| THE VALLEY HOUSE |
Stevan Orescan
Hawaii is one of those places that’s half way there; Halfway to Asia, half way to mainland
America, half way to the Buddha and halfway to Jesus. It’s a place for fun in the sun, for easy
living, for mangoes, papayas and good pot, a place for the lyric poet, a place for the man of the
sea. It is androgynous, terribly masculine and at the same time tenderly feminine with blessings of
both simplicity and wisdom. And beauty is everywhere; in the flowers, the waving palms, the
colorful clothing, the sunsets, the turquoise sea, the smooth blending of the races. It is a paradise on
earth.
A Bodhisattva is a person just on the edge of enlightenment; his being is the essence of perfection
and in Asia this personage is represented in both male and female form, as Kwan Yin in China, and
in Japan as Kwannon, the Madonna of the East, and as Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of
compassion, in Nepal and Tibet. Together they are the Bodhisattva of boundless love that dwells in
the heart of all sentient beings and in India they are united as Ardhanarishvara, Shiva and his
consort Shakti, sharing a single androgynous body, the masculine yang, the feminine yin.
If nirvana means the absence of desire, hostility and delusion then surely the gods of earthly
paradise must live in Hawaii, if they live anywhere at all, for there the soul is pacified beyond all
measure, and the mind lives in quiet repose from the selfish concerns of a suffering ego.
Those were the thoughts on my mind as my journey took me to the garden island of Kauai, the
most beautiful of all in the Hawaiian archipelago.
I had been invited to take part in an experimental, therapeutic, alternative community that was
being formed on Kauai under the auspices of The Institute For Creative Living, the brainchild of a
mainland psychiatrist and one time mentor and colleague who was now a part of the State of
Hawaii’s psychiatric establishment. A brilliant and flamboyant black man, Doctor Fred was
innovative, controversial, contentious and entertaining with a compelling and charismatic
personality. Artist, teacher, bon vivant, lover of beautiful woman, Fred always had his finger in
some new creative pie and this latest project, one that had been kicking around in the back of his
prodigious skull for some time, was ready for birthing as the pieces and people needed for it’s
creation came together.
The Spaulding Estate, an old sugar baron’s plantation, circa 1940, consisted of a very large
dilapidated mansion with a dozen smaller, equally ramshackle, out buildings, and a large concrete
floored structure that could accommodate a couple of hundred people as a meeting place. It had an
Olympic size swimming pool containing green slime, fish and various other forms of unidentified
creepy-crawlies that attested to it’s lack of upkeep since the second world war, as well as an acre
or so of cultivated string beans being tended by an ageing Japanese caretaker. All of this was
situated on eighty lush green acres of forest, lichee orchards, caves, streams, water falls and
farmable land about ten miles from the small village of Kapa’a. This was the proposed site of our
project. It was available and affordable at $1000 per month. It had at one time been used as a
gambling casino and during the war as a brothel that serviced the many men in uniform that passed
through the islands but it had been vacant since then and it’s owners were anxious to clean it up,
and turn it once again into a paying proposition.
Taylor Camp, on the island of Maui, was a hodge-podge of tree houses, sand castles, shacks
and tents, a sprawling hippie camp on a beachfront property owned by a famous movie star’s
brother. It was a beautiful spot and over the years had developed into a transient and artistic
community of no small merit. To the state of Hawaii it was an eyesore, a health hazard, a den of
iniquity that attracted drugs, runaways, welfare scammers and borderline crazies and for years there
had been ongoing attempts to close it down. But it was private property and was being occupied
with the permission of the owner who apparently had a soft spot for the alternative and artistic
endeavours of it’s residents. The handwriting was on the wall though and the state, with stubborn
and plodding patience, was finally closing in, and a date had been set for its demise. The people
living there were on the lookout for another place to dig into, and soon the word spread that a new
scene was happening on the island Kauai.
A meeting had been called for a Sunday at his home on the grounds of the state hospital where
Doctor Fred was the chief of the psychiatric department. About seventy people showed up; Taylor
camp folks, locals interested in the project, social workers and nurses and friends and family. A
famous Honolulu newscaster, fund raiser and publicist flew in with his family, and a round of
speechifying with questions and answers was soon under way. The main questions were what was
our purpose, what was our master plan and where was the money coming from? At the time we
didn’t exactly know what our purpose was, we didn’t have a master plan and we weren’t sure
where the money was coming from. What we did have was energy, ideas and a lot of creative
people that wanted to be a part of an exciting project. We would start a community, put everything
in place and let it evolve organically. This was 1973 and we were going to be an experiment in new
age living taking place in the Garden of Eden
Doctor Fred, the big Kauna with the credentials and local government influence, would stay in
the background taking care of the finances and the politics, the famous newscaster would return to
Honolulu stirring interest and raising funds and I would be the on site manager overseeing the daily
running of the show and distributing the funds that we didn’t yet have to the various proposed
activities and undertakings such as food co-op, school, clean-up crew, farming etc.
