aim, Bill Klein complained, was Doug's style.

I flew to California to meet up with Doug for our first fundraising trip together. As I drove a rental car down Interstate 280 south of San Francisco on the way to Portola Valley, Doug barked orders to some poor subordinate in the family business on the other end of his cell phone, his silvered Leonine head c.o.c.ked to one side. A frown lined his long face. His kids nicknamed him "Growlie," and I could see why. He rarely seemed pleased. Doug ordered people around like a nineteenth-century British Army officer. Including me. "Make my plane reservations!" he'd command before hanging up. For a while, I asked my secretary to handle his travel arrangements. Then one day Doug and I were in Honolulu for meetings when he turned to me and said, "What time is my flight tomorrow?" What flight? I answered. Oops. After that, he conscripted Dr. Klein's secretary for such personal services. As a journalist, I'd know exactly how to deal with a Doug, telling him to stuff it. But here I trod on foreign ground, trying to understand the delicacies and quicksands of courting board members and donors. And Doug was both.

Many nonprofit organizations lack a real board leader willing to expend effort and shoe leather to make the necessary personal calls to donors. Doug relentlessly pursued prospects and goals, showing a fierce love for the Garden. Part of his attraction to the inst.i.tution lay in a powerful connection of family history: He introduced himself as Douglas McBryde Kinney in Hawaii, emphasizing his tie to the McBryde sugar family. Doug's great uncle, Alexander McBryde, long ago owned Lawai-Kai before the Allertons bought the property. Another of Doug's great uncles, Judge Advocate W. A. Kinney, presided over the kangaroo court that prosecuted Queen Liliuokalani for treason after the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1899 and pushed aside the last of the Hawaiian monarchy. Aside from a family dynasty, I suspected that an even more profound motive drew Doug to the Garden: the possibility of redemption.

Doug had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, an heir to an electronics company. In his youth, he briefly worked as a bond salesman in New York but after that never found anything to particularly distinguish himself. Now in his mid-sixties, he devoted himself to golf at the exclusive Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest, Illinois, from Easter to Thanksgiving; the Seminole Golf Club in North Palm Beach, Florida, through the winter; and a jaunt to St. Andrews in Scotland every August. He played three hundred rounds of golf a year. "That's my job," he frequently said, and sounded only a little defensive.

When Hurricane Iniki flattened the island, Doug immediately flew to Honolulu and pulled strings to get on the first flight to Kauai. He seized total control. The Garden not only lay damaged but also rudderless, as the previous director had suffered a paralyzing stroke. Performing triage, Doug closed down public operations, laid off most employees, then flew back to his Lake Forest house and ran the skeleton operation by phone. Few ever opposed him or his sometimes wrong-headed ideas. "It takes a lot of energy to fight Doug," one trustee confided to me. "A lot of energy."

Bill Klein had put an end to Doug's fiefdom. Even so, Doug usually telephoned at least once a day, insisting to be put through to whomever he wished to speak to, wherever they were - intrusions that became flash points in the continuing power struggle between the two men. Both had huge shares of confidence and egotism, making their inevitable clashes seem t.i.tanic.

Still, Bill and Doug regarded each other with grudging mutual respect. "Dead in the water," Doug often said to describe the moribund Garden before Bill Klein. "We were dead in the water until Bill Klein came. He's doing more things in one year than the previous director did in seventeen. Now we have a real chance to become world-cla.s.s."

And if Bill valued Doug's devotion and his energy, he counted at least equally on Doug's generous donations. Between fending off Doug's interference and trying to fit Dr. Klein's schemes and dreams into reality, I felt I was in constant battle mode. Trying to coordinate a campaign with them was like trying to take two Great Danes out for a walk.

As we cruised past browning California hills, my attention reverted to the task ahead of us as we turned off the highway at the Stanford University exit and began the climb to Bill and Jean Lane's ranch.

We turned onto a drive marked by a red mailbox, then climbed higher, past horse pastures railed with log fences. A Porsche was parked in a hilltop courtyard in front of a sprawling ranch house that commanded million-dollar views of the valleys below. A heavy carved wooden door looked like it had once adorned a Spanish mission. Jean answered our ring, looking girlish in casual slacks and tailored shirt. A woman servant silently served us soup, tomato salad, and fresh bread while Doug and I listened to Jean. After lunch we moved to the living room with its Western ranch furniture. Doug threw me a softball: "Look, Jean, we want to bring you up to date on the campaign."

