by T W Neal
The sea’s primitive termite treatment so long ago gave the wooden walls inside the cottage a silver hue that hasn’t changed. But in the kitchen, once painted yellow, mold has grown over the walls in lichen-like patterns. Memories flood me as I stand in front of the rotten counter and broken shelves where Mom kept gallon jars of mung beans, brown rice, and whole wheat flour flecked with bran.
We are rendered silent by the ravages time has wrought here.
Veils of rotting screen drift over the handmade wooden bedframe I remember lying on to read in the window, my little sister sleeping beneath me. The room looks harshly abandoned, a giant hole in the roof admitting leaves and branches that fill the corners.
I take some pictures with my phone. Feelings are jumbled and clogged within me, and I see them jostling in Mom’s eyes too. Mom and I share hazel eyes, the greens and browns of the stream that sings beside us, but this is one of the first times we’re totally in tune with each other and no words are necessary.
There was a time when I wanted to get as far away from these walls as I possibly could—and I did. I transformed myself from barefoot hippie in Hawaii to middle-class mental health therapist living in the Midwest, married with two kids, two careers, and two cars. Since then, I’ve come full circle: now, at my home on Maui, I recycle, organic garden, practice yoga, surf, and spend all the time I can outside.
“This place was all I ever wanted, but I couldn’t stay here,” Mom’s voice is thick with grief. “The mana was too strong.” The mana, spiritual power, of this elemental location, combined with hallucinogenic drugs, drinking yeast, and studying the occult, brought on the psychotic break that took us all to California while she recovered.
“I know, Mom. I loved it here too.” I support Mom with a hand back down out of the cottage and we walk around to what used to be the front yard. I can’t help glancing under the porch as if my beloved puppy, Argos, will miraculously reappear—but it’s filthy and dark, with a smell of mildew that makes my nostrils tighten.
I look over in the direction of Taylor Camp, the hippie encampment next to our house—and gasp again.
The forest has been bulldozed into vast mounds of rotting logs. Sunlight blasts an open wound where jungle once sheltered many homes made of plastic and bamboo. This particular stretch of Haena jungle was purchased by the state of Hawaii for park development long ago, but plans are obviously progressing to make the area a fully usable property.
Mom picks up a windfall orange from the familiar tree we used to feast from, now struggling to live in the shade of the invading monkeypod. She peels the orange and hands a section to me.
As I bite into the sweet-tart, juicy fruit, I see this yard again as it was: the clothesline, with our towels drying crunchy-hot. The plywood privy nestled in banana trees. Jungle surrounding the open glade, the trees’ susurrating voices enhancing the sound of the stream. Makana Mountain behind the cottage, a jutting, green-clothed spire. Antique roses sheltering humble graves near a lush vegetable garden. Hand-sickled grass where we’d lie naked in the sun to dry after baths in the stream.
I’m glad that this will be a park and not just another opulent vacation rental for out-of-towners. Everyone will be able to enjoy this place, not just the privileged few.
We make our way down to our former bathing spot on Limahuli Stream. Mom reminds me how we used Dr. Bronner’s Biodegradable Soap and tried to leave no footprint before that concept became a buzzword.
We truly left no footprint here. Instead, this place left a mark on us, all the rest of our lives: a deep-buried longing to live in the shadow of the mountain and hear the song of water. Mom and I listen to the stream, watching the clear water flow over the mossy rocks where we used to jump in and shriek at the cold. Our eyes wander over the beauty, and the destruction, and we take it in to think on later.
Pinky the Chihuahua provides a welcome distraction as she picks her self-important way, plump bottom and curly tail wagging, to the path leading down from the house toward the ocean.
“Guess we should go down to the beach.” Mom follows Pinky, her steps slow and careful, a twist in her back hunching her. She looks small on the path ahead, a bent older lady with a funny little dog.
My heart squeezes with a new kind of sorrow because when we lived in this enchanted place, Mom was tall and long-legged, her rippling brown hair catching glints of sun, a surfer Ali McGraw with a big smile. I ran after her, barefoot, freckled, and golden. Pop followed, carrying Bonny on his shoulders and his surfboard under an arm, his blond head as high as the sky.
I spit the seeds from the orange into my palm and slide them into my pocket. We pick our way around devastation wrought by chainsaws, finding a path long buried in vines and grasses, and as we go I feel a deep gratitude that Mom and I could come here and see this place again before guardrails, pavement, and Keep on Trail signs corral this wilderness.
Seeds from the tree that sheltered our little house lie slippery in my pocket. I’ve got a knack for growing trees, a glimmer of Mom’s famous green thumb. Maybe in another forty years, we’ll still be eating juicy Hawaiian oranges from this unforgettable spot.
Acknowledgments
Me with a toad, age 4
Dear Readers:
Kauai, for all its magic, can be a brutal place, and many who appear in this memoir are gone now. Here’s what I know so far:
Dead:
Minka: Died in the 1980s, leaving two young children.
Kenny Bryan: Disappeared in 1992. Presumed murdered.
Melanie Adams: Killed in high school, hit by a cane truck.
Chris (Knight’s friend): Drowned surfing.
