Pakala

The summer wave still spins perfectly around its arc of shallow reef. Photo: denjiro Sato

Just off the narrow two-lane highway, sitting incongruously alone, is a tiny, one-room building. Lush, green sugarcane fields, their stalks billowing in the gentle trade winds, fill the rich land on either side of the road. The building is a post off ice and the sign reads Makaweli, kaua’i. It sits on an intersection where the crossing road is dirt of an astonishing shade of red.

Across the paved highway, the road heads straight mauka, toward the mountains. However, these mountains aren’t really mountains but rather low, rolling hills planted in more sugarcane. Makai, or toward the sea, the road runs straight, and on the left beyond a small field of cane is a large, open equipment shed. Scattered around the yard lies the machinery used to plant, maintain, and harvest sugarcane.

Much of the equipment is dilapidated, obsolete, and permanently parked. The machines that work are well used. Everything is coated with a layer of red dust. Mechanics work on trucks and other obscure farming machines under the hot sun. From the machine shop, the flash and sparks of welding can be seen, and the sounds of grinding and pounding echo off the high tin roof. On the right side of the road, a rough, rock wall and an irrigation ditch border another cane field.

Past the shed and equipment yard, a fork in the road splits and goes off to the right. There are small board and batten houses of rough sawn one-inch by twelve-inch pine and built up off the ground; all are in the same traditional plantation labor camp design, varying slightly in size and age. The homes are set apart by small yards surrounding them and occasional wooden fences. Many have large mango trees, some citrus, a few lychee, banana, and papaya. Well-tended vegetable gardens or noisy chicken coops fill others. Some have neatly trimmed lawns with flowering shrubs, while a few are only dirt resting grounds for automobiles in varied stages of high mileage or final, slow decay.

The little community, affectionately known as Pakala by its residents, is housing for Gay & Robinson Sugar Plantation workers. The residents are a mix of Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Korean, and Filipino immigrants. Many are the second generation—sometimes the third generation—of their families and are lifetime employees of the plantation. Their skills vary: some are field workers, others mechanics. All work outdoors every day, their hours controlled by the morning, lunchtime, and pau hana whistles.

Pakala, depending on how it is pronounced, means “the shining of the sun” or “a money field.” It is where Sinclair Robinson, the eldest son of the plantation family, lived. His home overlooked the sea and Ni’ihau, the westernmost inhabited island in the Hawaiian chain.

In the late 1800s, Sinclair Robinson’s grandmother, Elizabeth Sinclair, relocated her family from New Zealand. She spent $10,000 to purchase a rich agricultural Kaua’i ahupua’a, a traditional Hawaiian land division consisting of a pie-shaped section beginning at a point in the middle of the island and extending out to the shoreline. She chose this in lieu of a hot, flat, and barren piece of property in Honolulu that was available for a similar price. This O’ahu land would soon become the most valuable industrial real estate in Hawai’i. The Makaweli land, although fertile and beautiful to look upon, would prove to require years and generations of backbreaking work to farm.

Sinclair, who may have possessed the most vision of any of his family, was determined to work with what he had. He set about making something of his land. He built the home he named Pakala and turned his attention to growing a new crop that was putting Hawai’i on the U.S. and world maps, making millionaires of its growers.

Still, the sugar business offered no guarantee of success. Owning the most fertile growing land in Hawai’i was not enough for the Robinson Plantation. Finally, Sinclair made a deal with C. Brewer & Company to lease his land and farm the sugarcane. The new company, called Olokele Sugar Company, was more successful. The Makaweli plantation became the richest-yielding fields per acre in the islands.

My grandfather worked for the plantation, and my mother and her siblings were raised in Pakala. My grandpa, K. K. Itakura, was gifted with intellect. He won the admiration and trust of Sinclair who did a startling thing: Sinclair took my grandfather out of the fields and made him the bookkeeper for the plantation. My grandfather did so well in this position, it opened another door and he was installed as vice president of the local First National Bank in Waimea. These were unheard-of events, as plantation workers in the U.S. Territory of Hawai’i in 1940 were still second-class citizens, unable to vote and without the same rights as white citizens.

My mother attended the University of Hawai’i where she met my father, and another unusual event occurred: They married. For a Japanese girl to marry my haole father, an upstate New Yorker of Spanish-German descent, was shocking to the closed ranks of Hawai’i’s Japanese community. It did come as a shock to my grandfather, but over a period of time that shock wore off. K.K. Itakura must have realized that the world was moving into a new era. Being on the leading edge of social change in west Kaua’i, he and his family welcomed my haole father with open arms.