I pulled out colored architectural drawings. A scientific research and horticulture building would serve as the heart of the Garden, I explained. A new visitor center complex would be built in phases as a new entrance to Allerton Garden. I unfurled a sketch of the little plantation house we planned to renovate. She sat on the edge of her chair, her eyes darting from one sketch to another. "Gee, both look so good. I just can't decide which one we ought to do," she said. Doug and I avoided looking at each other. We never mentioned figures but the papers were clearly marked with dollar signs. Two million to build the nursery center; half a million for the visitor center.

A WEEK LATER, Bill Lane telephoned with the news that they would donate $500,000 to restore the plantation house, to be named the Bill and Jean Lane Visitor Center. Experienced donors, they asked for a pledge card outlining the terms of their gift and a schedule of payments. I faxed a letter of agreement.

Bill Lane signed it with a big, bold pen, revising the payment schedule so that more money would come sooner.

Over the ensuing months, Dr. Klein presided over noisy, almost party-like sessions to chart renovations of the sugar shack. Spencer Leinweber, a Honolulu architectural expert in historic preservation, flew over to unveil her latest drawings. We hired Mike Faye, who had done such a spectacular job restoring my own cottage. He answered questions about construction. John Rapozo gave his evaluation on excavation. Bill named Scott Sloan, head of the grounds crew, as project supervisor, giving him a new confidence and authority.

Another of Bill's master strokes, I observed. By involving everyone he fostered excitement, dedication, ownership. We were all pinning a lot of hopes on this little building. Sometimes I worried whether it would collapse under the weight of them all. Dr. Klein wanted a new gift shop to help pay for the NTBG's expansion. A museum exhibit to explain our scientific mission. Bookcases mounted on wheels, so they could be pushed out of the way for evening lectures. A small cafe to sell cold drinks and sandwiches. A series of small gardens surrounding the center to give visitors a taste of the Allerton and Lawai gardens without having to go on a full guided tour. How were all these plans going to be crammed into 1,800 square feet? Faye projected that the building could be picked up, moved, and rehabilitated for about $150,000. I could almost hear the whirl of an adding machine racking up tens of thousands of dollars in additional costs.

"We'll just have to get Lucinda to raise more money," John Rapozo told the group at one meeting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

Last Harvest

A BREEZE CAUGHT MY wide black straw hat, threatening to lift it off. Cars and people already jammed the narrow streets of Koloa Town, gathered for the annual Plantation Days Parade to celebrate the August cane harvest. Paniolos on horses pranced up and down the roadway, their mounts decorated with swags of braided greenery. Open convertibles carried rhinestoned teen queens. Hula girls danced and ukulele players strummed atop orchid-strewn floats. A flatbed truck carted an antique sugar locomotive once used to transport workers and cane. In the distance stood the gray metal buildings of the Koloa Sugar Mill, strangely quiet.

Mill operators had announced they would shut down in a few week's time. The last blow had come when Pepsi canceled its contract. All two hundred workers would be out of jobs at harvest's end. Established in 1835, the Koloa mill became the first successful refinery in Hawaii. Over the next hundred years, raising sugar was as good as growing money. By 1955, 1,282 sugar planters tilled the fields in Hawaii. Now only three plantations still operated in all the islands: one on Maui and two on Kauai.

Experimental forays into agriculture to replace cane remained tiny. When riding Bo, I liked to nudge him into a canter through the hedgerows of coffee that had been planted as an alternative, although the idea had yet to prove profitable. Small truck farmers started asparagus beds and papaya. No one really knew what to do with all the former cane fields except build vacation housing. Top real estate agents and time-share salesmen made the only big money on the island.

I spotted the Garden's old Dodge silver sampan, festooned with bird-of-paradise spikes, ginger torches, and elephant ear leaves. Dr. Klein had insisted that the Garden enter the parade, a first for NTBG. As symbols go, it telegraphed that the Garden had emerged from its sh.e.l.l and joined the community. A dozen of us squeezed into the vehicle's rear leather benches. The driver revved up and we moved off with ceremonial speed, falling in line behind the locomotive float. As we approached the center of Koloa, hundreds of people lined the road. A master of ceremonies announced our arrival at the judges' stand on a gravelly microphone system: "And here we have the National Tropical Botanical Garden, folks. That is some car, isn't it? Let's have a round of applause."

