Midway Point

As my plane touched down in the darkness, I chuckled to myself. I have a friend who is always teasing me: “You’re going where? But why, when you could go to easy places, like London or Paris or, for that matter, New Orleans or New York?” Once again I was headed in a contrary direction: to Midway, a smattering of tiny islands and atolls at the farthest western tip of the northern Hawaiian Islands chain, a full three hours by plane from the considerable charms of Maui.

Why Midway?

My friend once remarked that I engage in traveler’s one-upmanship, trying to go to ever more unvisited places. Midway is America’s Galapagos, an isolated ecosystem that has been open to paying visitors for only one year.

My husband, who favors scaling remote mountains in China or Borneo over shopping the boutiques and emporiums of Waikiki, had a say in our vacation plans this April. He had been steadily at my side during a relaxing week of self-indulgence in Honolulu, and now his turn had come. He was ready to rough it in a more exotic location, where birds outnumber humans by about 10,000 to 1.

A U.S. naval base for more than 50 years, Midway now is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the benefit of a million wild creatures, the most distinctive of which is the Laysan albatross. If the island were abandoned, nonnative plants imported over the years would overwhelm the natural habitat and wildlife.

Sand Island, Midway’s main landform and only inhabited island, is just two miles long and one mile wide. For most of the year, it is dominated by the 430,000 pairs of albatrosses that call Midway home. Every fall they return in monogamous pairs to the exact spots where they nested the year before. It is as though there is some invisible grid laid over the island, enabling the birds--commonly called gooneys--to position their nests exactly a yard apart.

I soon learned to step carefully around the gooneys. They are calm around people but they won’t budge, and they are likely to respond to a human’s misstep with a lashing cut with their big beaks. I also became adept at guiding my bicycle around them on the roads, where they form an obstacle course of considerable challenge.

Although my bicycle was a big, clunky coaster type, it was speedy enough and efficient. Motorized vehicles such as golf carts make even slower progress on Midway because someone has to hop out continually and “sweep” the birds--that is, pick them up and move them off the road.

No one was in a hurry anyway. Life on Midway is slow and easy. Guests stay in one of two former Navy barracks, still named “Bravo” and “Charlie.” The quarters are tidy and comfortable, with televisions (reception courtesy of enormous satellite dishes still functional from Navy days) and, down the hall, washers and dryers, rusting but also still functional.

The residents of Midway number only 140 or so, and the guests never total more than 100. After a few days, everyone looks familiar. It is small-town life at its storybook best: A big crime on Midway is borrowing someone else’s bike.

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Most people on Midway--residents and visitors alike--take their meals at the old Navy galley, where cooks from Sri Lanka whip up a wide array of dishes, ranging from hamburgers and lasagna to very pungent curries. A hydroponics garden supplies excellent salad fixings, but for me this healthful eating was counterbalanced--outweighed, I’m afraid--by plate-size freshly baked cookies.

Besides the galley, there is a pricey new restaurant. There also is a little store selling snack foods, beer and sundries.

One day, I saw a hand-scrawled note on the store’s cooler: “Strong Texan is coming.” I figured it was a brand of beer. No, the Strong Texan is the island’s most eagerly awaited visitor--the ship that brings nonperishables and durable goods twice a year.

Deep-sea sportfishing can be arranged through a private outfitter, and a variety of the usual resort sports was available, as well as guided tours conducted by Fish and Wildlife. But our main daily activity was simply bicycling around the island, checking on the gooney families.

Gooneys are gorgeous birds with shiny black and white feathers. Prodigious fliers with wingspans of 6 feet, they are at home in the sky but awkward on land. (The Laysans’ albatross cousins in the South Pacific, immortalized in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” have wingspans up to twice as wide.) They earned the gooney nickname because of the comical way they land, tumbling over on legs unfamiliar with terra firma. Their most spirited activity is a three-part social ritual that involves clacking their bills vigorously, tucking their heads under their wings, then throwing back their heads to cast an Oh-ooooo call to the sky.

