Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island

Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island

by Lucinda Fleeson
Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island

Waking Up in Eden: In Pursuit of an Impassioned Life on an Imperiled Island

by Lucinda Fleeson

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Overview

Like so many of us, Lucinda Fleeson wanted to escape what had become a routine life. So, she quit her big-city job, sold her suburban house, and moved halfway across the world to the island of Kauai to work at the National Tropical Botanical Garden. Imagine a one-hundred-acre garden estate nestled amid ocean cliffs, rain forests, and secluded coves. Exotic and beautiful, yes, but as Fleeson awakens to this sensual world, exploring the island's food, beaches, and history, she encounters an endangered paradise—the Hawaii we don't see in the tourist brochures.

Native plants are dying at an astonishing rate—Hawaii is called the Extinction Capital of the World—and invasive species (plants, animals, and humans) have imperiled this Garden of Eden. Fleeson accompanies a plant hunter into the rain forest to find the last of a dying species, descends into limestone caves with a paleontologist who deconstructs island history through fossil life, and shadows a botanical pioneer who propagates rare seeds, hoping to reclaim the landscape. Her grown-up adventure is a reminder of the value of choosing passion over security, individuality over convention, and the pressing need to protect the earth. And as she witnesses the island's plant renewal efforts, she sees her own life blossom again.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781565129443
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date: 06/16/2009
Sold by: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
File size: 836 KB

About the Author

About The Author
Lucinda Fleeson is director of the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Program at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. She was a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer for many years and has been awarded an Arthur Rouse Award for Press Criticism, a McGee Journalism Fellowship in Southern Africa, a Knight International Press Fellowship, and a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. Before settling in Washington DC, she lived in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Budapest, Botswana, and, most notably, Kauai.


Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Solitary Expeditions

SLOWLY I TURNED the corner onto my perfect little street of stone houses and picket fences already steeped in the long shadows of early evening. I parked my Toyota, then picked a path through the tricycle and other toys left on the sidewalk by the neighbors' children. There was no hurry. I had no plans.

Inside, my reading corner waited, a lady's wing chair in wool plaid pulled close to the white brick fireplace. Passing into the narrow galley kitchen, I gathered the makings for a simple meal, a standard entry in my repertoire of Single Working Girl's Twenty-Minute Dinners. Green salad, leftover balsamic vinaigrette. I set a pot of water on to boil for angel-hair pasta, peeled garlic cloves, and chopped parsley. On second thought, I turned off the water and went upstairs. Blue and white toile papered the renovated bathroom and dressing room in an eighteenth-century pastoral scene. I switched on a brass student lamp in the darkened study. Twin green globes cast ponds of light on a wall of photographs: smiling family members and friends; vacation shots from hiking the Alps; skiing in Italy; watching the races at Saratoga Springs. All evidence of a full, happy life, right?

I kicked off high-heeled pumps and hung up my tailored suit while I drew a hot, foamy bath in the claw-footed tub, then got in for a soak. Even that didn't take the edge off an evening with too much free time. Wrapped in a silk dressing gown, I went back downstairs and launched a CD of John Coltrane's My Favorite Things. In a nightly ritual, I dared myself to light the fire with a single match, touching the flame to four corners of crumpled newspaper. Satisfied that it caught, I set a tray with cloth napkin and silver, then brought it back to the fireside. I studied the flames. My God, I'm going to spend the rest of my life here. Restoring this English-style ramshackle cottage until it was as trim as a sailboat had consumed nine years. But I had tired of playing house. A child of preppy, Connecticut suburbia, I had settled for more of the same in the happily-ever-afterdom of suburban Philadelphia. For most of my neighbors and peers, lawyer husbands and above-average children had replaced the circle pins and penny loafers we had worn with brutal conformity as teenagers.

While many women my age rushed about, drawn and quartered between big lives of child-rearing and high-powered jobs, I found myself underemployed and sliding into midlife with not much to show for it. Now forty-four, I'd been divorced for almost fifteen years. My last great love affair had died more than a year ago. I couldn't quite escape an ingrained sense that a solitary woman was a misfit, a dried-up celibate or eccentric, or worse yet, too unattractive to find a presentable mate.

I once deemed my work as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer the apogee of existence. Now corporate profiteering and betrayal had slithered into our midst. It no longer seemed fun or noble. Healthy, over forty, either single or with children who had flown the nest, many of my colleagues faced similar midlife angst, professional and personal. Our well-developed careers had gone flat. What to do now with our brightly educated minds, expensively toned bodies, and elongated life spans that promised another thirty or forty years of active life? Was plastic surgery to be the last frontier? Recently a recurring nightmare plagued me, waking me with a Delphic warning: You are doomed to a life of small luxuries. Not lavish, big spending bursts of vacation houses, big cars, and jewels, but just enough for comfort.

