Coast to Coast (24 page)

L
ook to the west from the Golden Gate, and you will descry Hawaii, the 50th State of the Union. She is 2,200 miles away as the Boeing flies, but the Hawaiian reputation is so gaudy and glaring that any sensitive observer may see her there, flashing like a fair-ground beyond the horizon. For myself, I went to Honolulu almost reluctantly, for I did not relish the contrast between San Francisco’s elegance and the honky-tonk of Waikiki beach: but I was wrong, quite wrong. Of all the American States, Hawaii has the most piquant and pungent history, and through all the sulphur, saccharine and frying-fat of tourism, she retains a soft languorous fragrance of Polynesia.

The day I arrived there a legislative inquiry was being held in the Iolani Palace in Honolulu. The prison administration had been accused of namby-pamby attitudes towards its convicts, and there in the shadowy cluttered hall was all the paraphernalia of American official investigation: the microphones, the reporters, the lounging shirtsleeved witnesses, the interrogators stern-faced at their tribunal, the sweating gossipy audience crowding at the door. It was a cameo of Americana, and a middle-aged lady even introduced herself to me as the wife of the prison psychiatrist—most indignant she was, too, at the very impertinent thought of an inquiry. Just twenty feet away, though, in the other half of the same building (a sort of little ginger-bread Blenheim) there stood all but deserted the throne room of the Hawaiian royal dynasties, still preserved in all its feathered splendours. I was pursued by the drone of the inquisitors as I entered this elaborate chamber, but inside all was flamboyantly royalist, and all around me were the gorgeous gewgaws, the regal portraits, the thrones and escutcheons that supported the precarious dignity of the Hawaiian monarchy until its overthrow by the Americans in 1893. I could all but hear the sonorous decrees of those vanished Polynesian kings—“The Law of the Splintered Paddle” was one of the most celebrated. I could almost see them sitting there, clutching their imported sceptres and
smothered from head to foot in robes made from the tufted feathers of the O-O bird.

Think of it! Seventy years ago, in our grandfathers’ time, Hawaii was an independent kingdom: yet by the time I got there, in 1960, she was quite happily debating whether to call herself the Sugar State, the Pineapple State, or The State of the Golden Welcome. There are people alive today who can remember when Her Majesty Queen Lydia Liliuokalani, “The Salt Air of Heaven”, still ruled the speckled islands of the Hawaiian chain, united under one flag by her two-fisted predecessor Kamehameha the Great (whose countenance was truly savage, wrote Thomas Manby in 1793, “as all his foreteeth are out”). There are citizens still about who coyly admit, tidying up their back hair, that the blood royal of the islands runs in their veins. Yet the fastidious wanderer, gazing dubiously out from California, has forgotten the very existence of those lost monarchs, and thinks of Honolulu as the nadir or epitome of razzle-dazzle Americanism.

Seven of the Hawaiian islands are inhabited—Oahu, Hawaii, Maui, Kauai, Molokai, Lanai and Niihau. Their Americanization has not been a sudden phenomenon. It happened in fits, starts and accidents. An Englishman, Captain Cook, was the first white man to set foot upon them, and also the first to die there (his head was given to Kahuopeonu, his legs went to Kalaniopuu, and his heart was eaten in error by a man who found it hanging on a tree and mistook it for pig’s offal). Nor was it any bold Yankee empire-builder who first raised Old Glory in these parts, but a straight-laced group of evangelical missionaries, blown in by the trade winds from New England. They arrived in the 1820’s, and long before Washington assumed political power in the islands they had snatched the easy-going Hawaiians out of paganism, invented an alphabet for them, schooled them and offered them salvation, taught them the elements of hygiene and modern government, and even dressed them more properly (for they went in for grass skirts and bare bosoms) in long-skirted dresses, called
muumuus
and
holokus
,
that were adaptations of respectable female attire back home in Massachusetts. In Honolulu the traces of those high-minded old zealots are still everywhere apparent: in the roll of island names, for instance—Bishops, Richards, Binghams, Judds, Spaldings, Doles; in the enveloping flowered
muumuus
still to be seen in every draper’s window; in the strong strain of evangelism still stoutly surviving; in the handsome old Kawaiahao Church, on the corner of King and Punchbowl Streets, where squeaky Hawaian songs still emerge from the schoolroom, and where a memorial tablet to the Queen Regent says of her that “although
naturally proud and haughty, she humbly accepted Jesus as her saviour”.