Ginger (Kala’s mom): Killed in the Anahola flood of 1992.
Aunty Jan: Died in her fifties of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
Onward and upward:
Toby: Author and therapist, married over thirty years to blue-eyed surfer Mike who she met in 1983. They have two grown children.
Bonny: Magazine publisher, lives in Hawaii with her family.
Anita: Married, living in California.
Wendy: Living in California with her family.
Mom and Pop: Divorced, still sober and active in twelve-step programs, doing good works and living “green” in Hawaii.
Tita: Married to a helicopter pilot with two sons, she now rides an Arabian stallion across the deserts of Saudi Arabia.
Kira Yoshimura: last I saw her, working in the hospitality industry.
Kala Alexander: Big wave surfer, waterman, actor, father, and activist. He lives on Oahu and appears regularly in movies and on television.
The Wilcoxes at the Big House: They and extended family were fictionalized in The Descendants. (All homes on the original property, including the Big House, are now available to stay in as vacation rentals.)
Tom and Cheri Hamilton: Parents of two awesome sons and Bethany Hamilton, pro surfer, shark attack survivor, and worldwide inspiration.
Island School: Now Kauai’s premier private preparatory academy.
Knight Richardson: international surf legend.
Memoir caveat:
This narrative is based on a true story. Freckled is how I remember things. Where possible I fact-checked, but as with all firsthand eyewitness accounts, impressions will differ.
For instance, for the longest time I remembered Mom looking on and not helping Bonny and me during the “cup incident.” When I fact-checked, she said she and Anita were gone on a walk with the stroller when those events occurred. Finding that out actually made me feel better, but the trauma of the time had distorted my memory of it. If I got something wrong, I apologize—I have done the best I could, to be as truthful as I could.
I have also changed some people’s names and basic descriptions. Kauai is a small island and Hawaii is a small place. Anne Lamott has famously said, “Own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
That is true. And it’
s also true that we writers are the ones holding a pen and chiseling someone’s actions into history without their knowledge or permission. I tried not to be unkind in my telling of events and descriptions of people and places as I remember them.
This book would not be possible without the midwifery of my incredible friend Holly Robinson. Her first published book is her memoir, The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter (2009), and from the time she came into my life, we’ve been talking about my memoir project. She’s a ghostwriter, celebrity biographer, and women’s fiction novelist, and thus uniquely qualified to help people tell their life stories. Even with all that experience, she had her hands full coaching me!
Writing a memoir can be therapeutic, but it’s not therapy. A good memoir is primarily a story for the consumption of others, and ripping open your soft parts, spilling your guts, and then assembling something entertaining out of that mess—well, it’s not for the faint of heart.
Holly kept telling me this book would be good, maybe the best I’d written (and I’ve written more than thirty fiction novels.) She said the book was important, even as publishers turned it down as “too small” and “too niche.” She said Freckled was more than just my story: it was a glimpse into a unique era and lifestyle in a sublime place. Reading this memoir would enrich others’ lives, and help them make sense of their own.
I began to succeed more and more with my fiction, and for years at a time I set Freckled aside for writing that was easier, more fun, and paid the bills.
Ongoing, Holly fed me memoirs others had written and novels that she thought would stimulate my mind: Wild by Cheryl Strayed, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr, The Unheard by Josh Swiller, and more.
I became hooked on memoir, on trying to figure out how other writers had made a cohesive narrative arc out of the mishmash of vignettes that are real life. It wasn’t until Holly gave me Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, that something clicked in my brain.
Dogs is so spare, so unsentimental, so “just the facts” in the most horrific of times and inhospitable of African places. The book is hauntingly beautiful in its understatement. The love in Alexandra Fuller’s bizarre family comes through, clear and powerful.
I finally found the tone I wanted, the feeling I hoped to leave the reader with: in spite of everything, there was a lot of love in my family too.
Writing this book was so intense that it was like giving birth and being the baby struggling to be born at the same time. I did the first draft in a mere six weeks, hoping to find mental and emotional relief when it was finally over. I laughed out loud and cried rivers. The memoir took over my life, derailed my publication schedule, strained my marriage and all my family relationships. It’s been terrifying, wonderful, painful and joyful . . . and something I just had to do—my personal Everest. Thank you, Holly. I couldn’t have done it without you.
Kim Rogers, a wonderful photographer and writer, provided an early edit and the cover photograph. Thanks for being a witness and cheerleader, Kim! Shannon Wianecki, another journalist friend, ran an eye over an early version of manuscript and gave feedback. And Christine Pride, an independent editor specializing in memoir, also did two passes through the manuscript. Then, my wonderful friend Angie Nakamura Lail, a local girl from Hawaii who’s read ALL of my books, stepped up to copyedit, and Shirley and Jamie typo hunted. This book needed a lot of help, and I was happy to have all of the input I could get.
Mom and Pop, I love you guys.
I hope you can feel that in every page. I’m so proud of us, of all the healing work we’ve done to get where we are. It was a bumpy journey, and not pretty many times, but I’ve come to appreciate so many things about both of you through this life review process: your strength to rebel against conventional forces and make your own way in the Kauai of those days, your determination to live life on your own terms, and most of all, your courage in getting clean and sober and staying that way for over thirty years.
