A hui hou

April 13, 2005
by Rob Lafferty

Aloha, gentle readers;

This is the last bit of writing I will do as editor of Haleakala Times, as my wife Karen and I are moving to Oregon at the end of this month. Beginning with the next issue, Don Gronning will assume the responsibility of running the editorial desk.

For nearly eleven years, this island has been our home. Like many before us, we came to the islands as refugees from a different place and time, seeking beauty and adventure.

We were welcomed here in the warm waters off Kamaole, and found our way up onto the mountain – for we both are mountain folk at heart – and into a succession of rented homes in Kula and Keokea.

We wandered Maui often in those first few years, sleeping and cooking in a VW camper. We had time to enjoy empty roads and private beaches, fascinating people and beautiful sights. We embraced the concept of malama ‘aina, and Maui embraced us. We thanked Her for Her generosity, and tried to be good stewards wherever we went.

The years living here have been good to us in many ways. But we both have always known when it’s time to move on, and we know that time has come again.

We’ll miss many of the island people we have come to know, those who are island born and also those who have been “sung to the land,” as native Australians say. This island is still full of people with a Hawaiian heart; it has been our blessing to have met many of them, and to have befriended a few.

As for me, I’ll miss riding waves in warm water; I’ll miss the sunset view from Keokea; I’ll miss the monk seals off Ho’okipa and the whales and dolphins off the South Coast. I’ll miss Halloween night in Lahaina, too...

But living here, there are other things that I miss – like old-growth forests where bears and big cats still prowl. Walking in the home range of creatures that view humans as a possible food source has a very different feel than hiking the valleys of Maui.

We both miss snow falling, seasons changing, and San Francisco. We like to sit under oak and elm and sycamore trees in the fall. We miss fishing for trout in a mountain stream, and sitting by a wood stove long into a frosty winter night.

Those dreams cannot be fulfilled on Maui, not for us. The high price of land and cost of living has much to do with that, but it’s our own unfulfilled desires, not any unhappiness with Maui, that are urging us on.

Most of all, we want to get back to growing our own food on land that we can claim as our own. So we hope to build a log home on a couple of acres along the crest of the Oregon coastal range, and see if I can restart my freelance writing career.

And also do what I can to preserve at least one of those old forests in the American West that taught me so well – and probably saved my life – many years ago. They are being threatened on all sides, and I owe them.

But who knows? We could end up in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, or in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the sacred heart of the Sioux Nation where I spent much of my childhood. Might even be that the Canadian Rockies are where we belong. Our home is out there in the world somewhere, and we’ll find it, no worries.

As for the Haleakala Times – from this moment on, it is in better hands than mine. Don is a long-time journalist and editor who’s been a freelance writer and associate editor for HT at various times over the past seven years, and regular readers will recognize his name and his work. Among other things, he’s also been a bull rider, but you’ll have to ask him about those stories.

He knows the mission of this paper as well as anyone ever associated with it, and he has the editorial experience to help it grow as Maui grows. I can tell you this – his favorite section of any newspaper to read is the Letters section, so please keep sending yours in.

To all of you who sent letters during the past year that I did not publish, my apologies to you. We get a lot of letters, from local folks and from around the world, and some editions of the paper just don’t have room to print all of them. We do manage to fill two or three pages of every edition with letters, so please believe that I tried to publish your voice.

Here’s some unsolicited advice to future letter writers; if you follow the guidelines completely, then your letter has a better chance of being printed than someone else’s longer letter. If you don’t provide contact information, it won’t get printed. But we encourage you to give your opinions a voice within the community, because democracy was born out of public forums and only stays alive through the exchange of ideas.

I also encourage you to send e-mail to Don (editor@mauisfreepress.com) and tell him what you want to read when you pick up the Haleakala Times.

There will be changes to the paper in style and content, of course. The best thing about this job is having total freedom to publish whatever you think the community desires and needs to know, and I am certain that Don will take full advantage of that in his own way. I know I certainly have...

When Hawai‘i Publications, Inc., bought the HT from the Pinsky family last summer, many of our readers feared that the paper would go soft. Being owned by a publishing corporation is different than being a family-owned operation, and a lot of people expected the paper would change its tone, soften its focus or be censored. I kept hearing all summer that the paper was doomed.

To counter that, I decided to print stories that were not being told anywhere else, to find strong social and political commentary from all over the world that was still fit to print in a newspaper that is mailed to people’s homes. Editorially, I criticized the current administration policies as often as possible – but I would have done that, anyway, because they deserve it.

I was accused of excessive “Bush-bashing” by some people, and there has been a lot of that in these pages the past year – but I respectfully disagree that any amount of criticism can be considered excessive when compared to the extreme behavior of this country’s highest elected officials.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that the Haleakala Times has continued to print the kinds of stories that are expected from the alternative media of a free press. And since I’m not hearing those dire predictions of doom anymore, we’ve begun to bring the focus back to Maui again. Which means that all of you folks out there who’ve been sending me stuff to publish will now have a better chance of seeing it in print.

But I still feel compelled to state for the record one last time: I have been totally responsible for the content of each edition since my first day on the job. The publisher sees the paper for the first time after it’s been printed, and has had no knowledge or influence over what was printed in any way.

That is what was promised from the start, that is how it has been, and that is how it will continue to be.

I’m quite optimistic about the future of the HT, just as I’m optimistic about the future of Maui County. Both have the kind of people in place who work tirelessly to make things better because it is their dharma to do so, and they are happy to make a living doing what they love.

Adrienne Poremba Pinsky remains the heart and soul of the Haleakala Times. She helped to give it birth eleven years ago, and in her role as General Manager, she continues to give it life every day. She makes sure that we all have fun, too.

Emily Forster gives our advertisers the personal attention they deserve and her work pays the bills for us all. Sharon Shough tracks all the ads, creates most of them and makes sure that the rest look good. Brooke Pileggi does everything else, including the Community Calendar, then joins Emily in writing stories and taking photos, too.

That’s our staff right now, along with all the talented freelance writers who have been willing to tell important stories for modest pay, and dozens of others who have contributed over the years. They are one half of the HT family – the other half is you, gentle readers.

As for the island of Maui, it will grow and change over the coming years. It will never be as it was just a decade ago, but if the public continues to stay involved in the process, it will grow into a more liveable community than it is now.

And what better place to create a new model for human communities than on an island that once hosted the closest thing to Paradise that human beings can remember?

Aloha to you all, be happy and be well. May peace and love always find you...
Rob Lafferty