In December of 1941, war came to Hawai’i with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It must have been a trying time for my father, married to a “local Japonee” while fighting “Japan Japonees” on the island of Saipan. But the Hawai’i Japanese suffered neither the resentment nor, worse, the internment to which the “Katonks,” or West Coast Japanese, were subjected. It would have been a difficult endeavor in Hawai’i, where the Japanese community made up a majority within the working-class population.

After World War II, both my uncles Hiroshi and Saburo returned from Europe, where they and the other Hawai’i Japanese boys served with great distinction in the 100th Battalion of the 442nd Regiment. Real changes began to happen in post-World War II Hawai’i. The veterans made use of the GI Bill college entitlement, and many graduated as lawyers, using their new knowledge to bring about the change from second-class to first-class citizenship.

I was born in 1948 and had the great fortune to be the first grandson. I spent a lot of my youth at my grandparents’ home in Pakala and came to love that place more than any other. My grandfather died of a heart attack when I was eight years old and I will miss him always. My grandmother, my Uncle Sab, and Auntie Betty still lived in the Pakala house, and during my childhood I spent as much time there as I could.

The house was spotlessly clean inside and out. I was hustled out in the morning so my sister and female cousins could help my grandmother and aunt clean it again. I never had shoes, never wore a pair until I went to the seventh grade. Once outside, my feet were dirty, and I wasn’t allowed back into the house unless I washed and dried my feet. This was too big a task for a little boy, and I preferred the outdoors anyway. There were big mango trees to climb in the front yard and kiawe trees across the road. The beach in front was a vast playground in itself.

With my uncle’s dog Rusty, I scoured the beach for sand crabs, carefully following the twisting holes down in the soft sand, digging until the crab was exposed and would attempt its escape back to the water. Rusty would pounce on the scuttling crab and bite it once before spitting it out. I would throw the remains into the water and watch the shoreline fish rush in for a meal.

There was an old Filipino man named Juanito who sometimes caught the crabs, chewed them up, and spit into the water, driving the fish into a feeding frenzy, where he hooked them one after another with his bamboo pole. Sometimes he put on a pair of small, homemade bamboo goggles, one over each eye, and with a small metal hook he dove the shallow water near shore for tako, or octopus.

This was even more fascinating to me. I recall watching as he surfaced for air and then disappeared underwater for long periods. Sitting on the beach, I tried to hold my breath until I saw him again. I needed to breathe four or five times during the time he was underwater. When he was done, he came ashore with octopuses stuck all over his body. The heads were turned inside out and the guts cleaned. He peeled them off in front of me, then gave me the biggest one to take home to my grandmother. I ran home to the back door and yelled for Gramma. She came out, smiled, and commented about the fresh tako, then took it from me and went back inside.

My Uncle Sab was gone early every morning to his job as a draftsman at the Kaua’i Pineapple Company in Lawa’i. My Auntie Betty moved to Honolulu to be a schoolteacher for several years before going to France and later Spain to teach for the military at the U.S. bases there. I continued to spend summers at Gramma’s house. Sometimes, when she finished her housework for the day, she called me to go fishing with her at the landing.

The bay known as Kai Ho’anuanu, where the camp at Pakala sat, had the best anchorage for the early interisland steamers that connected Kaua’i to Ni’ihau. The Robinson family also owned the island of Ni’ihau. Hawaiian people of mixed descent lived there. They spoke Hawaiian as their first language and lived more in the old way than anywhere else in the islands. The Robinsons were a very private and strongly Christian teetotaler family. They did not allow liquor or guns on Ni’ihau. If anyone broke the rules, he was exiled and not allowed to return. I never understood it when I was a boy. Today I find the concept vaguely medieval, though I concede that the Robinsons’ policies probably preserved elements of a fragile culture that might otherwise have disappeared.

The Robinsons had a surplus World War II landing craft that weekly plied the channel, carrying supplies and bringing the Niihauans to Kaua’i. There was a landing just down the beach from Gramma’s house. In the old days, before airplanes or freighters, the interisland steamers brought in stores at that landing. It was a sturdy structure, built of huge boulders from the shoreline. Farther out was a wooden pier extending beyond the surfline. I never saw any ships dock there. Another newer landing, inside the reef and farther up the beach at Mahinauli, provided a safer loading moorage for the Ni’ihau barge. But the old landing was an excellent fishing platform until a tidal wave in 1960 washed it away.

When Gramma took me fishing, she would gather her fishing gear and her big hat, and we would cross the cattle guard into the pasture and walk to the landing. There were bulls in the pasture that always scared me a little, but the donkeys were worse. If I was with my grandmother, none of the livestock bothered us. If I was with other kids, the donkeys would charge and try to bite us. When I asked my grandmother about it, she just said, “Don’t bother them and they won’t bother you.”

