Freckled
Page 35
Kauai’s population shrank by almost 50% to about 25,000 in the 1960s—less than a fifth of today’s de facto count.
Meanwhile, on the mainland, the “leave-it-to-Beaver” illusions of the 1950s were shattered when the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were murdered, and student protesters were shot and killed at Kent State University. Eisenhower’s prophetic warning about the threat of the “military industrial complex” was made manifest in the Vietnam War. College campuses across the country erupted while the inner-city ghettos burned. Disillusioned and frightened, many mainland youth searched for somewhere to escape the violence and conflict.
Kauai’s low population, abandoned plantation labor camps, and abundant natural food sources, combined with perfect waves, spectacular scenery, and a benign climate made the island seem a safe haven—in spite of its territorial residents.
Taylor Camp began in 1969 on Kauai’s North Shore, when Howard Taylor, brother of actress Elizabeth, posted bail for thirteen men, women, and children arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to ninety days hard labor in the local county jail. Taylor had recently learned that the Government planned to condemn his oceanfront property and convert it into a state park, ending his dream of building a family compound on the seven-acre site. In an act of both compassion and revenge, he invited the young mainlanders he’d bailed out to camp on his land.
Rising on the stone terraces of an ancient Hawaiian village at the mouth of Limahuli Stream near the end of the road, Taylor Camp is remembered by many of its former residents as “the best days of our lives.” Rejecting the values of their parents, then reinventing them with long hair, marijuana, and a vegetarian, “clothing-optional” lifestyle, the flower-power campers developed a whimsical experiment, ostensibly living a back-to-the-land ethos of fishing and farming, while actually propped up with food stamps, pot-growing, and welfare.
Soon waves of hippies, surfers, and Vietnam vets found their way to Kauai and Taylor Camp—and Toby’s surfer parents were among them. When these young haole (Hawaiian for non-natives, especially whites) stumbled into the invisible web of rules, customs, and traditions of small-town Kauai society, their wide-eyed joy and wonder was often blindsided by suspicion, hostility, and violence.
The working-class locals quickly developed a love/hate relationship with the surfers and hippies. For many locals, this was their first exposure to haole that were poor, ragged, and shiftless. Until then, all haole on Kauai had been plantation owners or managers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, publishers, and wealthy businessmen—Hawaii’s kama'aina elite, the ruling oligarchy (many descended from the early nineteenth-century missionaries) that had dominated Hawaii’s society and economy for over one hundred years.
Most locals had not seen haole like these before and instantly recognized that the ignorant outsiders, lacking the protection and defense of family and community, were easy prey—perfect to replace them at the bottom of Kauai’s social pecking order.
For these young haole fleeing the continent, Kauai—even with all its localism and prejudice—was still an answer to a prayer. This wasn’t America. It was Polynesia and felt like another world, another time, another place. Many arrived on Kauai with awe and humble respect. They wanted to belong, often joining hula halau (schools), studying the language, reading Hawaiian history, and supporting the Hawaiian cultural “Renaissance” that flowered in the 1970s. Some local families recognized this sincerity and welcomed them into the fold—often employing them as laborers on their farms.
These young haole might have been dumb, but they did have a crop that made sense to Kauai’s hardheaded truck farmers—pakalolo (marijuana). While some local farmers with connections to the Honolulu crime syndicate (usually those supplying cocks to the fighting pits of Oahu) had grown pakalolo before the hippies arrived, these young haole introduced new, more potent and higher-yielding varieties, along with scion propagation that guaranteed seedless hermaphrodites and an almost limitless mainland market. Previously struggling local farmers and ranchers were soon buying new trucks and tractors and making trips to Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, the old-moneyed kama'aina—the ruling white upper class—deeply despised the hippies and surfers. The kama'aina were under siege politically, economically, and socially. The plantation economy that they’d built and dominated for over a century was collapsing, their cash flow drying up—but they still owned most of the island’s land.
Survey flags appeared in the pastures of Princeville Ranch, staking out Kauai’s first planned resort community, and signaling the beginning of the real estate boom. In this atmosphere, community and political pressure to close down the camp continued to build. Taylor Camp was finally shut down in 1977, and the tree houses torched by State enforcement officials.
The Kauai of the era covered by Toby’s memoir was an anomaly—a brief period of low population and natural abundance, a breathing space as the engine of the plantation economy wound down, and the real estate bonanza and cultural assault of tourism began to build.
As development boomed, Kauai rapidly changed from a community where a strange vehicle on the road was met with curiosity and suspicion, to a hotbed of resorts, rent-a-cars, and traffic jams. The Na Pali coast, once one of the world’s most peaceful and sacred places, has been inundated with back-to-back sightseeing helicopters and tour-boat loudspeakers bombarding the valleys with unholy racket. And many locals can no longer afford to live in the place where they were born.
The photos of Taylor Camp and its people—which I began making in 1971—and their stories, are a tribute to that fleeting in-between moment, a period of our lives on Kauai when we possessed little but youth. Toby’s memoir adds a very personal facet, a child’s view of a unique time, place, and people.
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Me ke aloha,
John Wehrheim
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Find John’s Taylor Camp film The Edge of Paradise, book Taylor Camp, and his photography at: https://www.theedgeofparadisefilm.com
References
Hawaiian Style 12 Days of Christmas: Music and lyrics published by Hawaiian Recording and Publishing Company, Inc., and copyrighted in 1959.
About the Author
Award-winning, USA Today bestselling social worker turned author Toby Neal grew up on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. Neal is a mental health therapist, a career that has informed the depth and complexity of the characters in her stories. Neal's police procedurals, starring multicultural detective Lei Texeira, explore the crimes and issues of Hawaii from the bottom of the ocean to the top of volcanoes. Fans call her stories, "Immersive, addicting, and the next best thing to being there."
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