Ruins, 1999

Thomas Farber has been a Fulbright Scholar, awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and three times National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio. His recent books include Here and Gone, The End of My Wits, Brief Nudity, and The Beholder. He shares his time between Honolulu, Boston and the Bay Area.

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Time travel. “Here today, gone tomorrow.”

Or, HERE TODAY, GONE TO MAUI, as the bumper sticker read.

Māui, actually, trickster demigod who fished up various Polynesian islands. Who was en route to conquering Death by heading up Her vagina until She crossed Her legs: the end of the end of Death.

In the 1970s, hanging out in a friend’s shack on Māui’s north coast, I’d go to the sleepy sugar mill town of Pā‘ia for groceries and coffee. Pā‘ia had by then been discovered by hippies, for them an incarnation of, say, a vegan colonic therapy epicenter.

When I returned in the late 1990s, Pā‘ia was a soon-to-be former mill town, locus of several time warps and anachronisms. Mill as before just up Baldwin Avenue, plume of vapor like cotton candy. Diffuser / crusher / escalator / scrubber / mud bath / catwalk / shredder / centrifuge / clarifier. Trucks with payloads of fifty tons. But also Pā‘ia’s weathered wooden storefronts; flocks of helmeted tourists on bikes; old Horiuchi market empty; windsurfers from France / Germany / Brazil.

Also, as well, dazzlingly ahistorical seekers still abounding in the ozone of nearby Ha‘ikū or Makawao town, barefoot with sun-bleached hair, eyes open very wide, swimming in the sea of the soul. Shopping at Mana Health Foods. Bulletin boards offering Sufi music, Taoist yoga, Reiki training, rebirthing, channeling, holistic facials, avatars...

To return to Pā‘ia in 1999, I joined the flow of interisland travel, starting toward Honolulu International Airport in rush hour. Gridlock on Interstate H-1, despite the then ever-more-depressed economy, “visitor” count way down in a two-industry state (US military the other big spender). It was dawn, full moon setting, surf on O‘ahu’s north shore wrapping around to the east and west.

At the airline terminal, there were cetaceans on the walls. Alas poor Ahab: everyone Saved by Whales.

Waiting for the flight, women from “the mainland” were sporting white pants / white sneakers, their consorts wearing large stomachs without apology, as if tolerating another inevitable of the spousal-paternal role. Talk about carry-ons! Their teenage boys, baseball-cap brim reversed, were generic, as recognizable to each other as long-lost twins. And, for the whole family, fanny packs / cameras / tethered sunglasses. NAKED CO-ED GOLF read one man’s T-shirt. Tourism a stage play requiring an agreed-on diminution of the Unknown. Analogue of, say, the roller coaster. 

There were also racks of tourist literature. Free post-modern smorgasbords of opportunities. Coming soon to Hawai‘i: The Rolling Stones, Yale Wiffenpoofs, Dave Brubeck, Koko the signing gorilla. Jeep safaris, available anytime. Snorkel Bob in a woman’s bathing suit. Atlantis Adventures’ submarine visiting a “brave new world.” (“’Tis new to thee,” Prospero responds when daughter Miranda utters these words in The Tempest.)

But why my flight? Like Pā‘ia’s New Agers, I was a seeker. My quest? To respond in written words to Geoffrey Fricker’s photographs of a ruin just outside of town. I already knew his other photographic concerns: wild and “tamed” rivers and watersheds of California; dinosaur fossil assemblages—“death beds.” Had spent time with him on the upper Sacramento River.

So: off to a ruin. Where a métier can lead you. 

I’d done some homework. Industrial capital came to Hawai‘i in the form of sugar. With, that is, descendants of the nineteenth-century missionaries who, by 1893, sixty-something years after the missionaries’ landfall, had overthrown the Hawaiian kingdom.

Annexation, private property, and sugar in Pā‘ia meant the end of traditional Hawaiian farming of taro, breadfruit, banana, arrowroot, yams, kava, and sweet potato. Meant the building of miles of siphons, tunnels, and flumes to transport water from the windward slopes of Haleakalā, this area too low to draw rain out of the northeast trade winds. Meant the arrival of thousands of immigrants to work the plantations. Meant stoop labor. Meant a local industrial hero, the legendary Henry Perrine Baldwin, adjusting a mill’s cane-crusher and getting fingers caught in the turning rolls, right hand and arm mangled.

Mr. and Mrs. Endo at McGerrow
Camp home, Pu‘unēnē, Maui, 1974.
Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker

Nineteen ninety-nine. From Pā‘ia, out past the high flames and black smoke of burning cane, the sugar company’s oversized tractors and steam shovels cartoon-like, as if out of a children’s book. Driving along the sea cliffs to Ho‘okipa Beach park, bumper sticker on an old VW Bug reads, IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO HAVE A HAPPY CHILDHOOD. And sticker on a pickup, THE HAWAIIAN KINGDOM RESTORED JUNE 7, 1992. Restoration still pending, however.