If we were going to the landing, or the river mouth beyond, it was easier to walk down the pasture road than to walk in the soft sand on the sloping beach. Without any adults, however, the beach was safer because even without any fence, the animals never went there. Sometimes, as I walked with Gramma, the big bulls would be standing right alongside the road. She walked calmly right by them, never even giving them a look while I fearfully watched them wide-eyed. Even when the donkeys stood in the road they moved when Gramma came along. They trotted out of her way almost as if they were afraid.

At the landing she would greet the other fishermen, and they would chat about the day’s luck and what was biting. The prize catch was papio, but a fat mullet or moi was OK, too. Sometimes a weke would bite, but their mouths were soft and one had to be careful about setting the hook and hauling them up. I could always try for aholehole near the rocks, but the surge often washed my hook into the holes where it would snag. Then, shamefaced, I’d have to ask Gramma for another hook. Her fingers deftly tied the catgut fishing line around the tiny fishing hooks; for me, it was nearly impossible. Her patience with me, the fish, and everything else in her world had no boundaries.

When I was older I was allowed to swim unsupervised. I remember the water inside the reef was crystal clear. The steady flood of irrigation required for growing sugarcane stained the entire shoreline a dirty shade of red brown. In the early years, the ocean was clear enough for me to learn to spearfish. I spent hours diving all along the shore. My Uncle Sab was an expert spearfisherman. Occasionally, I would be allowed to go with Uncle Sab and his friends to other places on the island where the fishing was better. It was a wonderful time to be in a magical place with the imagination of youth.

One day two guys with surfboards tied to the roof of their car arrived and parked in front of Gramma’s house. I had been vaguely aware of the waves breaking out on the reef, and sometimes I had joined the two older Pratt brothers, Lloyd and Terrill, bodysurfing or paipo-boarding in the little shorebreak on the far side of the landing. But the outside reef in front of the small fishing boat mooring might as well have been the other side of the moon.

The two surfers were excited that day. They looked at the waves while we gathered around looking at them, wondering at their excitement. Both were Kaua’i boys from Lihu’e side. One was named Carlos Andrade. In the following years, I would come to know him well.

Together they walked down the beach, sleek shiny surfboards under their arms and a flock of kids following behind. The surfers put their boards in and paddled out to the surf at the break in the reef where my uncle and the other fishermen drove their sampans through to get outside the waves. What happened next profoundly changed the direction my life would take from that day forward.

Both Carlos and his friend were expert surfers. The waves we never really had taken much notice of beforehand were, we saw for the first time, ideally shaped for long, graceful rides. Carlos and the other boy danced effortlessly to a tune we hadn’t heard before that day. They were amazing, gliding and floating across the faces of those waves. Suddenly those waves, which I had looked at for the twelve long years of my short life, but had never before actually seen, took on a new light. I had surfed once several years before at Waikiki, but after the momentary thrill I had lost interest. My brother Victor had caught the surf bug the first time and had his own surfboard. I was not smitten until that day at Pakala.

The following year, in the summer of 1960, surfing exploded. Any place with a beach and waves became a surf spot. Everyone was learning how to surf, and I was part of the trend. Pakala quickly became one of the most popular surfing spots on Kaua’i. No one living in Pakala surfed, but boys from nearby Waimea, Kekaha, and Kalapaki flocked to the perfect wave. After long days of surfing, the big, heavy surfboards were left, leaned up against the spreading Milo tree in the pasture. The local surfers came and went, but the surfboards were safe and secure all summer long under the Milo tree. The surf spot had taken the name Infinity. It was given that name by Michael McPherson on a surf trip there from Kailua, O’ahu, with Roy Mesker, Chris Green, and Randy Weir in 1963. Randy was the grandson of Sinclair Robinson.

At lunchtime, the surfers who had the forethought to bring food with them ate fast before having to share with the others. I walked back to Gramma’s house where she had lunch waiting for me. Although the concept didn’t exist then, I guess I was one of the first Pakala locals. Localism, and being a jerk in the lineup, was still many years in the future. But at that time there was no hierarchy determining who got which wave, no jockeying for position, no such thing as dropping-in. Everyone took turns catching waves and always knew whose turn it was. Sometimes friends, or even strangers, caught the same wave and rode it together … happily.

I spent the next couple of summers staying at Gramma’s house and surfing every day at Infinity. Those days were, without a doubt, some of the best times of my life. Then several things happened to change those idyllic summers. My Uncle Sab built himself a new home in Kalaheo and moved Gramma there to live with him and his new wife, Auntie Hitoe. Gramma’s house in Pakala was no more. I started surfing a place in Honolulu called Ala Moana and fell in with another crowd of surfers.

