Resisting Progress : Molokai: Hard Times in Paradise

The sleepy islanders straggle onto the wharf in pitch dark. Clutching pillows and thermoses of coffee, they board the bobbing ferry and settle in for the 90-minute ride, watching along the way for whale spouts against the pink sky of a new morning.

They are on their way to work at the pricey resorts of West Maui, where they will spend the day feeding and cleaning up after the tourists they are fighting to keep off their own island.

Unlike the tanned vacationers who will cruise aboard the Maui Princess during the rest of the day, the Molokaians view their daily trip on the dawn “job ferry” not as a way to reach paradise, but as a way to save it.

“You like to have choices,” says Walter Ritte, who spent nine years unemployed and on welfare while bucking development on Molokai. “You don’t want every place to be the same.”

Neighboring Glitter

The same, to Molokai, would mean the same as Maui, the same as Oahu--the same hotels, discos, housing crunches, traffic and crime. Molokai wants no part of professional luaus on roped-off beaches and jet-skiers chasing away the porpoises and whales.

But the price of resisting progress is steep, and Molokai, known in ancient times as the “fat land,” is now the hard-luck case of Hawaii.

In a state where unemployment is extremely low, Molokai’s jobless rate hit 19.6% last summer, and when the Del Monte Corp. shuts down the island’s last pineapple plantation later this year the situation promises to worsen.

Pineapple was Molokai’s primary industry for more than 50 years, but growers have turned increasingly to cheaper operations in Third World countries, and while other islands have looked to tourism as a mainstay, Molokai has hung back.

‘Keep What We’ve Got’

“We’re trying so hard to keep what we’ve got and not have it change,” explained Napua Kaupu, the wife of a retired Molokai fireman. “This is the last of Hawaiiana and we’re afraid of more improvements. There will be no Hawaii.”

Her friend, Donna Uahinui, a waitress at the Midnite Inn in the tiny main town of Kaunakakai, was more vehement, though development could mean a better job for her.

“How do I treat tourists? I answer their questions,” she said. “There used to be a time when we’d go out of our way to make them feel at home. But I don’t any more, because then they’ll come back and buy a spot and stay and then we lose another part of us.

“Even if we don’t have money,” she continued, “we can still dance, still drink and still sing. On the east end, people will be outside drinking under a mango tree and if you pass by, they say, ‘C’mere,’ and before you know it, the whole neighborhood is out there under the mango tree.”

For all its tranquility, Molokai has always been something of the willful stepchild in the middle of the Hawaiian chain, a place known as much for controversy as for tradition.

It was Molokai where lepers were cast off in the 19th Century, where hippies and cults gravitated in the Age of Aquarius, where the biggest landowner has imported giraffes do the weeding and, where, despite its sobriquet of “The Friendly Island,” tourists have been known to find spikes in the tires of their rental cars.

Molokai has no stoplights. The two highways stop short of girdling the island, giving up long before the rugged terrain does. There are four dentists, no obstetricians, 20 softball teams and one transvestite hula dancer.

The island’s current population--about 6,500--is roughly the same as it was 155 years ago when the newly arrived missionaries took a census. After Capt. James Cook discovered the islands in 1778, Molokai reportedly bustled with activity, and there are accounts of 10,000 to 38,000 people living there.

Most Hawaiian

Today, with the exception of Niihau, a privately owned island, Molokai is the most Hawaiian island in the chain. About 60% of its residents are of Hawaiian ancestry, and one-third of its adults speak little or no English.

Native concerns over preserving traditional life styles and land use proved to be the main stumbling block for developers wanting to bulldoze the lush landscape and put up hotels, golf courses and vacation condos.

Molokai is 260 square miles--two volcanoes with deep jungled valleys, linked by a plain so expansive that its rainbows, in tropical Technicolor, can be seen from beginning to end. The world’s tallest sea cliffs soar 3,300 feet above the turquoise Pacific.

Physically, Molokai has changed little over the decades. Now, with pineapple going for good, Molokai has little choice but to change in order to survive.

“In the old days, it was a one-crop industry. When you got out of high school, that’s what you had to look forward to--working in the pineapple fields all your life,” said Louis Hao, the island’s county services administrator.

“Now, the phase-out of pineapple has brought out a lot of opportunities and possibilities. When we had pineapple, it was a paternalistic plantation mentality. We didn’t have to think.”

What Molokai is thinking about is how to get better without getting bigger, and, in Hao’s words, how to “keep Molokai Molokai.”

The job ferry was the first step. The state charters the Maui Princess for one $1,600 round-trip seven days a week. Because of a labor shortage in West Maui, hotels there were willing to pay $5 per commuter each way, while the employees chipped in another $5 to defray part of the state’s cost. How long the state will be willing to subsidize the ferry is still in question.

Now, nearly 150 Molokaians make the trip. “You can’t beat it,” said Lawrence Aki, a 32-year-old utilities steward who takes the ferry to Maui. “It provides a lot of opportunity for the people of Molokai, and at the same time, it preserves our island.”

Larry Edson, the skipper, admires his passengers’ stamina as the 116-foot vessel plows through choppy channels that churn with 10-15-foot seas on a normal day and may be slammed by 20-foot swells during a storm.

“We’ve had people sick as many as 30 days in a row, and they still go through it,” Edson said. “It’s a real gamble for employers, too, because anytime a single ship can’t make it, it could mean having to replace 40 workers at once.”