I hope sharing our story helps even one person get free of substance abuse and press on with their family into healing, no matter how challenging the process is.
I also want to thank Mike Neal, my dynamic, talented, and amazing husband, exactly the right man for me—who is just as relieved as I am that I ended the book where I did. Thank you for being my one big true love!
To my sisters:
Bonny, you’re my best friend, confidante, courageous fellow survivor and overcomer, outrageously beautiful to this day. I love you even more for having gone down this road into the past, realizing that you walked almost every step of the way with me as we grew up together. I thank you for your unswerving support and incredible resilience. You are simply awesome.
Anita, you came into my life at the perfect time to be the recipient of all my blooming maternal instincts. You were always so easy to love. I adore you, and one of my life’s great sorrows is that somehow you didn’t know it. We have never had enough time together.
Wendy, you’re a kindred spirit. Always stirring the pot, speaking your truth, feeling your feelings and expressing them beautifully—I see myself in you, and I love you for it and so much more. I’m excited to see how parenting, writing, and creativity manifest in your life, and I celebrate that we get to share these things.
To my children:
I’m sorry that I’ve always been an over-sharer. Thanks for being there for me, inspiring me, fulfilling my fondest dreams, and making me proud every day. Thank you for being, along with Mike, the family I longed for. You have made my dreams come true.
To Kira, Knight, and all the schoolyard bullies out there: someone’s probably bullying you, at home or at school. Ask for help rather than acting your pain out on others because the pain you inflict will haunt you, and can’t be undone.
Seeing how I reenacted bullying on my sister Bonny was one of the most painful realizations I had writing this book. Though it’s textbook stuff I see as a clinician, it made me sad all over again.
To victims of bullying: the best revenge is a well-lived life. To kids bullied in school for any reason: red-haired, poor, black, white, Asian, Mexican, Guatemalan, Micronesian, zitty, chubby, four-eyed, dorky, dweeby, ditzy, and a million others: you might need to retreat, but never give up. Persevere, and someday you’ll look back and see how your wounds made you stronger. Your life is what you make it in the long run—don’t let a bully win by stealing your future.
One of the many things I realized in writing this memoir was our isolation from the local people on Kauai. I didn’t see the totality of that until I was writing this, finding that not one close friend in my early life was Hawaiian or mixed heritage due to the race issues of the time. It saddens me that this is the truth of my experience, even as a third generation kama`aina. I love the Hawaiian culture, and as an adult, I’ve healed that a lot through working for the Hawaii public schools for twelve years as a counselor, making friends with local folks, doing therapy with them, studying the culture, and writing about it all in my fiction mysteries, the Lei Crime Series, Paradise Crime Series, and more.
Kauai is the most beautiful and enigmatic island of a Hawaii that’s much more of a tapestry made up of distinct threads than a “melting pot.”
My story is just one more thread.
With much aloha,
Toby Wilson Neal
Afterword
By John Wehrheim
Toby Wilson Neal’s memoir begins in 1965 and ends in 1983. She writes in the first person, present tense—a child’s point of view growing up as a redheaded girl born to hippie surfer parents. From within her narrative it wasn’t possible to present a historic account of the overarching cultural and racial tensions in Hawaii at that time. Toby asked me to write an essay that would provide context for her coming-of-age tale, referencing stories from my book Taylor Camp, an iconic photographic record of a hippie/surfer community on Kauai’s North Shore in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Toby’s memoir spans a time of intense tr
ansition for Kauai, the oldest and most remote of the major islands of the Hawaiian chain. Back then hippies were all but unknown on Kauai, a “chop suey” community of Hawaiians, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos.
Television had yet to invade. News in the eight-page Garden Island paper was provincial, and the “coconut wireless” was all local politics and gossip. Far away and out of mind, the rest of the world had only begun to affect Hawaii’s neighbor islands. Culturally and physically removed from the mainland, unconquered by Hawaii’s first monarch, and proud of their heritage as the “Separate Kingdom,” Kauai’s people practiced a style of localism that not only shut out news and views from the outside but also considered native Hawaiians from other islands as interlopers.
A newcomer to any of Kauai’s small, isolated plantation communities and rural villages instantly became the talk of the town. An unfamiliar car or truck was observed with suspicion. A photographer setting up a tripod and telephoto lens at any of Kauai’s surf breaks risked a beating as well as having his equipment trashed, as locals fought to keep their island’s secrets to themselves.
Local hunters and fishermen divided the island into family territories, usually watersheds in State Forest reserves or plantation-owned uplands, following ancient Hawaiian ahupua`a (land divisions) and konohiki (fishing rights) on the reefs. Outsiders hunting and fishing these areas would be warned off and then, if the trespass was repeated, met with violence. The same practice ruled the surf breaks.
Hawaii’s pineapple and sugar industries were rapidly declining after a fast but short-lived bonanza in the early ‘60s when they exported technology and consultants to the Third World. After decades of cradle-to-grave paternalism in a unionized sugar and pineapple plantation economy, unemployment forced many of Kauai’s people to leave the island in search of jobs far from home.