Roosters haunted me like the Ghost of Christmas Future. During the years when my girlfriends and I had hunted antiques stores and flea markets to fill up our newly purchased houses, we noticed rooster knickknacks everywhere. Rooster coffee mugs, rooster salt shakers, rooster napkin holders, rooster-anything-you-can-imagine. "Look, another item for the rooster shop we're going to open when we're old and retired," we'd joke. The roosters became emblematic of all the useless junk that Americans buy and all the wasted hours middle-aged women fill with aimless shopping for more useless stuff. Opening a rooster knick-knack shop was the last thing I'd ever do, I vowed.

I had read many of the writings of psychologist Carl Jung, who devoted much of his study to the midlife crisis. He felt the suffering at that age held potential for change. Adults dedicate the first half of life to building fortune, family, and career. Jung theorized that at midlife those pursuits lose their power of attraction, and personal values shift into reverse. What was once important dims, while new pursuits and a growing spirituality loom on the horizon. Fail to pay attention to the warning lights of depression and anxiety, and you risk sinking into a quagmire of regret and resentment. Thousands of us baby boomers are reinventing ourselves, we're told. But I had yet to find any instruction books. How to begin when you're frozen by inertia? When fear paralyzes? "We would rather be ruined than changed, We would rather die in our dread," wrote W. H. Auden.

The telephone ring interrupted my gloomy ruminations. I rushed to the kitchen wall phone and stood listening while Dr. William Klein cheerily announced that he was coming to Philadelphia for meetings. He invited me to dinner Sunday night. "We'll go someplace fancy," he promised. Bill Klein was an erudite botanist, one of my favorite sources. Over the years, I enjoyed our infrequent lunches that probed the realm of ideas.

I hung up the phone, went upstairs, and pulled on a pair of faded green Army fatigues and one of Dad's old sweaters with holes in the elbows. I rummaged under the sink for a flashlight, then escaped outside to the garden. With its damp scent of recent rain, the cold night air made me shiver. A nearly full moon washed the garden in light and shadow. I trained the light beam on top-heavy, wobbling daffodils. Every autumn I had dug in more bulbs, more varieties, until now hundreds lit the small yard: sunset oranges of the giant Fortissimo; creamy Ice Follies; a few collectors' pinks such as Salome, with its whisper white petals and apricot centers. I searched for perfect blooms. Not those past their prime, marred by creeping translucence along crinkling petals.

I carried an armload of flowers into the kitchen. A few dots of black dirt speckled an insouciant Las Vegas blossom. Once I watched champion daffodil grower Kathryn Andersen use the tip of her tongue to gently lap away splashes of dirt from prize entries. Anything stronger could nick or dent the flower. I tried it. The petals felt as soft as baby skin but had a crisp taste of celery. Gardening always cheered me up.

BUYING AN OLD HOUSE had unleashed a pent-up desire. That first winter I read garden books late into night. Weekends I haunted nurseries, just to look at the plants and smell loamy earth. I signed up for a night course in landscape design at the nearby Morris Arboretum. Although a novice, I chose one of the most difficult and labor-intensive projects: an English perennial border, to match my English cottage. I lusted after towering blue delphiniums, pink snapdragons, lavenders, and heathers.

My small cottage garden occupied only about four hundred square feet. It begged to be called postage-stamp in size. Worse, a fortresslike hedge of arborvitae surrounded the perimeter. "Get rid of it," advised the landscape instructor. I looked at him as if he were an anarchist. But I came to realize that if I was to get anywhere, I had to clear-cut the whole yard, analyze the site for light and shade, drainage and soil conditions, and then start anew.

I chopped down each tree with a hatchet. Even with goatskin gloves, my thumbs ached. A dated gardening book, a gift from my mother, advised double- digging eighteen-inch trenches, English-style, then filling the furrows with cow manure. Two truckloads of organic humus and sand added height. I liked the physical work of bending muscles to the task and learning to use a shovel. Lured by the magical alchemy of the garden that transforms manure and garbage into roses, I saved coffee grounds and vegetable peels as precious nutrients for the compost heap. The mindless weeding and meditation on each task transformed my small plot into a place to forget daily cares. Minutes disappeared into hours without notice. Sometimes I'd garden as the moon came up, trying to squeeze in a few last tasks.

That first spring, every inch of the yard exploded into lavenders, nasturtiums, and lilies. Brooding, black-red Don Juan roses and nude-colored New Dawn pink climbers veiled the second-story balcony. A really good garden requires an almost religious adherence to its theme. I couldn't resist growing American-as- pie zinnias by the score or cramming dinner-plate-sized dahlias into the back of the border, ignoring one English garden writer's dismissal of dahlias as "so vulgar."

