348 Portlock Road

After a week or so in lovely Ka'a'wa, we moved into our house. To the best of my recollection, Dad had: rebuilt the roof, replaced all the door knobs, carpeted (dark/light avocado green shag!), installed avocado-green appliances, replaced the kitchen counters, built book shelves along the full length of the hallway we used as the entrance, built a gate for the formal entrance, and probably a lot of other things we took for granted.  The house had a panax hedge along the front and one side, a wall in back, the Durants on the other side, and a row of tall coconut trees in the large back yard. The lawns were full of kukus, local "stickers" that seemed to love to be found by little kids' bare feet. For a while we even had a series of pieces of plywood in a "trail" to the sandbox to avoid those kukus, but we eventually got rid of them.

Mom had a thing about antiques, and shortly before leaving the mainland we'd acquired an old wrought-iron bed, and as we got settled in Mom somehow acquired some official Kaiser pink paint, probably from the Kaiser estate up at the end of the street. She's probably just walked off with it. So the bed was painted this pink, and it's what I slept on for a while.

Mom's strength was painting, and refinishing, and she painted and refinished and "antiqued" all sorts of furniture, and painted parts of the house like the carport (my next youngest sister, April, leaned against the wet paint and made her t-shirt all stripey, that really set Mom off) and the formal front entrance which I got to help with - I liked painting and I liked helping so it's one of the few good memories I have with Mom.

We kids got settled in and started exploring the neighborhood. "There are no sidewalks!", said Mom, who was offended by this fact. In actuality, there were none on our part of Portlock Road, but all the streets branching off had them, and the lack of sidewalks never gave us kids a second thought. "Go together, stay together, play together" Mom was always lecturing us, and thus we explored the nearby streets, learned to walk to school, and found out about the local beaches.

Nearest was a magical place, Little Beach. We called it that because it was very little. It was larger at low tide, when a nice layer of coral sand - and seashells and all sorts of wonders - built it up. At high tide, all this light stuff was stripped away, leaving the base layer of green olivine sand. This is otherwise known as peridot, and thus I can say we played and dug and threw sand on a beach of pure gems. Olivine sand gets very hot in the sun, though, and if it's dry, expect to hop if you are barefoot to the wet part.

But to me the real gems were seashells. I think my fascination with them probably started with one of those plastic-sealed packages of them, a variety harvested from all over the South Pacific and sold to tourists in Hawaii to this day, that was given to me when we were still in Ka'a'awa. I soon had a little book, Seashells Of The World, and at the beach I'd find cowries, cone shells, bubble shells, top shells, turritellas, lucines, tellins, cherrystone clams, slipper and cup-and-saucer shells, and one wonderful day, a large Partridge Tun.

I don't think Vladamir Nabokov had a bigger fascination with moths than I did with seashells, back then.

Little Beach was a wonderful place to dig and play and yell and scream and to get away from Mom. One time, Alan dug in the sand and found an Indian head penny. We had a drawer with a lot of cowries in it, and when I'd open it, they'd roll around with the most satisfying sound. The water was clear in those days, and there were a few kinds of limu, seaweed, growing here and there. My favorite looked like green long hair, swirling around in the water, it was beautiful.

Mrs Heart was an older lady, who in her proper old-lady one piece bathing suit and swimming cap, would come out to swim. Or rather walk, slowly out into the water, until she was neck deep and then slowly, walk back to shore. We kids were happy to have a new swimming friend and would swarm around her. "Hello Mrs. Heart!"  "Hey, are you gonna swim?" "How deep can you dive?"  And so on. This would result in a call to Mom, who'd lecture us on being "those bad Carter kids". Mom was sure "those Carter kids" were the scandal of the neighborhood. I doubt we were, it's just that she kept us on such a short leash at home that the beach became our place to let out pent-up energy.

Those Styrofoam "surfboards" - still sold in Hawaii - were a kids' staple back then, and I used to paddle and paddle mine until my arms were limp than paddle some more. Hawaii Five-O was a big deal back then and I'd paddle as fast as I could, with my head down on the board so it seemed like the water was going by fast, thinking the Hawaii Five-O theme in my head. There are waves off Kokohead Point, but far too far out for a little kid.