Part of the money was going to come from rent. We calculated that a hundred people paying ten
dollars a month would take care of the rent. Agriculture and food co-op would bring in cash,
private counseling and therapy sessions would contribute and funding from the state for mental
health programs would also be forthcoming. As a non-profit corporation we could solicit private
funding and apply for government grants.
And so we started. People from all the islands arrived in droves and before we knew it we had a
hundred residents; the Taylor camp people, welfare mamas, students, Jesus people, Dharma bums,
Hari Krishna devotees, poets, hippie gurus, druggies, European farmers, stock brokers and
cowboys as well as a number of people from State mental health programs. Thanks to the latter we
soon derived some income as well as becoming known as Crazy Acres.
There was a flurry of activity as the first order of business was the get the place cleaned up and
form a council to govern ourselves. Every week we met in a circle to discuss problems and
solutions, ways and means, how to enforce our three house rules; no fighting, no drugs and
everyone must work, setting up a day care center for the children, a community kitchen, a food co-
op that distributed fairly the food that would come in from town donations, from scavenging and
from the 400 lichee trees and the string beans that were on the property. The no drugs rule was
literally ignored as everyone was a pot smoker and most had used psychedelics and still did
whenever the opportunity arose. These were not considered drugs but religious sacraments, and an
integral part of our alternative life style, but the rule was official policy in order to placate the outside
world.
And the outside world was attentively curious at what was happening. Overnight the village had a
hundred new inhabitants and many came in every day for food, gasoline, laundry, to the post office
to pick up SSI or welfare checks, young people with wild hair, some scantily dressed, often
wearing beads and Indian clothes, hitch hiking and driving junkers, mostly haoles, foreigners to the
local people, and not always well behaved or respectfully observant of conservative local customs
or protocol.
One of the topics continually under discussion was clothing: to wear or not to wear. It was finally
decided that the wearing of clothes was optional during the week but on Sunday, when we had
open house to the public, the body had to be covered. Little old ladies from the Honolulu
Historical Society would on occasion show up for a tour of the grounds and were duly shocked at
the nakedness of the inhabitants.
Every so often officials from the county would appear, six or seven Japanese-Americans dressed
in white shirts with neckties and carrying clipboards. Some of these fellows were from the
Environmental Protection Department and their main concern was how we handled our shit. I
would dutifully walk the land with them to inspect the different camps, each one having their own
hole in the ground. Usually being warned ahead of time that the county was coming we went to
great lengths to make sure the holes were properly covered, with a bucket of lime nearby and the
surrounding area clean and tidy with water and toilet paper available.
They also wanted to inspect the various structures people were living in to see if they met
county code requirements. Many of these living spaces were made from bamboo and clear plastic
sheeting, others from scrap lumber and odd pieces of corrugated tin. Nothing met county code
standards but since we were incorporated as a religious community and construction was in
process we were put on hold until a future date. Looking up at one hippie fellow sitting in his tree
shack reading a comic book and smoking a joint they inquired as to what the status of that structure
was. Over the door was nailed a hand painted sign reading Temple Of The Most High. That was
the temporary chapel for Most Reverend Jelly Bean Jackson of the Universal Life Church, I
replied. Ahh so, they muttered, and with typical Oriental inscrutability made a notation on their
clipboards, never once looking startled or raising an eyebrow.
Along with Universal Life Church members our religious community consisted of fundamentalist
Christians from The Children of God organization, Buddhists that had come over from the Maui
Zendo, and Hari Krishna devotees that traveled back and forth between Berkeley, Hawaii and
India. All of these groups built their own temples of worship, of transformation; meditation hut,
prayer garden, chapel, or ashram, something that signified their particular brand of faith and spiritual
disposition, and where they could practice their pursuit of transforming the dross of the ego to the
gold of enlightenment.