I cared not. The garden became a place of abandon for me, a joy of fantasies.

Dr. Klein had introduced me to the notion of the garden as an intellectual journey, a physical record of the history of civilization. From him I learned that medieval monks cultivated medicinal herbs in the first botanical gardens. For thirteen years, Dr. Klein had directed the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania, transforming it from a weedy and forgotten Victorian botanical garden into a thriving educational center with new buildings, explosive plans, and thousands of visitors. "If Bill Klein had been a plant, he would be a pachysandra," I had written in a profile of him for the Inquirer. "Invasive and slightly out of control." One of those rare scientists who knew how to spin a story, he enlisted people to his cause. Some found the ebullient, verbose botanist rather alarming. And like all visionaries who goad for more and more progress, he eventually found himself out on a limb. Just as university regents were about to impose budget controls to rein in his little Eden, he quit to become the director of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida.

I kept in touch after he left Philadelphia, and flew down to Miami to write a story for the newspaper shortly after Hurricane Andrew blew apart much of south Florida. The storm toppled Fairchild Garden's collection of rare palms and turned its manicured grounds into a snarl of overturned trees. Many staff members lost their own houses, yet they showed up to work long days for Dr. Klein. As he walked through the rubble, Dr. Klein promised, "Fairchild will rise again. It's the nature of gardeners to take these disasters and improve on them."

His garden reopened to the public in thirty days. "It was nothing that General Patton couldn't have done," he insisted. The performance earned him a reputation in the garden world as the hurricane-fixer. But he quarreled with Fairchild Garden's intrusive board of directors, complaining that they were always leaning over his shoulder, hampering his plans, restricting his vision. So he jumped at the chance to become executive director, CEO, and president of the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. "As soon as I heard that the board of trustees lived five thousand miles away and met only twice a year, I knew it was the place for me," he confided. Now aged sixty-two, he planned to stay until retirement, transforming his last garden institution into his masterwork.

Sunday evening I studied my closet full of clothes, looking for something suitably dressy for a pricey dinner. I had a classy wardrobe, thanks to hand-me- downs from my sister who lived in Milan with her Italian clothier husband. I chose a tailored navy blazer and slacks, with a silk top draped into a V-neck, a chunky gold ring set with an emerald-cut green tourmaline, flashy earrings to match, and navy heels.

I always enjoyed the sunset drive down to Center City along the Schuylkill. Rowing sculls skimmed the river, bathed in the same golden light Thomas Eakins painted more than a century ago. I regarded Philadelphia as just the right size. Big enough for a world-class orchestra, great restaurants, and museums, small enough that I could drive home in thirty minutes.

When I entered the noisy lobby of the nondescript Hershey Hotel on South Broad Street, I did not see any sign of Dr. Klein. Finally he appeared, dressed in rumpled pants, wrinkled sweater, and a green baseball cap. He looked kind of schlumpy, balding with professorial wire-rim glasses and a girth of extra pounds he was always trying to lose. "Where should we go?" he asked. I groaned silently. He had forgotten his promise of an upscale meal. I slipped off my too-fancy earrings and hid them in a pocket, then suggested Upstares at Varalli, a casual Italian restaurant across the street. I tried to suppress my irritation. By the entrée, I regained enough humor to ask about life in Hawaii. "Mah-velous, mah-velous," he said expansively. "You should see my office. I can see whales breaching in the distance out one window. The other looks out onto a hillside where cows graze."

"Sounds like the boondocks," I said. "What are you doing on the East Coast?"

"Looking to hire somebody to help me raise money, actually," he said. "Are you interested?" He threw it out so casually that I didn't see the barbed lure.

"Oh sure," I said. "It probably doesn't pay anything."

"Actually, it does."

I said quickly, "I'll never leave journalism."

He looked away, eyelids dropping over half-closed eyes.

TWO WEEKS LATER, I waited on the couch outside the executive editor's office, surveying the familiar newsroom landscape. I had spent years here on midnight deadlines and frenzied story chases. Cheap metal desks jammed against one another, cluttered with newspapers and file folders. A plastic shark head hung over one desk. The newsroom had served almost as a college dorm for my generation of journalists who spent most of their professional lives at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Truthfully, it was better than college — a couple hundred of the best young journalists in the country, all intensely inquisitive and engaged, had fought and schemed to get here. We were drawn by the newspaper's legendary editor, Eugene L. Roberts, Jr., who valued creative writing and investigative reporting and gave reporters enough time and money to pursue their best work. Despite the dedicated individualism of journalists, we all drank the same elixir, a heady promise that we were building a great newspaper. The stories produced in those years soared, uncovering police brutality, budget excesses at the Pentagon, chaos at the IRS, and deep narratives of ordinary lives made brilliant. Then the apparatchiks and bean counters took over and corporate greed became the dominant goal. Roberts couldn't fight off Knight Ridder, the newspaper chain owners, and even he left.

