Molokai Reef

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Molokai Reef Page 16

by Dennis K. Biby


  They walked the half-mile long causeway and into the hale. Several hundred islanders crowded around the vendors - beer for the adults, shave ice for the youngsters. Deep-fried cockroach-shaped Spam morsels skewered on toothpicks, poi-dogs, and squid-on-a-stick were the most popular snack foods. Gybe returned from the beer truck and offered Kara a sixteen-ounce plastic cup of Bud.

  He counted four race rings spray-painted on the sand floor, one in each quadrant of the building. Nailed to one of the pillars, a sheet of plywood served as a scoreboard.

  Young girls, maybe 4-H’ers, flitted about the livestock pens. Some buffed the cockroach backs while others groomed their legs and antennae. Kara’s paddler friend from the other night stepped to the center of the hale, raised a conch shell, and signaled first call. Breeders carried their entrants to the pre-assigned tracks.

  Each ring represented one roach class – all male, all female, coed, and derby. The first race was the all-male division. The final race in the first heat would be the derby division – no rules, dress-em up, paint them, or drug ’em. It didn’t matter.

  Strumming their ukuleles, three men in native Hawaiian attire and fresh leis strolled through the crowd playing mariachi music.

  Gybe spotted Polunu hovering near the third track. When they made eye contact, Polunu nodded towards two native Hawaiians standing just outside the hale. Gybe assumed these were the pakalolo brothers, Makaha and Nahoa. He slipped away from Kara when the conch blast started the first race.

  “Hey guys.”

  The two men ignored Gybe as if he were silent and invisible.

  “Excuse me, I need to talk with you.”

  Still no response.

  “Yo poi boy. Anybody home?” Gybe tapped the syllables on the man’s pecs in five-four time.

  Something large, meaty, and smelly gripped each of Gybe’s arms. Oops didn’t seem to describe the situation as he was dragged into the darkness.

  “You shoulda seen the other guy.” Gybe sat leaning against a palm tree while Kara tried to stop the blood flow above his left eye.

  “He looked OK to me.” Mongoose commented. “Except he either spilled his beer or drank it. Did you learn anything?”

  The meatheads had carried Gybe away from the races to the far side of a banyan tree. While the gorillas, there were two of them, held his arms, Nahoa – the smart brother - warned Gybe to stay away from them, stay away from pakalolo, stay away from the murders.

  Gybe asked if Nahoa knew the two victims.

  This was to be a one-sided conversation. While the two apes held his arms, the strong and possibly crazy brother played punch the piñata with Gybe’s body.

  Lying on the ground weaving back and forth across the line of consciousness, Gybe thought he recalled that Nahoa had suggested that Gybe should stay away from Moloka‘i. That was the last he remembered until someone threw water on his face.

  Kara and the ’goose helped Gybe back to Ferrity. Kara cleaned his wounds, fed him several aspirin, a big shot of vodka, and helped him into the bunk. She shucked off her shorts and T-shirt and snuggled up next to him. Gybe groaned with pain and fell asleep.

  43

  “Now what?” Kara asked. The boat sat motionless at anchor in the glassy water of the harbor. The sun lingering behind Maui’s Mt. Haleakala had yet to warm the crisp sixty-five degree air while the air was as rippleless as the water. Steam rose from Kara’s mug as she sipped the bean juice tainted coffee.

  Gybe had a half-inch cut over his left eye and a yellowing bruise under his right eye. The nose wasn’t broken, but the port side was numb. His ribs ached when he moved but he didn’t think they were broken.

  “Surfing is out. Maybe I’ll talk with the police about the brothers.”

  “Not a good idea.” While Gybe regained consciousness last evening, Kara had wanted to call the police. Mongoose, never fond of the law, dissuaded her. At least one police officer was a sister to the brothers. Four other officers were part of the pakalolo Ohana, although they weren’t in the distribution network. At least not in a provable sense.

  “Well, then it’s off to see the brothers again.”

  “Are you nuts?” Kara blurted.