A Tantric practicing, cigar chomping Rabbi in his sixties with his two young followers had his
temple in a bamboo grove and squeals of delight that punctuated his reciting of the Torah could
often be heard as one passed by. The randy Reb as he was referred to wore only a towel around
his large hairy frame, and packed his cigars with the local pakalolo that he always smoked with
Ruby, one of his well endowed devotees who had been a bump and grind artist in San Francisco
before she found God. Whenever she noticed anyone sneaking a peek she would lift up her shirt,
when she was wearing one, shake her magnificent bosom in their face and exclaim, “Shalom! God’s
gift to me, my gift to you, take a good look brother!”
There were also those that did not adhere to any belief system but attempted to maintain an
honest inquiry into truth, and who struggled with both inner and outer forces in their pursuit of living
a life of excellence. These were the secular humanists, one could say, and they seemed to put an
unselfish and disproportionate amount of labor into the community compared to the others.
Our resident farmers were Vladimir and Olga from Czechoslovakia, he a handsome young man
of about twenty with dread locks, she a wrinkled and toothless woman in her late forties with a
radiant smile, who had been a restorer of fine art for European museums. Together they had
experienced a religious epiphany and had come to Hawaii to live a life in and of the soil. They had
a little blond cupid of a son and the three of them lived in the field that they worked by hand, living
in the middle of the raised beds in a lean-to that they had constructed out of branches and leaves.
They were usually naked except on Sunday when they covered the lower part of their bodies with a
few leaves that they hung from a length of vine wrapped around their waist. They ate only what they
grew and always raw and they were the only people in the whole community that didn’t smoke the
local pakalolo, though they were known to nibble a bit of magic mushroom now and then, after the
rains.
One day a group of inner city Hawaiian teenagers from the concrete jungles of Honolulu arrived.
They were glue and paint sniffers and wards of the juvenile court system that had been sent to us
for two weeks for an alternative wilderness experience. Most of them had never been in a rural
setting before, had never had the opportunity to associate with other young people from different
cultures, and had never been so close to beautiful, bare breasted, hippie girls. Pandemonium
resulted, a complete paralysis of the community that their counselors were unable to control. They
ran into the village and shoplifted paint and glue from the local hardware store, and returned raging
and violent and attempted to rape several of the young women before they were eventually
subdued. The next day they were shipped back, en mass. They were the other side of God’s face,
the Christians said, the devil’s side.
Every weekend Doctor Fred, wearing a white Panama hat, would drive down in his yellow
Volkswagen convertible to inspect how the cleanup was going, discuss problems, offer advice and
stroll the grounds. People would pester him demanding that he spend more time, take control, be a
leader. They wanted a guru, a big daddy that would take the responsibility off of them. When they
tried to put me in that position I would tell them that I was just the manager that controlled the
check book. As soon as they evolved their own system of government with their own leader I
would turn the finances over to them and be on my way.
There were many strong personalities within the community but no one with a clear vision or
enough of a focus to be able to take charge. For hours on end people would argue about trivial
matters during the weekly council sessions and get nowhere. Everyone had their own agenda or
individual axe to grind so consequently the interests of the group were never really addressed.
Endless discussions and even heated arguments would ensue over whether to cut weeds in our
clean up efforts since they were alive and we should respect all life. In order to clean the pool we
needed to kill the algae and small fish and that upset some people. It was a microcosm of the
outside world, a small scale model of our very own democratic system and our Congress with its
special interests and petty squabbles. It seems that people, when suitably aroused, can tear things
apart with little problem but have difficulty in creating anything new and meaningful.
Our experiment in creative living lasted a little less than a year. Somewhere along the line the
local people decided that they had had enough and early one evening a dozen or so Primo warriors
( named after the local beer), young Hawaiian toughs, arrived with chains, baseball bats and
gasoline. They beat up a few people, smashed some cars and set fire to the main building after
telling everyone to leave or die. Most left but some hung out in the underbrush to watch the
fireworks, a thrilling spectacle and worth the risk they later reported.
It was an unfortunate ending. The essence of life is creativity, and though we will never be able to
determine the source of the creative spirit, the urge to bring forth something new out of those inner
treasures we’ve been given can never be killed though our limited vision may not be able to
penetrate the series of causes and effects that result from a wrong direction or an irrational decision.
Creation is an act of expression. We were not trying to create something out of nothing but to build
on something that was already there. We made mistakes and wrong turns were taken. It was a
grand experiment and experience and a little bit more was learned about ourselves and each other.
Perhaps we did not inquire too deeply into the essential ideas or purpose on which it was founded.
