Their route took them along well-maintained walls of greenish fishponds spared from ancient lava flows. They found some shade on a small beach and sat down. Kawika again noticed her well-defined muscles, this time of her neck and arms. She’s incredibly fit, he realized. She slipped off her sandals, dug her toes in the sand. Kawika kept his shoes on. He wore a soft green and blue aloha shirt, nicer than the one he’d worn the day before, thanks to a few things he kept at his dad’s.
Jarvis had told Kawika a bit about Patience. Now she asked about him. His parents had met at Hapuna Beach, he told her. “Dad had the day off; Mom had come from the mainland to work at an observatory.” Kawika had been born a year later. “Mom raised me in Seattle after the divorce,” he said. “I spent summers here. Dad says you and I played together when we were little.”
“I don’t remember that, but I sure remember Jarvis from back then,” she said, laughing. “He’d take me out in the waves. I’d hold tight around his neck; I couldn’t get my legs around his back.” Her parents had met Jarvis on the Mauna Kea golf course, she said. “Daddy lost his tee shot in the sun,” she explained. “When he got to the green, Jarvis was standing there laughing. Daddy had hit a hole in one—his first and last. I don’t know, maybe Jarvis gave it a nudge. Anyway, Jarvis handed Daddy a beer from his cooler. I think later they went out and got drunk. They still make a point of seeing each other whenever Mom and Dad are here.”
“Aloha,” Kawika said, smiling.
“Aloha,” she agreed with a laugh.
“And you’ve been coming here ever since?”
“Yup,” she replied. “My parents love the beach at the Mauna Kea, but Daddy wanted this condo here at the Mauna Lani Point. He loves sitting with a drink, looking out at the ocean and the sunset and the championship tee—” She hesitated for a second, then pressed on. “And that over-the-water par 3. Though he’s practically filled the little bay there with his tee shots—plus a five-iron he tossed in there once. The fish must hate him.” She chuckled. “Anyway, when I got married, they gave me the condo as a present. I’m there a lot, sometimes for months when I’m writing. But honestly, after the divorce I’ll sell it in a minute if I can get a nice place at the Mauna Kea. The beach there—I mean, you know.”
That allowed Kawika to turn the conversation to business. “Mauna Kea, Mauna Lani: you know the South Kohala resorts. I don’t; Hilo isn’t South Kohala. Dad says you wrote about the Hapuna Prince getting built, the fight over it. That’s the sort of thing I need to understand. How these resorts get built, how they make money.”
“Or lose it,” she said. “Some have lost a bundle.”
“Losing money—yes. That could be important too.”
“Well,” she began, “you need to go back a bit.” After World War II, she explained, the government made tourism on the Neighbor Islands a priority. They invested in Hilo, building an international airport, a hotel strip. Planners thought visitors to Hawaii wanted nice wet tropical jungles. Lush vegetation. Banyan trees, parrots, rain showers. They figured tourists would never go to Kohala—too hot, too dry, no plants, no water.
“And lava fields,” she added. “It’s a moonscape here—barren, empty, wide-open spaces. Who’d want to visit?” She laughed again; Kawika had begun to like that laugh a lot. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Nowadays South Kohala’s getting crowded. You know what they say? Everyone here has something in common: we all used to go to Maui or Kauai.”
Things began to change, she continued, one day when the government invited Laurance Rockefeller to the Big Island and placed a helicopter at his disposal. “Take your time,” they told him. “Pick a spot”. He picked his spot, a perfect South Kohala beach. “I’ll build here,” he said. “The Mauna Kea.” But on one condition: that he be allowed to build another hotel next door on Hapuna Beach. That way, Patience explained, he’d have the two best beaches in all Hawai‘i, and no one on the Big Island could ever compete with him.
“Nasty problem,” she said, “because Hapuna’s a state park. It was totally pristine back then—not a sign of human development. And it was sacred to the old Hawaiians.”
Rockefeller got his way at first, she said. He built the Mauna Kea and made it Hawai‘i’s premier resort. But he couldn’t get anything built at Hapuna. For thirty years, neither could his successors.
“An opposition group formed, called Save Hapuna,” Patience said. “Lots of locals joined. Lots of visitors, hippies, Native groups. Even Mauna Kea homeowners. They held concerts, raised money, took the fight to Hilo and Honolulu. In the end they basically lost, because the hotel finally got built eight years ago.”
“Sounds like they lost, period,” Kawika said.
“Not entirely,” she replied. “The hotel’s nicer now than when it was first designed—lower, less intrusive. More sensitive, better landscaped. Blends in a bit, don’t you think?”
Kawika agreed; he considered the Hapuna Prince quite beautiful. “But how did it get built at all?” he asked. “After thirty years, you’d think developers would give up.”
“No one can stop development here,” Patience said. “No one. Eventually the forces grow too strong. You’ve got the developers and their money, the investors. Next you’ve got the construction unions. Then you’ve got the locals who aren’t rich, aren’t retired. They want the jobs. They fight back against groups like Save Hapuna. ‘You’ve got yours,’ they say. ‘Now you want to stop us getting ours.’”
Kawika sighed.
“And this is Hawaii, after all,” she added. “Government here is, well, weak in some ways. Subject to pressure, easily persuaded, let’s say. So it’s majority rule, or money talks. Either way, development can’t be stopped.”
“Depressing,” he