  Gybe waved Mongoose over from Makani. The three drank coffee as Gybe expressed his deepening interest in the brothers. There were no other strong leads into the murders. Maybe the dead researchers, in their attempt to sell the hashish, got mixed up with the wrong people. “By the way, why do two seemingly unconnected scientists have wholesale quantities of dope?”

  Neither Mongoose nor Kara answered.

  He didn’t know if they were involved in the murders or not. But, he still wanted to know if they had met the victims. Had the victims tried to sell hashish, as rumored, to the brothers? Did the brothers buy?

  If not, then maybe the dead scientists tried to sell to someone else. Were the murders the result of a drug sale gone bad?

  Many questions. He would begin with the brothers. Gybe explained his plan.

  Gybe, Kara, and Mongoose turned to watch Flyn motor into the harbor. She handled the boat well and she was not alone.

  Like him, Gybe knew she preferred to anchor far from other boats. You never knew their expertise with anchoring. Waking to the banging of another hull on Ferrity at three in the morning – it always happened in the middle of the night – was not fun. However, he knew Flyn’s skills and she knew Gybe’s. She dropped her CQR plow anchor about thirty yards off his stern.

  They knew that the two boats behaved similarly in wind and tide. The boats would swing in parallel, each within the radius of the anchor chain, like two ballroom dancers.

  Gybe motioned for Flyn to join them, then he asked Kara to make another pot of coffee. Thirty minutes later, the five settled in to Gybe’s cockpit. Flyn and Mongoose had never met. Flyn introduced the fifth man.

  Gybe estimated that the young man stood about five foot seven or eight. He was lean with a muscular build attained outdoors, not in a gym. His skin color spoke of Polynesian ancestry, confirmed by his black, thick hair, cut to a medium length. The tattoo on his left biceps reminded Gybe of a tapa cloth pattern. He wore surfer shorts, no shirt, and no shoes. The classic surfer dude. He was a decade younger than Flyn. A boy toy. Flyn told them that she had met him near the Ala Wai Small Boat Harbor in Waikiki.

  44

  As Flyn had offered when they met at Mala Wharf, she had sailed to O‘ahu to talk with University of Hawai‘i professors about the reef. Susan’s motive, according to the prosecutor, was that the genetic modification experiments at the seed corn companies were escaping the lab and field test plots. The byproduct of the reckless research was killing the reef.

  The reef was dying. No one disputed this.

  Flyn sailed directly from Maui’s Mala Wharf to Honolulu, leaving at sunrise the morning following her discussion with Gybe and Kara. After motoring for an hour, she cleared the lee of the island and set sail in the northeast wind of the Pailolo Channel between Maui and Moloka‘i. Except when she entered the wind shadow southwest of Kamakou, the high peak of Moloka‘i’s east end, she sailed all the way to O‘ahu. An hour before sunset, she motored into the Ala Wai Harbor and claimed an empty slip near the Ewa end of the 800 row transient dock.

  For Kara’s benefit, Flyn explained that like many harbors in Hawai‘i, Ala Wai maintained mooring balls about sixty feet away from the dock. When Flyn motored into the slip, she snagged a line to the mooring ball, tied it to the stern cleat, and then eased the boat forward. Two bow lines and a stern line to the buoy kept the boat perpendicular to the dock. As a singlehander himself, Gybe knew that this was not an easy task, particularly if the trade winds blew against the side of the boat.

  The next morning, she checked in with the harbormaster. Sighing, she turned to Gybe. “It took forty-five minutes to fill out the redundant forms. I was staying for two days. In a private marina, I would have flipped them a credit card, they would have given me a map to the area and coupons for the restaurants.”
r />   “Welcome to the people’s republic of Hawai‘i. In forty some years since statehood, Hawai‘i has been named State Bureaucracy of the Year for the past seven years. In international competition, they are climbing rapidly towards the top third world bureaucracies.” Gybe knew of what she spoke.

  Decades of bureaucracy at the state-monopolized harbors had created a labyrinth of paperwork. He didn’t know if the indifferent employees rose to their level of incompetence or if they were as frustrated with the endless, nonsensical paperwork as he was. Any for-profit business worked to satisfy its customers and employees. If it didn’t, its competition would and the business would fail. Government bureaucracies, like the Hawaiian Small Boat Harbors, were monopolies. No incentive to succeed, no penalty for failure.