The gooney female lays a single egg; both parents incubate it, and both feed the hatchling through regurgitation. The chicks are covered with curly gray down that looks like the fur of an unkempt poodle, giving them an endearing Muppet-like appeal. By late spring, the chicks are full size and on their own; the parents take off for good, going out to sea until late fall when the breeding season resumes. Left alone on their nests, the chicks are, as James Aliberti of Fish and Wildlife puts it, on the “fly-or-die plan. Either they learn to fly, or they die of dehydration.” Most--about 80%--make it. Then it’s off to sea for about seven years until they are mature enough to mate.

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Midway is indeed “for the birds,” but there are more birds than just the gooneys. Once the gooneys clear out, the other birds can move to center stage. Among the favorites are the delicate white terns, often called fairy terns, which hover overhead like hummingbirds. Red-tailed tropic birds abound, as do the burrowing Bonin petrels.

On Midway’s other main island, Eastern, uninhabited and accessible only on day tours organized by Fish and Wildlife’s resident biologists, the bird population is even denser and more varied. I found the cacophony of screeches and squawks there almost unbearable.

The waters around Midway support other wildlife, including the endangered green sea turtle, spinner dolphin and rare Hawaiian monk seal. Over the course of my week on Midway, I saw all three, although when the spinner dolphins propelled themselves out of the water, their turns and rolls were all too brief, as fleeting as a falling star.

There is another aspect to Midway, the human side. Even though it has absolutely no indigenous population, the atoll has plenty of history. Most notably, the waters around Midway were the site of the most decisive single naval encounter of World War II, the Battle of Midway, June 4 to 6, 1942. Much of its wartime runway system and infrastructure, many of its buildings and even some of its recreational facilities, such as the theater and bowling alley, remain intact, converted now for tourism.

The public had been barred from Midway as long as the Navy operated there. Its location remained strategic during the Korean and Vietnam wars, in fact throughout the Cold War era. In 1996 the Fish and Wildlife Service took over, to manage Midway as a National Wildlife Refuge. In turn, Fish and Wildlife turned to Midway Phoenix Corp.--coincidentally an old Navy contractor--to develop and operate a visitor program, making Midway one of the newest eco-tourism destinations.

Some of the visitors I met were former Navy personnel who wanted to see how the old base looks today. Many of the structures have been removed to make way for wildlife habitats, but revetments, bunkers, ammo huts and gun emplacements remain, as do a historic World War II command post and seaplane hangar. There are also several pillboxes overlooking the shoreline--actually the turrets of World War I tanks that were set in the ground in case of Japanese invasion.

One of the most significant structures is the house that lodged Bob Hope, Boris Karloff and other entertainers when they played to the troops on Midway. It was also the site of an important meeting between President Richard Nixon and South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu in 1969. So that the dignitaries could make the half-mile drive from the airfield in style, 41 Lincoln Continentals were flown in for this one short meeting.

Midway’s history goes back further than its Navy days. The first permanent residents were employees of the Commercial Pacific Cable Co., which built five substantial concrete buildings here in 1903 to 1905, when Midway became the final link in the Pacific cable system. Amazingly, all five buildings still stand, although wind and weather have taken their toll. Other legacies of the Pacific Cable era are the hundreds of wild canaries I saw in flocks here and there, descended from caged birds some employees had brought along.

Biking around Sand Island, I found two grave sites, one holding the remains of five men, four of them doctors, interred between 1906 and 1950; the other for some Japanese, perhaps fishermen, who apparently were buried here in 1911 and 1916.

Unfortunately, there is nothing left of another chapter in Midway’s history. In 1935, Midway became a stopover for the Pan Am Clipper, the enormous pontoon plane that first took commercial air passengers across the Pacific. To keep its well-heeled travelers in comfort, Pan Am even built a hotel here, nicknamed the Gooneyville Hotel.

As a tribute to the Pan Am era, Midway’s new restaurant is called the Clipper House. Perched on the white sands of the swimming beach, the Clipper House is run by a young French couple. Maybe, I thought, as I explored the art of French cuisine in this rough-edged outpost of the U.S., I can convince my disapproving friend that I’m getting closer to a civilized destination.

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GUIDEBOOK

Making It to Midway

Getting there: Visits to the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge must be arranged through travel agencies or the concessionaire’s reservation service, Midway Ltd., telephone (888) 574-9000. Travel is via charter flight from Honolulu; the fare is $750 per person, round trip.

Accommodations range from $120 to $225 per night; daily meal plans are $25 to $45 per person.