Dear Oprah

By TAD BARTIMUS

Welcome to the neighborhood. Like many of us, you probably think moving to Hawaii means escaping the rat race. Think again. Life follows you to the end of the road.

Even here, phones ring, faxes arrive, e-mails pile up, bills accumulate. In winter, folks fleeing the cold arrive on our doorsteps and, like fish, begin to smell after three days. When one batch leaves, another appears.

They expect a stereotypical tropical idyll. All of us who moved here did. But there are plenty of surprises. Wild cattle are road hazards, wild boars roam our rain forest, a man down the road lives in a cave, and many of our children prefer surfing to television. We're used to losing electricity when weather knocks out the line, our ancient water system frequently leaks, and medical evacuation services are limited.

Except for native Hawaiians, we're all interlopers -- Filipinos, Chinese, European and Japanese all mixed up. There's a clash of cultures and an undercurrent of racism. Hawaiian-Polynesians are the vast majority, white folks a minority. There are a few African-Americans. We define ourselves not just by ethnicity, but also as haves and have-nots. The haves own land (now priced at $100,000 an acre and up); the have-nots don't own land, but want to.

Despite all of your wealth and fame, we hope this complicated backwater of America will have more impact on you than you will have on it -- or us.

Rumor has it you won't build a "starter castle" on your 102 acres of oceanfront land. Your personal trainer, Bob Greene, who also has purchased a few acres for a house, probably won't either. In a bulk mailing to "postal patron" sent by the ranch owners that sold you property, you are described as someone "who respects the cultural and environmental preservation of this important area ..."

About 2,000 of us live along 100 miles of Maui's windward coast. Permanent residents are county employees who brave big storms to keep the narrow, one-lane road open to our nearest big town two hours away. We are teachers at a K-12 public school where more than half the children qualify for free breakfast as well as free lunch. We are commercial fishermen, bus drivers, gardeners, backhoe operators, rock wall builders, contractors, realtors, vacation rental owners, farmers, several Hollywood types, a handful of dot-com wunderkinds, artists, a lawyer or two, a couple of retired entrepreneurs, many cowboys. There are a few millionaires and some of us are middle-class; many depend on public assistance.

The main employer is a luxury resort hotel that has financially anchored the community since 1948, much as the now-defunct sugar plantation did in earlier times. It owns the gas station, the two main restaurants, one of our two general stores and nearly all the commercially zoned property.

The undisclosed millions you paid the ranch for your new home site will, we hope, stave off mini ranchettes, condominiums and golf courses proliferating at our state's more popular tourist areas. The seller's letter said "no other ranch properties are on the market," which we think means it got enough money from you to pay down its debt service. That's a huge relief to all of us who worry our open space could get carved into subdivisions.

You came from humble beginnings, Oprah. You understand what it means to struggle to pay escalating property taxes in a place where cereal costs $5.40 a box, gasoline is $2.40 a gallon, and eggs are $3 a dozen.

You aren't a stranger here. We've seen you jogging past emerald pastures, admiring the horses and soaking up the solitude. You wave at us as we drive by; we wave back, but we don't bother you. We're used to celebrities. Caroline Kennedy stayed at our four-star hotel on her honeymoon. Hillary Clinton checked in without Bill. Leonardo DiCaprio and Britney Spears have visited.

You are neither our wealthiest nor most famous part-time resident. Rockefellers and Charles Lindbergh arrived before 24-hour cable entertainment shows and People magazine. Lindbergh found it so quiet and peaceful he chose to die and be buried here.

The late Beatle George Harrison spent many low-profile weeks at his oceanfront farm. He dressed like the rest of us -- old jeans, rubber sandals, banana-stained T-shirts. You can't live here without getting banana stains on your clothes, because everybody grows bananas. Local etiquette allows anyone who's hungry to pick a banana and eat it, free.

We wonder how your presence will impact us in a world now obsessed with celebrities. Your bigger-than-reality persona already has put us in the headlines; that's not a place most of us here want to be. We hope you won't want to be there, either, after you've spent time with the rhythms of wind and tide, gazed at black nights lit only by stars, and eaten a few free bananas.

We look forward to the day, Oprah, when you embrace your new community's isolation and inter-dependence, wear stained clothes and join our book club.



© 2002 The Women Syndicate

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