Since then many another kind of American has landed in Hawaii, from the rip-roaring whalers of the 1800’s to the bush-bearded Stanton Dole, a Honolulu lawyer, who led a republican revolution in 1893, deposed the last of the feathered monarchs and prepared the way for American annexation. Today upon these isolated islands, half-way between Tokyo and San Francisco, you may experience almost the whole gamut of the American way, set paradoxically against a backdrop of volcanoes, glistening rainbows, succulent expanses of fruit, phosphorescent surf and delectable sub-tropical flowers (of the 1,700 botanical varieties found in Hawaii when the white man arrived, nearly 1,600 were unique to the islands—as were 90 per cent of the 3,750 insect species). Mark Twain called Hawaii “the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean”; and since his day the Americans, with their talent for fun and their resolute idealism, have made this a paradise all their own.

Some of it is, as the world assumes, tinsel and money-mad, and makes the old American residents of Honolulu sad in contemplation. Here through the floodlit night, much as in Omaha or Cedar Rapids, the endless gleaming acres of used cars await their buyers—in 1961 there was a car in Honolulu for every two and a half inhabitants. Here you may see Miss Wiggles performing nightly in the Forbidden City Burlesque Revue, described tellingly in the advertisements as “sexy but nice”. Here you may wander baffled but bemused through the dim exotic labyrinths that have become a requisite of American holiday hotels, or you may biliously suck a Banan-a-Dip—frozen banana dipped in a stew of chocolate and walnuts—as you wander towards Mr. Henry Kaiser’s Authentic Hawaiian Village. You may attend the Honolulu Den luncheon of the Lions, you may have medicated honey applied to your sun-tanned shoulders, you may eat hot dogs at the corner drug store, shop at the inevitable air-conditioned super-market for the inescapable processed foods, join the evening hula classes at your hotel, or even buy yourself, if your Puritan instincts are wearing thin, a “shortie
muumuu
”, less lady-like by far than those demure New Englanders ever conceived, and showing a distinct reversion to tropical type. There are twenty radio stations in Hawaii, and there is a television set in eight out of every ten homes. The word
aloha
is an ancient Hawaiian synonym for love, greetings, farewell or welcome: but to hear it exuded breathily by the switchboard girl at the Surfrider Hotel, you would think it had been a publicity slogan all its life.

But America, that Janus, has brought many nobler things too. There is a universally literate population in Hawaii—a territory which, a
century and a half ago, did not even have an alphabet. There is a fine art gallery, a symphony orchestra, a distinguished university (graced, as it happens, by the greatest living authority on British naval history in the first quarter of this century). In the very middle of Honolulu’s tourist frenzies there is a delightful bookshop, open until midnight, supervised by an elderly lady who whiles away the night hours painting surrealist landscapes. There are admirable roads in these islands, and a mesh of air routes links the capital with the sixteen airports of the group. There are great sugar estates, magnificent ranches, forests of pineapples. Honolulu is full of nice, quiet Americans, and even the tourists, especially in the less fashionable months, can be unexpectedly engaging—they have often saved up for years to live it up just once on Waikiki beach, and their pleasure is irresistibly infectious.

