Hawaiian medley

The phenomenon of those mid-Pacific islands which are of the United States and yet not in it, and where leisure blooms for the plucking

JOSEPH C. GRANGER

Last August the first President ever to visit Hawaii stood on the balcony of the rococo palace where native kings once lived amid a baffling mixture of European and Polynesian luxury and where now Governor Pointdexter listens to the problems of an interracial body politic. "Your Administration in Washington," said Mr. Roosevelt, addressing a multitude whose eyebrows had a tendency to slant upward, "will not forget that you are in very truth an integral part of the nation."

The Administration may not forget that the Islands are American (though someone did when the sugar quotas were being established last spring and Hawaii was permitted to send the United States less sugar than foreign Cuba or the Philippines), but anyone going for pure pleasure to Hawaii—not Hawahyah, but Hah-wy-ee, and, to the purist, Hah-vy-ee—is strongly advised to do so. History and fact and indignant residents insist that Hawaii is American, has been an American territory for thirty-four years, pays its taxes to our federal government, has a delegate in our Congress; may, indeed, if machinery now in operation is successful, become our fortyninth state. But Hawaii itself—its semitropical climate, its flora and fauna, its traditions, even its customs—says something else. Despite the American flag, despite reality, despite the pronouncements of the sugar factors, Hawaii is a foreign land; as far as the senses, those not unimportant witnesses, are concerned.

Why foreign? Because Hawaii's particular kind of beauty, or rather its thousand and one kinds of beauty, is not to be found within the confines of continental United States. There are those, though not many, who will try to tell you that the Islands are no more than Southern California moved out to sea, and that Honolulu is merely a semi-tropical Des Moines or New Haven. This would be a tragi-comedy if true; but it is not true. The chief industry of Honolulu is, of course, the making of money and not the eating of lotuses; but the citizens go about their business with what seems to be more ease and leisure than they would in the same jobs back on the mainland. They work hard enough—offices open at eight and close at four—but they work to live rather than live to work.

Yet today panoramas yield to details. Who cares that the climate is marvelous, varying little from summer to winter, that the people are extraordinarily hospitable, that the scenery is unbelievable? Today the candid camera view has superseded the stereopticon.

OFFPORT.—Near Diamond Head the little boats came out to meet the big, white boat, and the boys and girls who have been away at school on the mainland for a year simply cannot bear it any longer. New faces —newspapermen, photographers, hotel representatives, and impatient friends— crowd the already crowded decks, calling first names and reechoing "Aloha!" The fragrance of a hundred leis is warm and heavy: gardenia, plumeria, pikake, shredded carnation, ginger—long garlands placed around your neck with the utmost simplicity and naturalness. For some strange reason, these people are glad to see you.

Diamond Head slips past, and Waikiki comes into view—a yellow rim backed by a white hotel, the Moana, and a pink hotel, the renowned Royal Hawaiian. A man with a feather lei hatband, which doesn't look the sixty dollars he probably paid for it, is kissing the belle of the ship, has been kissing her for some time, seems to enjoy kissing her while the hearts of six assorted gentlemen who have bought her champagne cocktails for the past five days shrivel with malignant green hate.

The Aloha Tower rises in the foreground, and with it a pier packed with whitegarbed figures. The brown boys have swum out now, and are diving for coins; pennies and nickels mostly, to their infinite sadness.

The faces on the pier become slowly distinguishable—a quarter of a mile of smiles and waving hands with leis, more leis. The band is playing "The Song of the Islands"; a chorus of deep-breasted, powerful Hawaiian women—all fat, all magnificent in bearing—are singing, but not "Aloha Oe", because that is a song of farewell. Behind the pier clusters Honolulu, behind Honolulu the mountains, a ridge of mountains bisecting the island from northwest to southeast. People on the dock are screaming greetings to people on deck, and neither can hear what the others are saying but everybody smiles and nods. Then the gangplank is run up. Bags and suitcases slide down the runway. Finally the passengers begin to disembark. Wherever you came from, you're at home now.

WAIKIKI.—There are wider beaches, better beaches—especially Kailua and Lanikai, across the Pali to the northeast—but none in the world with quite so much glamour. It has glamour in spite of its coral bottom occasionally cutting unwary feet, in spite of its being cluttered with too many sun umbrellas and sun chairs and too many people. It stretches in a curve, and toward it rolls—rolls, not booms—the surf that is like no other surf anywhere: as witness the fact that in no other place is surfboarding so popular a sport. Honolulu is going to "clean up" Waikiki, and it can do it, too. Didn't it ban billboards from its roadsides? It did, to its everlasting credit. Once more the Outdoor Circle, a group of Honolulu clubwomen, is on the warpath, and this time it wants the scalps of those who desecrate the most famous littoral in the world.

