It was around Day 1.5 that I began to develop the living-in-Hana fantasy. At dawn, I opened the louvered glass shutters of Ark's guest cottage, her Carmen Miranda foliage redolent from evening rain. From the lawn, the Big Island rose mirage-like in the distance, the ocean the color of a pearl.
I jogged along the empty Hana Highway, dodging fragrant, fermenting mangoes that would thud Chicken Little-like in my path. There were ancient rock walls, mossy one-lane bridges with construction dates chiseled in old calligraphy. One day, I saw a street sweeper clean up what passes for garbage - breadfruit leaves.
Erin Lindbergh has come to understand her grandfather's connection to this place, though she was only 12 when he died in 1974.
"People here are so present," she said yogically. "There is no artifice. So they allow you to be who you are."
She shared this wisdom as we bushwhacked through cane grass in the jungle, the serrated edges like razors on my sunburned legs. We were climbing to a spring-fed pool and waterfall high in the mountains, accompanied by her dog and my husband, Roger, who had flown in briefly for our 20th wedding anniversary. The air was dense with humidity; soon, it began to rain. She was a sweatless, smudgeless still life in white linen. Thorns only added to her luster.
At last the enchanted pool loomed, a vision by Henri Rousseau. She disrobed, plunging in taut down-dog near-nothingness into the water, more perfect even than linen. Roger stood transfixed. I began channeling Nora Ephron.
People come to Hana to reinvent themselves. Anne Lindbergh understood this well: she christened her home Argonauta, a reference to a mother who leaves her shell to start a new life.
Ark moved to Hawaii 35 years ago with her first husband after living in Paris. Her neighbor on Oahu was Marvin Nogelmeier, "a hippie jeweler from Minnesota." He is now Puakea Nogelmeier, a celebrated authority on Hawaiian language and culture.
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