Tramp Royale

by Robert A. Heinlein

  The flight was uneventful and as monotonous as over-water flying in good weather is bound to be. Just after dark we landed at Nandi on Viti Levu in the Fiji Islands, walked fifty yards to an excellent, modern hotel and had a simply wonderful dinner. But it could hardly be called a trip to the Fiji Islands, since all we saw of the Islands was that one hotel, all we saw of the Fiji Islanders were a dozen tall, grave, barefoot black men who were the waiters at dinner. We could tell we were back in the tropics by the heavy, smothering heat, and the glimpses of luxuriant gardens outside in the dark. But it was all hello-and-goodby.

  They bedded us down when we took off from there, beds much like Pullman berths, but with safety belts. Ticky did not fasten hers, since the flight was smooth as a superhighway. But early in the morning we passed through some turbulence and she was awakened by finding herself two feet over her bunk, from which position she descended rather suddenly to her mattress. It solidified her opinion that we had placed our lives in forfeit to escape from dirt and rudeness, but she did not complain. However, it did upset her very much and when we landed on Canton Island I took her ashore for a stretch and a cup of coffee. Canton is an atoll just north of the equator, and a British-American condominium, which means that nobody quite knows who should do what. We could barely see the lagoon and could not make out the shape of the atoll ring-another hello-and-goodby.

  We had the luxury of breakfast in bed, served by a pretty airline hostess. About noon we sighted lordly Diamond Head and at twelve-thirty, having crossed the date line in the night, we landed at Honolulu on the same date we had taken off from Auckland but three hours earlier than when we started. There was the Stars and Stripes flying over the port, we were home, back in the United States! My eyes filled up and my mouth began to tremble and I had to grope to get down the stairway without falling.

  Only the fact that the runway was smeared with spilled oil at the spot where we deplaned kept me from falling on my knees and kissing my native land. I wanted to do it. I wanted to hug it and never let it go.

  XIII

  Paradise

  We zipped through immigration in nothing flat and through customs in about five minutes, at least four of which were occupied by the customs officer chatting with us about where we had been and our own bubbling over about how happy we were to be home. He shook hands and welcomed us back.

  Waiting at the door of the inspection room were Bob and Vi Markham, our chums in the Gulf Shipper-how many miles and months ago? They were loaded down with flower leis and grinning like pups. The leis were placed around our necks with kisses and warm aloha and again we could not see for tears. Home!

  It had been years since I had last seen Honolulu. It seemed a bit bigger, a bit brighter, more automobiles and more curving, beautiful boulevards, but essentially unchanged. Aloha Tower still offered welcome, the royal palms still swayed in the warm and steady trade winds and the breakers still rolled in on Waikiki. But I had forgotten how splendidly beautiful it is.

  There are those who complain that Honolulu is too artificial, not a South Seas sort of place at all. I am not one of them-I have seen Auckland! Honolulu is as shiny and up to date as a new car and it is that way because most people want it that way. It is impossible to take proper care of more than fifty thousand visitors a year with just a few grass shacks on a beach; fine big hotels are indispensable. For those who want untouched nature and solitude there is plenty of it on the Big Island, miles and miles of empty beach without a soul in sight. But one should not ask for silence and solitude at Waikiki any more than one would expect it at Rockefeller Center.

  Bob and Vi drove us out to their home at Aina Haina, beyond Diamond Head. I stared and stared the whole trip, still in a state of shock at the sudden transition from grim and dreary Auckland to this chrome-plated Land of Oz-like being dumped from an icy tub of water into a warm bed. But I am not going to give a blow-by-blow account of our stay in Hawaii. Hawaii is home, just as New Jersey is home; neither one belongs in an account of a trip around the world told from an American viewpoint. So I will simply dust off the high spots just to get us back to Colorado, where the argument with Ticky had started a year earlier.