A sense of power, too, makes Honolulu much more than a Pacific holiday camp. Hawaii lies slap in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where the trade routes cross and the western outposts of the United States look towards Asia. Midway, scene of the greatest of all naval battles, lies in the north-west of the Hawaiian group, and at Pearl Harbour, a few miles up the road from Honolulu, the funnel of the doomed battleship
Arizona
still protrudes from the water as a terrible memorial to 1941. Hawaii is a bastion still, the headquarters of all American naval forces in the Pacific—a command covering an area of 80 million square miles. The streets of Honolulu are full of willowy American sailors in virginal white. The skies of Honolulu are busy with aircraft—a streak of fighters across the mountains, a flow of airliners from the west coast, Australia and Japan (only reduced now that the big jets stream clean across the Pacific from one shore to the other). If you look between the warehouses of the docks, where the white tourist ships come in to a shimmy of hula girls and a flurry of garlands, as likely as not you will see a great grey carrier brooding there off-shore, or the shark-shape of a nuclear submarine.

Most agreeably of all, Hawaii remains resiliently Hawaiian. Americans talk of it rather as the Russians talk of Kazakhstan, but in fact the environment is coming out on top. I do not mean the hula girls and the Royal Hawaiian Band, or the surf-board men riding in like princes at Waikiki. I mean the very atmosphere and temperament of the place, which has miraculously survived war, vulgarity, and all the bounce and thrust of commercialism. Hawaii remains in many ways an oriental territory, astride the Tropic of Cancer. Nearly half the population is Japanese by stock, and another quarter is Chinese. Seven per cent are original Hawaiians, or thereabouts, and there are sizeable communities
of Filipinos, Puerto Ricans and Koreans. In 1960 one of the State’s three Congressmen was Chinese by origin and another was Japanese; and one recent Miss Hawaii was part English, part Chinese, part Japanese, part German, part Irish, part Scottish and part Polynesian. All this has happened, over decades of immigration, with scarcely a trace of racial friction, and for this we must thank the easy-going benevolence of the indigenous Hawaiians, which still imbues everything in these islands, from the mission halls to the milk bars, with a graceful and indolent charm. They seem to me the very sweetest of people, even if they did eat Captain Cook. At first you think their smiles and friendliness must be the mercenary kind, picked up at long range from the practitioners of Madison Avenue: but no, it is the real thing, and it is inescapable. Wanderers of every kind have settled in these islands: whaling-men and speculators, paunchy hoteliers, rugged Scottish traders, a Prussian royal bandmaster and an English court butler, and all that lounging riff-raff that is washed up with the driftwood of tropical seas. Yet through it all, surviving all the ups and downs of historical fortune, the old Hawaiian magic—Rupert Brooke’s dark scents whispering, dim waves creeping—has triumphantly, hauntingly survived. One immigrant from the mainland told me, as we sat beneath a banyan tree beside the murmuring sea, that during sixteen years’ residence in Hawaii he had only six times heard a car horn hooted in anger.

The State motto of Hawaii is
Ua-Mau-Ke-Ea-O-Ka-Aina-I-Ka-
Pono
, which means “The Life of the Land is Preserved in Righteousness”, and for once such a text rings true. A stone’s throw from the holiday madhouses of Waikiki there stands a row of rickety tables beside the sea, shaded by straw matting, where elderly Honolulu citizens while away their Sunday mornings with chess, chequers and inexplicable card games. I was sitting there one day in reverie, happily lost in the sun and the salt breeze, when a prickly old gentleman on the bench beside me tapped me on the shoulder. “You look kinda melancholy, son,” said he kindly. “Aincha read the proclamation?”—and he pointed to the notice painted on a weatherboard above us. “This Is A Public Park,” it said. “Have Fun!”

