Point of View
Beautiful Kauai loses its history and livelihood
By Carl Heintze
My favorite island, Kauai, the most northerly of the inhabited islands of Hawaii, is in trouble. Last November, what probably was the last shipment of sugar left Kauai's shores for California. Although one plantation, Gay and Robinson, says they are going to continue to plant and harvest sugar cane, there's no certainty they will. Or that raw sugar will ever again leave Kauai for the mainland.
So, after more than 150 years of planting, irrigating, burning, cutting and compressing sugar cane, sugar no longer will be a crop on Kauai. Indeed, it no longer will be The Crop on the island. Already where once thousands of acres were planted in sugar, the cane now lies either abandoned, or has been replaced with grass and weeds. It's as if the heart of the island somehow has died.
Sugar became a way of life for many Kauaians in the 19th century when missionary planters, blessed with a fertile soil and a favorable climate, found a way to bring water to the cane fields from Kauai's abundant supply.
(Kauai's mountains are among the wettest places on earth. Each year as much as 400 inches of rain fall on their slopes.)
Thus, for more than 100 years and through three or four generations sugar planting was how Kauai prospered. It drew to the island thousands of immigrants, most of them from Japan. Their descendants now rule Kauai politically, if not economically. The last two mayors of Kauai County, for instance, both women, have been descendants of Japanese who were imported to reap the harvest of sugar.
For them sugar was a way of life. It was work. It shaped their lives. It was a part of the island.
Sugar was a labor intensive crop. Although mechanization gradually modified planting, cultivating and harvesting cane, it was a tough, hot job. Many Kauaians got their start as harvesters of cane.
It also gave rise to half a dozen sugar mills where the cane was run through rollers, and its juice squeezed and then boiled to make raw sugar.
Where once plumes of smoke from the mills dotted the sky, now not one still operates. Some, notably Grove Farm Plantation's and Gay and Robinson's mill at Kekaha, still stand, but they are black and rusty remains--stark reminders of when sugar was king.
Now the king is dying or dead.
To mark the sailing of the last ship from Nawiliwili Harbor in November 2000, the island held a commemoratory parade. Cane trucks, suitably decorated and visible everywhere on Kauai even 10 years ago, rumbled through the streets.
But it was less a celebration than a funeral, the passing of a way of life.
"It was sad," one observor said. "It was the end of something."
Although that's certain, what remains is much less so. Just what will happen to a sugarless Kauai is at the moment very much unknown.
There's coffee, a crop which has done well on Hawaii, but Kauai coffee, so far, is neither as well known, nor as well liked as Kona coffee from the Big Island. Corn also has been planted experimentally, but it is uncertain whether large corn plantings will follow these experiments.
The immediate effect on the island has been the loss of more than 400 jobs, but the subtler effect of cane fields, turned into weed patches, has yet to be fully realized.
Tourism remains, of course, but tourism on Kauai has never been as rampant as it has been on Maui, for instance, or Oahu. Still it is increasing. This year for the first time, since a peak in the late 1980s, Kauai will be seen by more than a million tourists.
And Kauai is tough. It has weathered two hurricanes. The first, Ewa, devastated parts of the island in 1982.
The second and more destructive, Iniki, swept across the center of Kauai in 1992, doing more than a billion dollars in damage and setting the tourist industry back a decade.
The storm ripped the roofs from hotels and homes impartially, stripped trees of their leaves and raked the beaches with debris. It launched a massive program of rebuilding which is still under way.
Three of the hotels, damaged in that blow, have yet to be rebuilt. But they will, in time, apparently be restored to life.
The other hostelries are booming.
Despite the demise of sugar, Lihue's airport is busy again. Most days the island's single road is still a morning and afternoon traffic jam. The tourists have returned in force.
It is only the cane fields, that are choked with weeds.
Beyond them the green mountains and the red earth still shine in sun and shower, and Kauai remains, at least to my mind, the most beautiful of all the beautiful places of Hawaii--indeed, among the most beautiful of all places on earth.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