Things like that happen in surfing all the time. A surfer gets hurt and no one realizes he’s even gone until he returns to the beach healed. A new surfboard comes along and the old one is forgotten. A surfer starts riding a new break and the old spot is barely a memory. Surfing happens best when it’s in the present; the past is behind and the future not yet. The only thing of interest is what’s here and now.

In June of 1966, I graduated from high school and made plans to attend college in Southern California. Surfing was not my first priority. But I discovered surfing again while in California and went on my first real surf safari in Baja, Mexico. I found a new commitment to surfing that surprised me. I thought I had liked to surf before; I now discovered that it was really all I wanted to do.

The summer of 1967 solidified my commitment; I became a surfer for life. The following winter, I began to surf the North Shore waves on a regular basis. Dick Brewer shaped me a surfboard that not only gave my own surfing a huge step-up but also turned the entire surfing world on its head. That surfboard was the opening shot of the shortboard revolution.

By the next summer, the growing surfboard industry was in turmoil. Surfboard design was evolving at a pace too rapid for the big factories to stay current. The backyard industry blossomed, and I became a part of it, finding myself swept up in a life lived from one surfboard to the next.

Other world events factored into the equation. The Tet Offensive in January of 1968 escalated the Vietnam Conflict into another dimension. In every place where young people gathered, old belief systems were cast aside and new ideas sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. We were all swept up in this time of exciting and rapid changes.

The youth movement rejected rigid establishment values with student demonstrations in Paris and throughout Europe, as well as on college campuses across the United States. Violence hit the streets. Like many of my generation who grew up through the Kennedy and King assassinations to be confronted by the moral abyss of the Vietnam War, I found that the status quo of American values as espoused by leaders like Richard Nixon held little appeal. I found that surfing, to which Pakala with its special memories had opened a door, held out the promise of a better life. I dropped out of college and devoted my energies toward building a better surfboard.

Photo: Gerry Lopez Collection

A surfer I greatly admired named Herbie Torrens found a small house near the Menehune Ditch in Waimea. He called to tell me he was surfing a great break all by himself every day and wanted some company. I went to stay at my Uncle Sab’s place in Kalaheo. Every morning I would borrow his 1956 Nash Rambler, drop my grandmother off in Waimea, and go on to Herbie’s house. He was the only “mainland haole” in town and his place was called the “hippie house.”

Together we would grab our surfboards, a little food, and begin the long walk along the beach from the Waimea River mouth to Pakala. A lot had changed since the early days when Gramma lived there and all the surfers left their boards under the Milo tree.

Sinclair had passed away, but not before he had closed the beach to surfers. Some visiting California surfers had abused the access privilege by chasing some of the Robinsons’ mares ready to foal. The pregnant mares were always kept in that pasture between the main house and the surf break for close observation. It seemed that one of the mares had died; no more surfers were allowed across Robinson property. The only access was to walk from Waimea town on the beach below the high-tide line.

This was the reason the lineup was empty. The wave was still as good as ever and the walk always passed quickly. Herbie owned one of the new Brewer mini-guns just like the one Dick Brewer had shaped for me only six months earlier. I had an even shorter board that I had made myself. The surfboards probably didn’t matter because we had our pick of any of the perfectly peeling Pakala waves.

George Weaver, another good surfer whom I had met in California, showed up one day and we became a threesome. A few days later another friend, Tom Gaglia, came over from Lahaina, Maui. Tom, George, and Herbie had all grown up together in Newport Beach. The four of us enjoyed day after day of perfect Pakala by ourselves. After surfing and the walk out, I drove over and picked up Gramma from my auntie’s liquor store. Then we headed back to Kalaheo. Uncle Sab asked me what I did, and I told him we surfed all day. He didn’t understand and just shook his head.

One particularly great day of surfing left us pretty tired. The four of us were dragging our feet on the walk out. Right at the very end, near the river mouth, in front of the Russian fort, there were a lot of rocks on the narrow, steeply sloping beach that made a tiresome climb. A row of ironwood trees above the high-tide line bordered a narrow dirt road alongside a cane field where the walking was easier. Normally we never used the road; we thought it was Robinson property. But, this day it was late, we were weary, and we weren’t thinking. We stepped off the sand, up on the road, and had taken only a few steps when a jeep roared around the corner. Two guys dressed in khaki jumped out and yelled that we were under arrest.

