Christmas comes to Kalaupapa in summer
By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Transportation Writer
Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser
KALAUPAPA, Moloka'i —Samuel Kaauwai was waiting for his new La-Z-Boy lounger. Jerry Guieb needed a stove to replace the one he has cooked on for 13 years. Gloria Marks was expecting almost 500 cases of beer, enough to keep her new bar supplied for a year.
Irene Cecconi of Kaua'i kisses Clarence Naia at his home in Kalaupapa on Barge Day.
Welcome to Barge Day 2003 in Kalaupapa.
It's the one day of the year when the patients and workers in this former Hansen's disease colony, still Hawai'i's most isolated community, establish a cargo lifeline to the world. It's their only opportunity to receive bulky dry goods, building supplies, automobiles or a new refrigerator affordably.
"If it doesn't come off the barge, mostly it doesn't come," said Ku'ulei Bell, who has served for 20 years as postmistress for the community, which has 29 full-time resident patients and 72 workers.
Although residents now come and go freely and receive most things by air cargo, barge day marks a time in living memory when patients with Hansen's disease — once known as leprosy — were isolated from the world, children torn from their parents and sent to live on the wind-swept peninsula. Almost 8,000 patients died here between 1866 and 1969, when patients ceased to be confined.
Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser
Today, Barge Day is a cross between Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday — community celebration, field day and spectator sport — where nearly everyone gathers on the steps of the settlement's store to see who's getting what.
Kathy Hancock of Kaunakakai hugs Albert Pu of Kalaupapa, chief of maintenance for the National Park Service, in front of the barge.
It's the only day of the year that the Rev. Lon Rycraft of the Kana'ana Hou-Siloama United Church of Christ can describe as frenetic.
"Everybody is checking it out," Kehau Kaiama said. "They sit there ask, 'Whose car is that?' or 'Who does that belong to?' "
This year's barge, which arrived from Honolulu on Saturday, was chock-a-block full of lumber, gravel, fencing, cars, toilet paper, household goods, hospital beds, water heaters, museum cabinets, refrigerators, roofing supplies and most other things residents elsewhere take for granted. Kalaupapa is accessible by small plane, but cut off from the rest of the island by soaring cliffs that can be crossed only by foot or mule.
"In Kalaupapa, you can't just run down to Home Depot when something breaks," said Mike McCarten, the Health Department's administrator in Kalaupapa.
Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser
The barge carried 30,000 gallons of gasoline, enough to keep all the cars running for a year, and 6,000 gallons of diesel fuel for the trucks. There were hundreds of cases of Spam, Vienna sausage, mayonnaise, corned beef hash and soy sauce. This year's supply of rice totaled 6,000 pounds, said Gena Sasada, who runs the Kalaupapa Store.
Irene Cecconi of Wailua Homesteads, Kaua'i, watches the arrival of the barge from Honolulu, an event that brings out nearly all residents to the front steps of the Kalaupapa store.
By 6:30 a.m., the town's main street, Damien Road, was closed to traffic and several dozen people were lined up on a hill overlooking the pier, watching as the Young Brothers barge, guided by two tugboats, appeared below the 3,000-foot-high cliffs that once defined the community's isolation.
Bringing goods into Kalaupapa is by far the most challenging job Hawai'i barge crews face all year, said Glenn Hong, president of Young Brothers, which has been handling the job for years.
"It's the most difficult pier to access in the whole state," Hong said. "It's only possible to get in here three or four months out of the year, when the conditions are just right. If there's any surge at all, it all becomes very iffy."
Each year, the company flies in six experienced stevedores from Kaunakakai and a port manager from Maui to handle the unloading on a portable ramp big enough for one large forklift to cross.
The barge is carefully packed in Honolulu to expedite the unloading. It has to leave again before the tide runs out.
Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser
First off the boat are four gasoline tanker trucks, which will spend the morning dropping off their load at the only gas station.
From left, resident Ku'ulei Bell, Susan Dancil of Maui, and residents Pauline Chow, Nellie McCarthy and Lucy Whiting wait at the store.
The tankers are a welcome change from the old days, when all gasoline came on 55-gallon drums that had to be rolled through town, said Albert Pu, the National Park Service's first Kalaupapa employee 21 years ago.
Because the gas is purchased once a year in Honolulu, the price stays the same for the next 12 months. By state law, all goods for the settlement have to be sold at Honolulu wholesale prices, McCarten said.
Next up are the construction supplies — and there are plenty, because the National Park Service plans a major project in the fall. More than two dozen aging buildings will be stabilized and repaired. There are also plans to build a museum behind the meeting hall.
Because there is no holding area on the dock, local workers take the goods off the ship and transport them directly to the buyer, whether it's a government office or home.
Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser
Next come the cars, carefully watched by everybody in town. This year's hit was a new passenger van for Richard Marks, who runs the only tour operation. It was impressive, but nothing to rival last year's sensation, a yellow Mazda Miata convertible brought in by care facility nurse Kathy Koblas.
A cross between Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday, the annual visit of the barge is marked prominently on a Kalaupapa calendar.
"It was probably the first convertible we ever had here," McCarten said. "Everybody wanted to have their picture taken with it."
Among the last things to come off are individual items, including Guieb's industrial-strength stove and Kaauwai's La-Z-Boy.
"He's been waiting all year for it," said Kaauwai's son, Earl.
Guieb, too, has been anxious in the months leading up to barge day. He ordered the stove from the Mainland months ago to put in the food service kitchen run by the Health Department. He has been tracking its progress since March, but says there's no guarantee it will arrive on time or in the right place.
Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser
During a break in the unloading, nearly everybody in town joins a community lunch on the steps of the store, where the menu includes chili and rice, Polish sausage, macaroni salad and chocolate cake. The lunch, a thank-you for workers unloading the barge, is the only time when so many people in Kalaupapa get to eat together.
A truck was among the items being delivered to Kalaupapa, along with refrigerators, building materials, a year's worth of gasoline, Spam, toilet paper, rice and other supplies most in Hawai'i simply buy at a store.
Afterward, much of the crowd heads home, but the work continues. Gloria Marks stays to wait for the beer and wine she ordered for the only bar, now known as Fuesaina's. A couple of friends worry that a pallet of Heineken has been sitting in the sun too long and will spoil, an idea almost too tragic to imagine.
When the last goods are taken off in midafternoon, there's the outgoing stuff still to be loaded. It's another subtle reminder of how times have changed since the last patients were quarantined here in the 1960s. Now, people and commerce flow both ways.
It's mostly trash headed to a recycling center in Honolulu: broken fencing, bicycle parts, lawn mowers, rusted washers and dryers, bed springs, water fountains and heaters, engine parts and about a dozen junk cars and trucks.
There's old furniture being shipped to relatives, household goods from workers heading home after living in Kalaupapa for years and a few running vehicles being sent for servicing, hopefully to be finished in time to be sent back on a special Park Service-chartered barge in September, the first time in nearly a decade there will be two barges in one summer.
This year, for the first time, the Park Service took over administration of the $60,000 barge operation from the state Health Department, another sign of change.
With the youngest Hansen's disease patients in their 60s and the average age reaching 74, there's increasing concern among the survivors about what will happen when the last patient dies and the Park Service assumes full responsibility for preserving the settlement and telling its painful and peaceful story to future generations.
"We don't want it to change," Bell said. "We want it to be remembered always as it is."
For now, at least, Barge Day will serve to remind people of how it was — and still is.
