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99 C H A P T E R 7 Zapped I seen this thing break up families. I let the people know: I’m not a bad person—I just got caught up. And at the wrong time in the wrong place when you’re having problems, you meet up with the wrong person, and anybody, in any high achievement can get onto this drug. It’s not for low-class, no-class, or just Hawaiians. This thing will hit you. In your hospitals, in your schools. It could be the people in your doctor’s office. Everywhere. —Lori Ryder of ‘Okana Road, Kahalu‘u, August 7, 2006 At Percy’s funeral I’d found myself wondering how it could have happened in Kahalu‘u, of all places. How could Percy have been killed in Kahalu‘u, so close to that valley of his where people still grew their own food, where so much was still done as it had been done since his grandfather ’s day? When I learned more about how the community had been able to band together and fight off suburban development, and then stand up to a tsunami of Japanese resort developers, it came to make even less sense. The place seemed to have been on a permanent neighborhood watch since before Percy was born. How could ice have taken hold the way it had in such a place? “This was supposed to be like Hawai‘i Kai,” a Waiāhole-Waikāne Community Association member named Bernie Punuciel told me at a 2007 Waiāhole Beach Park cleanup. About thirty of us were cutting grass and whacking weeds in the twenty-acre field fronting the two valleys, a collection of retired folks fighting the good fight along with subsistence farmers who traded their taro with other farmers for vegetables. After thanking me profusely for simply showing up, one of the farmers had handed me a 100 Chapter 7 gas-powered weed whacker and handful of nylon replacement lines. Citing an aversion to using chemical herbicides, he’d instructed me to search for two types of troublesome weeds and grind them to bare ground. During a water break I listened to Bernie’s stories of the association’s history, all the while looking around at the deep green valleys and the mountains beyond. And though I’d driven past the area hundreds of times over the years, for the first time I could picture the postcard views as someone like Tom Enomoto might: a golf course over here, a subdivision up that ridge over there, a strip mall and gas station right here next to the highway. And the bay may have been a bit muddy from stream runoff, but it was as peaceful as a lake. “The marina was supposed to go right there,” Bernie told me, pointing just up the coast. Standing where I was less than thirty minutes from the city center, the green untouched emptiness of the valleys suddenly struck me as a kind of miracle. I walked out across the big field, lowering the weed whacker, gunning it, grinding a weed into a cloud of dust, and moving on. There were no showers or restrooms, or even a sign designating the park, and the task of maintaining the place—keeping the cane grass near the ocean’s edge cut short so “druggies” couldn’t congregate there, towing the occasional abandoned car from the jungle off to the right, and even cutting the huge field’s grass—had fallen to the community association. They hung a sign beside the highway every month or so to announce a “cleanup,” and let the hard workday evolve into a potluck party under the big tent someone had put up the day before. The buzz of the weed whacker put me into a rhythm, my mind wandering as I worked up a sweat under the morning sun. I felt like I was doing something, even if it was only one weed at a time. The idea was for the surrounding grass to move into the bare spot left by the weed whacker; even though the weed would probably grow back, if you stuck to it for a few months the grass would eventually take over. But when I stopped and looked back over the vast field of grass now dotted unevenly with manhole-cover-sized patches of brown dirt, hundreds of dark green clusters of weeds still left to grind, the image came into clear...

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