Surprised, shocked, and a little scared, we jumped back on the beach and ran for it. When we got to the river, we hopped on our surfboards and paddled across. Looking up, I noticed a police car pulling down into the lot where fishermen parked. Tom and Herbie were already across and approaching the lot. I pointed out the police car to George and we both stopped in midstream.

“Who were those guys back there who were yelling at us?” George asked.

“That was the Robinsons, and I don’t think it’s over yet,” I answered, watching the police car stop next to Herbie and Tom.

“Well, I don’t think we did anything wrong,” said George, “I’m going to see what’s going on with those guys.” He headed after Herbie and Tom.

I didn’t know what to do. Sitting on my board I noticed a nice wave breaking off the river mouth. Remembering something I used to say to myself—“When in doubt, paddle out”—I paddled out to the break. I watched my three friends walk off with the police car following. A little while later, it came back. I saw the policeman get out, open the back door, and I watched my grandmother get out of the car. I paddled in immediately.

We were all arrested that afternoon for trespassing. We were told to appear in court in Lihu’e the following week. My grandmother seemed more upset about riding in the police car in front of her friends than by my arrest. My uncle warned me that the Robinson family wanted to make an example of us and not to do anything foolish.

The four of us showed up at the courthouse in Lihu’e for our appearance. A court official asked us if we had anything to say. He was looking directly at Herbie, whom he addressed as Mr. Porrens. George, Tom, and I looked at each other: “Porrens. What the heck?” Tom rolled his eyes.

“I think you might have made a mistake, my name is Torrens,” Herbie stammered. Tom told us later that when the police were filling out the arrest report, they asked Herbie his name. In some far-flung hope to confuse them he had blurted out, “Porrens.”

“That’s what I thought,” said the official. “You guys come on in now.”

We looked like country bumpkins compared to the county prosecutor in his fancy suit and shiny shoes. We might as well have been in a foreign country when we walked into that courtroom. We were as out of place as anyone could be. We were directed to sit at one table, while the fancy “Portagee” (Portuguese) prosecutor took the other one and disdainfully ignored us.

We all rose when the judge entered and gave us the briefest look before sitting down. He said we were charged with criminal trespassing and asked us how we pleaded. We had agreed that we would plead no contest and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court. The look the judge gave us when we said that made us wonder whether we had made the right decision.

The prosecutor spoke first. He talked about surfers trespassing in the pastures, stampeding the cattle, chasing the horses, breaking the fences and on and on, until the Robinsons had no choice but to close down access through their property. He implied that we had done all those things, were criminals, and should be treated as such by the court. The judge listened and finally asked us if we had anything to say. Tom, Herbie, and I were shocked to silence, but not so George.

George politely asked the judge if he could use the blackboard to illustrate what had happened. With a piece of chalk, he drew the river mouth, the Russian fort, the beach, and the dirt road, explaining where we were and what we did every day when we walked from Waimea to surf in Pakala. Our intention was not to trespass. He showed where the Robinson boys had surprised and scared us in their jeep and where we ran into the water. The judge asked a few questions about exactly where we were and where the jeep was. Finally, George ran out of steam and sat down. The judge wrote something while everyone waited; then he looked at us and told us to stand up. We all thought he was going to lower the boom, but out of left field, he dismissed the charges against us.

The county prosecutor leaped out of his seat to protest, but the judge told him the Robinsons had overstepped their boundaries and no trespass had occurred. The prosecutor looked like his neck and face were going to explode: The prospect of the story of how he lost his case to a barefoot hippie with a piece of chalk circulating around the legal community of Kaua’i caused him dire distress.

The judge admonished me personally, telling me he was certain my grandmother had warned me about trespassing on Robinson property numerous times. He said he better not see me, or my friends, in his court again. I promised him that from then on we always would stay below the high-tide line. We walked out of that Lihu’e courthouse free men.

I learned a great lesson that day. Had Sinclair Robinson still been alive, I doubt whether any arrest would have happened. I met him once as a little boy with my grandfather; he bought me an ice cream while they chatted. He struck me as sincere, and as a visionary but down-to-earth person.

A man of vision embraces the future. Aware that all things change, he plots the best course through all the twists and turns of life. People who can’t let go of the past try to build fences around the way things are. They hope to keep everything the same and refuse to accept change until it is forced upon them.

Sinclair’s home in the sunny place overlooking the surf spot has become a vacation rental. People have come and gone, but the dry and sleepy southwest coast of Kaua’i has remained relatively unchanged when compared to other popular Hawai’i destinations. The summer wave off the little point of the bay at Pakala still spins perfectly around its arc of shallow reef, just as it did before my grandparents lived there, or later when a child looked up to notice its ample grace.