Low tide at Ho‘okipa. The papa, shelf of reef along the narrow sand beach, exposed. No wind, water “glassy,” and, farther outside, north swell “closing out” the bay, forming enormous unrideable waves. Not a soul at the breaks—Pavilions / Middles / The Lane / The Point.

Hāmākuapoko: from H-Poko Point, back toward Pā‘ia, then up Holomua Road a mile and a half through cane fields. Mongoose hot-footing it across the pavement. Parking just below old Maui High School, much of it abandoned, overgrown by vegetation. Looking way down to the ocean, green / blue-green / jade / blue-black, white of breaking waves. Vast slopes of cane, cloud-covered ‘Īao Valley. Police car pulling up by a rental car’s smashed window.

Hoofing it on red-dirt roads, traffic-less intersections with stop signs in the apparent middle of nowhere, not a sound of humans or the man-made. Head-high sugarcane. Walled in. Cane stalks rustling, sun burning, rooster crowing. Two resolutely straight, fastidiously branched Cook Island pines. Ironwood, monkeypod, guava, papaya, passion fruit. Jacaranda, kiawe.

Trying to find an abandoned nineteenth-century sugar mill, taking one fork, another, backtracking, spotting this stone wall or gulch a second time, a third. Hot, irritated, confused. And then, no doubt only several hundred yards from where I began, a canopy of foliage, what seems a stand of trees, and, through its branches, a structure.

Slipping down an orderly row of cane, I reach the wreckage of a building perhaps 200 by 100 by 50 feet. Blackened cement-and-stone walls, upper floors fallen, roof girders above, sections of rippled corrugated iron on the ground, window and door frames empty. This was once an agricultural factory: towering smokestack, ox-drawn carts, workers / foremen / bosses from around the world. A babble of languages creating pidgin English above the din of the crushers. For laborers, a lifetime of hand-cutting cane, crouching.

Ruins. Latin ruina, “a collapse,” “a rushing down,” “to fall.”

The End? No: here, time failed to stop. Empty beer bottles (Steinlager from New Zealand); spray-painted Chinese ideograms. And, why the surprise, photosynthesis.

What’s growing? Banyan trunks, roots, branches. Countless banyan trunks, roots, branches. Branches like sections of a pipe-fitter’s mania, superglued—no give when I yank on them—to the walls. Plastered, layering / over-laying. Minimalism this is not. Over-the-top growing. Overkill? Over-living. Or just…life.

All nature has a pattern, they say. What’s the plan here, the composition? Trees, but where do these branches begin, end? Going which way? Backtracked from a branch, the regression keeps regressing. No obvious single point of origin; no clear end in sight.

Banyan(s)? Plural? So many trunks in and around the building, how many trees are there? What if your life depends on a tally? And you, your one and only self, in this...labyrinth of branches and trunks, these...tentacles? This...lava flow of growing. Such life force from sunlight / air / water / soil. Are they, is it, one thing? A graft? Married? At odds? At war?

Meanwhile, POV the building, its walls are...drowned / smothered / strangled. Cannibalized, digested. Windows and doors spared, branches framing them, dropping (?) down (?) beside them or angling past the rectangles. Spared, or avoided: branches superstitious about windows and doors? Branches seeing something in them that should be left alone? Or, is the building crumbling, branches holding it up, holding it together?

And? Melded / matted tendrils hang from branches, as if determined to reach the ground. All this in heavy shade, sunlight blocked by the leaf canopy. Visual escape eliminated, a feeling of the inevitable, and, mill so undone, collapse. Dazed, you think, say, Angkor Wat, expect macaques or other simians.

Hāmākuapoko Mill, 1979.
Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker

Such silence, as if the banyan(s) has / have been waiting for you. Waiting a long time. Capable of waiting some more. Waiting us out. Waiting for all of us to be gone.

Disorientation, claustrophobia, hint of suffocation. Out, out of the mill, down a consolingly orderly row of cane, onto a red-dirt road. Into the light, sky now above. Of course. Larger world, ongoing, visible. Of course. Helicopter, jet, Pacific down below, the long upslope of Haleakalā’s volcanic bulk.

Looking back, I see the canopy as a bump in the sweep of the fields. Upended umbrella floating on the surface of the cane; Mont-Saint-Michel in a high-tide’s sea of green.

The banyan, the mill. Did the mill walls have a choice? The banyan? Fossilized bones of the dinosaur, they say, become one with the rock.

