[ SUNDAY TRAVEL ]
At our first meeting, I asked Ahi Logan to help me understand Margaret Na'ai's haupia recipe, which ran here last week. Generous from the start, he threw in his recipe for kulolo. Ahi then carefully explained the art -- complete with diagrams -- of cooking by imu. Hawaiian life,
legacy come full circle
in PunaluuBy Sweet William
Special to the Star-Bulletin"Come visit," he growled, as he disappeared into his office, his 5XL aloha shirt trailing him like a sail.
I moved around Punaluu. I learned from Godfrey Ching of the long history of Punaluu's Chinese. One evening I met with Creighton and Kathy Mattoon and Sam Rowland about Punaluu's nonprofit, "Keep the Country, Country," the community's environmentally correct effort to remain rural.
A respectable amount of time having lapsed, I show up at Ahi's house one evening, around sunset. You can't really understand how people live until you get inside their homes.
White-haired and 70 years young, he had invited me to try some shrimp at his nearby restaurant. It hasn't been easy for Ahi growing up in the 20th century but it has never been hard, something about innovative genes.
His father, Jubilee Maiola Logan, was one of the founders of Laie's Hukilau, a monthly luau-fishing-entertainment-crafts fair, and forerunner of the Polynesian Cultural Center. In 1985, he came up with the idea of selling noncommercial size shrimp. When his restaurant in Kahuku burned down in the late 1990s, he moved to an old Chinese homestead in Punaluu where an enormous 1860s Oriental banyan tree shades Ahi's logo, a 1920s cane truck.
He leases land from Kamehameha Schools with an unobstructed view of the sea. Breezes blow through the house rhapsodically. It's never too hot in Punaluu; palm fronds do most of the talking.
Ahi sits opposite me at a table in the center of a cavernous room 20 feet wide and 30 feet long. Bay windows and louvered windows reveal the ocean's brilliant aquamarine, its frothy reef in the distance.
When I ask Ahi about Windward fishponds, it's like opening a vault of Hawaiiana. "Before 1848, the Konohiki was the king's steward of the land; for each ahupuaa, there was a headman. The Haaheo family is still responsible for Kahana Bay."
The room is dark except for a muted television blinking in the corner. "A hukilau," Ahi explains, "is the communal pulling of the nets, followed by a division of the fish.
"Now that you've been to Waianae, you'll find the myth about the anae holoholo interesting. Laie marries a gal from Waianae. His wife misses the mullet. Her father, an alii of great spiritual mana (power) travels around the island, offering a pohaku every place he stops: Waikiki, Lighthouse, Kaneohe, Kahana, Waiono, Laie. Wherever he stopped, the mullet congregated and to this day that is the spawning run of the waianae (water mullet).
Where's Waiono? I sheepishly ask?
Ahi smiles. "Next door to Ching's Market. Best water, waiono. Comes out of Green Valley. Punaluu means 'spring bubbling up.' Great taro country."
Ahi's son, Bula, enters. A tall, 6-foot-2 Hawaiian with long, black, shoulder-length hair. Although the room is dark, the sun long gone, within a minute Bula asks me, "You have something wrong with your shoulder?"
How could he tell that a low-grade infection of a nerve in my jaw from a long-ago dental extraction had suddenly flared up to such a degree I had ordered a dose of antibiotics, which I rarely use? I, alone, knew the pain went down my neck into my right shoulder, or so I thought.
Bula sits me on a tall stool and starts massaging my right shoulder, arm, hand, my neck and head. After a vigorous 20-minute treatment, part accupressure, part massage, Bula hands me a container of his homemade Noni.
"Take it three times a day before meals, swish it around your mouth. Looks like you have an infected nerve, goes down your neck."
The large room, I learn in the morning, is by day a traditional Hawaiian Healing Center. Bula is a native practitioner, his path, hoolomilomi.
As we walk to Ahi's Restaurant, I ask my cultural ambassador why he walks barefoot. "It's for good health, a mini-massage to all those nerve endings," he says with a chuckle. "Bula is very helpful. His example has me in the ocean, swimming to Kahana Bay and back, every morning. I'm now 3XL," he boasts.
Bula meets me at Aloha Tower. Among other things, he explains that Emerson's narrow interpretation of Hawaiian words misinterpreted the depth and spirituality of Hawaiian culture. "Every Hawaiian word has three meanings: literal, implied, and the hidden, spiritual meaning. Viewing only one aspect, you can miss the spiritual significance of a particular human act."
Bula is a busy man. Two days a week he gives hoolomilomi treatments to seizure victims on Maui. He leaves next for a three-week tour of Japan -- workshops and treatments in Toyko, Osaka and Nagoya. Interest in Hawaiian healing is growing from Canada to the continent. Within a week, Noni has a new convert; disagreeable taste or not, my nerve infection is on the run.
Ahi says he can recite 14 generations of his family lineage; I can account for only four. He even traces his grandfather Hamana Kalili's hazel eyes to the female survivor of a European shipwreck off South Point during the reign of King Alapaunui (1760-1765).
Ahi Logan is an oral tradition man, steeped in genealogy, history and legend. As Herb Kawainui Kane explains in his book "Ancient Hawaii" (Kawainui Press): "Words transmit mana as knowledge." Ahi and his son Bula are sharing their knowledge with non-Hawaiians. I'm glad they are; it's such an obvious extension of the aloha spirit.
Ahi's family -- and others I've met on my interisland tour of 2001 -- are part of a dynamic Hawaiian renaissance that began as an unconscious response to statehood and continues to blossom into a garden of opportunities. This renewal is the reason the empty green valleys of Hawaii are so full of promise.
Sweet William is a paradise writer and Eden experimenter.