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Having spent the better part of his 70 years escaping to and from one exotic locale to another, Ed Gardner fancies himself something of an expert on the paradisiacal.
"The whole world has changed in my lifetime," Gardner says, his bare arms sweeping and undulating as he continues his daily tai chi workout at Kapiolani Park. "Brazil is dangerous and so are Thailand and Jamaica. In Hawaii, people still look out for each other. It’s developed but it hasn’t been ruined."
Gardner, who grew up in Hollywood, says he fell in love with the islands during family vacations. So enamored was he with what he saw as the idyllic island life that he ran away from home at age 15, bought an $80 one-way ticket to Honolulu and set out to live like his beachboy heroes.
Falling in with a group of like-minded surfing buddies, Gardner said he surfed all day and improvised the rest.
"In those days you could get two scoops of rice and gravy for 25 cents," he said. "You could get enough for that by turning in 13 Coke bottles at the market."
For a time, Gardner was also a practitioner of the dine-and-dash method of procuring free meals. A footrace with "1,000 pounds of angry waiters" illuminated him to the error of his ways.
Gardner eventually returned home to California, but a brush with the law prompted his father to enlist him in the Marines. It didn’t last long. Gardner, who had developed a fondness for funny-smelling cigarettes, got in trouble again, spent a few months in the brig, then promptly lit out for Morocco.
For the next several years, Gardner’s life resembled a literary picaresque as authored by William Burroughs as he learned how to produce hashish from Moroccan farmers and bounced around the Spanish islands of Ibiza and Formentera.
Gardner returned to the U.S. eight years later but again got in trouble with the law — this time during a misadventure that involved getting to New Orleans to secure a boat to sail to Calcutta — and spent two years in jail.
After his release, Gardner spent several years in Asia. During an extended stint in Bali, Gardner befriended Gerry Lopez, Dick Hoole and other veterans of the Hawaii surf scene. The connections rekindled Gardner’s affections for Hawaii; he moved back to the islands soon after.
His wanderlust long satisfied, his penchant for running afoul of law enforcement behind him, Gardner, who rents a unit in a Black Point home owned by a traveling buddy with whom he once shared a cave in Afghanistan in the 1970s, now spends his days swimming, walking and studying tai chi in the only place he still considers paradise.
"So what if heaven has been overly developed?" he says, laughing. "It’s still heaven."
——— Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
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