Hopefully we will be wiser the next time.
America, half way to the Buddha and halfway to Jesus. It’s a place for fun in the sun, for easy
living, for mangoes, papayas and good pot, a place for the lyric poet, a place for the man of the
sea. It is androgynous, terribly masculine and at the same time tenderly feminine with blessings of
both simplicity and wisdom. And beauty is everywhere; in the flowers, the waving palms, the
colorful clothing, the sunsets, the turquoise sea, the smooth blending of the races. It is a paradise on
earth.
A Bodhisattva is a person just on the edge of enlightenment; his being is the essence of perfection
and in Asia this personage is represented in both male and female form, as Kwan Yin in China, and
in Japan as Kwannon, the Madonna of the East, and as Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of
compassion, in Nepal and Tibet. Together they are the Bodhisattva of boundless love that dwells in
the heart of all sentient beings and in India they are united as Ardhanarishvara, Shiva and his
consort Shakti, sharing a single androgynous body, the masculine yang, the feminine yin.
If nirvana means the absence of desire, hostility and delusion then surely the gods of earthly
paradise must live in Hawaii, if they live anywhere at all, for there the soul is pacified beyond all
measure, and the mind lives in quiet repose from the selfish concerns of a suffering ego.
Those were the thoughts on my mind as my journey took me to the garden island of Kauai, the
most beautiful of all in the Hawaiian archipelago.
I had been invited to take part in an experimental, therapeutic, alternative community that was
being formed on Kauai under the auspices of The Institute For Creative Living, the brainchild of a
mainland psychiatrist and one time mentor and colleague who was now a part of the State of
Hawaii’s psychiatric establishment. A brilliant and flamboyant black man, Doctor Fred was
innovative, controversial, contentious and entertaining with a compelling and charismatic
personality. Artist, teacher, bon vivant, lover of beautiful woman, Fred always had his finger in
some new creative pie and this latest project, one that had been kicking around in the back of his
prodigious skull for some time, was ready for birthing as the pieces and people needed for it’s
creation came together.
The Spaulding Estate, an old sugar baron’s plantation, circa 1940, consisted of a very large
dilapidated mansion with a dozen smaller, equally ramshackle, out buildings, and a large concrete
floored structure that could accommodate a couple of hundred people as a meeting place. It had an
Olympic size swimming pool containing green slime, fish and various other forms of unidentified
creepy-crawlies that attested to it’s lack of upkeep since the second world war, as well as an acre
or so of cultivated string beans being tended by an ageing Japanese caretaker. All of this was
situated on eighty lush green acres of forest, lichee orchards, caves, streams, water falls and
farmable land about ten miles from the small village of Kapa’a. This was the proposed site of our
project. It was available and affordable at $1000 per month. It had at one time been used as a
gambling casino and during the war as a brothel that serviced the many men in uniform that passed
through the islands but it had been vacant since then and it’s owners were anxious to clean it up,
and turn it once again into a paying proposition.
Taylor Camp, on the island of Maui, was a hodge-podge of tree houses, sand castles, shacks
and tents, a sprawling hippie camp on a beachfront property owned by a famous movie star’s
brother. It was a beautiful spot and over the years had developed into a transient and artistic
community of no small merit. To the state of Hawaii it was an eyesore, a health hazard, a den of
iniquity that attracted drugs, runaways, welfare scammers and borderline crazies and for years there
had been ongoing attempts to close it down. But it was private property and was being occupied
with the permission of the owner who apparently had a soft spot for the alternative and artistic
endeavours of it’s residents. The handwriting was on the wall though and the state, with stubborn
and plodding patience, was finally closing in, and a date had been set for its demise. The people
living there were on the lookout for another place to dig into, and soon the word spread that a new
scene was happening on the island Kauai.
A meeting had been called for a Sunday at his home on the grounds of the state hospital where
Doctor Fred was the chief of the psychiatric department. About seventy people showed up; Taylor
camp folks, locals interested in the project, social workers and nurses and friends and family. A
famous Honolulu newscaster, fund raiser and publicist flew in with his family, and a round of
speechifying with questions and answers was soon under way. The main questions were what was
our purpose, what was our master plan and where was the money coming from? At the time we
didn’t exactly know what our purpose was, we didn’t have a master plan and we weren’t sure
where the money was coming from. What we did have was energy, ideas and a lot of creative
people that wanted to be a part of an exciting project. We would start a community, put everything
in place and let it evolve organically. This was 1973 and we were going to be an experiment in new
age living taking place in the Garden of Eden
Doctor Fred, the big Kauna with the credentials and local government influence, would stay in
the background taking care of the finances and the politics, the famous newscaster would return to
Honolulu stirring interest and raising funds and I would be the on site manager overseeing the daily
running of the show and distributing the funds that we didn’t yet have to the various proposed
activities and undertakings such as food co-op, school, clean-up crew, farming etc.