  We did all the usual things-shopped, ate in restaurants where we could see hula dancing, drove around Oahu, saw the place of murdered ships and murdered men at Pearl Harbor, inspected the pineapple fields and went through the Dole pineapple cannery, of which Bob was an executive, attended a luau and ate poi and laulaus, having learned first how to prepare and tie a laulau, stood in the wind on the high Pali where King Kamehameha the Great sealed in blood the unification of the islands as one nation, and took a packaged commercial tour by air and automobile of Hawaii much as we had taken such a tour in New Zealand, a tour which had as its high spot a stay in Volcano House on the rim of the great, live crater Kilauea where the firegoddess Pele lives.

  But you have probably been to all these places, too. If not, mark it down in your book. This is one of the fairest parts of the United States. You need no passport, you undergo no red tape, you don't have to worry about the drinking water; all you require is the price of a round trip ticket from the Mainland, $250 by aircoach, plus what you care to spend while there. Prices in Honolulu are higher than they are in San Francisco as almost everything has to be imported, but they are not much higher. What you spend depends mostly on how much liquor you drink, where you eat, and what you buy. An all-expense luxury tour (and I do mean "luxury") of the outer islands costs about $30 a day, but you need not spend that much if you do not wish to be spoon-fed. On the other hand it is no trouble to spend a hundred dollars a day in shops and night clubs if you wish.

  Whether you pinch pennies or spend it like water, you will be treated with courtesy. Much more than half of the population is of Chinese, Japanese, or Hawaiian descent, three cultures outstanding for politeness, and the Caucasians or haoles have absorbed and taken for their own the leisurely, informal, almost excessively courteous spirit of the islands. Besides that, the Chamber of Commerce and the territorial government have been pushing a Be-Kind-to-Mainlanders movement which is carried to such extremes that it is considered bad form to call us trippers "tourists"-we must be called "visitors" or "guests" and every resident has been reminded repeatedly that it is up to each one of them to make us feel welcome.

  Of course this last point is not just altruism; tourists bring money into the islands and the purpose of the drive is to remind the islanders not to mistreat the goose that lays the golden eggs. But one real and important result is that here is a place where a tourist who thinks he has been cheated or mistreated need not swallow the matter and try to forget it; the Visitors' Bureau will take a warm personal interest in his complaints. Besides that, politeness feels good whatever the reason.

  The visitor will want to be equally polite. Just as three words of Spanish are enough to go all around South America three simple rules are sufficient for visitors to get along smoothly in this variant of the basic American culture:

  1. Honolulu is pronounced with the "o's" long and fully sounded, as in "Oh, no!"-not the way it is generally heard elsewhere; and Hawaii is pronounced "Hav-wah-ee," not "Ha-wah-yuh." The "vw" sound is a slurred labial not found in English and should be sounded as a single consonant; if you have trouble with it, make it a simple "w"-but don't let a "yuh" get into the ending. There is no "y" sound and it is either a prolonged "ee" or two distinct long-E sounds said very rapidly one after the other-Hawaiian Polynesian is filled with vowels unseparated by consonants.

  2. Never, never, never speak of "going back to the United States." This is the United States. That bigger piece over there to the east is referred to as "The Mainland." People from it are "Mainlanders" or "malihini" and the term "Americans" is used only inclusively and must never mean mainlanders as distinguished from islanders, no matter what their race or color.

  3. And never forget that here there is no color line of any sort. The Mayor of Honolulu is of Japanese descent. One of the most distinguished of j
urists here looks like Kamehameha the First. A mistake on this score will convince you that even an islander can be impolite if you push him hard enough.

  But if you follow these easy rules you find that when you leave you will join in the ancient toast "Me ke aloha pau ole" (May our friendship be everlasting)-and mean it with all your heart.

  A word about the word "aloha"-its usual literal translation is "love" but it also means "friendship" or good feeling of any sort; therefore it is used as a toast, as a greeting, as a farewell-which tells more about the Hawaiian culture than anything else could; Hawaii is a place where "love" is the commonest word in daily use.

  What this weary planet needs is a lot more aloha.

  The islands affected Ticky the way catnip affects a cat; she decided that she wanted to stay there forever, raising orchids outdoors, a prospect that dazzled her after the short growing season of our Rocky Mountain home. Soon I was subjected to a well-organized campaign, led by Ticky and ably brain-trusted by Vi, to get me to agree before we left Hawaii that we would come back and build a home there.

