Lu'au on the Island

I spent Sunday on the island, helping to prepare kalua pig for a lu'au.

The name of the island starts with an "S." Sorry, there's no "S" in the Hawaiian language, so where could this island be? Sauvie Island, in the middle of the Willamette River just north of the St. Johns Bridge in Portland, Oregon.

It was the annual summer picnic for Portland Culinary Alliance, for which I serve as president. When I learned that one of our member chefs, Mike Downing of Quimby's Restaurant in Newport (best clam chowder on the Oregon coast, if you ask me), used to be a lu'au chef on the island of Kaua'i, where he grew up, I began to think that this year's picnic would be more than just a potluck.

Mike was willing and eager. The next task on the list was to find a great location. Enter Don and Sandra Kruger, of Kruger's Farm Market on Sauvie Island, and we were all set.

On Saturday night, my daughter, Meriwether, and I packed a couple of shovels into the car and drove out to Kruger's. Digging the pit according to Mike's specifications (4' x 6' x 1-1/2') took us about an hour and a half. The sun had just set when we called it quits.

My other chore was to find the requisite banana and ti leaves. I found them at Uwajimaya, of course. But they were not cheap. I think Mike was used to picking them off a tree. I also lined up the wood delivery. I called a woman who'd advertised on Craig's List and when she called me back she said she was visiting her mother in Newport and was right next to Quimby's. So she personally arranged with Mike the type of wood (alder) and the quantity (1/3 cord).

On Sunday morning, Mike called me at 7:45 to say he was at the farm, after driving since 4 a.m. from Newport. Thirty minutes later, the wood lady called to say she was at the farm to deliver the wood. I showed up at 8:30, to help prepare everything before PCA members and guests began arriving at 3:30 p.m.

Mike's assistant, Tom, was already crouched in the pit, trying to light a teepee of kindling, with the help of some newspaper. The alder wood was stacked nearby. In time, Tom had every piece of wood in the pit, and the fire was roaring. Once the fire began to die down to coals, Tom put a layer of lava rock atop the wood.

Then it was time to prepare the pig. Our pig was about 80 pounds, nestled in a large cooler full of ice. Mike set it on a table and before he began I thought it was only fitting to sing an oli, or chant, to honor the pig. The only oli I know is the one we sing before we start hula class every week, but I figured it was better than nothing.

Mike sprinkled Hawaiian seasoning salt inside and outside the pig. Then he asked Tom to pick up a few of the smaller hot stones to put in the cavity of the pig, as well as in the armpits and groin, just to make sure it cooked through. The pig was laid on a bed of banana leaves and ti leaves, that in turn was laid atop a length of chicken wire. The leaves and then the wire were wrapped around the pig. Mike made similar packages of taro root, sweet potatoes and two turkeys, all wrapped in leaves and chicken wire.

The pig and the other packages of food were set atop banana leaves and corn stalks laid over the hot coals. Then we lay wet burlap over that and then a couple of tarps on top of that. Finally, we each grabbed a shovel and covered the pit with the dirt Meriwether and I had dug up the night before.

It was noon by the time we finished burying the food in the underground imu, oven. Mike and his assistants, Tom and Michael, should have taken a nap under the large oak tree that marked our picnic spot. But they kept going, getting other lu'au foods ready, such as lomi lomi salmon, ahi poke and, of course, macaroni salad.

We were just setting up the tables when the first guests arrived. As more people arrived, they drifted down the grassy hill toward the covered pig pit. At 4:30, Mike said he was ready to make the Big Reveal. He crossed himself -- privately he worried that we'd be having pork sashimi -- and began to shovel dirt off the tarps. Several men grabbed shovels and uncovered the tarp. It was pulled back to reveal . . . another tarp! That was pulled back to reveal a layer of burlap, then lots of banana leaves and corn stalks. Then Mike and Tom each grabbed an end of the bundle that contained our pig and brought it to the prep table.

The pig was perfectly cooked. It was, as the Hawaiians say, "ono." Delicious. The meat easily came off the bones and was piled high in a container that was moved to the group of tables that held our potluck feast.

There was well deserved applause for Mike and his helpers. As the party died down, they loaded up their SUV and began their 3-hour return trip to Newport. The lu'au had come to an end.

It wasn't Hawaii and we were under an oak tree, rather than palm trees. But we were on an island and the food was ono. All in all, a perfect day.

Dem Bones

Nâ iwi kûpuna was the topic of my Fun Fact for this week's hula class. Literally, it means the bones of ancestors. I'd been curious about the significance of bones since sharing with my class what I'd learned about the death of Captain Cook, who met his end on the Big Island in 1799 after answering the islanders' hospitality with hostility. Not the best of manners for an Englishman, especially when his life was at stake, and all over some pilfered nails.