We had lots of books, among them one about Robin Hood, out of which Dad would read me a chapter at bedtime. This got me interested in bows and arrows, and I set about building these. Any old stick with some string worked OK for a bow, and an arrow was a bit more difficult, but I eventually managed OK with mynah bird feathers and on one of them, a big needle at the business end. I'd shoot from one end of the back yard, which was pretty large, up at 45 degrees and it'd make it to the other end. Dad noticed this one day and for the next holiday or my birthday, I'm not sure, I got a real bow and arrow set. It's the same 20-lb set that is still sold today. Dad set up a box and put a target on it, and got out HIS bow and arrows, that he kept in the gardening tools closet, and we did archery together. It was great. He showed me how to shoot properly, not using the "pinch" hold that worked OK with the lightweight bows I'd made, and to not let the shot off too soon, but to pause a bit, not do a "snap shot". One afternoon I walked out to the yard to practice and was horrified to find one of our cats, Kai, asleep among the arrows in the target box. I was sure he'd been in there when I'd last been shooting and had only luckily been missed. Actually, he'd just crawled in there when I was not around, curled up among the arrows, and had a nice cardboard box cat nap. Whew!

But this brings me to the neighborhood kids. The Ko family lived up the street, and it's safe to say the Ko kids were worse behaved than the Carter kids. I was walking back from Little Beach with Mom and one of those Ko kids came up with a bow he'd made and a panax stick for an arrow, and tried, at about point blank, to shoot my eye out. My good eye! I flinched just in time and he got me on the cheek, making a small scrape. Then he ran off, I guess. Mom had a word with Mrs. Ko, who probably said something like "Eh, what kids gonna do?" and between that and my telling the kid that if he tried that again I'll bring my real bow over and shoot him with it, that put a stop to it.

Another time my youngest sister, Cinda, was with me, going to Little Beach with maybe a side-trip to some poor neighbor's who had wonderful tropical plants, a veritable jungle, and a well-cared for one. There's one plant that looks like pale green teeth, hanging down in long bunches. We'd each take a couple of the "teeth" off, stick 'em in our mouths and be vampires. "Bla, bla," we'd say. So we were near that place and some bullies came by, Hawaiian kids. There were three or four of them, and it was just me and little sis. So I picked up a stick or a big seed pod or something and charged at them yelling, and they took off! I didn't even care about myself, the usual target of bullies, but I wasn't going to let anything happen to my little sis. 

Bullies and good kids were across the whole spectrum, local and haole, Asian, Caucasian, Hawaiian. But the Hawaiian kids who lived up in the back of the Kuapa valley had a certain reputation for being rough. One time we were swimming off of Little Beach and some of 'em came down and started throwing rocks at us, large ones. Fortunately they were pretty easy to dodge, but these rocks were not meant to pester, they were meant to injure, or kill. Now I know that the Kuapa area was a prime Hawaiian living area, and it got taken over and re-made in the mainlander's way by Henry J. Kaiser and there was no more care for the Hawaiians there originally than for the mosquitoes the DDT truck sprayed for, making a smell like rotten eggs.

Starting out at Koko Head Elementary School, I sat next to one of these Hawaiian kids, Ronald. "Yawwwwwww....." he'd say, making a funny face and making me laugh. He was hilarious. "Want some Fritos?" he's ask. Of course! Then he'd take his foot out of his slipper and stick it in my face. Free toes, get it? The teacher was teaching us about the equals sign, saying "equivalent". But every time she said "equivalent" Ronald would say, right next to me, "E-kill-avent, it kills you...." while sprawling in his seat. So the teacher calls me up to the front, and asks me why this and that side of the equation are the same, and I said it's because they're e-kill-avent. She told me to say equivalent, and I told myself to remember, it sort of sounds like quiver, like in archery. She also explained to me the minus sign, and I thought minus bird like mynah bird, I can remember that.