  I tried to combat it with logic; I should have known better. "Look," I said, "use that knot on the end of your spinal column. We've got a house; you've got a garden-back in Colorado Springs. Remember?"

  "The deer eat all my tulips."

  This was true. I don't know why mule deer prefer Dutch tulips to all other forms of salad, but they do. "I thought it pleased you to have deer wandering around our house?"

  "It does. But they ruin my garden. And just look at the garden Vi has! I could never have flowers like those in Colorado no matter what I did."

  This also was true. In Hawaii one does not need to encourage flowers; one needs a flamethrower to subdue them. "Ticky, you know perfectly well that, lovely as this place is, in six weeks you would be homesick for your mountains."

  "Sure! But that's just the beauty of it-we'll commute. When the weather gets cold and nasty in Colorado, we'll come here. When we get tired of perfect weather and begin to long for mountains and flash floods, we'll go back to Colorado. About three months each way, maybe. Perfect!"

  I winced, then took a deep breath and started the fatherly, facts-of-life approach. "Look, baby, my name is not Ford, nor Morgan, nor Rockefeller. You probably should have married that Philadelphia banker chap, assuming that you could have hooked him. As it is, I can't afford two households, neither the initial cost nor the overhead. I have to write like mad, an overworked hack, just to keep up with your whims and-"

  "I didn't want to travel," she broke in. "I merely wanted to build a greenhouse. Traveling was your idea."

  One simply cannot hold a woman to the point in a discussion. "Never mind that," I answered with dignity. "The point is that, after all, you can't have everything."

  "Why not?" she wanted to know.

  I have never been able to think of an answer to that one, not one which is emotionally convincing. "The cat won't like it," I said feebly and shut up, which I should have done much sooner. But the economic facts of life did soon slow Ticky down a bit; she started pricing building lots in suburban Honolulu and found out that too many people just like herself were very anxious to obtain the choice sites which were all too few. Choice home sites near the city were not for sale at any price; the best that was offered was long-term leasehold at a ground rent which seemed very high to people from the wide open spaces. Ticky did not stop trying but the difficulties subdued her and she quit lobbying at me about it.

  But she had planted the germ in my mind. The idea really did have attractions . . . to be able to throw away my snow shovel, to be an upholstered beachcomber, yet able to return to our mountains whenever we began to yearn for the dry-wine air off the snow fields. We didn't have to compete for that expensive beach property near Honolulu; we could go clear to the other side of the island if we wanted to. Just a little grass shack of whitewashed cinder blocks and only one bathroom, nothing fancy or expensive-oh, a lanai, of course, and a barbecue. One I could build myself, naturally.

  Maybe just a little one-

  But the cat certainly would not like it and we hardly ever do anything without the advice and consent of the cat. I put it out of my mind . . . mostly. Ticky surprised me by not taking up one minor feature of Hawaii; she is probably the only white wahine ever to go there who did not attempt hula. All of the white female residents have studied hula at some time, as a graceful accomplishment and a delightful exercise, whereas the women visitors from the Mainland sign up in droves for about three lessons each, then go home and demonstrate to their friends that they have "learned" the hula-an accomplishment requiring ten years or more and for which study should start at about the age of five.

  But, knowing that Ticky delighted in every form of dancing from rumba to waltzing on ice and including ballet and square dancing, I found out the name of the best teacher available to beginners and signed her up for a quickie course. But she never got there, not when she discovered that bare feet were obligatory. "I'll wear heelless sandals," she had said comfortably.

  I looked shocked. "Would you take a swimming lesson in riding boots?" For once, Vi formed an alliance with me, instead of against me, and convinced Ticky that anything but bare feet for hula would be as ridiculous as a tail coat at a picnic.

  Whereupon Ticky canceled the lessons and never did study hula. I had known that she disliked to go barefoot but I had not realized that she carried it to such extremes-I had had not too much difficulty in persuading her not to wear shoes to bed and she always takes them off while bathing. But it seems that some no-nonsense adults had forced her to go barefoot in the country during summer while a small child, which had offended her baby dignity. So no hula.