Anyway, when I told what happened to him -- he got roasted, after being killed in a skirmish -- one of my hula sisters asked, "Did they eat him?"

In all my reading on Hawaiian matters, I've never come across any anecdotes about cannibalism. In fact, from what I've learned, after death the flesh on a body was of little interest. It was the bones that held all significance. The traditional belief was that a person's bones were the repository for mana, spiritual power. The greater the chief, the greater the mana, and hence, the greater the importance of the bones.

In the case of a great chief, which is how the Hawaiians viewed Captain Cook, it was important to preserve the mana by taking care of his bones shortly after death. His body was roasted, which made it easier to remove the flesh, and once the bones were stripped they were distributed among important or significant people. The meat from the bones was deposited into the sea. It was usual that the bones of a chief were buried at a secret place, sometimes in a cave or lava tube. That way, the chief's enemies wouldn't be able to benefit from the mana still residing in the bones. The mana was meant to reside in the 'âina, the land, and be received by subsequent generations in the family.

The thigh bones were thought to be particularly powerful. And now I understand why the Hawaiians delivered Captain Cook's thigh to his horrified crew. Surely the Hawaiians thought they were doing the crew a great honor by bestowing the mana-ful thigh upon Cook's ohana, family of sailors. And surely the sailors thought the Hawaiians were performing a grisly and barbaric act.

But the topic of bones has modern significance in Hawai'i. Probably the most significant occurrence was in 1988 when Hawaiians managed to stop construction of the Ritz Carlton on Maui after the ancient bones of about 1,100 people were dug up during construction. This sort of thing had happened time and time again during earlier major construction projects on other islands, but the protests had little effect. However, in the Ritz Carlton case, the hotel heeded the protests and ended up building far from the beach where the burial site was. The site, pictured above and to the right, is once again sacred ground.

Today there are Burial Councils on each island, to make sure any ancient bones disturbed during construction are returned to the earth where they can continue to spread their mana.

Aloha Tower

My hula class has been dancing to a fun tune called "Aloha Tower," as sung by the Brothers Cazimero. With our hand and arm movements and by making 180-degree turns, we tell the story of the tower, which has a huge clock on each of its four sides and at one time performed duty as a lighthouse.

Aloha Tower opened on Sept. 11, 1926 as sort of the Statue of Liberty of Honolulu, because it was the landmark that cruise ship passengers saw as they arrived. Locals referred to the day that cruise ships arrived as Boat Day and it was a festive occasion. The Royal Hawaiian Band Played, hula dancers danced and there were fragrant leis for all the newcomers. Colorful streamers rained down on the ship and from the decks passengers tossed coins into the water to watch the native boys dive for money.

At 10 stories high, Aloha Tower was the tallest structure in all of the Hawaiian Islands. It held that claim to fame for about 40 years. You can still take the elevator to the 10th floor and step out on to the observation deck, which sits above the four clocks. Each clock weighs 7 tons. Made in Boston, the clocks were among the largest in the United States.

In the early days the Aloha Tower also served as a lighthouse. Its beam was visible 16 miles out to sea.

By the 1960s there were taller buildings in Honolulu and fewer cruise ships, as more travelers chose air travel. Just for fun, here's a clip from the 1939 film, "Honolulu," showing Gracie Allen and Eleanor Powell anticipating fun in Honolulu while on their cruise to Hawaii.

The Errant 'Okina

After reading that the famed Big Island artist, Herb Kawainui Kane, was "sickened" by the diacritical mark applied to the new Hawai'i stamp, I learned everything I ever wanted to know about the 'okina and more.

Kane created the surfing image for the new first class stamp, which debuts August 21 in honor of the 50th anniversary of Hawai'i's statehood.

Kane said his original rendition of the word Hawai'i was correct but the U.S. Postal Service changed it and erred in making an apostrophe out of what should have been an 'okina.

I confess I stared at this stamp for the longest time, trying to figure out what's what and what's not. When I couldn't see the error, I did a little research.

The 'okina, by the way, is an actual consonant in the Hawaiian language, representing a glottal stop. In Hawaiian the word means a break, and it's what happens when the sound of a vowel is broken off when the glottis, a flap in the larynx, closes off air flow. To illustrate using an English example, it's the sound (or lack of sound) that's made between the two ohs in "oh-oh." In Hawaiian, use of the 'okina is critical in conveying the correct pronunciation and meaning of words, although even in Hawai'i many people seem to consider its use optional.

But how it's represented is up for debate. After considerable research I found it described as an upside down comma, a 9-shaped apostrophe turned 60-90 degrees counter-clockwise, an upside down apostrophe, a little 6 with the circle colored in, a backwards apostrophe, a single open quote mark, and a French accent grave.