Dr. Klein waved excitedly to people, then jumped off the sampan and waded into the throngs, shaking hands and pa.s.sing out Garden brochures. At the Koloa community ball field, large striped tents held booths hawking Hawaiian crafts, teriyaki chicken, volcano-hot chili, shave ice, saimin, and long rice. Hula troupes and bands would perform all day. A giant plastic balloon of King Kong loomed over it all. But the edge of forced gaiety only partly masked an underlying sadness over the end of an era.

Before Dr. Klein had arrived, entering a parade would have been out of the question. Garden staff even routinely turned away magazine and newspaper reporters. Now flattering articles about the Garden's renaissance rained in by the dozens. National Geographic, Preservation Magazine, Sunset Magazine, and the Royal Horticulture Society's Garden Magazine all ran big spreads. The Sunday New York Times national page led with a story about the Garden's plant rescue. Tourists filled Allerton Garden tours to capacity. Progress in opening up the Garden could be seen everywhere. Over on Maui, the kapu sticks had finally been removed and plans were under way to open the garden. My own job grew easier after I happily watched the departure of the oppressive finance director who resigned to return to the mainland. I liked his friendly new replacement.

As I became more settled and the job became more manageable, my affair with Cal the surfer ran out of steam. The pa.s.sion had served its purpose but no romance or friendship had developed. Nor would it. Missing between us was a straightforward honesty that in recent years I demanded from all my relationships, whether in work or play. We lacked the essential ability to talk to each other. All of my best romances had begun in conversations that explored each other's minds.

The key to loving island life, my well-traveled new friend Mathea counseled, was to realize that there was no enjoyment difference between attending the opera in London or a potluck with friends on Kauai. Outsiders would ask, Don't you miss culture? The theater, concerts? Although I didn't attend the opera on the mainland, on Kauai I frequented the International Film Festival in June and the Prince Albert Music Festival in November that brought in young prizewinning concert soloists. A pile of us spread blankets under the stars in August for the outdoor Kane Hula Festival, which attracted men's hula troupes from the other Hawaiian Islands to compete in sword-thumping, macho dances.

My routine became stable, even predictable, not like at the newspaper, when I flew out the door in the morning and sometimes didn't know when I'd get back. A long-held flirtation with the idea of adopting a baby from China graduated to a visit to an adoption agency in Honolulu. After decades of using contraceptives, I ruefully acknowledged that with approaching menopause, I probably didn't have a fertile egg left. An adoption could be done in about a year. I had the cash from a small inheritance. I had the schedule, I had the agency. But did I have the will?

A few weeks after the Koloa harvest parade, bills, financial records, and correspondence acc.u.mulated in a messy pile on the walnut desk in my cottage study. I picked up the sheaf of adoption agency papers, still blank. Filling them out and retrieving all the necessary doc.u.ments would take weeks. But that was not what stopped me. Did I need to have a husband, or a child, to feel fulfilled? Or did I just lack the courage to construct a life that wasn't quite what my mother expected or that others defined as the ideal? Was I at heart a conformist? Or did a primal mother-love cry to be answered, no matter what the cost?

A baby would shake up my life to its core, with baby giggles and nighttime snuggles, sand castles and bedtime stories. Yet I remained ambivalent, conflicted.

My generation of women was the first to have easy access to birth control and abortions that gave us so much freedom that more than a few of us forgot to fit children into our grand plans. What brittle irony awaited for women who postponed babies for career or fun, only to find that we couldn't find any potential fathers, or our bodies let us down by turning infertile. These days, modern medicine allowed women my age to produce last-gasp babies of their own. They changed diapers while experiencing hot flashes, perhaps chaperoning field trips with a cane.