Part of the money was going to come from rent. We calculated that a hundred people paying ten
dollars a month would take care of the rent. Agriculture and food co-op would bring in cash,
private counseling and therapy sessions would contribute and funding from the state for mental
health programs would also be forthcoming. As a non-profit corporation we could solicit private
funding and apply for government grants.
And so we started. People from all the islands arrived in droves and before we knew it we had a
hundred residents; the Taylor camp people, welfare mamas, students, Jesus people, Dharma bums,
Hari Krishna devotees, poets, hippie gurus, druggies, European farmers, stock brokers and
cowboys as well as a number of people from State mental health programs. Thanks to the latter we
soon derived some income as well as becoming known as Crazy Acres.
There was a flurry of activity as the first order of business was the get the place cleaned up and
form a council to govern ourselves. Every week we met in a circle to discuss problems and
solutions, ways and means, how to enforce our three house rules; no fighting, no drugs and
everyone must work, setting up a day care center for the children, a community kitchen, a food co-
op that distributed fairly the food that would come in from town donations, from scavenging and
from the 400 lichee trees and the string beans that were on the property. The no drugs rule was
literally ignored as everyone was a pot smoker and most had used psychedelics and still did
whenever the opportunity arose. These were not considered drugs but religious sacraments, and an
integral part of our alternative life style, but the rule was official policy in order to placate the outside
world.
And the outside world was attentively curious at what was happening. Overnight the village had a
hundred new inhabitants and many came in every day for food, gasoline, laundry, to the post office
to pick up SSI or welfare checks, young people with wild hair, some scantily dressed, often
wearing beads and Indian clothes, hitch hiking and driving junkers, mostly haoles, foreigners to the
local people, and not always well behaved or respectfully observant of conservative local customs
or protocol.
One of the topics continually under discussion was clothing: to wear or not to wear. It was finally
decided that the wearing of clothes was optional during the week but on Sunday, when we had
open house to the public, the body had to be covered. Little old ladies from the Honolulu
Historical Society would on occasion show up for a tour of the grounds and were duly shocked at
the nakedness of the inhabitants.
Every so often officials from the county would appear, six or seven Japanese-Americans dressed
in white shirts with neckties and carrying clipboards. Some of these fellows were from the
Environmental Protection Department and their main concern was how we handled our shit. I
would dutifully walk the land with them to inspect the different camps, each one having their own
hole in the ground. Usually being warned ahead of time that the county was coming we went to
great lengths to make sure the holes were properly covered, with a bucket of lime nearby and the
surrounding area clean and tidy with water and toilet paper available.
They also wanted to inspect the various structures people were living in to see if they met
county code requirements. Many of these living spaces were made from bamboo and clear plastic
sheeting, others from scrap lumber and odd pieces of corrugated tin. Nothing met county code
standards but since we were incorporated as a religious community and construction was in
process we were put on hold until a future date. Looking up at one hippie fellow sitting in his tree
shack reading a comic book and smoking a joint they inquired as to what the status of that structure
was. Over the door was nailed a hand painted sign reading Temple Of The Most High. That was
the temporary chapel for Most Reverend Jelly Bean Jackson of the Universal Life Church, I
replied. Ahh so, they muttered, and with typical Oriental inscrutability made a notation on their
clipboards, never once looking startled or raising an eyebrow.
Along with Universal Life Church members our religious community consisted of fundamentalist
Christians from The Children of God organization, Buddhists that had come over from the Maui
Zendo, and Hari Krishna devotees that traveled back and forth between Berkeley, Hawaii and
India. All of these groups built their own temples of worship, of transformation; meditation hut,
prayer garden, chapel, or ashram, something that signified their particular brand of faith and spiritual
disposition, and where they could practice their pursuit of transforming the dross of the ego to the
gold of enlightenment.
