Abandoned in paradise
Hawaii’s Kalaupapa leper colony held so much sorrow, yet so much compassion
My old mule clopped straight to the edge of the first switchback. One more step and we’d tumble down a sheer cliff, falling almost 500 metres to the sea.
But mules are smart and, at the last instant, she swivelled 120 degrees onto the next leg of the rugged path that zigzags down to the historic leper colony of Kalaupapa.
The isolated site is the No. 1 tourist destination on the untouristy Hawaiian island of Molokai.
I felt a little queasy on that first switchback, leaning back in the saddle, bracing in my stirrups against the pitch, thinking, “Whoa, that’s a long way down.”
Luckily, bushes blocked some of the most vertigo-inducing views.
She was an ornery mule, but I knew she knew her stuff. I put my reins around the saddle horn and let her make the calls as we plodded downhill.
The promontory below us — formed of lava, hammered by rough seas and swept by winds — became Hawaii’s famed leper colony starting in the 1860s, almost eight decades before an antibiotic treatment was found to arrest the disease.
More than 8,000 exiles would die there, many disfigured, crippled and blinded by the sickness now commonly called Hansen’s disease.
At its peak, it had more than 1,200 residents: men, women and children. Today, only a handful remain, all elderly, along with the dozens of workers who manage what is now designated the Kalaupapa National Historical Park.
Only 100 visitors are allowed in each day. They must have permits and cannot talk to the former patients, take their photos or enter their properties. No one under age 16 is allowed.
Visitors arrive by small plane, mule, or by hiking the cliff trail, an arduous trek for the very fit. The five-kilometre trail is slippery in rain, subject to rockfalls and landslides, and narrows to a few feet in some spots.
National Park Service workers occasionally pluck exhausted hikers off the trail, calling for mule rescue or rolling the afflicted down the hill on a wheeled gurney to be flown to outside islands for medical care.
Mule trips pose their own risks. Riders can fall, or can be pitched off — which is why operators at the Kalaupapa Mule Ride take tourists’ insurance information, require them to sign waivers and stick to hard rules. You can’t weigh more than 250 pounds or be pregnant, and you must be in good health.
All three ways of getting to Kalaupapa are expensive. The total for my mule trip was $230.
It was pricey, but I had to go. Locals had told me Kalaupapa was a “mustdo,” a sacred place with a “special feel.” Every time I pressed for details, there were no more words. “Go. You’ll see for yourself. You’ll know.”
To prepare, I read interviews with longtime residents. They told of being tracked down at home by bounty hunters who got $10 for each suspected leprosy victim. As children, many were yanked from school and quickly sent to Kalaupapa still crying for their mothers.
Many were shunned by friends and relatives. But there were also those who demanded to come with their loved ones, regardless of risk. These were the kokua, the helpers.
I also read up on Father Damien, canonized in 2009. The hearty, handy 33-year-old Catholic priest came to the first settlement in 1873 determined to improve the lives of the sick and save their souls for Christ, constructing for them sturdy buildings and, sometimes daily, helping build their coffins and dig their graves.
Only a small percentage of humans are susceptible to the disease, but Damien was one of them. He died in 1889, nearly blind and covered in festering lesions.
I thought about these stories as our 11-mule train neared the trail’s bottom. My thighs were burning and my knees were stiff and numb as I dismounted, took in the dreamy sandy-white beach beside me, and looked up, stunned by the intimidating green cliff we’d just come down — and would be going back up.
Before boarding the tour bus, I asked our guide Norman Soares about a restriction that puzzled me. Why no one under 16? Because infants born here were taken away from parents immediately after birth for fear of contagion.
Residents also grieved for children they’d left behind when they were forced into quarantine. They needed no reminders. “Some patients are still dealing with that brokenness,” Soares said.
The village’s little bookstore is stocked with souvenirs of Father Damien and Mother Marianne Cope, also sainted for her work helping the afflicted.
Sea captains with boatloads of new patients would anchor on an island just offshore, sometimes telling already frightened passengers to jump overboard and swim for shore in rough seas.
I thought about how these exiles made a life for themselves, creating a community that bonded together, celebrated together, married, buried and mourned together.
“In Kalaupapa,” said one resident, “we are all in the same boat; we help one another.”
The mule ride up seemed easier on us, harder on the mules. My mule Tita’s sides were heaving halfway up. I could feel her heavy heartbeat through my thighs.
I took my tired body to a masseur the next day, and he used some swift Hawaiian Lomi-Lomi moves to “pull up the bad energy from the sore spots and whoosh it away.” As he whooshed, I thought about another kind of ache, the one I’d experienced the day before in Kalaupapa.
It was a strange sensation: a burning of heart, a tug of throat. I realized that it was that “special feeling” locals had described — a spell cast by a place of so much sorrow, so much compassion, so much courage and such staggering beauty.
“Go,” said the locals. “You’ll see for yourself. You’ll know.”
I had. I knew.