Koko Head Elementary School, last time I was over there, still sits, sleepy and light pink in the sun. It was a classic piece of late 1950s or early 1960s architecture. The classrooms were light and airy with large windows the lucky kid in each class got to open with a hook on a long pole before first class and another lucky kid got to close at last class. The classrooms were in rows branching off of a long covered walkway, like leaves branching off of a stem. There was a large auditorium that was also the lunch hall at the left side of the base of the stem, and on the other side, a 2-story building with offices below and the library above. There's a circular driveway for mothers to pick up and drop off their children but in those days only very few did this. Mainly that driveway was useful for the big armored car to come by to pick up our lunch and juice money. Every day in class the juice nickels were collected in a Band-Aid box with a slit cut in the top. Then a student took that to the office. I got to do this once. I skipped down the "stem" singing, while shaking that box as hard as I could, making a big racket. I didn't get to do that again.

The lunches were pretty good. You paid a quarter for lunch and a nickel for juice, which alternated between orange which was good and guava which I could not stand. The lunch - and this held through high school - was a meat course like lasagna, spaghetti and meat balls, meat loaf, etc., a roll or some sort of bread etc., a vegetable like salad or watercress salad, a piece of cake or a stewed prune or half a canned peach, and milk. It was very balanced. I was later to learn that on the mainland, lunches were typical fast/junk food and you had to pay much more than a quarter. And if you don't have money, you don't eat. I look back with fondness on those old Hawaii school lunches, because they're a physical illustration of how, on the mainland, society is atomized and competitive, while in Hawaii there's more of a feeling that we're all in this together.

The most popular teacher at Koko Head, at least I like to think, was Mrs. Nobriga. She knew kids like to sing and yell, and used that to teach us the multiplication tables. "2!! 4!! 6!! 8!! ..." etc. It was so much fun! However, other classrooms complained so we had to quiet it down. We used to do fire drills; you'd think the school was in imminent danger of bursting into flames for all the fire drills we did. We had, once a year, Junior Fire Marshal material, printed all in red. How to stay low, and feel if a door is warm, and all that.

One day Ross's house burned down. Ross was a kid my older brother Alan knew. We saw a big plume of smoke, black, rising into the air; Ross only lived about a block down from us on Portlock Road. I wonder, did he know to stay low? Did he check if the door of his bedroom was hot or not, before exiting? Did being a Junior Fire Marshal help him get himself and his family out? We never saw Ross or his family again. The house stayed empty and eventually the swimming pool got green and was full of frogs.

Another kid I knew was Cedric. It's more like he hung around me, I think because I could draw. It started with my seashells; I wanted to draw them like the illustrations in Seashells Of The World. My first efforts were awful, so I kept working at it. Both parents being frustrated artists, there were no end of nice "Draughting" pencils around the house, plus Dad's endless supply of Flair pens. I kept at it and kept at it, and began to get places in drawing shells. So I worked on other things, like jet planes, which I'd trade to Cedric for one of his drawings of dragsters, which he in turn was good at - super good. One day I was drawing a nehu-nehu, which is a small fish that lives in the shallows, and I'd discovered a school of in the drainage canal at the far end of Mai-Tai's beach. (Mai-Tai's beach was called this because of a dog there named Mai-Tai who jumped up on my youngest sister, scratching her stomach a bit.) So I'm drawing this nehu-nehu from memory, and Cedric comes up and suggests I add some teeth, make the mouth bigger, add some gill slits, etc. Nehu-shark. Then that Hawaiian kid named Cedric went off to draw another dragster.

The variety of people around our area was amazing. Because I was so interested in seashells, Dad took me to Hawaiian Malacological Society meetings and joined me up. We got to meet people with rare shells in cases, and one member had a Greek amphora, a real one, by the front door of his house. The newsletter was interesting too. Hawaii has the most interesting mix of people I've seen anywhere. From the native Hawaiians, to the descendants of all the successive waves of immigrants, to missionaries and whalers and sailors without a ship, WWII vets, to the people, like Dad, who realized it's a much neater place than the Mainland, to the scientists there to study at UH... So of course they'd have a Greek amphora by the door. Goes right with some other house that had a pair of try-pots from a whaleship in their yard. It's taken me far too long to realize how humdrum most of the US is.