I worried about the disappearance of quiet time. The arrival of small children turned a woman's life into a train schedule: up at 6 a.m.; carrying a child out the door in the early light; shuttling to day care; picking up; fixing dinner; playing nonstop games and talking nonstop talk. Solitude, I had learned, was a luxury if it wasn't enforced incarceration. It had become a deepening, gnawing need. It had taken me ten years to get used to living alone, and another five to like it. I didn't mind, even longed for, an entire weekend without talking to anyone.

I now experienced the oddly disconcerting feeling of being in the position to receive what I no longer felt I had to have. I definitely missed what children can bring but was no longer certain that my life lacked its own rich, if different, character. I put the blank application forms into a folder and slipped it into a drawer.

I'd look at them later. Maybe.

ISABELLA BIRD NEVER DIVULGED, in writing at least, any regret over her childless state. But she did give marriage a brief go. After her Pacific and Colorado adventures, Isabella returned to London and found a publisher, John Murray. Six Months in the Sandwich Islands appeared in print a year later. A second volume of her Wild West explorations ent.i.tled A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains quickly entered a seventh printing and became her most commercially successful.

Once home in her quiet life in England, however, she relapsed into her former invalid self. A friend made in the Sandwich Islands visited and could barely recognize the carefree and daring explorer of a few months before. Isabella and her sister Henrietta became acquainted with a quiet doctor, Dr. John Bishop. Although ten years her junior, John and Isabella shared an interest in botanical histology - examining tissues under a microscope. The doctor began to court her, ever worshipful, reverential, and as loyal as a lapdog. Hardly the rough-and-tough Mountain Jim, Dr. Bishop was self-effacing and modest, with stringy silver hair plastered against his head, downward-slanted thick eyebrows, and a graying beard. "Very plain," Isabella wrote. She confided to a friend that she was romantic enough to still hold out for a love match. Dr. Bishop's effect on Isabella was a renewed determination to leave the country.

In 1878, she set out again, for j.a.pan. On the return voyage she stopped in the Malay Peninsula, where she chronicled the living habits of the Chinese; the trip led to two more books, Unbeaten Tracks in j.a.pan and The Golden Chersonese. It was as if the Victorian conventions and strictures that constrained Isabella were so severe that her breakout rebellions needed to be equally acute, requiring her not just to travel but to trek to the ends of the world.

In 1879 her beloved sister Hennie contracted typhoid. Dr. Bishop returned, hovering in the sick house, and when he broke his leg, he gave up his normal practice and moved in with the Bird sisters to supervise and administer care.

Henrietta died. Isabella spun into paroxysms of grief. "She was my world," she wrote. Dr. Bishop resumed his campaign to marry Isabella. This time she consented but barely concealed her doubts. Now aged fifty, she insisted on wearing black to the wedding. She invited no guests. A friend tried to argue Isabella out of dressing for the wedding in deep mourning but got nowhere.

Marriage did little to improve her health. She developed a series of carbuncles close to the spine and was in deep, constant pain - surely an even better excuse than a headache to avoid conjugal relations? Eight months after their nuptials, the doctor contracted blood poisoning when operating on a foreign sailor suffering from a bacterial skin infection. Without antibiotics, it led to four years of crippling, degenerative health. As the doctor became incapacitated, he retained an uncomplaining n.o.bility; at long last, Isabella declared love and devotion for him.

After her husband died on March 6, 1886, Isabella grieved for a year. But then she hatched a plan. What better monument to her good husband than a series of memorial missionary hospitals in the Far East? She went to London to study missionary nursing, then quickly ran off to Ireland for five weeks, ostensibly to study the Irish question, traveling in open carts during midwinter. She revived, discovering again in Ireland what she calls "a sad fact," that delicate and ailing as she almost always was, "a rough, knock-about open-air life" always brought back health and strength. "Oh! To be beyond the pale once more," she wrote, "out of civilization into savagery? I abhor civilization!"

She established a hospital at Islamabad, then that accomplished, she set out for a grand tour through Central Asia and Tibet, riding first on an Arab steed, then on the back of a yak, the half-wild ox of Tibet.

In 1890, she undertook her most perilous and perhaps most remarkable journey, from Baghdad to Tehran, from Isfahan to Erzurum, across s...o...b..und pa.s.ses and bandit-infested regions never before traveled by a European. She was almost sixty years old. Back in England for only a few months, she then set out again for a three-year trip through China, j.a.pan, and Korea.

