Helen Dano
Hawaiian translation: 'aina = land; Waipahu = name of a small city (33,000 pop.) on the island of O'ahu, named after a once powerful spring that spewed more than one hundred million gallons of water daily (mcd) out onto the earth; thus, the name wai = fresh water pahu = the large, ceremonial drum with a deep, loud, forceful sound
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
—Herman Melville
between the mid-1960s and 2000
Before my mother’s land, the backyard looking down on an abandoned cane haul road;
before the sun’s calm shimmer over the harbor
beyond the interstate highway, not far from here,
reflects the heat of day;
before her vegetable garden:
the bushes of suluyot, tomatoes, okra, eggplant in their tidy rows,
the neat, squared plots of sweet potato, squash, and scallions,
the drought-resistant marunggay trees with their sprays
of dark green lace-like compound leaves
and mara-utong, the foot-long string bean-like beanpods,
the papaya trees, bordering a side yard hill, their slight-sized fruit affected
by the calcareous rock hiding under a shallow layer of topsoil,
the trellised beans and bittermelon vines
in the early evening breezes, dancing
(and the dinner hours' kitchen odor of fermented anchovy paste,
this Filipino bagoong boiling away in a water base, churning
with fresh tomatoes, onions, and llonng,
tiny, sun-dried, orange-colored shrimp, awaiting
the evenings' pick of vegetables);
before the four loulu palms, sentinels in a short, straight line in the front yard
(born of a rare tree, from seeds she picked up
on the grounds of the Foster Botanical Gardens in town), their
fronds failing to shade the enormous plate glass living room window
from the long afternoons' sun, and
the mango tree with its fruits dangling heavy
on their paniculate stems, and
the bettle nut palm, and
the rose apple tree she considered cutting down
but did not, and
the stump of the guava tree she did cut down --new
growth shooting out from it as if to defy the drastic action,
the pots filled with her large, old sago palm
and the tangled, magenta-colored bougainvillea
and the red amaryllis I sent her one year,
ordered through a catalog from
--what was suppose to be--
my impermanent mainland home,
though, she never believed that
--and was right
(and the year before she died, she told me that she wanted
to send the flower to me so I could also see its beauty,
"Oh, my!" she said several times, back then, "Oh, my!"),
and the custard apple tree that never bore fruit
until I left to go away to school,
and her noni bushes and the stunted coconut tree, none
tall enough to own any breeze, their roots
resting on thick limestone rock;
before her abandoned attempts to garden bonsai trees, orchids, the peony
(oh, the sweet-smelling peony --that needs a frozen winter's rest
to flower in late spring-- she fell in love with the peony
while on her first Mainland trip to visit me);
before her pride, her admired roses;
before many of the town’s children, grown, including those
of her friends and two of her own
taking leave of this place,
moving somewhere far from its scorching sun,
and further away from its dying cane
and the sugar mill closing on this 'Ewa plain;
before the old Depot Rd., once vital, now superseded,
truncated by Farrington Highway
with its too many mini shopping malls
and one-too-many used-car lots
lined up one next
to the other,
the town center lost:
Big Way, Arakawa's, Kawano's, shuttered,
mom-and-pop stores along Waipahu Street
closed, then torn down,
the post-office displaced,
and the largest of the new subdivisions
wanting their own zip codes
as progress and its urban sprawl usurps the surrounding
cane lands and the pineapple’s smooth, cool hills
(these lands, stills in Blue Hawaii,
as Elvis cruised up Kam. Hwy.
not far from what would become my mother's yard, with
Diamond Head in the upper far right frame of the picture);
before backyard fences of concrete bricks did not altogether
block the sight and the noise of the highways
that steered the city toward the country and
sculpted suburbia into these carmine-colored plains;
before streetlights seen far off: like icy jewels strung up and reeling
through valleys once grown dense with sugar cane,
disappearing deep into the gulches,
cresting the low ridges of the encroaching distances,
before the clear creeks (these seepage from several springs
that can be annoyances to modern development):
their beds pressed with prefabricated concrete blocks,
these man-made channels built to discourage
the mosquito breed --and, when they did not,
crop-dusting planes were sent up to spray the night--
and to avert the seasonal, treacherous floods
that could do damage to the new subdivisions
built on lands with forgotten histories of rice paddies and taro patches,
and despite this artificial ground,
the big-eyed aholehole fish
teem and spawn --just as generations of their kind
have done before--
in the brackish waters melded
of the cold, sweet springs of these leeward lands
and the briny tides of the harbor Pearl;
before the military fences, and their "DO NOT TRESPASS!" signs,
and the state government fences and their "KAPU! KEEP OUT!" signs,
and a city & county landfill sight burying an ancient sea's coral coastline
--all severing this town from the harbor that defines its southern border,
here, thirteen miles from the expanding metropolis, Honolulu,
before the red dirt, ubiquitous, flies, becomes red dust;
This land, this ‘aina, was my grandfather's.
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