The house Dad had built on the lot he'd bought in Pupukea was a "pre-fab". These were pretty controversial in Hawaii, where there are no RV's, billboards, or "mobil" homes. Essentially, they were built somewhere in the industrial area near Sand Island, then trucked to where they'd be set up. This one was in two long halves, which would normally be fastened together at the site. Imagine taking a long, unsliced, loaf of bread and slicing it down the middle lengthwise. That's about the proportions of the two halves. Dad, being the inventive guy he was, was able to get a change in plans: The two halves would be some distance apart, with a big living room in the middle and a big deck at the front and a smaller deck at the back. There was a half-open garage, and a driveway. This was all on Akanoho Place, a small road that went up and down like a rollercoaster.
We went out and visited while it was being finished, and we kids got to know all about different types of nails and wood. I thought the house looked great in the natural wood colors it had before it was painted, but sadly, it got painted a color Crayola used to call "sea green" with darker green trim.
While we waited for the house to be finished, we stayed several temporary places. First, we rented a house on the next ridge over, which was rather nice. I felt very sad about leaving Portlock Road and spent a lot of time just sitting, looking out the window and watching the crop dusting planes treat the sugar cane fields over in Wailua. We were not supposed to have cats there and agreed not to have cats but ... we had cats. One of them kept peeing everywhere and thus, we didn't last long there. We then stayed someplace in La'ie, next to a family of kids who weird in two ways: they liked salted licorice and they had a pet monkey. Then we left and stayed in one of the "cottages" at Pat's In Punalu'u. That was great, for as we all know it was only a mile or two from Ka'a'awa, and the same wonderful fresh sea air and walking along the beach brought back great memories. Somewhere in this time frame we also stayed in the Schofield Sands, temporary rentals usually used by soldiers and their families. It was pretty great. One morning a bunch of TANKS went clanking by at 6:30 in the morning. Mom was infuriated, but Alan and I thought it was great and hoped they'd visit again soon. For some reason we'd acquired a couple of baby ducks, who paddled around on the painted-cement floor and got their bathing pool very dirty. The Schofield Sands had a soda machine that had Diamond Head Orange, the only kind of soda I liked. What really impressed me was, if I was having trouble with the machine which I generally was, some kind soldier would help me out, cheerfully. And they'd say Hi and things like that. It was amazing. I was used to local-haole relations where no one said Hi to a white kid. I was used to being barely tolerated by the local storekeepers, school officials, really anyone with any sort of authority, or without. So these friendly Mainland soldiers, generally from the South, were a revelation.
We finally moved into our cheerful green house, and we had to wear rubber boots outside because of the red mud, which Mom was *not* a fan of. This was kind of annoying because we were used to going barefoot almost everywhere. For Christmas, or maybe using some money Aunt Mary had given us, Cinda and I got cowboy boots. We'd run around in those, pretending to be cowboys. They did make a nice galloping sound. We had great fun exploring the valley, and after just a day or so after moving in there all of us got so involved in exploring that when we got back Mom was livid because she didn't know where we'd gone and was worried. It was so nice and green in the valley!
Initially, like with any new house, things were great. Everything was clean and new, we had the furniture all set out in the dining room, living room, bedrooms. Dad built a storage shed because we had a lot of books and bedding and things to store, and it was green too. The trash can area was next to that, like anything Dad made, well-built with gravel on the bottom. Dad also built a mailbox that looked like a miniature of the house, which was pretty neat. Unfortunately, the mailman refused to use it. Now, thinking back, what Dad should have done was take a regulation mailbox and then build the house-model around it, but he didn't. So it got used for packages or the newspaper. It has a spring-loaded door and the "thwap!" of that closing told us something had come.
We kids got to recognize the sound of the neighbors' car motors and could tell Mom who it was going by. Down at the end-end of the road was a guy who was Hawaiian and supposedly a coach at one of the high schools, and rumored to be very mean. We took care not to cross paths with him. There were the Finleys just up from there, the Bensons (among whom was the famed surfer Becky Benson), Jeff Hakman (another famed surfer who used to shape boards) the d'Alessio's who had a dalmatian who used to always bark at us, the McRae's (Heather McRae and her mother) and some others we knew but I can't remember the names of now. Up around the corner were the Wallroths (I don't know if I've spelled that right) who had a very neat large flat piece of land with grass almost as short and stiff as the d'Alessio's dalmatian's.
