It is a gamble; one tempts fate when one meddles with the past. Sometimes it’s best to leave dreams untampered with : Hana a Sentimental Journey

I have returned to Hana in search of a dream, the 26-year-old memory of an enchanting couple of days spent here in the late, late springtime of my youth. The year was 1960.

It is a gamble; one tempts fate when one meddles with the past. Sometimes it’s best to leave dreams untampered with.

Despite the foreboding, there was a compelling urge to live over again those perfect days, and so I dashed through a downpour as the little Cessna that was to airlift me to Hana was about to take off from Kahului on the other side of Maui.

After taxiing onto the runway the pilot surveyed the sky and returned to the terminal. He’d earned his gray hair with caution, that was evident. Squinting at the overcast, he waited out the squall that had reduced visibility nearly to zero. For another five minutes the rain fell furiously. Then, after a break in the clouds, we took off, flying along the eastern coast of Maui, which evolved into a scene to remember as waterfalls went on a rampage, plunging from heavens bursting with more rain while immense ocean swells slammed into sheer cliffs below our wings, sending the surf boiling in a white frenzy against the jagged black lava lining the coast.

At Hana, this old, un-bold pilot landed the little airplane with grace for the opening scene in the rerun of a dream.

Waiting beside the runway--it was hard to believe--was the same old bus, a Packard, easily 50 years old, that is still used by the hotel to gather its guests.

As we headed along the narrow, rain-lashed road to Hotel Hana-Maui, there came alive again the memory that wouldn’t go away. Only this time it was different: On the earlier visit I’d arrived by car from Kahului rather than flying, and instead of rain there was glorious sunshine. While it is barely 53 miles from Kahului to Hana, one must be patient, because the road is narrow, with more than 600 curves and 56 bridges--some so narrow that only one car can cross at a time.

We had bounced over potholes and negotiated curves with sheer drop-offs, hundreds of feet above the sea. But what we saw was worth every bounce, every aching kidney: Rainbows fell beside golden waterfalls, and peaceful pools mirrored shower trees; these along with fragrant flowers of every imaginable color. The same pools caught the reflection of thick jungle and moss-covered mountains with peaks lost in a crown of clouds that swelled in a sky so blue that we blinked.

The jungle alongside the road was choked with breadfruit trees and coconut palms, passion fruit, papaya, mangoes, torch ginger, hibiscus, guava and plumeria. Ferns as delicate as spider webs appeared among vines so thick that day turned to darkness, and the voices of birds were heard from the jungle.

This was old Hawaii--the Hawaii that no longer exists except at Hana and a handful of other places in the islands.

In winter, storms scream in and the surf explodes against the headlands. Year round the waterfalls spill, but when it rains they roar from the jungle like broken dams.

The road to Hana--not the present road, but the original one with the potholes I had driven over--was built in 1926 by convict labor. Paved with cinders, it kept washing away in heavy rains that sent mud slides crashing onto the road, sometimes tying up traffic for days. Finally, in 1962, it was paved, but still it washes out on occasion.

With the potholes gone, traffic has increased. But Hana, as I discovered on this sentimental journey, has changed little. There are still small shanties with their rusted corrugated roofs. Only now, TV antennas rise overhead. The bank stays open for only an hour or so a day, which makes teller Mike Minn’s job one of the choicest in town. It’s the same with the post office. And if you don’t buy gasoline before 6 p.m., you’re out of luck. That’s when the local Chevron station closes. It’s also the hour that Harry Hasegawa shuts off the lone pump at his famous general store.

Although locals describe Hana as a town, it’s actually less than three blocks long. Besides the bank and the post office, the two general stores, a few churches and the filling station, it contains little else. Only Hotel Hana-Maui, which is low-rise and low-key; the seven-unit Heavenly Hana, the Hana Kai Resort and Hana Bay Vacation Rentals. There were questions when Hotel Hana-Maui (along with the ranch) was bought awhile back by Caroline Hunt Schoellkopf, who operates the Bel-Air Hotel in Beverly Hills and the Mansion at Turtle Creek in Dallas. High society coming to Hana? Well, that turned out to be far-fetched, of course. Schoellkopf intended only to refurbish the hotel, which she is doing at a cost of $20 million. It will remain low-rise, a colony of fashionable cottages with French doors, trellised verandas, four-posters and loads of marble, wicker and rattan. Only instead of 82 rooms, there will be 102 tucked away on 21 acres. The new owner is also remodeling the restaurant and putting in a new bar. Meanwhile, she is keeping the hotel open. Otherwise, the 176 employees would be jobless, which would be a disaster since Hotel Hana-Maui is the town’s major employer.

Nearly everyone on the staff is related in one way or another. Displayed in the lobby is a graph that reads like a genealogy chart. For example, it tells how Louisa Roback Pu is related to James Pu, Lorrie Mendonsa Pu, Annie Pu, Lavern Elaban Bednorz, Dorothea Strait Pua and Carol Kapu.

For miles in either direction there is only the rugged coastline, a few taro patches, and ravines choked with the splendor of tropical blooms. Beaches, like those pictured on the travel posters, are mostly deserted. Guests at Hotel Hana-Maui swim at Hamoa Beach, which James A. Michener described as one of the loveliest in the entire Pacific.

In earlier days, the land between here and Paia flowed with sugar cane. Contract laborers were recruited during the 1800s. They came from China, Portugal, Japan and the Philippines. By 1900, workers earned $15 a month for 10-hour days, which figured out to a nickel an hour. Even by the 1940s, in the dying days of the sugar industry at Hana, the average wage was barely $500 a year.