The heart of Waikiki is the yardage fronting the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and the Outrigger Canoe Club. Here you find the pretty ladies, gleaming with oil and slowly browning to the desired Negroid tint (the fashion magazines may say that deep tans are out, but they're still in on Waikiki), and the handsome, pouter-pigeon-torsoed gentlemen, whose abbreviated trunks would give Coney Island authorities food for quiet thought. Standing on a surfboard on the beach, a towel around his hips and a hibiscus flower behind his ear, an exhibitionistic youth— American by birth, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer by inclination—does a hula; does it well, too, to the accompaniment of a blonde's ukelele and a brunette's husky contralto:

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"King Kamehameha, the conqueror of the Islands

Became a famous hero one day . . ."

The quickest way to learn to surfboard is to pay a native beach boy— and boy can mean any male up to forty years old—two dollars and a half an hour to teach you, but you can get more fun out of it by experimenting yourself. It would be nice to be able to say that surfboarding is dangerous, but it isn't. You are rarely out over your head, and the only peril lies in being hit by your own board (twelve feet long, made out of Kona wood, and as heavy as lead) after you've fallen off. Because you will fall off, frequently. But once you manage to catch the right wave at the right second, to balance, to guide, you'll be a slave to the sport for life. You'll try it at Long Beach, California, and Long Beach, New York; but it won't be the same, because the surf and the contour of the ocean's floor won't be the same.

If you can't learn to surfboard, either by yourself or with the aid of an instructor, you can at least try an outrigger. This is a long canoe, rounded on the bottom and with a frame wing to keep it from upsetting, holding eight or ten people. You paddle out, and then you turn around and wait for the perfect wave. All waves look alike to you, but one is best and your guide knows which it is. When it comes along everyone begins to paddle furiously for a moment, and after that moment you are skimming straight ahead on a white crest, sitting back with spray in your face and wondering if an act of God is going to keep the outrigger from heading directly into the Moana Hotel.

And so you surfboard and you go out in outriggers and you lie back in your legless beach chair watching people holding copies of Anthony Adverse and you feel the sun eating into your bones—and you watch the ships heading toward Diamond Head and you're glad you're not on any of them.

At lunch you eat in your bathing suit in the palm grove of the Royal Hawaiian, which certainly must be the most luxurious hotel in the world and which is undoubtedly one of the first goals for which one-day visitors to Hawaii, stopping off on boats from or to the Orient, head. It is a mid-Pacific Ritz, a stately pleasure-dome decreed by someone who had a genius for hospitality.

HAWAIIAN VILLAGE.—Mr. and Mrs. Mossman, who are Scotch-Hawaiian —and it's not an unusual combination, either—run the Hawaiian village, in the Waikiki district, and there you will find the best replica of that ancient Hawaii whose legends are so magnificently preserved in Honolulu's Bishop Museum. Here are the grass huts and the grass skirts, not raffia but fresh green ti leaves picked and plaited the day they are worn; here, too, are the Mossmans' four pretty daughters, including Pualani (Flower of Heaven), the prettiest of them all, who dance a variety of hulas and sing a variety of songs beneath the most royal palms on Oahu.

Several nights a week (Thursday night is best) a luau is held at the village, a luau being the Hawaiian feast where a pig wrapped in ti leaves and stuffed with hot rocks is cooked in an underground oven, where poi (the Hawaiian equivalent of potatoes) is pounded from the taro root before your eyes—and eaten with your fingers: one-finger, two-finger, or threefinger poi, depending on its consistency —and where a surprising amount of an ancient civilization is recaptured. The Hawaiian village is, obviously, operated for tourists; but it also happens to be the best way to discover what Hawaii was like before the missionaries came in 1820.

As a preface to a luau, you should have a couple of drinks of okolehau, though you won't get it at the Mossmans' because it isn't legal—or wasn't: it is now undergoing official canonization. Okolehau ("Oke") is the native Hawaiian whiskey, a potent and highly palatable beverage resembling Bourbon and made either from the very useful ti leaf or, as is more common now, from rice. It is and always has been as plentiful on the Islands as gin was on the mainland during prohibition. It is cheap—from three to six dollars a gallon, depending on its quality and how long it has been aged in its keg—and it lends itself admirably to highballs or old-fashioneds. Furthermore, unlike the glutinous poi, most people don't have to be taught to like it.

ODD LOT.—You can buy two leis, each about three feet long and each made up of about twenty gardenias strung together on an invisible string, for twenty-five cents.

If you like fresh pineapple juice, go to the lobby of Dole's big pineapple factory in Honolulu; they have three faucets, one for water and two for icecold pineapple juice, and all you have to do is drink. Incidentally, the fresh juice is less healthy for you, over a long period of time, than the canned: too acid.

Iwilei, once a notorious section in Honolulu, is now largely devoted to a cannery, and the ancient Hawaiian ordinance that "fornication is forbidden in the public highways" is but a poignant memory. Honolulu is not Havana, and except for the dances at the Waikiki hotels and evenings spent at the dockside beer joints, there is very little night life. On the other hand, the largest army post in the United States is quartered on the Islands and soldiers don't go to the movies every evening.

Hawaiian shrimps are small and taste like rubber; ulua is a very tasty fish which seems to be good no matter where you order it; and Island people use catsup as a sauce for avocados. . . .