  Now I am the one who demonstrates hula to defenseless guests. I don't do it any worse than most females who visit Hawaii.

  I have promised not to take you step by step around the islands but I cannot refrain from listing some things which you must not miss when you go there. The first of these is Volcano House on the Island of Hawaii, a fine hotel which sits on the edge of a great live volcano in the middle of one of our National Parks. You will probably not have the luck (good or bad, depending on how you look at it) to see Kilauea in eruption but you will see steam rising and will be awed by looking down into the crater, and you will see the scientific demonstrations and documentary motion pictures prepared by the vulcanists who maintain a research station there. The last are in color and are at least as frightening as having a tomahawk thrown at you out of a 3-D screen.

  Despite the continuous watch by scientists Kilauea last went into major eruption without any warning. It might do so while you are there, making of you either a victim or an extraordinarily favored observer; the possibility is one of the fascinations of the place. After all, you don't want to live forever. Or do you?

  Orchids you cannot avoid seeing; they grow here as easily as dandelions on the Mainland, and the residents grow them in their back yards and in their living rooms. But while you are on the Big Island go see the commercial orchid nurseries in Hilo-if you are on a guided tour you are certain to be taken. The sight of tens of thousands of blooms in hundreds of species makes one a little drunk.

  There are at least three thousand cultivated species of orchids, an estimated fifteen thousand species wild and tame, and nobody has ever tried to count the enormous number of varieties. I was amazed to learn that there were some forty native species in my own mountain area-I had not known there were any. The flavoring in vanilla ice cream comes from the seeds of the vanilla orchids. The common cattleya, the "orchid"-colored orchid used in the United States by wolves to break down the resistance of females and which costs from three to eight dollars a bloom on the Mainland, is so common in Hawaii that you are likely to be given one as a free sample.

  Most temperate zone orchids grow on the ground but tropical orchids, as almost all cultivated orchids are, grow on trees, clinging to them and never touching the ground. They are air plants; the term is "epiphytic"-since
"epidemic" means a disease raging among humans and "epizootic" means the same thing for animals, "epiphytic" sounds as if it should mean a pretty sad state of affairs for fish, but what it does mean is a plant that rests on another plant without deriving nourishment from it. Orchids sometimes are called parasites but this is an unfair slur; they use trees only for mechanical support. Just how they do make a living has me buffaloed-apparently by taking in each other's washing.

  If you want to raise them yourself, go right ahead. Don't let Nero Wolfe fool you, it is not hard. A few years ago Philip Wylie had an article in The Saturday Evening Post telling how to do it and the periodical index in any public library will locate it for you.

  You will want to attend a luau while in the islands. These feasts are a great treat socially, but the authentic Hawaiian foods do not especially appeal to me. Here "poi" are not little dancing spheres but is a sticky grey paste made from taro root, sort of an underprivileged tapioca eaten with the fingers. It was the staple of the natives until they encountered corn flakes and hamburgers and such, and a great deal of it is still eaten. You will be served it at luau; if you really like it, let me know. Laulau is a chunk of pork, a piece of fish, and a handful of taro leaf, all wrapped in ti leaf (the long leaves from which grass skirts are made) and baked. Laulau makes quite acceptable food but nothing to get excited about. The rest of the feast is likely to be fish, possibly raw, pig barbecued whole, fruit, and much aloha, some of it liquid. Pig is the authentic main dish as the Hawaiians never did have the vice of "long pig"-they were never cannibals. They fought among themselves until Kamehameha the Great put a stop to tribal war with one last big one, but they never ate the slain.

  Sophisticated modern variations of primitive island cookery are delightful indeed. Honolulu is bulging with gourmet restaurants, some of them surprisingly reasonable. The Sky Chef at the airport terminal building is as good a restaurant as may be found in New York and New Orleans taken together, but I would hesitate to say that it is the best restaurant in Honolulu because there are so many fine ones. If you do not like poi, you need not lose weight. Ticky gained back the eleven pounds she lost in New Zealand and I gained weight I did not need. Oh well, the Hawaiians say it takes a big opu (belly) to hula properly.