Meanwhile, Hana had grown. Lining its country roads were more than a dozen stores and a couple of movie houses. A restaurant turned out steaks and saimin and a billiard parlor provided recreation for scores of cane-field workers.

It was during the last gasp of the sugar-cane industry that San Francisco entrepreneur Paul Fagan established his famous Hana Ranch with thousands of white-faced Herefords, which graze even to this day over pastureland that once produced cane.

Even with the ranch, though, jobs were scarce, and to provide work, Fagan opened Hotel Hana-Maui. After that he sent for his San Francisco Seals baseball team to engage in spring training there; a sportswriter sent home dispatches calling it Heavenly Hana, a name that survives to this day.

Vacationers seeking solitude do pilgrimages to Hana, but it is not for everyone. By 8 o’clock, even today, the town is asleep. Those searching for the action of Waikiki or Kaanapali would be bored silly.

Hana is peaceful and isolated and so draws the discriminating traveler who searches for a Hawaii that’s stereotyped in the minds of dreamers--the Hawaii of the early 20th Century, before the era of the jet and the high-rise hotel. Indeed, there is not a single tall building along the entire road to Hana. No jets arrive--only the little Cessnas and flights by Maui Helicopters.

Hana gets dozens of day visitors. They arrive in rental cars from Lahaina and Kaanapali to visit Hana’s famed Seven Sacred Pools and the grave of Charles Lindbergh, who is buried on a bluff near Kipahulu Hawaiian Church. After that they negotiate the curves again and cross the little bridges, returning to the lively tourist centers of Maui.

I had this nagging need to be certain that the image of my drive 26 years earlier hadn’t been exaggerated by time and memory, so I rented a car in Hana and drove to Paia and back--a trip that took nearly the entire day.

Paia is called the Last Chance Town on the road to Hana. At Paia, motorists gas up and stop for meals before zeroing in on this wilderness road. They stop at Mama’s for fish, and at Dillon’s with its six-stool bar and Tiffany lamps. Others drop by Picnics, so called because it prepares gourmet lunches for the trip to Hana. Picnics fills the hamper with spinach nutburgers, smoked turkey sandwiches, fresh pastries and other delights.

Paia is an old plantation town that comes into focus like a scene from a Hollywood Western. Barely a whisper long, it provides a lineup of sagging buildings chewed to pieces by termites, time and winter storms. Besides being an art colony of sorts, Paia is the windsurfing capital of Hawaii. Or rather, Hookipa Park down the road is. None of this is far from Makawao, the cowboy town on the slopes of Haleakala.

In Paia, an old-fashioned plantation-type store sells everything from candy bars to kerosene lamps. I stopped for coffee at Dillon’s and then started out for Hana. Gray skies exploded and waterfalls roared as I drove through the same rain forests of years before. Nothing had changed. Nothing.

The road dipped and climbed past villages with little seaside shanties. Birds roosted on the backs of cattle, and ravines overflowed with orchids and ginger.

It was like being caught in a time warp.

So much of Hawaii’s beauty has been violated but not on this stretch between Paia and Hana. Rain fell and later the sun would shine again, creating still another rainbow. Rivers rushed toward the ocean, breezes carried the perfume of plumeria, and a sign at a nursery declared: “Don’t hurry, don’t worry--and don’t forget to smell the flowers.”

Back in Hana I stopped to visit with Harry Hasegawa, whose store is legendary. Indeed, Hasegawa’s is the best-known country store in the Pacific, containing every imaginable item from Band-Aids to barbed wire. Hasegawa’s pumps gasoline, stocks chick mash, rifles, chain saws, horseshoes, nails, fishing poles, passion fruit, paint and pickled cabbage--as well as T-shirts that say: “I survived the Hana Highway.”

Hasegawa’s is a clutter of hundreds of items and resembles a mobile-home park after a tornado has torn through. Only one human on earth can put his finger on any one item in the entire outrageous mess, and he is Harry Hasegawa’s shadow, his right-hand man, his sidekick--Andy Olivera, who has been stashing away all that junk, that scrap and those articles for 25 years. Harry prays each night for Andy to show up the next day. If sometime he doesn’t, Harry’s little world might collapse.

No matter how often Harry travels to the mainland to visit a couple of brothers in Huntington Beach, he always returns anxiously to Hana. Celebrities Jim Nabors, Richard Pryor, George Harrison and Kris Kristofferson understand; at Hana they have built homes that overlook the sea--places where they go when the pressures of the outside world dig at their souls.

Carl Lindquist, the big gun at Hana-Maui Hotel, gave up a prosperous publishing business in Honolulu to run the resort. He camped at Hana in 1967 with his family, and the memory wouldn’t go away.

It isn’t just because Hana is remote that it remains unchanged. The Hawaiians are responsible, too. This is their Elysium. They don’t want it to change. Some have no jobs, so they fish or live off the land, but they don’t fear crime or fight freeways or breathe filthy air.

Still they are troubled by one question: After Hana, won’t heaven be disappointing?

Accommodations:

Hotel Hana-Maui, P.O. Box 8, Hana, Maui 96713. Telephone (808) 248-8211.

Heavenly Hana Inn, P.O. Box 146, Hana, Maui 96713. Telephone (808) 248-8442.

Hana Kai Maui Resort (condominium apartments on the ocean), P.O. Box 38, Hana, Maui 96713. Telephone (808) 248-8426.

Hana Bay Vacation Rentals, P.O. Box 318, Hana, Maui 96713. Telephone (808) 248-7727.