More homework: banyans are indigenous to the Himalayan foothills, widespread throughout India and Indonesia, planted for shade. They’re a kind of fig, related to breadfruit / mulberries / elms / hemp. An ornamental, and evergreen, the banyan is hardy, fast growing. A central trunk sends out horizontal branches in all directions. From buds under the bark aerial roots emerge, hang hair-like, and eventually reach the ground, themselves evolving into substantial buttresses, pillars. Thus the tree, seldom more than seventy feet high, spreads laterally, coming to resemble a thicket, a tangle as it produces a dome of dense shade foliage with a diameter of one hundred yards.

Its bark is smooth. Leaves compact, elliptical, dark, often covered with a black mold that grows on the excretion of a bug that feeds on the leaves and twigs. Fruits small, fig-like, seeds dispersed by birds—airborne, the fleshy fruit passing through the bird’s alimentary canal.

Or perhaps the banyan evolved to get humans to help it disperse. Banyans came to Hawai‘i in the nineteenth century with Westerners, tree and Westerners non-indigenous / non-native / exotic and exfoliating successfully. Invasive? Alien species, both of them.

Twenty years ago, when I went back to Pā‘ia to see the mill, Hawai‘i was immersed in simultaneous nostalgias. Most markedly, the irredentist dreams of many Native Hawaiians, ongoing mourning of the lost Kingdom, and frequently invoked love of the ‘āina, land possessed by usurpers since 1893. Every new hotel a visible displacement, violence. As for Hawai‘i-born citizens of Asian or European ancestry, there was rue for the gradual passing of the allegedly simpler plantation world. Still, plantation labor could be close to slavery, hiring strategies were often racist by intent, workers did owe their lives to the company store. There were labor wars, strikes, and sabotage; there was legal power viciously misused. Yet there was also nostalgia for the routine of plantation life, comforts of a small and ordered community in which you knew your place.

In 1999, much in Hawai‘i was thus lost, reverberating, or, if deliberately unacknowledged, impending but already deeply felt. Simultaneities, alterations. Transformations. Ironies, terrors, the quotidian, the moment, the merging of destinies.

Despite Hawai‘i’s beauty, the word paradise was overused, oversold. Hawai‘i prelapsarian? No. The theme of loss of paradise was not just sentimentality or pastoralism, but also response to daunting human-induced change. As Robert Pogue Harrison argues, “For reasons that remain altogether obscure, Western civilization has decided to promote institutions of dislocation in every dimension of social and cultural existence...an aggravated confusion about what it means to dwell on the earth.” 

Earth. Wandering away from the ruin on red-dirt roads, I encountered a sugar company foreman. That odor in the air? “The smell of money,” he explained. Big money, though he said it was good to be nearing retirement: the operation might soon close—consolidation.

Soon we were bouncing down cane roads in his company pickup as he recounted tales about the plantation. Much more here than decay. At one site we stopped, foreman teasing field workers about waiting for a wind-shift before igniting the stalks.

“Just burn the fucker!” he yelled.

“What about the EPA?” a worker replied. “You know, Clean Air, that poor old lady’s house over there.”

The workers waited. I waited. “Fuck the old lady and her fucking house too,” the foreman shouted. “And fuck the EPA. Tell them, we suck, but we do not swallow.”

The foreman. And Buddha, who, some say, sat all night under a bodhi tree (cousin to the banyan, a kind of ficus). Wouldn’t budge till he achieved Enlightenment. At dawn, they tell us, beholding the morning star Buddha cried out in joy: “Wonderful, wonderful, all beings are perfect just the way they are.”

Unqualified affirmation may only rarely be what Art is about, only for instants of insight or song. Art may, however, help set the terms of both mystery and loss—what one confronts, will live with. Where the artist, through his craft, may discover what Robert Adams termed “his proper silence.”

Reverb. Persistence of sound after a sound is made.

What I’ve recounted took place twenty years ago. What to make of it? Of, for instance, Geoffrey Fricker’s photographs of the ruin, his many repeated stays, repetition compulsion which then sent me there to find words. In Fricker’s images there’s composition and control, thus reconciliation, but the camera also selects detail to the point of disorder, presents ambiguities the eye (for good reason?) suppresses. Brings forward what we might otherwise choose not to see. May function as the visual equivalent of the id, undermining coherence. 

On the other hand, beholding the paired architectures of mill and tree, one might come to accept the banyan. Or, even, identify with it. Twenty years since going back to Pā‘ia, twenty years older, now in my midseventies, I read the banyan’s life and death and my own life and death as intertwined, inevitable, a form of embrace.

Plantation home of Pinaro family, Pu‘unēnē, Maui.
Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker

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From Acting My Age (Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020). Reprinted by permission.

Geoffrey Fricker received an MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. His book Sacrament: Homage to a River (2014) documents the many faces of California’s Sacramento River, and his work is included in The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment (2011). He has partnered with groups that include the Nature Conservancy, River Partners, and Sacramento River Preservation Trust. His work is in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.

Photographs by Geoffrey Fricker used by permission.