New author Mehana Blaich Vaughan explores resilience, community, stewardship, responsibility, and sense of home in her book, Kaiāulu: Gathering Tides. Just as Kauaʻi’s unique and colorful rivers and streams flow into the stunning Pacific Ocean, Vaughan’s interviews with more than sixty Hawaiian elders, leaders, and fishermen and women gather together with clear and vibrant prose. Vaughan's book is a deeply personal tribute to a community based not on ownership, but reciprocity, responsibility, and caring for the places that shape and sustain us. Below she shares an example of the resilience of this community – Kaiāulu – in the face of natural disaster.
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It is one am and I am awakened from sleep by rain so hard it feels like our roof will cave in. It has been raining all day, for a month really off and on, here in Haleleʻa, on the north shore of Kauaʻi. But this rain is different, this rain thunders. Minutes later my husband’s radio starts going off. He is a fire fighter on our small island and the radio is relaying the 911 calls from nearby Hanalei valley. Hanalei is known for its long crescent beach, lined by vacation rentals, consistently rated one of the best beaches to vacation on in the world. The flatlands behind the sand are cut by two rivers, feeding into the wetlands behind the town. Tonight the rivers are lunging out of their banks, the increasingly frantic calls coming from near by the usually placid Waiʻoli stream. “The water is two feet from our door and rising quickly. What do we do?” We hear the firemen trying to respond, radioing in that they’ll need to evacuate the shelter at the local elementary school as it is flooding too, but they can’t get there because the highway is under ten feet of water. I am up and texting friends in low lying areas to see if they are alright. They are awake and watching the waters approach, grateful for our concern. Then our cellphones go blank. The next afternoon thunder and lightning lash the island bringing more flooding. The rivers rage café au lait, scenic waterfalls thundering under the roadways, tiny rivulets swelling to tear homes from their foundations. Landslides close the highway in six separate locations cutting off each valley, each community one from the other.
Now, two weeks later the two-lane highway along our coast is just slowly opening to a shuttle operating twice a day for residents. Over 600 tourists were boated and helicoptered out of their vacation rentals in these isolated communities in the days after the floods. Residents are now slowly emerging from their valleys for the first time, and official Red Cross or FEMA assessments are only just beginning to reach them.
But the community has not been waiting. Within days of the flood boats mobilized to run food, water, and supplies down the coast to cut off areas. Off duty firemen, the only emergency responders in some areas, worked four days straight to be sure people were alright. Neighbors helped one another to muck out houses, and haul away wet mattresses, couches and other wreckage. Community members with excavators and bobcats went to work clearing mud as high as the power lines, to make it possible within four days, for state crews to access the roads.
When asked how her family survived the most recent hurricane on Kauaʻi, Aunt Anabelle Pa Kam responded:
“I guess the way we grew up, because we never had money, money was nothing to us. You know, everything was hand-me-down. And I was happy to have the hand-me-downs. We didn’t need anything new. We learned survival. That’s how, when [Hurricane] Iniki came, we could live. We didn’t need anything. We could live off the land. And that’s what I teach my children and my grandchildren, how to live off the land” (Anabelle Pa Kam 2015).
This is the community, our Kaiāulu, that is the focus of this book. This excerpt, describing how the people of our area got through past tidal waves and hurricanes, resonates with everyday life for many in Haleleʻa now.
I hope that readers will enjoy this book, and that it will help us all to consider how we build resilience, connections between neighbors, and responsibility to one another, and to the places we call home in our changing world today.