Something to Crow About on Maui

A woman who lives down the road from Pamela Hayes and her mother had a rooster she kept in her washing machine. Pamela discovered the rooster’s hardship post one day when she was walking down the road near her house, a couple of miles from Wailea on Maui.

It was just at dusk when the lilac shadows were beginning to tint the folds of the hills behind the road. Pamela could hear the affronted rooster squawking and looked into the side porch of the woman’s house just in time to see her stuff the poor rooster into the washing machine. For a terrible moment, Pamela thought the woman was going to give the rooster a Ninja ride in the machine, but the woman put the top down on the washer and walked away.

The next day Pamela walked back and saw the same insulting thing happen to this dignified rooster. Pamela and her mother discussed the situation and decided to talk to the woman. The woman said she was going to get a hen to keep him company and build a nice pen for both of them.

It never happened. At least it didn’t happen for three weeks. Every night at dusk, the rooster went into the washing machine and Pamela and her mother seethed. They are both animal lovers and resented the treatment of the rooster who was fast becoming crestfallen, literally. His comb drooped. He slumped around the yard all day and his crow had diminished to a weak mouse-like squeak. Pam and her mother were convinced that the woman’s only plan for the rooster was to pop him in a stew kettle of dumplings.

Pamela hit upon a plan. She waited until the woman left for town to do some shopping and went to the woman’s house. The rooster was gimping around the yard, shoulders down, tail feathers dragging in the dust, the light gone from his formerly piercing eyes. Three weeks in the washing machine had taken a great deal out of him. Even if the woman had bought him a hen for company, they probably would never have been more than good friends.

It was no trouble for Pam to catch him. She just picked him up by his fallen arches and put him in a box. And then came her wonderful solution. She took him five miles up the road to a large poultry farm and opened the gate and tossed him in. Then she ran for her car and never looked back. She has been to see him several times but has never been able to pick him out from his fellows. All of the roosters look arrogant, well-fed, scarlet-combed and well-adjusted.

The woman may suspect, but she has never said a word to Pam or her mother, and to this day no one has asked to use her washing machine.

I met Pamela Hayes and heard this story on the Maui Artists Tour, a highly successful project put together by two bright women named Judy Ivec and Barbara Glassman. First, they published a book called “Maui Art and Creative People,” picturing the work of about 100 Maui artists and telling a little about each one. There are artists who work in every medium--watercolor, oil, acrylic, fabric, metal, woods--all beautiful, original, enriching.

The step after their book was the Artist Tour. The women pick up their guests and drive them through beautiful Maui, calling on artists and seeing them in their natural habitats--studios.

I told Judy I was an unreconstructed red-barn lover with an overlay of Impressionism, leaning toward Pissarro, Gauguin, Van Gogh and anything by Dufy.

Pamela Hayes’ house was our first stop. Her painting called “Molly and the Laundry” is on the front of this year’s Maui Artists book. It’s a pure joy of a painting of a tiger-striped cat napping on a windowsill, behind it a tree loaded with pink and blush mangoes and three clotheslines full of bright T-shirts. Molly had obligingly napped on the same windowsill for three days.

Pam served us coffee and a delicious coffee cake she made and gave me the recipe.

Pamela Hayes studied a year in Florence and had a year of graduate study at the Royal College of Art in London. First? She’s a Valley Girl who grew up here in Southern California.

Our next visit was to Curtis Wilson Cost’s marvelous hillside house where we met his wife, Jill, his small daughter, blue-eyed Julia and a large, amiable dog and a small noisy one who reminded me of the vocal Peaches.

Cost paints with acrylics and is thinking of going to oils. His paintings have the feeling of a green-grass fragrance and of the soft air of Kula country on the slopes of a huge volcano. He paints water towers, rusting tin-roofed ranch buildings, pasture land, rivers, creeks, the ocean, trees. Everything he does has “a sense of peace and a sense of life,” to use his words. He has a painting called “Lavender Rain” of a flowering tree leaning over a house of weathered siding. I could feel the newly wet grass in the meadow between my toes. A friend of mine who has bought some property near the Costs’ home has purchased two of his paintings. If I can’t have them, I’m glad he has. He’s a good friend.

Curt has an electronic piano with a long name I have forgotten and a small keyboard he can program for drum accents. It looked like rare good fun for an artist taking a break.

I told Curtis some of his lush green hillsides reminded me of the Carmel Valley after a nice, wet spring, maybe up by Tassajara. And I told him his name was familiar. He told me his father was the artist James Peter Cost whose paintings I used to enjoy in his Carmel studio. Well, sure.