Hana Hou

Chapt. 7

Past and Future

She looked down towards the tiny cove, and even in the bright, early afternoon light the scene was surreal. The girls walked along the water's edge, occasionally stopping to pick up a bit of driftglass that had caught their eye. The whole beach was made of frosted, water-worn bits of glass, unintentional products of a dump that had been since covered over with soil and vegetation. Years ago the ocean had begun to cut into the accumulation of trash; things made of glass had been pulverized and transformed into the strange, beautiful beach.

Not that it was all intrinsically pretty stuff. The south edge was an accidental sculptural garden of salt-eroded industrial junk; engine blocks, iron forgings, steel wheels and other unrecognizable metal objects were caught in mid-transformation; fused into each other and embedded into dark stone as they returned to the earth as before they were shaped by man. Of course, Jane was busy photographing the art that she was finding.

The old woman she had met had told her of this place when she had learned that Daria was a writer.

"It's just a few miles away. You're going back to Hanalei? As soon as you hit the main road, you'd be turning left. But if you go straight, you'll be heading to the port, and you turn left right behind the power plant. Park where the paved road ends, and walk in. It's not far at all. If you go there, what you will see depends on what is inside you. Some see sadness, some joy. It's easy to see little ugly parts, but there is a deeper beauty there that will more than make up for it."

She had begun to walk up the rutted dirt road that climbed to higher ground towards the south, and began to see westward-facing stones standing amid the overgrown vegetation. It was a cemetery, first seeing use in the late 1800's and holding some of the first remains of immigrant laborers that had come dreaming of a better life. Most had believed that a few years of backbreaking labor in the cane fields would allow them to return home with the means to build better lives for themselves and their families.

For most of them, that had been nothing but an illusion.

Many of these stones bore carved passages in a form indecipherable to her. They stood in the bright tropical sun, facing the lands across the Pacific that they had once longed to return to.

Moving further up the hill revealed the respectful efforts of good people to clear the brush away, affording the now anonymous graves some dignity. The cemetery had been abandoned for years, the trust organization members originally responsible for its upkeep having passed on themselves. No doubt some of the graves had been exhumed and remains moved to prettier, more maintained sites inland, but the ones left behind had simply been forgotten. No one was left to care for the graves, and no one was left to remember the people they had once been.

And yet, here, more than a hundred years later, she found a strange sense of peace. These lives had witnessed terrible things; for the Japanese among the graves here they had been oddly fortunate to have passed before the events leading to the Second World War. Even by then the graves had begun to slide into obscurity; the cultural guilt and suppression that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor had perhaps contributed to the growing shadows of brush and grass.

It was the failing of memory that had broken the bonds to the living, and in the drifting away came the peace. The lives these graves bore witness to no longer mattered to anyone.

There was something obscene about the proximity of a garbage dump so close to the cemetery, although it wasn't her place to judge. Perhaps the site had been much farther away in the past, only being forced further inland as the ocean ate away at the shoreline.

The port nearby to the north had been a modest one when the cemetery had first been established; it was the economic lifeline for the island, where the sugar was shipped off and the goods and fuel for life was unloaded. The rip currents running along the shore were disturbed as the port grew, and the shoreline began to change.

As the rest of the world progressed and moved on the little cemetery lay forgotten. There was a sad irony in the choice of sites in the first place; from where they had been laid to rest, a visitor could see the arrival and departure of ships.

From the thickness of the stumps between the graves, the site had been pretty much overgrown. Cleaning it up had required much more than mere weedwackers- chainsaws, from the look of things.

As she scanned the area, she noticed a small figure standing amid a shock of wild sugarcane growing along the eastern perimeter. She wasn't sure why, but she knew that the figure was female. Whoever she was, she was dressed in clothing clearly intended to provide protection from brush; A straw hat secured with a strip of fabric kept the sun at bay. In her hands was a curious tool- a triangular blade with a hook notched into the wider end; a simple handle of riveted wood covered the narrow end. Daria had seen these in the Kauai Museum; it was a cane knife. These were simple tools stamped from sheet steel; the wider blade provided the mass that made the cutting edge effective. The hook was used to pull the tall sugar cane stalks down towards the worker. The figure waved; Daria returned the gesture.

"There you are," Trent called out as he came up over the rise. "I heard something about this place, but I'd forgotten about it."

She shaded her eyes, noting the sun beginning to get noticeably lower. "I think forgotten pretty well describes this place."

They stood in silence, listening to the breezes moving through the scruffy grass and brush along the perimeter. Beyond the scrub, the blue of the Pacific sparkled in the distance, and the faint laughter of the girls drifted up to where they were.

She and Trent joined hands. Daria looked back towards the east, but the woman must have stepped away into the vegetation. Beyond that spot, fallow fields that once borne a century of sugarcane stretched into the distance, towards the mountains. There, they were lost in low waves of gray clouds.

They turned and began walking back to the cove.

"Oh man, I'm starving," laughed Kuulei, sniffing at the large cardboard box that held the plate lunches Trent had bought.

"We're stopping by the coffee plantation store," Jane smiled. "They have picnic tables outside. Touch my kimchi and you're dead, missy."

"Why?" Kuulei giggled. "Haole ladies like you not supposed to eat kimchi. You get bad breath from all the garlic."

"So?" Jane shot back. "How am I supposed to eat the Korean barbeque without kimchi?"

"Kyle likes garlic," Kimmy said seriously. "Women with bad breath are his thing."

"Watch it, girls," Jane said sweetly. "You two are gonna fall asleep on the drive home, and I have a brand new magic marker in my pocket."

The girls claimed a table while the adults entered the store to purchase two bags of coffee beans still warm from the roasters.

Daria watched in amusement as the two girls ate heartily. Somehow, her own appetite was somewhat absent, and she merely picked at her meal.

The oddly dark clouds stayed to her left as the car made its way south to Lihue, and then east back home. She glanced fondly at the snoozing siblings in the front next to her, and the two girls passed out in the back.

After the usual traffic snarl in the little town of Kapaa, the miles began to slip by more quickly. The cloud cover seemed lower than usual, and the afternoon began to darken into an early evening as she drove on.

A/N: Glass beach is real, and sadly so is the old cemetery.