Betty Fullard-Leo
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"This Molokai trail leads to a never-never-again land, lest we forget."
Buzz SPROAT HAD THE LOOK OF A REAL MULE SINNER: Grizzled gray whiskers, weather-beaten leather chaps. He smiled at his favorite mule more than he smiled at me.
"Relax," he said, blurred pidgin unmistakably marking local guy. "Dis mule so sure-foot you can take notes when' the trail to Kalaupapa. Lots a time, I like carve racing cars wen we go down the trail."
Perched on Black Jack's broad back five feet up in the air, I looked down the cliff side, trying to count the 26 swtichbacks along the narrow path clinging to the hillside like a skinny stuck on a curtain of green velvet. Kalaupapa lay 1,664 feet below, a five-square-mile peninsula, splendid in its windswept isolation, dappled greens against the brilliant blue of the ocean.
Were it not for Buzzy Sproat, the quiet colony that still 63 former victims of leprosy (euphemistically called Hansen's disease), would have been nearly as inaccessible as it was in Damien's day-except for the planes that occasionally fly down from Moloka'i's tiny airport topside. Hardier souls than I do hike down, and locals still talk about the Swede who ran three-and-one-eighth-mile trail in 38 minutes.
The mule ride to Kalaupapa was always Moloka'i's most thrilling adventure, so when the former owner closed it in the early 1990s, a trip o the "Friendly Isle" seemed to have lost some of its zing.
Sproat, who shod and generally took care of the mules, ended up with them. He comes by his love for the recalcitrant animals naturally, he says.
"My dad and my grandfather were always hors'n around mules," Sproat says. "Granddad used mules to put the (irrigation) ditch in the Kohala mountains (a historic feat of engineering on the Big island) in 1905."
In 1994-1995, the National Parks system hired Sproat and a few others to rebuild the trail to Kalaupapa-"It was a lot rougher, rockier before," Sproat insists. When the peninsula was ready to be reopened to visitors, he went to Roy Horner, a Moloka'i businessman for financial advice. The two became partners, and the mule ride was back in business under their management in 1995, after a two-year closure. It continues to be Moloka'i's most moving experience-literally and figuratively.
We were a pack of about fifteen descending the trail, a guide at the head and one at the tail. The mules plodded along at their own speed, never once crushing our legs against the inside cliff or stumbling over the edge even at the tightest, most precarious of switchbacks. Within half an hour, my legs felt locked into position from the constant instinctive braking, and by the time we hit level land, most of us midlife adventurers had spaghetti limbs when we tried to stand.
Jimmy Brede, our guide and a patient-resident for 54 years who came to Kalaupapa when he was fourteen, ushered us aboard an old school bus before we had time to wonder how we could possibly survive the ride up the cliff again.
The peninsula is flat with only a few semipaved roads wending
through kiawe, pandanus, and scaviola, giving way here and there
to Vistas of blue sea and frothing white surf. We stopped at monuments
to Father Damien, the famous Belgian priest who cared for the
lepers until he caught the disease himself and died, and Mother
Marianne Cope, a Franciscan nun who arrived at Kalaupapa the Year
before Damien died.
Father Daniien, the Reverend Damien de Veuster, was assigned at
his own request to tend the
outcast lepers of Molokai'i in 1873. By the time he arrived, 797
lepers had been sent to Kalaupapa; almost half of them had died.
The Board of Health had chosen Kalaupapa as a leper colony because
it was a natural prison surrounded by cliffs and sea.
In the beginning, Damien took care to protect himself. One of his first distressing visits was to see a young girl. He found that worms were eating away one side of her body. "Many times," he wrote, "I have been obliged not only to close my nostrils but to remain outside to breathe fresh air. To counteract the bad smell, I got myself accustomed to the use of (pipe) tobacco."
In December 1884, he was soaking his feet in some hot water, but noticed he had no sense of heat or pain. After eleven years of working and caring for his flock, teaching them to farm, to sing, to play instruments, building churches and tending the stricken, Damien had caught the disease. He died on April 15, 1 899 was laid to rest under a pandanus tree in the little cemetery by St. Philomena Church, where he had preached so many times.