I
f Hawaii is out of your range, drive northward from California, into Oregon and Washington State. The transition is less abrupt, but hardly less beguiling. The coast road, often narrow and unfrequented, wind
its way along beautiful cliffs, with meadows on one side and the blue Pacific on the other; it is a rocky coastline like Cornwall’s, but softened by the green fields which sometimes lie beneath the cliffs, too, and stretch down to the very beaches. Not far from San Francisco the road passes an old Russian settlement, established in 1812 (a great year for the Russians) as a centre for fur trading, but abandoned soon afterwards. There is a church with a bulbous steeple, a fine wooden house that belonged to the garrison commander, and a stockade overlooking the ocean; the whole surrounded by fields, with humming-birds darting about the bushes, an odd and piquant memorial to an ill-starred colonial venture. Soon the character of the country changes. Woods begin to creep down to the road from the higher ground to the east, and before long on each inlet of the sea there are saw mills belching smoke, with piles of tree-trunks awaiting attention, and a smell of shavings and wet wood. This is the country of the lumber industry, which dominates the economy of the Pacific north-west and dictates the character of the northern Pacific Coast.

The most famous of the Pacific trees is the Coast Redwood,
sequoia
sempervirens.
In conversation in San Francisco you cannot escape the eventual intrusion of this tree, because a pervasive
mystique
has arisen around it. Scholarly societies fight to protect the chastity of its woods. Wealthy philanthropists compete to finance its preservation. Countless tourists, avid at once for the gigantic and the educational, flock to stare at its trunk and awe their unhappy children with details of its antiquity. A great section of country has been christened the “Redwood Empire”, and as you travel north you can scarcely fail to notice when your road suffers the inevitable metamorphosis and becomes the “Redwood Highway”. There is no more beautiful tree than the Coast Redwood; immensely tall, straight, slender and gracious, its branches intertwining high above you to form a dark and luscious canopy. There is something magical about a grove of these great trees, so vast, old and silent. But unless you are a passionate subscriber to the Save-the-Redwoods League, there comes a time as you motor north when each successive grove of Redwoods (usually piously christened after the benefactors responsible for its preservation) begins to look astonishingly like the one before; until, having savoured the mystery of these ancient things for a good many miles, and paused in their shadow for several cups of coffee, and dutifully left the road to visit the oldest and the tallest and the most historic trees, you detect in your reaction some slight affinity with that of the less scrupulous Pacific lumbermen, who would dearly like to chop all the Redwoods down and turn them into planks.

All the same, there is an extraordinary fascination about their age. In several places in the Redwood Empire there are trunks of Redwood trees that have been sliced across to display their age rings; and marked on the wood are the years represented by each ring, and a few contemporary events to illustrate the slow but irresistible growth of the thing. You may find, for instance, that the tree you are examining was a sapling in King Alfred’s time; was a stalwart young Redwood at the time of the Norman Conquest; entered Middle Age with the Renaissance; advanced into dotage with the Age of Reason; and died a few years ago, eleven or twelve centuries old, having experienced nothing through all the vicissitudes of history but a fire or two (duly dated on the rings) the winds and the rain of the Oregon forests, and the ultimate sharp cleavage of the saw.

There were once Sequoia trees all over the world, but most of them were exterminated in the glacial age, leaving only fossils to be picked up in Cornwall, France, Russia or Alaska. Until recently naturalists thought that only the two American species of the genus were left—the
sequoia
sempervirens
of the Pacific north-west, and the
sequoia
gigantea
of the Sierra Nevada. The former are the tallest living things—up to 364 feet high; the latter are the biggest and oldest—35 feet thick sometimes, and 3,500 years old. (The
sequoia
gigantea
was originally named, by British scientists,
sequoia
Wellingtonia
,
at a time when scarcely an Englishman had set eyes on one. “Emperors and kings and princes have their plants,” it was said, “and we must not forget to place in the highest rank among them our own great warrior”.) However, an odd thing happened a few years ago. A young botanist employed by the Chinese Government penetrated to a village in Szechwan where, he had been told, there was a very big tree. He found that it was, in fact, a very big tree indeed, and he hastily took cuttings of it. Analysed by astonished pundits, these cuttings proved that the tree was a third kind of
sequoia
‚ as much a living fossil as the coelacanth (that impudent fish which defied all the rules of natural science by emerging from the Indian Ocean in a condition several millennia out of date). Since then many specimens of this tree, the Dawn Redwood (
Metasequoia
)‚ have been found in the remote valleys of central China, and some have been transplanted elsewhere.