I wish I remembered the street number of the place. I was last there in 2003, and someone put a second story over the living room, making it a bit less distinctive. And it'd been painted brown, no more "Esmond" green. The only way to pinpoint it would be to go back there and physically stand in front and write the number down, and the chance that I'll see Hawaii again is pretty close to zero. I'd say it's the place just downhill from Jeff Hakman's and on the same side, but there are probably 1-2 houses between Jeff Hakman's and our old place now. I managed to get Google Street View working, and Akanoho Place is so different it's unrecognizable. When we moved there, the landscape was dominated by "haolekoa", a legume that grows to the size of a small tree, has fuzzball flowers, and makes a funny smell when it relaxes its leaves in the evening, local "ironwood" trees, actually casaurina, and the grass that would dry out in the summer, with native pink orchids scattered through it. Now it's all overgrown with actual pine(!) trees like you find on the Mainland, and all sorts of other stuff. Most of the houses are hidden behind hedges and masses of greenery. With two famous surfers on the street even when I was a kid, no doubt the area is home to a lot of "surfing elite" mainland types who can afford to surf and own a car - it's not that bad a drive to get to all the good north shore spots. But it's been "mainlandized". This makes me very sad. I used to sit, very quietly, and listen to the bittersweet, longing cries of native birds, and I wonder if no one hears the distinctive swishing sound of the wind through casaurina trees, or picks guavas in the valleys any more? I guess I am writing about a place that doesn't exist, in a sense, any more.
We got to know quite a few people around the neighborhood, but looking back I note they were all fellow haoles. The Japanese people in the area tolerated us at best, and the locals/Hawaiians were to be feared. There was a Japanese guy who had a Kobota tractor who roto-tilled the back yard of our place, and Dr. Yurioka who stitched up April's face after she'd fallen off a go-kart Alan had made, and he was nice, but we were lucky to get a polite wave in exchange to our wave and "Hi!" later.
Dad was around quite a bit, building things and trying to relax. But Mom was a nag as usual, and the drive back and forth to Honolulu was a long one. He was in the habit of sleeping in his office at times, or, I believe, with a "stew" which is what he called a stewardess. Also being a white computer programmer in Hawaii is, as I've mentioned, not the best career choice, and I believe he was having job trouble again. I remember that for a short time he got a job as a salesman for Hitachi, and showed us one of the first handheld calculators - 4 functions and only $400, and if you tried to divide by zero it went nuts.
So, at first, times were great, we had clothes and food and books and Dad even got the TV working kind of OK (TV back then was three channels at best) and Barbara would go with Dad into town each morning, to Punahou and work, respectively. We even had a horse! An old horse, named Candy, and we took some riding lessons from the Wheelers up the street. We'd go out and ride on the trails, and we learned out of a book called "Happy Horsemanship". Except for the times Cinda and I would tell each other, in private, how much we missed Hawaii Kai, life was looking pretty good.One notable adventure was when we went to the valley on the other side of the road from us and discovered a huge pond from the rain, full of the most wonderful almost-black mud. We took paddle boards and things down there, and had the most glorious mud fight. We came back, far later than we'd told Mom we would, and boy was she angry. We looked like we'd been dipped in dark brown paint. She had us go right into the showers, clothes and all, and clean up. You could almost gauge how much fun something was by how mad it made her. Wouldn't a normal mom just get a little bit mad, and then tell us that, if we're going to play in the mud, to wear old clothes or swimming clothes, and to simply be careful?
I think what happened with Mom was, when she met Dad she'd been going to college classes and was quite smart, and really "going places" and when she married Dad she thought she was going to have this great life, with plenty of art and adventure, and instead she ended up raising 5 kids and expected to be no more than a housewife, in an economy that kept grinding down. She probably felt she'd have been better off to stay in California and I think she would have.