A newspaper resembles a grand opera company, with its repertoire cast and fierce competitions, endless fallings-out and countless love affairs. Once it slips, it can never attain those high notes again, and you spend the rest of your life remembering.

Now, editors relegated more and more reporters to the Shit List. Including me, I feared. Whether covering New Jersey gambling, corruption at city hall, or cultural institutions, I could dig out stories. But in the new era, support was vanishing for that kind of reporting. A couple of years ago I had volunteered to create the Home and Design section. An odd choice for a hard news and investigative reporter, but I saw it as a refuge that also offered a chance to write about architecture and gardening. It worked for a while. The new section editor didn't know anything about home or design but delivered pep rally speeches in Dale Carnegie platitudes: We're going to be number one in the country! We're building a team! Lately I had to fight off news-you-can-use stories. I got away with turning down an assignment to write a shopper's guide to summer fans. But when I refused to write puff pieces promoting real estate for sale, I ventured into insubordination. I asked for a transfer, reactivated a campaign to go overseas, to cover science, to do anything to get out of Features.

The secretary signaled me to go into the executive editor's office. Max stood poised before an antique worktable, his carved mahogany desk and bookcase behind him. Its sumptuous decor had the odd style of a turn-of-the-century robber baron. Max's starched blue oxford shirt was rolled up to the elbows as he ruffled papers, ostensibly busy. He glanced sideways at me and said, "Sit down, Lucinda, this will only take a minute." He remained standing. Max was handsome, in a rich kid's preppy Harvard way, with dark hair curled over chiseled features. Charming and so fresh-faced that I instinctively smiled and forgot to be wary.

He never met my eyes and continued to leaf through papers. Okay, I would not have to write about real estate, but I could forget about going abroad. Or anywhere else. I wasn't going anywhere. He ran through a list of trumped-up offenses. "That's a bunch of crap," I said. I may have sounded tough. But as I stood, I felt like I teetered on a tightrope. As I walked out the door I knew I had reached a dead end.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Waking Up in Eden"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Lucinda Fleeson.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

PART ONE: Discovery,
Chapter One: Solitary Expeditions,
Chapter Two: Treasure Island,
Chapter Three: This Is the Boondocks,
Chapter Four: They're All Lost,
Chapter Five: The Secret Garden,
Chapter Six: They Were One of Us,
Chapter Seven: Mission,
PART TWO: Digging In,
Chapter Eight: Chicken Skin,
Chapter Nine: My Plantation Cottage,
Chapter Ten: Sow a Seed, Reap a Life's Work,
Chapter Eleven: Local Style,
Chapter Twelve: Alien Species,
Chapter Thirteen: The Rosetta Stone of Evolution,
PART THREE: Light After Darkness,
Chapter Fourteen: Hearts in the Snow,
Chapter Fifteen: A Walk on Mahaulepu — Deconstructing Extinction,
Chapter Sixteen: Mango Madness,
Chapter Seventeen: Last Tango in Paradise,
PART FOUR: Living Well Is the Best Revenge,
Chapter Eighteen: The Pansy Craze,
Chapter Nineteen: A Kapu on the Garden,
Chapter Twenty: New Wave Luau,
Chapter Twenty-one: Last Harvest,
Chapter Twenty-two: In a Heartbeat Everything Changes,
PART FIVE: Resolution,
Chapter Twenty-three: Macbeth,
Chapter Twenty-four: Never Too Late,
Chapter Twenty-five: Obake,
Chapter Twenty-six: Renegade Plant Rescuer,
Chapter Twenty-seven: Saying Good-Bye to a Garden,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
Selected Readings,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"When the few remaining individuals of an endangered plant species are too few to have much chance of survival in nature, we must intervene; the same is true when our own lives reach a level of sameness at which they seem to lose purpose. In this engaging book, Lucinda Fleeson tells us how she found new meaning for her life among the plants and fascinating people of the tropical paradise that is the beautiful island of Kauai in the Hawaiian islands. Highly recommended." – Peter H. Raven, President, Missouri Botanical Garden. St. Louis

"Part history, part personal confession, part cautionary tale about environmental preservation...[An] impeccably researched, beautifully told tale of how America's most exotic locale transformed the life of an urban journalist." —Gioia Diliberto, author of The Collection

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