In the old days the Pacific lumbermen did their best to eliminate the Coast Redwood, swathing their way through its forests with terrible abandon, leaving devastated areas behind them, buying up forests, chopping them down, and moving on ruthlessly to other regions. Thousands upon thousands of the Redwoods were cut, dragged through
the woods by teams of oxen, and floated down the forest streams to the coast, where the saw mills seized them and did their duty. “We may not know how to grow them,” says one lumberman to another in a cartoon I was shown in Oregon, “but we sure know how to cut ’em down!” It was, of course, this process of blind extermination that led to the foundation of the various Redwood preserves; but hard economics have now convinced most of the lumber companies that conservation is as important in forestry as it is in agriculture, and only a few minor, unrepentant operators are still demolishing the woods with the old carefree robustness.

I was the guest of one of the most enlightened Redwood lumber companies at Fort Bragg, in northern California. This is a company town
par
excellence
,
all but wholly owned by the Union Lumber Company. Its streets are crowded with prosperous lumberjacks, big men in check shirts and boots, and with cheerful wives wearing headscarves, like English ladies at a point-to-point. The company store, the town’s chief emporium, is a square building made of redwood, with a little of the manner of a frontier trading post, and a Scandinavian standard of neatness and convenience. There is a company train, a little diesel car nicknamed “The Skunk” (because of its strange fumes), which chatters off each morning through the surrounding hills and woods to join the main line forty miles away. Down by the sea there are the remains of a jetty, for until the 1920’s the company used to ship its lumber by sea to San Francisco, and schooners and steamers used to stand off-shore whie the wood was loaded by pulleys.

Nlear the company offices there is a little museum. The lumber industry is pleasantly interested in its own history, and this gentle preoccupation with the past casts a sometimes misleading aura of detachment around the activities of the different companies. The beginning of the Pacific lumber trade occurred not much more than a century ago, and the work of the early lumbermen is still easy to imagine. The Union lumberjacks often find pieces of old equipment, abandoned in the woods by their predecessors when they moved on to new territory—old steam donkeys, with tall black chimneys, standing rusty but statuesque among the trees; axes and hammers of antique design; and big wooden wheels on which the sawn trunks were transported. Sometimes deep in the woods, miles from anywhere, you come across a shattered and decaying house, with the remains of a flower garden, and a front gate tottering on its hinges. This was once a ranch, where the lumber company’s oxen were raised and grazed, and toughened for the task of dragging immensely heavy logs through the thick undergrowth of the
Redwood forests. The Union people are still selling wood cut by the pioneers in the 1850’s. Occasionally, when logs were cast into a stream to float down to the mills, they sank, or were entangled in foliage, or for other reasons failed to make the journey; these logs are still being retrieved, none the worse for the 100 years’ hiatus between their chopping and their milling, and if you buy a redwood plank you may well be handling lumber cut by some of the first white inhabitants of the north-west.

Nevertheless, the big lumber companies have modernized and mechanized their activities with impressive thoroughness. Nowadays few lumbermen live in the old remote lumber camps, in brawling and boozing comity; they prefer to live domestically in maisonettes, driving into the forests each morning in their own fine cars, along rough jungly lanes. Once in the woods, they cut their trees with power-saws, and the logs are pulled by tractors to a central clearing-place. There enormous lorries are waiting for them. They have driven up the forest roads with their trailers carried pick-a-back behind the cab, to save tyres and make the driving easier; now these trailers are lifted off by cranes, coupled up, and loaded with logs, until the whole machine bends and creaks with the strain, but starts up nonetheless with a roar and a puff of exhaust smoke, and pounds off through the woods to the mills. Most big lumber companies have private roads into the woods, and this means that the lorries can carry a heavier load than is legally allowed elsewhere. On the Union Lumber Company’s roads they travel, for one reason and another, on the left-hand side of the road instead of the right; and it can be disconcerting for the unwary and ill-oriented motorist, plodding around a corner, to find himself faced by a gargantuan lorry with a mountain of logs, careening towards him at great speed on the wrong side of the highway.

