Return to Palolo reawakens hazy spirits of the commune

It’s the worst type of vanity for a man to dwell on nostalgia when reason argues that his memories are flawed. But there’s a place at the back of Palolo Valley that haunts me.

A place where orderly neighborhoods gave way to a jungle-shrouded community of free spirits. A place, I’ve told myself for almost 40 years, where every memory has to be an exaggeration.

Whenever someone mentions Palolo, the stories roll out of me. The same stories about the same place and the same people. Again and again. They’ve become a romanticized reality about a place I never fully understood.

The commune, which is what I’m going to call it, sat on several acres of undeveloped land above La-I Road. To reach it required a truck, but if you owned a VW bug, your wheels provided enough clearance to navigate a dirt access road.

There was an old house on the property. It had a porch with lava rock columns and walls filled with termites. Everyone lived in houses they built themselves. They lived by lantern light and extension cords plugged into the old house. A tank at the top of the property captured rainwater for drinking and a communal outdoor shower.

Maybe a dozen people lived there, all of them, like myself, students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Their landlord, a New York City transplant with a ponytail down to his belt and an acerbic vocabulary, was my friend. He represented the property owner and lived in the house with the porch.

We met the summer after my freshman year, working as groundskeepers at the Institute for Astronomy. On hot days we would drive to the commune during lunch and drink beer because it was cooler there.

He often described a life unlike anything I experienced growing up in Hawaii. He told his stories with such snarling sincerity, staring at me through small round glasses, that I had to believe they were true.

He moved to Hawaii and the commune after a gunbattle between the previous landlord and local gangsters. He boasted of his own criminal past — he sold LSD in high school — and how his girlfriend’s mother was a mule for Colombian drug smugglers. But Hawaii would be different, on the straight and narrow, he said.

When one of the tenants left, I was invited to move into his house. But I couldn’t let go of my suburban upbringing. I saw the world as a place that needed doors with locks. I worried about mud on the plywood floors and not how good it would feel to walk barefoot on the grass or shower outdoors.

Not long afterward I went away to graduate school, and in that time my friend moved away. In all the years that passed, there was no reason for me to return to Palolo, but that’s what I did last week.

The canopy of trees, the wind through the leaves and the crowing rooster were the same. But everything else was not. Everywhere I looked, I saw signs that said “No” or “Stop.” The dirt road was gone, as well. The jungle had reclaimed it. Probably the commune, too. There was no way to know.

All that remained were the ghosts of memory. I still share their stories, but I don’t care anymore whether they’re true.

Reach Mike Gordon at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.