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Hawaiian Vacation for Two!
Essence of Kaua'i
By Kim Steutermann Rogers Published: 08/09/2007
Too many travel stories about Hawaii start, “When we stepped off the plane...” Even one of my favorite travel writers, Jonathan Raban, succumbed to the all too common lead when writing about his visit with his daughter. And while the writer in me cringes, I'm beginning to accept the obvious.
In truth, it's a likely place to start—at the beginning—however, it just seems too, well, easy to me.
It's not a new phenomenon. Early in Mark Twain's letters about his visit to Hawaii in 1866, he writes about the houses, “...ornamented by hundreds of species of flowers and blossoming shrubs, and shaded by noble tamarind trees and the ‘Pride of India,' with its fragrant flower, and by the ‘Umbrella tree,' and I do not know how many more. I had rather smell Honolulu at sunset than the old police courtroom in San Francisco.”
There it is. Good ‘ol—then young—witty and sarcastic father of the American voice for once not exaggerating. It's about smell. Sure, the humidity envelopes like a full-body wetsuit upon disembarking the plane—or in Twain's case, the simile would be like a “traveling suit” of a “naval uniform” upon disembarking the steamer ship.
Yet that which remains—thousands of miles and even years later—is scent. Nothing conjures up a memory like it. And since it's so prevalent in Hawaii, our favorite authors cannot not write about it.
When Victorian vagabond Isabella Bird spent six months in the “Sandwich Islands,” stopping off at Koloa Landing on Kaua‘i, the first paragraph she writes in a letter to her sister back in England reads: “I am spending a few days on some quaint old mission premises, and the ‘guest house,' where I am lodged, is an adobe house, with walls two feet thick, and a very thick grass roof comes down six feet all round to shade the windows. It is itself shaded by date palms and algarobas, and is surrounded by hibiscus, oleanders, and the datura arbroea, which at night fill the air with sweetness.”
Hawaii is in the air.
In the book, A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman writes, “Each person has an odor as individual as a fingerprint.” So, too, must islands. That might be what guides the migrating Pacific Golden-Plover home each August from its arctic nesting grounds. Territorial in nature, the bird returns to not only the same island every year but to the same spot year after year. The Pacific Golden-Plover I watch in my yard as it darts in bursts “feeding on insects” is the same one that dined on my property last winter.
Ackerman says we can sense over 10,000 different odors. The Mokihana berry is one, although chances are you've never caught a whiff of it. If you did—if you do—you might say it smelled familiar.
In 1923, the then Hawaii Territorial Legislature adopted Na Lei O Hawaii and officially designated a lei to represent each island. Kaua‘i's is the Mokihana.
The lei of Oahu is ilima; Maui, loke; Hawaii, lehua; Molokai, kukui; Lanai, kaunaoa; Niihau, pupu shells; and Kahoolawe, hinahina. A distinct lei for each island, a distinct scent, too.
Mokihana is a slender tree that grows deep in the upland forests of Kokee on Kaua‘i and no where else in the world. It is a species of orange, although its fragrance is certainly not citrus. It is often described as spicy and similar to anise. A lei of mokihana is made from several strands of leather-like “berries” or seed pods and is often twined with maile, a woodsy, vanilla-scented leafy vine. Unlike flower lei, the scent of the mokihana lei lingers and can be used as a sachet for closets and dresser drawers.
The Latin name for the mokihana tree is Pelea anisata. It is named after the goddess of fire and the volcano, Pele. Once, when a reporter asked M
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