If Kauai were a woman...

She'd always be my childhood home

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A red and white rooster with iridescent black tail feathers strutted down the center of a street on the north shore of Kauai. Every few feet, he inflated his chest, threw back his head, and emitted an earsplitting crow. He was unquestionably the king of this little residential road, and he wanted everyone to know it.

Above him, clouds poufy as silk sails trimmed with the gold of dawn floated along at approximately five knots. That wind was just enough to rustle the fronds of the coconut palms lining the route, enhancing the songs of turtledoves and cardinals, the chatter of mynahs commenting on the start of a new day, and of course the vigorous bellowing of the rooster.

The chickens on Kauai have become a meme; everywhere you look, these descendants of the “canoe crops” brought to the islands by the Polynesians roam and scratch and—yes indeed—crow.

Why aren’t chickens that kind of presence on the other islands?

In a nutshell, there are no mongooses on Kauai. The mongoose was brought over in the 1800s from India to try to control rats in the sugarcane fields, an experiment gone wrong in that the nocturnal rats were not the food that the diurnal mongooses fed upon.

That food is…BIRDS.

On Maui, Oahu and the Big Island, where mongooses flourish, the “native jungle fowl” chicken populations are under control—but other birds, too, are under attack by these slinky little brown hunters.

Meanwhile, protecting their wildlife—and chickens! Kauai vigilantly traps and removes every mongoose they can catch. Thus birds thrive on the oldest, most remote island of the main Hawaiian chain.

But I digress.

This particular morning, the sun popped up all at once as I looked on. Its light hit the cloud-topped triptych of Namolokama, Hi’imanu and Mamaloa, the three green, rain-sculpted mountains that overlook Hanalei Bay. From my perch on a deck on the second story of the AirBnB that featured an Asian-styled, ceramic-glazed roof, I gazed around a courtyard enhanced with a keyhole-shaped plunge pool and ornamental plantings of palms, staghorn fern, and pots of impatiens in lurid orange and fuschia. Zebra finches darted around, alternating with large native dragonflies.

Everything, everywhere, was lush and saturated and I hadn’t even gone to the beach yet on this, Day Eleven of my book research trip to Kauai.

This island is where I grew up on in the 1970’s as documented in Freckled: a Memoir of Growing up Wild in Hawaii. Both a trip down memory lane and book research for Passages, my third memoir, I originally faced this journey with excitement, and apprehension, which I explored in this essay.

We have a saying in Hawaii: “the island decides.” People fall in love with Hawaii all the time and think they’ll make a life in the islands; but the ‘aina itself decides who to keep. I have experienced being taken in and supported, and have also been kicked out, broken and broke. What would Kauai do with me this time?