A Tantric practicing, cigar chomping Rabbi in his sixties with his two young followers had his
temple in a bamboo grove and squeals of delight that punctuated his reciting of the Torah could
often be heard as one passed by. The randy Reb as he was referred to wore only a towel around
his large hairy frame, and packed his cigars with the local pakalolo that he always smoked with
Ruby, one of his well endowed devotees who had been a bump and grind artist in San Francisco
before she found God. Whenever she noticed anyone sneaking a peek she would lift up her shirt,
when she was wearing one, shake her magnificent bosom in their face and exclaim, “Shalom! God’s
gift to me, my gift to you, take a good look brother!”
There were also those that did not adhere to any belief system but attempted to maintain an
honest inquiry into truth, and who struggled with both inner and outer forces in their pursuit of living
a life of excellence. These were the secular humanists, one could say, and they seemed to put an
unselfish and disproportionate amount of labor into the community compared to the others.
Our resident farmers were Vladimir and Olga from Czechoslovakia, he a handsome young man
of about twenty with dread locks, she a wrinkled and toothless woman in her late forties with a
radiant smile, who had been a restorer of fine art for European museums. Together they had
experienced a religious epiphany and had come to Hawaii to live a life in and of the soil. They had
a little blond cupid of a son and the three of them lived in the field that they worked by hand, living
in the middle of the raised beds in a lean-to that they had constructed out of branches and leaves.
They were usually naked except on Sunday when they covered the lower part of their bodies with a
few leaves that they hung from a length of vine wrapped around their waist. They ate only what they
grew and always raw and they were the only people in the whole community that didn’t smoke the
local pakalolo, though they were known to nibble a bit of magic mushroom now and then, after the
rains.
One day a group of inner city Hawaiian teenagers from the concrete jungles of Honolulu arrived.
They were glue and paint sniffers and wards of the juvenile court system that had been sent to us
for two weeks for an alternative wilderness experience. Most of them had never been in a rural
setting before, had never had the opportunity to associate with other young people from different
cultures, and had never been so close to beautiful, bare breasted, hippie girls. Pandemonium
resulted, a complete paralysis of the community that their counselors were unable to control. They
ran into the village and shoplifted paint and glue from the local hardware store, and returned raging
and violent and attempted to rape several of the young women before they were eventually
subdued. The next day they were shipped back, en mass. They were the other side of God’s face,
the Christians said, the devil’s side.
Every weekend Doctor Fred, wearing a white Panama hat, would drive down in his yellow
Volkswagen convertible to inspect how the cleanup was going, discuss problems, offer advice and
stroll the grounds. People would pester him demanding that he spend more time, take control, be a
leader. They wanted a guru, a big daddy that would take the responsibility off of them. When they
tried to put me in that position I would tell them that I was just the manager that controlled the
check book. As soon as they evolved their own system of government with their own leader I
would turn the finances over to them and be on my way.
There were many strong personalities within the community but no one with a clear vision or
enough of a focus to be able to take charge. For hours on end people would argue about trivial
matters during the weekly council sessions and get nowhere. Everyone had their own agenda or
individual axe to grind so consequently the interests of the group were never really addressed.
Endless discussions and even heated arguments would ensue over whether to cut weeds in our
clean up efforts since they were alive and we should respect all life. In order to clean the pool we
needed to kill the algae and small fish and that upset some people. It was a microcosm of the
outside world, a small scale model of our very own democratic system and our Congress with its
special interests and petty squabbles. It seems that people, when suitably aroused, can tear things
apart with little problem but have difficulty in creating anything new and meaningful.
Our experiment in creative living lasted a little less than a year. Somewhere along the line the
local people decided that they had had enough and early one evening a dozen or so Primo warriors
( named after the local beer), young Hawaiian toughs, arrived with chains, baseball bats and
gasoline. They beat up a few people, smashed some cars and set fire to the main building after
telling everyone to leave or die. Most left but some hung out in the underbrush to watch the
fireworks, a thrilling spectacle and worth the risk they later reported.
It was an unfortunate ending. The essence of life is creativity, and though we will never be able to
determine the source of the creative spirit, the urge to bring forth something new out of those inner
treasures we’ve been given can never be killed though our limited vision may not be able to
penetrate the series of causes and effects that result from a wrong direction or an irrational decision.
Creation is an act of expression. We were not trying to create something out of nothing but to build
on something that was already there. We made mistakes and wrong turns were taken. It was a
grand experiment and experience and a little bit more was learned about ourselves and each other.
Perhaps we did not inquire too deeply into the essential ideas or purpose on which it was founded.
Hopefully we will be wiser the next time.
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