The response also has helped Molokai’s image, which suffered from the stigma of welfare families and long-term unemployed.

“There’s a stereotype of Molokaians as being anti-development, that people don’t want to work and would rather remain on welfare,” said Alberta Napoleon, a counselor at the state Employment Service office in Molokai.

‘Want to Work’

“I think the ferry proved they do want to work,” she said. “And self-esteem has really improved.”

Discussions also are under way to revive Molokai through diversified agriculture, fishing, aquaculture and tightly controlled tourism.

This isn’t the first time Molokai has had to search for new ways to survive. By the mid-19th Century, the bloom of discovery had faded, and Molokai’s poor anchorage discouraged both heavy trade and new settlers. A frog-raising venture failed, and Molokai found a new market shipping white potatoes to the California gold fields. The Depression found Molokai dabbling in bee-keeping, briefly becoming the world’s largest honey producer. Disease wiped out that industry in 1937, but by then, pineapple was booming.

There are more recent misfortunes.

A few years ago, Molokai, which has the highest electricity rates outside of Alaska, sank $8 million into a biomass project that was supposed to stabilize prices by burning fuel such as wood chips and hay instead of expensive imported oil. The plant broke down before it could go into operation, and Molokai could not afford repairs. It was recently sold to a new owner who hopes to have it running later this year.

In 1986, ranching took a heavy blow when the government slaughtered all the island’s cattle in an effort to wipe out tuberculosis. The disease was found in only 2% of the 9,400 animals, and some bitter islanders still recount how neighbors hid calves in their kitchens and how one rancher turned a prize bull loose in the forest rather than see it slaughtered.

For Walter Ritte, at least, things have been looking up lately. He found his first job in nearly a decade--as the first Molokai coordinator of the state’s Department of Business and Economic Development.

He likes to reminisce about the old days, the stormy public hearings and anti-development battles.

“We have no government of our own,” Ritte explained. “The state government’s on Oahu and the county government is on Maui.

“Our life style is so different from theirs. They got frustrated with us. They shoved the whole idea of tourism down our throats. They wanted us to do the same things they did and we’re over here saying: ‘Good grief, we don’t want to be like Maui or Oahu.’ ”

Community Plan

In 1983, Molokai adopted a community plan which extends to the year 2010, allowing for a study of self-government and limiting development to the remote west end of the island where the only resort property, Kaluakoi, now sits.

Lorna Puailihau, who rides the job ferry with her 19-year-old daughter, Julie, does not want to see Molokai mushroom, but still thinks progress is overdue.

“We’re hoping West Molokai will develop,” she said, fighting seasickness. “It should have developed 10 years ago. This is an opportunity of growth for the children of Molokai.”

“There’s no question the majority of residents want to see growth, but at a pace they can accept,” agreed businessman Ada Hodgins. “One of the sad things about Molokai is our children grow up and go away because there’s nothing viable for them to come back to.”

The Japanese real estate concern Tokyo Kosan Co., Ltd., purchased Kaluakoi last October, paying $35 million for the 4,800-acre complex of hotel, golf course and beachfront condominiums with options to buy another 6,300 acres.

Tokyo Kosan has not come forward with any master plan for Molokai, and the real test will doubtless be a community meeting planned in the near future.

Emmett Aluli, a Molokai physician active in native Hawaiian rights, said there’s some skepticism about the Japanese venture even before the blueprints are drawn.

“There are some negative comments like: ‘First they bomb it, now they buy it,’ ” Aluli said.

“This place is real nice for local tourists,” he said. “It’s the only place where someone living on Oahu can get away and hunt, fish and relax. It’s perceived as rugged, the Hawaii of the past.”

Destination Molokai, the island’s first and only organization to promote tourism, was formed five years ago, emphasizing the island’s wilderness diversions such as camping, hiking, kayaking, fishing and mule rides.

“We believe in Molokai’s rural character--all that Hawaii used to be,” said Destination Molokai publicist Connie Wright. “We’re not trying to attract people looking for lots of nightclubs and glitz and glamour. We promote tranquility and friendliness.”

The Hawaii Visitors Bureau began keeping sketchy statistics on Molokai in 1985; research has shown only a fraction--less than 5%--of the state’s 5.7 million visitors stay overnight on Molokai.

Maui, by comparison, sees nearly 2 million of those tourists, a boom reflected in Maui’s 3% unemployment rate and a recent study placing travel agents and choreographers among the fastest-growing occupations.

No longer fighting tourism at any cost, Ritte is searching for alternatives for Molokai.

Chief among his projects is the rehabilitation of the 53 fishponds dating to the 13th Century. Islanders built coral and basalt walls offshore to form a pond, with wooden gates that allowed small fish like mullet in and kept predators out. The trapped fish would grow too fat to escape and would wind up being fed to chiefs and royalty.

Overgrazed Land

Centuries later, overgrazing by ranchers sent Molokai’s distinctive red clay washing down the mountains and into the sea, where the ponds filled with silt and fell into disuse.

Now, the idea is to feed tourists, not royalty. The state is setting up a $60,000 demonstration pond, and Ritte hopes aquaculture and a small deep-sea fishing fleet being planned will provide the catch of the day to restaurants in Maui and Oahu.

Molokai also is courting investment. Ritte reported that New Zealanders are considering raising sheep and game here, and that there may even be a slaughterhouse some day.

But some things about Molokai, hinted Louis Hao, may never change.

“We don’t want any stoplights,” he said.