The mills keep huge stock-piles of wood, because logging stops in the winter, and there must be a supply of raw material to keep the plant active during the cold months. A fascinating variety of machines converts these logs, when required, into planks. A powerful jet of water, for example, strips the trunk of its bark; the water gushing out of a nozzle with a roar, while two metal claws like lobsters’ pluck the log from a conveyor belt and revolve it to ensure that no snatches of bark escape the jet. The log is then placed on a mobile platform which is whisked up and down on lines, with an unfortunate operator sitting precariously on it like a young man showing off at a fair. On each of these precipitous movements the log comes into contact with the blade of a saw, which strips off a plank as a bacon slicer cuts a rasher. The noise is indescribable,
and the master sawyer, who stands at the controls beside the saw, gives his instructions with an odd, enigmatical sign language, the twitch of a finger, almost the contraction of a muscle, conveying some such meaning as: “Bring the blade forward two inches, Bert.” There is a delightful smell inside the mill, despite the profusion of machinery; and because much skill is required in processing and grading the wood, as well as in the forests, the industry has the quality of a craft, and commands much the same loyalty.

The flavour of Fort Bragg is very agreeable. Though the company has (for instance) its own aeroplane, it is still a family concern governed by inherited principles. I stayed in its guest house, an unpretentious Victorian redwood structure built by the company’s founder. The bathrooms were of unusual magnificence, but otherwise the house was appealingly old-fashioned and middle-class, akin more closely to society in the English shires than to the rough frontier environment in which it presumably made its debut. The business office of the company is also comfortably nostalgic, with polished wooden counters and grills, like a country bank, and small wood-panelled rooms for the executives. The young manager (heir to the family firm) wore a thick tartan shirt without a tie when I called on him there, and on his feet were high-ankled lumberjack’s boots. Like most of his contemporaries in the Pacific lumber industry, he has learnt every facet of the business, and pursues its affairs keenly but (mercifully) not so boringly as some of his counterparts to the east.

Another young man of influence at Fort Bragg is the chief forester, a disciple of the celebrated Emanuel Fritz, the greatest authority on the redwoods. As the industry has grasped the meaning of conservation, so the professional forester has assumed new importance in its hierarchies. Most big lumber companies now consider their trees as a crop, to be cut in rotation, taking care that a fresh supply is coming along; in future you will not often see those wide drab wildernesses that were the sure mark, in the past, of the indiscriminate passage of lumbermen. Nowadays the forests are either cropped selectively, or in strips, leaving islands of trees to reseed the ground; and great care is taken when timber is withdrawn from the woods to ensure that young trees are not damaged in the process. There is an accepted standard of conservation, and forests that reach it are granted certificates recognizing them as “tree farms”. The Union forester took me through miles of tangled woodland to visit a section of forest he was cherishing with particular care. There he had thinned a grove of Redwood trees, carefully removing those that were economically useless or especially ripe for chopping,
and leaving the others with much more light and space. The Redwood lumbermen are still cutting virgin timber, but they will soon be moving on to second growth, so there is especial significance to such essays in artificial cultivation. We stood in silence in his grove, a clearing of light in the dark forest: he thinking of trees in terms at once practical and affectionate, and murmuring now and then “I should have got rid of
that
old so-and-so!”, I allowing myself for an unguarded moment to plunge into a mystical reverie, much concerned with the fundamentals of Life, Death and Purpose. (It was true that I had recently read some of the literature of the Save-the-Redwoods League; but it was the haunting silence of the trees, the sombreness of the surroundings, and the overpowering sense of antiquity, that had this disconcerting effect on me.)