Paradise Park

Paradise Park Read Free

Book: Paradise Park Read Free
Author: Allegra Goodman
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big his whole body warmed me easily from head to foot. Being twenty, I figured I was past the escapades of my teenage years, and nowsettling down. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was something of a homebody for an activist.
    But Gary had got started with this reading group from the geography department at the university. It was a very small odd radical group of graduate students. They didn’t just study maps and charts. They were into geopolitics and the history of colonialism, and invading peoples warping ecosystems, and that’s where Gary got this bee in his bonnet about going out into the Pacific and trying to do some good in Hawaii. There was this guy who was a legend to the reading group, this guy out in Hawaii, named Brian Andrew Williamson, who was saving endangered birds. He was the world authority on some of the rare species, and had actually seen a pair of elusive vermillion iiwi birds that had been thought at one time to be entirely extinct. Gary went and read all Williamson’s papers in Doe Library, which he got access to as a “visiting scholar” from Harvard. He got hold of everything by Williamson in
Pacific Science
, all his articles in
Atoll Research Bulletin.
“Birds,” Gary said. “They’re like a key to the whole ecosystem. They’re the bellwether, did you know that?”
    “No,” I said.
    He looked at me as if I lacked feeling. “When the birds go, it’s symptomatic of the whole habitat’s decay!”
    Gary was already starting to get this Gauguin thing going. He was obsessed with seeing the birds of the Pacific. He got antsy; he gave me grief—which at the time I didn’t really understand, since we’d been through that big journey west, and all that time in Oregon. I thought all that had brought us closer together, all that history between us. But Gary was getting quieter and moodier and full of plans.
    Inspired by the ornithologist, Williamson, Gary got an idea he would go out and work on saving the endangered bird species in what was left of the jungles in Hawaii. He talked all the time about goats eroding the hillsides and wild boars uprooting trees, and the invasion of the white-eyes, these little green finches from Japan wiping out the native honey-creepers, which were Hawaiian finches. He just had to fly out there; he just had to see those raped islands for himself and do something about them. For money he was going to sell the Plymouth. He was going to find some guy, some automotive virgin, and sell him the Fury from hell. Then Gary would take off. So, of course, I said I would go out toHonolulu with him. I figured I’d go see the place too; and I cared about the native finches. And I think somewhere in me I knew that if I hadn’t gone with him he would have gone anyway.
    H ERE’S what I took to Hawaii: my guitar, and my backpack with my name on it in black laundry marker. In the backpack: six panties, and a bra. Five T-shirts of different colors, a pair of shorts (I wore my jeans), two Indian gauze skirts wadded up in little balls, and a macramé bikini. A notebook and a ballpoint pen to write down my feelings. My wallet, my hairbrush, and toothbrush, and, from the free clinic, a good supply of the pill. I had a watch, a big silver man’s watch that had been my grandfather’s. Grandpa Irving’s watch had a creamy face and bold black roman numerals. The crystal was scratched, and when you opened up the watch-case there were pawn marks inside, stamped in the silver. The watch was battered up, but lucky. Grandpa had kept it during the flu epidemic of 1918, when he holed up in his room for two weeks with a bottle of wicked germ-killing brandy, and he’d carried it through all his union organizing. It was his talisman—at least that’s how it was told to me. He even brought it down to Mexico, when he’d tried to organize the tobacco workers in Yucatán. So of things of value I had that watch and my guitar.
    It was raining when we got to Oahu. Everything was gray and white and

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