Bear in mind that Hawaiian was not a written language until the missionaries, who first arrived in 1820, began writing down words as they heard them. But in the first book written in Hawaiian, the Holy Bible, the missionaries left out both the 'okina and the kahakô, or macron, which indicates a lengthened vowel. So representing these sounds is a relatively new science. A Hawaiian grammar I own that was published in 1939 acknowledges the existence of a glottal stop, but in its lessons rarely applies either the 'okina or the kahakô to the written language.

Kane's complaint was that the mark on the Hawai'i stamp should have been a left-facing 'okina with a weighted bottom, rather than the right-facing apostrophe with a weighted top. It would all seem like much ado about nothing were it not for the fact that the Hawaiian language almost died out in the 20th century -- until it was revived by sticklers like Herb Kane.

Parlez-vous Pidgin?

When I was on Maui last month for the Wa'a Kiakahi sailing canoe race, another journalist riding on the escort boat turned to me after riding the waves for several miles, and said of the boat crew, "They're speaking a dialect I don't understand."

"That's Pidgin," said I, which contributed nothing to her understanding. "O-o-o-kay," she said, "but what language is it?"

"English!" I answered, while wondering what da kine journalist she was supposed to be.

"Have you noticed the frequency of the expression 'da kine'?" I asked. She nodded. Oh yeah. Like every other word. I told her it meant "uh," "er," "whatchamacallit," "whatever," or, well, whatever.

To be honest, I'm rather new at Pidgin myself, and most of what the escort boat crew said was Greek to me. Didn't understand them, but appreciated the good work they did watching out for the paddlers' safety and towing the stragglers, as pictured to the left.

So, with happy memories of riding on that boat with the cheerful crew (especially Gully Boy -- I still got yo numbah, you buggah!), I decided to talk about Pidgin for my Fun Fact at hula class this week.

Like everything else I've been learning about Hawaiian culture, it turned out to be pretty interesting. Pidgin, which is more properly called Hawaiian English Creole according to the linguists, had its beginnings in the late 1700s with the introduction of Chinese Pidgin, which English and American traders used when selling their cargos of furs in Canton. The sugar cane and pineapple plantations were established in the early 1800s and workers came from all over the world. The common language the workers devised had elements of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Tagalog, the language of the Philippines.

Pidgin gained strength as a language after the New England missionaries imposed their English-only rule in the 1870s. By the 1920s, Pidgin was the dominant language in the Hawaiian Islands.

It's still prevalent, a hodge-podge of languages with an English base. The grammatical constructions actually come from Portuguese, but there are words from all the contributing cultures.

There are Pidgin grammars and dictionaries available, such as "Pidgin To Da Max," and "Da Kine Dictionary." Novelists, poets and playwrights compose in Pidgin. I've read some of the Pidgin writings of Hilo poet and novelist Lois-Ann Yamanaka.

The New Testament has been tranlated into Pidgin. It's called "Da Jesus Book." Even Shakespeare got the treatment. His play, "Twelfth Night or What You Will," has a Pidgin equivalent that has been produced on Hawaiian stages: "Twelf Night o' Whateva."

There are those language snobs and educators who believe Pidgin speakers are handicapped. But I say, don't go pullin' another missionary thing and try banning Pidgin. Hawaiian nearly died out because of such meddling. Personally, I love to hear spoken Pidgin. Riding in the escort boat with the cheerful crew was a delight. Couldn't understand what the hell they were talking about, but maybe dat's mo bettah, yeah?

Holua Fun at Makahiki

July 2 was incredibly hot in Aloha, Oregon, and in hula class we were all pretty miserable. To make everyone feel a bit cooler, I chose "sledding" as the topic for my weekly Fun Fact. However, sledding in old Hawai'i had nothing to do with snow.

From what I gathered, the sport of hölua originated as a tribute to Pele, the fiery volcano goddess. Like hot lava rolling rapidly down a hillside, the sledders rode down steep hills. Their descent was slowed either by a level meadow at the bottom of the hill, or by a plunge off a cliff into the ocean. A lava flow (preferably no longer in use by the volcano) was the preferred route. Dirt and leaves were piled atop the lava rocks to make a smoother ride, and the runners of the sled were greased with kukui nut oil.

The sled itself was no more than about 6 to 8 inches wide, but long enough to hold a tall body, and then some. The sleds ranged in length from 7 to 18 feet long. A woven mat atop the two runners sometimes was used to provide some comfort. There were hand grips near the top. The trick was to grab a handle with one hand, start running like hell, throw the sled down on the ground and drop on top of it, hold on for dear life and prepare to reach speeds up to about 70 miles per hour.