In 1900, Isabella turned seventy. She began lessons in advanced photography, conversational French, and cooking. Her only concessions to age were the purchases of a tricycle to replace her usual bicycle, and a small ladder for mounting and dismounting from the powerful black charger she rode through Morocco the following year.

It was her last journey. From October 1903 until her death a year later, she lay confined to bed or couch. Although she unrealistically dreamed of another trip to China, an internal tumor and heart disease finally consumed her. Her last months were spent in bed, surrounded by books and devoted friends.

Nearly to the end, she lived the words she had written decades before: "I still vote civilization a nuisance, society a humbug and all conventionality a crime."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

In a Heartbeat Everything Changes

THE HIGH-HEELED silk pumps that matched the beige c.o.c.ktail dress lay buried in a s...o...b..x on the top shelf in the cottage closet. Torture chambers after months of bare feet and sandals. Holding up suits and dresses against my body, I felt like an archeologist exhuming a past civilization. Dr. Klein had already left for North Palm Beach, Florida, a winter enclave for the wealthy. We needed to attend posh fund-raising parties but also sort out a mess at our Florida garden. Dr. Klein's latest brainstorm had just blown up. With its expanse of lawn overlooking Biscayne Bay, The Kampong's nine-acre estate in Coconut Grove was a Gatsby-like setting. It had only recently been deeded to the National Tropical Botanical Garden and, although it was a nice garden sitting on high-priced real estate, we hadn't really figured out what to do with it. Dr. Klein had hired an event planner who busily rented it out for weddings and parties. Two weeks earlier, the neighbors nearly rioted in protest when a wedding band brayed blasts of loud salsa music late into the night. One neighbor, a Garden trustee as it happened, called the police. "With trustees like that, who the h.e.l.l needs enemies?" fumed Doug Kinney. He cancelled all future parties.

Bill and I hoped to calm everybody down, and then try to figure out how The Kampong could support itself. But he had another, deeper objective. Doug's intrusiveness into Garden operations had become so irritating that Bill Klein was ready to quit. "Doug's job as chairman of the board is to set policy, not oversee operations," he steamed. "I'm going to tell him that I'm out of here if he doesn't back off." Bill promised that he would get Doug to stop giving me orders, too.

I pulled a heavy suitcase from the back of a closet. I wore a swimsuit for the job. After loading the suitcases into the car for the drive to the airport, I was sweating. I took a last-minute shower before departing.

A UNIFORMED MAJORDOMO at the Seminole Club, an exclusive community for the wealthy in North Palm Beach, informed us that Mr. Kinney was at home. He offered to telephone for us. Bill and I waited in a room of overstuffed chairs and plaid, preppy furnishings. Doug arrived and we went into a room of bridge tables. Expansively, Doug greeted a number of men, retirement age like him. Most of them wore polo shirts with an embroidered head of an Indian on the breast, presumably a Seminole.

Bill pulled a written agenda from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and started smoothly ticking off accomplishments. When he arrived at the Garden only three years ago, all its Hawaiian sites lay hurricane-damaged or closed. He reopened all four to paying visitors and had begun similar efforts for The Kompong. We raised more money than any time in history. The annual budget was balanced. Already we had lined up $4.5 million of the $10 million campaign. Annual gifts netted $2.8 million - up $1 million from the year before. Construction had begun on a new, full-fledged visitor center. A new horticulture center would be next. Reconstruction of the Allerton estate house was nearing completion. A Ph.D. scientist was just appointed to a newly created chair of horticulture. A renowned biologist had agreed to a post as visiting scientist. We attracted a bounty of press clippings. Our new publications won awards, including best in the nation from the American a.s.sociation of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta. . . .

Doug interrupted, "You've had a fabulous year. No question. The Garden is just popping with excitement."

"Doug there's even more going on than you know," Bill countered. And then he moved in, General Patton sending in the right flank. Now that Doug had volunteered his approval, Bill listed instances when Doug had meddled with staff. The Christmas card Doug wrote to Rick Hanna telling him to change computer connections at the Garden, without Bill's knowledge. The instructions to women on the staff to coddle one of the Garden's old-lady donors. His attempt to choose the visiting scientist, ignoring Bill's wishes.