In 1936 his remains were exhumed and sent to his birthplace in Belgium. In 1995, he was beatified by Pope John Paul II and declared "blessed," the second step toward sainthood.
Guide Jimmy Brede pointed out holes in the floor of St. Philomena Church. "At Father Damien's first Mass," he said, "patients stood outside listening, because they were so ashamed. They had no control of saliva running from their mouth, because some were partially paralyzed, and they had to walk outside to spit. So Damien had holes put in the floor for people's comfort. The second Sunday, Father Damien had a pile of 'ape leaves. He gave one to each person. They folded the leaf like a funnel and stuck it in the hole. So as not to disturb the Mass with going in and out, they could spit into the tube."
You could have heard a pin drop in the church, where beautiful pastel scenes and statues of religious figures decorated the walls. Through the window, the cross on Father Damien's grave was visible, hung with a fresh plumeria lei. Beyond, the knife-edge cliffs of Moloka'i and the tiny islands of Mökapu and 'Okala jutted from the sea in lonely isolation.
The stories of the elderly people who have chosen to live out
their days at Kalaupapa pull at the heartstrings nearly as much
as the tales of Father Damien. "I landed at the harbor May
15, 1942, when I was fourteen," Brede reminisced. There were
fathers and mothers and 33 kids, all strangers, all with leprosy.
We were so afraid of what we saw. We cried our hearts out. It
took us time to be accustomed to the sight of the afflicted, but
they wanted to share their love.
Babies that were born on Kalaupapa were taken to Honolulu and
hanai 'd (adopted). When we came, the patients went crazy over
my six-year-old brother, but I told them, 'You take him, you got
to take me' so we could stay together.
"In 1946 we became human guinea pigs when doctors discovered sulfur drugs. They gave us 36 pills a day. Many died from the overdoses, but they felt they would die anyway.
"I married my wife here, and after we were cured, we had a son and a daughter. We were afraid. There was no guarantee, so our kids were raised by their grandparents on O'ahu. When they were infants, we didn't dare touch them."
Today Brede's children are success stories. His daughter graduated with a master's degree in sociology; and his son, whose wife recently had their first baby, lives in Utah. The elder Bredes, many other former patients with telltale deformities from the Cl disease, choose to stay at Kalaupapa.
Quietly, we boarded the old yellow school bus, disembarked again at what is perhaps the most beautiful scenic spot Moloka'i, Küka'iwa'a Point, a promontory looking across the ocean to those steep, jagged cliffs that made Kalaupapa such a secure prison. We were a somber, reflective group of mule riders.
By the time Brede dropped us off at Kalaupapa's arts and crafts gallery and museum, the mood had lightened. Literature and crafts made by residents--paintings of the peninsula, Christmas ornaments made of local materials, a monkey pod lamp, coconut shell vases--were for sale. The little museum's displays were poignant--spoons and forks with modified looped handles so deformed hands could hold them, historic photos of patients, nuns, and Father Daniien.
The settlement is little more than a crossroads that ends at the harbor. There's a fire station, but there are few fires. There's a police station, but there's no crime. There is no bank, but it's not problem on a peninsula where people do not own their homes and most exist on a ration of five pounds of beef and $45 a week. The biggest excitement of the year is not Christmas, but the day the barge arrives from Honolulu with all the really big things that peopie have ordered. Brede said, "Everyone comes even if they have crawl, or hobble on crutches. They want to see who gets a new car or new furniture."
Ironically, our ride up the cliff didn't seem to produce nearly much pain as it had on the way down. We rode silently onto the plateau topside, survivors of a trip into the past that left us awed, inspired, and maybe a little more compassionate to our fellow man
"They were strangers to each other, collected by common calamity, disfigured, mortally sick, banished without sin from home and friends. Few would understand the principle on which they were thus forfeited in all that makes life dear; many must have conceived their ostracism to be grounded in malevolent caprice; all came with sorrow at heart, many with despair and rage. In the chronicle of man there is perhaps no more melancholy landing than this ...."
-Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels in Hawaii