Needless to say, some sledders didn't survive their sport. In ancient Hawai'i, it was a sport reserved for the ali'i (chiefs). But the last recorded sledding contest, in which the winner was the one who rode the furthest, was held in 1825. Like so many other aspects of Hawaiian culture, it was outlawed by New England missionaries.

In 1993 the sport was revived by a surfer and Hawaiian history buff named Tom Pohaku Stone. Stone makes and sells hölua, as well as surfboards, at the Hawaiian Boarding Company.

Sledding and other royal sports, including spear catching (kids, don't try this at home), were part of the season known as Makahiki. The ancient Hawaiians devoted eight months of the year to warfare, and the remaining four months to rest and recreation, enjoying the fall's harvest, playing games, working on crafts, etc. Makahiki officially begins at the first new moon after the stars of Pleaides appear in the eastern sky, usually in November.

When I was in Maui last month, at the hotel where I stayed, the Ka'anapali Beach Hotel, the employees observe Makahiki each year. Well, not to the T, because in the old days, nobody worked for four months. The hotel employees do continue to work, but they take time to learn traditional crafts, such as making leis, poi pounders, fish nets, toys, etc.

Every department at the hotel decided on a particular craft to learn and each person made something. In the lobby of the hotel are glass cases holding many of the items that have been made over the years. Pictured above are fish hooks that were carved from soup bones by members of the culinary department. Eventually, the hotel ran out of room to display all the beautiful items in the lobby, so they converted one guest room into sort of a museum to hold all the handicrafts.

I liked this idea so much that for this week's Fun Fact I talked about Makahiki and how we could work some of its features (not spear catching) into our halau activities. I proposed that our halau observe Makahiki each year by making crafts that we can then sell at our annual hö'ike (hula show) and fundraiser. To that end, one of my wonderful hula sistahs, Kepola, ended our practice today by teaching us how to make candy leis. It was too fun, especially since sampling of the materials was allowed.

Ed Lindsey, Rest In Peace

When I was on Maui recently, I expressed an interest in meeting Ed Lindsey. I had heard about his work restoring the Honokowai Valley, which is just mauka (upland) from Ka'anapali Beach Resort, where I was staying. I thought I might be able to write an article about him and the transformation of the valley, once overrun with invasive species, to a showcase of ancient Hawaiian ingenuity in agriculture and irrigation.

I learned that Ed was ill. But in spite of his illness, he agreed to meet me and be interviewed. Lani Moala, a Ka'anapali Beach Hotel employee, drove me to Ed's home in Lahaina and graciously stayed for the duration of the interview (which ended up lasting two hours) so she could drive me back to the hotel.

Almost immediately after we first met, Ed told me that he had prostate cancer and had been given only a few months to live. But, in spite of some apparent discomfort, he showed great vitality, humor, curiosity and passion during my visit.

So I was stunned on Thursday to learn that Ed had died the previous morning. It had been barely three weeks since I interviewed him.

During my time with him, I really felt that this opportunity given to me was special, even magical. It was amazing to me how it had all come about.

I first learned about Ed when I took an online course from Kamehameha Schools about efforts to restore old taro fields and fish ponds in Hawaii. The course materials included a video about Ed and his organization, Maui Cultural Lands. I was intrigued and made note that his project was near Ka'anapali. Fast forward a few months when I received an invitation from the Ka'anapali Beach Resort to attend Wa'a Kiakahi, an annual sailing canoe race.

As it turned out, the Ka'anapali Beach Hotel, where I was staying, had a long relationship with Ed and his wife, Puanani, and before them with Ed's parents. Both generations of Lindseys were kupuna (elders) in every sense of the word, in that they considered it their mission to pass on the old values and skills that had always served the Hawaiian community. The Lindseys and the hotel had a longstanding partnership, with many guests volunteering to help pull out the non-native trees and plants that had cluttered and clogged the valley.

Lori Sablas of the Ka'anapali Beach Hotel kindly arranged for me to meet Ed. Later, she set up a field trip to the Honokowai Valley for me. Pictured here, Puanani Lindsey (r.) and Lani Moala (l.) took me up the rugged roads into the valley so I could see for myself the results of the Lindseys' 10-year project.

The contrast between the untouched jungle and the lovingly restored habitation of ancient Hawaiians was stark and dramatic. It was like walking out from under a dark and menacing cloud into brilliant and warm sunshine. Puanani walked me through the area, naming the native plants that beautified what had once been a streamside village. She knew when each one had been planted, by whom, and the plant's traditional purpose.

Before we sat down to our lunch that day, Lani said a grace, expressing thanks that I had come to Ka'anapali to help share Ed and Puanani's story. As for me, I am thankful for all the generous people and the amazing circumstances that allowed me to meet Ed and to walk the beautiful Honokowai Valley with Puanani and Lani.