The white vans began pulling up to the West Hawai`i Veterans Cemetery shortly after 8 on a recent startlingly clear Saturday morning. The passengers debarked quickly, laughing and chatting. One began to strum an ‘ukulele and softly sing along; several others tossed a football in the parking lot next to the groomed lawn where the bodies of veterans of every U.S. conflict since World War I lie under a thick carpet of neatly trimmed grass.
Altogether, around 40 clients of the Big Island Substance Abuse Council, from all parts of the island, were there to join 100 or so volunteers from the Kona community, landscape crews from the Four Seasons Resort at Hualalai, and officers from the Army’s Pohakuloa Training Area for a work day at the cemetery. The work days have become a regular event over the last two years as Richard Stevens, a Vietnam War veteran and professor at the University of Hawai`i – West Hawai`i, has pushed to see his vision of the once-desolate graveyard become what he calls the “Arlington of the Pacific, Hawaiian style.”
To prepare for the volunteers, Stevens and others had trekked up the cinder cone, Pu`u O`o, behind the cemetery the week before, placing small red flags at every spot where a seedling was to be planted. When the work days began in 2005, the first order of business was removing from the summit the fountain grass that is ubiquitous in West Hawai`i lava fields. Since then, thousands of seedlings have been planted and are flourishing; the pu`u is, in places, beginning to resemble what the undisturbed dry forests of Kona must have looked like before goats, cattle, sheep, and weeds took their toll.
On this day, volunteers would be planting more than 300 seedlings representing a dozen or more species of dry forest plants native to the Kona area. Some were donated by nurseries and the Army’s propagation facility at PTA. Others were purchased with funds from the state’s Kaulunani program (itself underwritten by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service). Still other grants, obtained by Angelica Stevens, Richard’s wife and grant-writer for the West Hawai`i Veterans Cemetery Development and Expansion Association, went to purchase food for the work-day participants and to help offset BISAC’s cost of bringing its clients – all of whom had volunteered for the task – to the cemetery. The perimeter fence, needed to keep goats and donkeys from browsing the new plantings, was erected with funds from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. A new greenhouse, where seedlings will be grown for outplanting across the entire Kona region, was built with money from the discretionary fund of former County Councilmember Virginia Isbell and the Hawai`i County Council.
The enterprise is now well established, but Stevens recalls a time when his group’s efforts were just getting off the ground. At that point, he says, the local USDA office provided a grant from its Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program. “That was critically important in giving us the confidence we needed to start off this journey together,” he says.
Rebirth
For Stevens, the enterprise represents the “resurrection of the land” – “rebirth in the heart of the cemetery,” he tells the volunteers as they assemble in a short ceremony at the parking lot flagpole before the planting begins. Just as Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia is famous for its trees, so, too, will the West Hawai`i Veterans Cemetery become renown for its vegetation, he says.
That vision lies at the core of the group Stevens and other veterans formed out of their frustration at the way in which the West Hawai`i Veterans Cemetery was being managed. “The situation of the cemetery two years ago was very, very low,” he says. “The organization really grew from the concern of veterans in the community here.”
On Memorial Day in 2004, a year before Stevens’ group became involved, an article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin by Rod Thompson described the cemetery as “59 acres of hot, barren lava rock and 1 acre of badly landscaped gravesites dug into crumbling gravel fill.” The Big Island Golf Course Superintendents Association stepped up to resod the gravesites, using salt-tolerant paspalum grass instead of the Bermuda that had been planted when the cemetery was opened in 1995.
In March 2005, Stevens and a few other veterans organized the first work day, coordinating their efforts with the Hawai`i County Department of Parks and Recreation, which manages the cemetery on land owned by the state. Stevens has nothing but praise for the support he receives from the county administration.
Other agencies have been less helpful. Stevens has received little support from the federal Veterans’ Administration and from the state’s Office of Veterans Services. “That’s been a continual frustration, but maybe it’s been a blessing, because it has forced us to go forward on our own. That’s brought a lot of results.”