  From the Harbor Office, she biked to the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa campus, where she sought the university library. She read and skimmed several books about the reefs before finding an Internet terminal to continue her research. By mid-afternoon, she felt prepared to meet with the university scientists. During the research, she jotted down the names of five people whose names appeared in the more informative scientific papers. The next day she talked with them.

  She biked back to the Ala Wai, showered, and talked with other transient boaters on the dock. One couple, on a boat called Strait Aero, invited her to dinner. They had sailed from Oregon via Alaska. In a few months, they would sail towards Europe by way of the South Pacific, Indian Ocean, and the Cape of Good Hope. She met Thelonius Monk, their cat, who would stress their patience as they dealt with animal quarantine laws throughout their voyage.

  After the great dinner and conversation, she hiked to an Irish Pub on Lewers Street for a pint of Guinness. That’s where she met the surfer dude.

  The next day she visited two of the five professors on her list. Confirming her previous day’s research, both professors denied that the seed research companies had anything to do with the death of the reef on Moloka‘i. Reefs were dying all over the world. Each referred her to a recent report Status of coral reefs of the world: 2002 by the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

  She printed the chapter relating to the Hawaiian Islands. The report divided the Hawaiian Islands into two categories. The Main Hawaiian Islands (MHI) consisting of the well-known populated islands and the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) comprised of the uninhabited atolls and banks.

  For the group in the cockpit, she summarized the more egregious abominable findings. “From agriculture, ranching, urban, and industrial sources in the main Hawaiian Islands – one million tons of runoff per year flow into the ocean. Reasons include poor land-use practices, such as, slash and burn of pineapple and sugar cane; increased oil and toxin spills including acids, PCB’s, refrigerants, heavy metals, pesticides, herbicides; and increased gray water discharges from the burgeoning cruise ship industry.”

  Gybe knew that many small communities still relied on septic systems, often only a few feet from the surf line. As a sailor, he had added filters to his gray water system. Without exception, Gybe complied with other overboard discharge regulations and laws.

  He wasn’t surprised at the chemical flows into the ocean. In his visits around the islands, he had found twelve-volt lead acid car batteries, oil buckets, and paint cans dumped along roads or left near trash dumpsters. Recycling was voluntary and from the size of the beer can middens he encountered, he assumed that few islanders participated.

  Flyn shifted her summary to the wildlife.

  The preponderance of small fish that seldom reach breeding size pointed to classic over-fishing. Hawai‘i had little to no regulation of fishing –less than three tenths of one percent of the reef area of the MHI designated as a “no-take” zone.

  There was an extensive infrastructure for the collection and trade of ornamental fish and invertebrates.

  Sea turtles, both the green sea turtle and the Hawaiian hawksbill were threatened. Turtle tumors (fibropapillomatosis), rare before 1985, were now common. Up to 60% of the turtles in Kane‘ohe Bay were infected.

  The turtle tumors alarmed Gybe. On the Big Island, he had docked in the Honokohau Harbor. The water was clear and he could see the harbor bottom beneath the boat. Daily, he watched rays and turtles swim around the harbor. In a small park, north of the harbor, dozens of the peaceful turtles fed on sea grass in the shallow water or basked in the sun on the beach. Signs warned visitors to stay several yards from the turtles. Even from that distance, he saw the grotesque tumors sprouting from the heads and flippers of the truck-tire-sized green sea turtles. The marble-sized tumors often mutated near the eyes or around the mouth.

  “If you guys want to learn more about the turtle tumors, I recommend Fire in the Turtle House by Osha Gray Davidson. It’s a good read and an eye-opener about how fast this disease has spread through the sea turtle population.” For emphasis, he added. “These turtles muddled around before the dinosaurs and then saw the dinos disappear. Now, in less time than it took to build the Internet, they could disappear.”

  “Top predators have almost disappeared.” Flyn read from her next factoid. “The counts are 260% lower around the populated islands than in the northwest islands.”

  “Shark mania,” exclaimed Mongoose.

  “In the report, jacks, sharks, and groupers are listed as the top predators. The carnivorous predators in the northwestern islands average almost six times the weight of the few remaining ones in the populated islands.”

