Kaua'i Reflections, Day 1: Intraisland and Interisland

3:00 PM

There are whole fields - owned by the Agribusiness Corporation - where nothing grows. Perhaps it's only the season, but they look dead. Parched, desolate, they dot the western sweep of Kaua'i - the dry side.

I'm driving back from the Wailaeua lookout - thirty-five hundred feet of canyon dropoff cinder cones slashed through the green hills, when I spot the dead fields.

We've passed U.S. Navy missile ranges, NASA radar centers, and narrowly avoided crashing through the gate of an Army ammunition dump. Every type of warning sign, every cautionary insignia, all manner of symbolic attendance has been thrown our way as we circumnavigate the island. It seems everyone has a stake in this little dot of land in the Pacific, and as the fiefdoms battle for control of the land, the sea, and the skies, the signs sprout up like weeds, directing tourists and the island's residents back and forth, bouncing among the remaining free zones, ricocheting off the bounds of corporate farms, missile sites, and naval no-sail zones.

And in the middle, scorching in the heat leeward of the Kaua'i hills, are the dead fields. They pass on our left, our right, flocked by those same signs - Do Not Enter. Restricted Area.

I'm picking out something on those fields now - something that stands out against the dry, the brown, the lifeless. Tall and curved, striped - it's a sun umbrella stuck in the dusty ground. Below it: a man, a chair, a cooler. His toes touch dirt, his hand reaches in the cooler. In the middle of the field, he sits, waits, watches the waves on the west shore.

The man sits at his station, guarding the field. Behind him, in a nearby field, another umbrella, another man. They sit, they wait. Umbrella, chair, cooler. Sitting, waiting, leisurely guarding the dry, lifeless ground from a little tropical outpost. There are dozens of them, one in every field for miles.

In the background, silently surgical, lurking off the west shore, a Navy frigate turns south, showing her broadsides. The string vibrates, tension holds against the island.

Drive on.

7:30 PM

We're on the seawall, dangly legs catching spray on the south shore of the island. Over beers, my father and I alternately discuss love, life, and the island.

There are constant whispers of a Superferry - an inter-island transport for cars and people - in the papers, on the lips of the hotel workers, and in signage around the island. Behind us, an arrow proudly points the way to the loading dock - the site that the new supervessel will dock to take on cars and passengers. But not yet. The Superferry didn't make it. Protesters jammed the harbor, and turned it back.

Three lights in the dimming sky suggest an aircraft on final approach, coming our way. Sailboats dance just off the harbor, using navigational buoys as impromptu race markers. Dozens of kayakers and surfers bob and slip the waves a few hundred feet away.

I feel Kaua'i as a beautiful place resistant to overdevelopment. They say it's what the "normal" islands used to look like twenty years ago, and perhaps it's only through the outcry of the citizenry that things haven't become more corporate. Signs of it are everywhere. Hardly a building over three stories. No investment banks. Real estate offices that still sit next to t-shirt stores.

The sun is going down, and the spray is becoming more pronounced as the land breeze scrapes pressure off the land and distributes it back to the sea. Behind us, a gate opens, and cars drive off in a quiet procession, emerging from the proud future site of the Superferry.

It's the next morning's paper that brings the news of furloughs at the Superferry site, carried through the day previous. Our day at the seawall, at the site of the Superferry, was their last. The cars we saw leaving were the exiled workers.

Drive on.