More is involved than just restoring the battered landscape of the 62-acre cemetery. Stevens also wants to use the cemetery as an educational instrument. Schools are invited to send classes to the work days. On this day, students from Hualalai Academy, West Hawai`i Explorations Academy, and Hawai`i Community College participated in the plantings. “We’ve worked with several schools and continue to do so,” Stevens says. “That’s really a very important part of what we do. We’ll often get students over a wide range of grade levels – from lower elementary grades up to college.”
Stevens tries to give everyone who participates a reason to feel invested in the success of the place. “We ask people to dedicate the trees they plant to the memory of someone special in their lives,” he said. “The plantings then take on the character of a forest of beloved souls. All those plants, every one of them, represent someone who is dear to the person who planted it.
“I heard one of the younger students say he’d dedicated his tree to his dog. That’s all right, too. The pu`u takes on another dimension and becomes a place where spirits can come and sit under the trees and congregate. We want people to feel that ‘part of the cemetery is mine. I’ve got a stake in there – Grandma’s up on top of the hill.’”
“The community aspect of all this – that’s been an unexpected benefit,” Stevens continues. “The cemetery work days have become a wonderful place for the community to meet. We have regulars. [The plantings] generate a lot of community spirit.”
Private corporations have become a key part of the restoration process, as well. The Four Seasons Resort at Hualalai donates the use of its earth-moving equipment (and operators). Kuki`o Resort, just across the highway, provides water for irrigation.
A Model
So far, about 2,500 seedlings representing some 30 to 40 species of native dry forest plants – trees, shrubs, ground cover – have been put into the earth at Pu`u O`o. Stevens hasn’t kept track of survival rates, but doing that is on his to-do list. “That’s one of the things we’re very interested in – which plants do well, which don’t,” he says. “So far, there really isn’t anything in the whole dryland forest inventory that hasn’t done well. We’ve planted uhiuhi, and it’s surviving. We had trouble with the erythrina gall wasp on wiliwili trees, but Bryan Kiyabu of the Amy Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden treated the wiliwili trees and they bounced right back.”
Students at the West Hawai`i Explorations Academy are helping with some research at the site. Late last year, the eighth-grade science class of Sylvia Texeira cleared and cast seeds of native plants over two large plots near the summit in an experiment to test the effectiveness of reseeding the area. Students from WHEA now monitor the area to see whether the seeds sprout and, if so, under what conditions. They also search the sere landscape for “kumu” trees – older, established trees that can be used as a seed source. At the recent work day, Texeira was eager to share the news that her students had spotted several a`ali`i seedlings sprouting near a water line installed to irrigate some of the new plantings.
Goats have posed some of the most difficult management problems at the cemetery. Nearly the entire area is now fenced, but outside the fenced area, trees along the road leading to Queen Ka`ahumanu Highway remain vulnerable to browsing goats.
“Goats have been our nemesis right from the first,” says Stevens. “The war with them is never quite over. So far, they have not been a major obstacle, and we’ve been able to mostly keep one step ahead of them.”
Stevens sees the efforts at Pu`u O`o as just the beginning. “We’re really thinking about regional restoration. The greenhouse is not only for our use, but for making native plants available to others interested in restoring the lowland dry forest,” he says. “We’ll be happy to supply plants to anyone who would like to put them into their landscape.”
Stevens’ enthusiasm is infectious, as the packed parking lot and steady stream of plant-bearing volunteers scaling the trail to the pu`u summit attest. Last year, the Department of Interior recognized his efforts by selecting him as one of 29 recipients of its “Take Pride in America Award.”
But for Stevens, the real reward lies in the coming-together of the community to repair the land.
“If we’re going to save the world, this is the way it’s going to happen,” he says.
— Patricia Tummons
April 2007 — Volume 17, Number 10