  Flyn glanced at her notes. “Each year three hundred thousand tourists visit the reefs. While snorkeling and diving, they inadvertently or ignorantly trample the reefs and pulverize the coral. The study found that in heavily used areas, the coral cover was as low as two percent. This compared with a control area with thirty-four percent coverage.”

  Gybe noticed Kara’s face reddening and suspected her blood pressure was spiking. Mongoose appeared disinterested, perhaps because this wasn’t news to him. Meanwhile, the shock value was lost on an observant Gybe.

  “Now for the rest of the story.” Flyn mocked Paul Harvey. She told them that unbridled shoreline development destroyed wetland areas and fringing reefs. Over the years, many exotic species had found their way to the islands, either deliberately to enhance algal culture and fishing or inadvertently aboard ocean ships.

  “Don’t forget the idiots?” Gybe interjected.

  With their eyes, the other three said ‘which idiots?’

  “There are the aquarium people who MUST have an imported plant species. Then they dump the aquarium in a lake and the plant flourishes. That one was Salvinia molesta. It choked a lake on O‘ahu until the government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars during a removal program. At the end of the eradication program, the legislature still couldn’t agree on a ban of the plant.” As an afterthought, he added, “un-fucking-believable!”

  On a roll, he continued. “Horticulturists imported exotic plants and along came the coqui frog. The dime-sized frog makes a deafening noise and it has spread rapidly on the Big Island. Scientists have discovered colonies on other islands as well. And there are a whole slew of plants, like miconia, that are crowding out native species on each island.”

  “You know this isn’t new, Gybe?” Kara suggested.

  “What’s not new? Idiots? Or, idiots bringing in their favorite species?”

  “Both. However, I was referring to the introduction of non-indigenous critters. The Polynesians brought pigs and other animals when they discovered and settled the islands.”

  “You’re right and the feral pigs have done a ton of damage. But, if Hawai‘i was paradise when the Polynesians found it, or Captain Cook re-found it for the Western World, or if we stretch and agree that it is still paradise compared to most of the U.S., then is it reasonable to assume that there are enough plant and animal species already here?”

  He paused for effect. “Hawai‘i should embargo the shipment of new plants and animals to the islands. If it doesn’t grow here, they don’t nee
d it. The hell with what Home Depot wants to sell in their garden department.”

  “You seem ambivalent, Gybe.” Flyn jabbed. “To cheer you up, let me explain my own analysis.”

  Flyn had observed that Hawai‘i imported almost everything and exported almost nothing. The large agricultural exports of the past, sugar and pineapple had diminished as cheap third world production increased. Lāna‘i, once known as The Pineapple Isle, was barren of pineapples.

  Quantifying her hunch, she had found a state publication called Hawai‘i Data Book for 2001 on the Internet. She couldn’t ascertain an exact figure for net imports to the islands, but the book revealed that the port of Honolulu handled nearly eight million tons of cargo that year. With over seventy percent of the state’s population, most of the cargo stayed on O‘ahu. Much of the rest was transferred to other islands via the interisland barges. Beyond this container cargo, nearly 150,000 tons of coal and almost 40 million barrels of oil were shipped to the refineries and electric power plants.

  “All of it, all of it” She emphasized, “ends up in the ocean.”

  This hypothesis got their attention, especially Kara’s. “Huh? What do you mean it all goes into the ocean?”

  “Interesting,” Mongoose interjected. “But what does this have to do with murder on Moloka‘i? We’re getting off track.”

  “Hardly,” replied Flyn. “Listen and pay attention.”

  “Buildings – houses, factories, hotels, office towers – grow from construction materials shipped from off-island. The buildings stand for a few decades, occasionally a century, before someone tears them down and carts the debris to a landfill. Furniture, appliances, lawn equipment, cars, trucks, buses, et cetera, are used until they are outmoded, wear out, or bore the consumer, then it’s off to a landfill or an illegal roadside dump. Office supplies, computers, telephones, copiers, drill presses, lathes, welders, and the tools of business are used until replaced and then once more, it’s a journey to the landfill.”

 

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