Tourist or Traveler: A Pilgrim’s Progress
Mike Dillon
The man I’d just met, a silver-haired, retired commercial real estate developer from the U.S. mainland, said he had been visiting Maui for more than twenty years.
The Kihei condo building where we were both staying loomed large at our backs. Ten yards below us several turtles, with their wise, Socratic heads, rocked and rolled in the surf as they fed off the rocks. The man clearly appreciated the Hawaiian universe we were in. And he took delight in the turtles, as I did.
“Honu,” he said, pronouncing the Hawaiian word for turtle.
After a minute or so of turtle watching, I glanced behind me as the sunrise slipped over the sugar-loaf heights of Haleakala.
“Kaho‘olawe is lit up,” I said. “You can really make out the russet patches and the ravines.” I pointed to the smallest of the eight main Hawaiian Islands seven miles distant in the southwest.
“O, the Bombing Island, you mean.”
During World War II the U.S. military used Kaho‘olawe for target practice and continued their high-explosive exercises during peacetime. After a long struggle by locals to reclaim the island, the bombing stopped in 1990. In 1994 Kaho‘olawe was transferred back to the state.
Today the Kaho‘olawe Island Reserve Commission, under state jurisdiction, works to restore the island for native cultural, agricultural and spiritual purposes, where some three-thousand historic sites have been catalogued. The hard work of cleaning up, planting and nurturing the damaged island back to its pre-contact state depends on a multitude of volunteers.
When my wife and I first came to Maui in 1986, “Bombing Island” was the given name for Kaho‘olawe within the tourist bubble we inhabited. In 2006 my wife and I returned to visit Maui, and have returned most years since. In 2006 “Bombing Island” was still in circulation. Today, not as much.
Over the years I had heard about one of Hawaii’s great heroes, George Helm Jr., and the effort to “Stop the Bombing.” I didn’t grasp how deep his legacy ran until 2016, when I talked to a Hawaiian involved in Kaho‘olawe’s restoration. A little younger than my sixty-six years, he was strong, self-sufficient and proud.
“George Helm is my hero,” he said of the musician, singer and activist who died at twenty-six trying to save Kaho‘olawe in March 1977.
George Helm Jr of Molokai, one of seven kids, learned about life on the family farm. His father was of Hawaiian-Portuguese-northern European descent. Through his Hawaiian mother he learned to play the guitar and ukulele.
An athletic scholarship took Helm, known for his fervor and prankish humor, from Molokai to St. Louis High School in Honolulu when he was fifteen. After high school graduation in 1968 he worked the “hospitality” circuit as a traveling musician. Playing guitar and singing to tourists couldn’t last. With characteristic intensity, Helm turned to his Hawaiian roots. He studied Hawaiian musical history and culture; he studied Molokai’s rights-of-way, land titles and access rights, and read for long stretches, writing everything down. Research took him to other realms, too: Jung, Nietzsche, Rilke, Gide.
In 1976 Helm and eight others landed on off-limits Kaho‘olawe; seven were caught, including Helm. Two of his companions-in-hiding underwent a powerful spiritual experience on the island. From then on, “Stop the Bombing!” became a rallying cry. That same year Helm helped form the Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana and became its president.
He traveled the islands, seeking out clusters of Hawaiian families, talking not only about Kaho‘olawe but local problems as well: hunting and fishing rights, water rights, lack of arable land.
“Do your homework” Helm often chided others, including legislators. In fact, he spoke to the state House of Representatives against the bombing less than a month before he died — an unprecedented event for a non-member. “If God can hear us, why cannot the politicians?” he asked. The House passed a symbolic resolution calling a halt to the bombing.
From George Helm’s journals: “Kaho‘olawe can teach the rest of the world aloha ‘aina and save us from becoming evolutionary dropouts.” Aloha ‘aina means, literally, love of the land. Those two words also dig deeper, towards a love of family, friends, creatures, the universe.
At some point, George Helm grasped that his time was short. In certain, late photographs, the bearded musician-turned-activist with intense, dark eyes, shows flashes of the granitic resolve and unbanked fires of an Old Testament prophet.
Helm had a beautiful, falsetto singing voice. A U-Tube video captures him, already embarked on his political activities, singing “Hawaiian Cowboy” with a back-up band. He’s without his guitar; hands and body are free. “Hawaiian Cowboy” is a let-‘er-rip kind of song. Helm’s yodeling falsetto climbs up and down the scales with daredevil ease. He’s having fun.
From his journals again: “Faith in the bud that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” Helm, besides his musical talent and acute intellect, had a poetic faculty married to an unshakeable will.
George Helm saw the Kaho‘olawe recovery effort as a catalyst for the renewal of Hawaiian pride. His upbringing in a Catholic home instilled a sense of the sacred and the power of sacrifice and prayer that flowed seamlessly into the Hawaiian cosmos.
A remarkable book published by Bamboo Ridge Press in 1984, tells the story of the fight for Kaho‘olawe. Ho’iHo’i Hou: A Tribute to George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, calls on multiple sources to create unforgettable portraits of two young men who had everything to live for.
Kimo Mitchell, born 1952 in Keanae, Maui, grew up in a close family where he learned to fish and cultivate taro. He was at home on land and sea — a good swimmer, strikingly handsome. Mitchell learned self-sufficiency early. When he was twelve, he spent the summer fishing in Alaska.
He starred as a linebacker at Baldwin High School and went on to play for Fresno State University. Later, he worked for the National Park Service on Haleakala. His concern for the community that nurtured him grew; he met George Helm 1976. As editor Rodney Morales wrote in Ho‘iHo‘i Hou: “Kimo had all the positive qualities George Helm wished for in all young Hawaiians: he had pride in his culture — and no sense of inferiority — a good education, a sense of purpose, and a willingness to give of himself.”
George Helm and Kimo Mitchell disappeared in early March 1977 somewhere off nearby Molokini while on a mission to rescue two of their mates hunkered down on Kaho‘olawe to protest the bombing. Helm, Mitchell and Billy Mitchell (no relation), had feared for their friends’ safety as the bombing continued. Smuggled on a small boat from Kihei to the island, they planned to bring their friends back. And so they searched the terrain, unaware their friends had been picked up by a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter in the meantime. In the days before setting out on his final voyage, George Helm seems to have entered a mystic state. Billy Mitchell later said that, once on the island, Helm seemed wracked by spirits, sometimes lying down on the ground and falling into a deep sleep.
The boat for their return journey never showed. The trio, paddling a pair of surfboards, set out for Kihei in the dark and struggled through rough seas. Billy Mitchell turned back for Kaho‘olawe to find help. The bodies of George Helm Jr. and Kimo Mitchell were never found.
On a Kihei beach one October dawn, I spoke to a fellow in his late-twenties I’ll call Edward. Dressed in a white T-shirt and old blue jeans, baseball cap faced backwards, Edward wore three days’ stubble and aviator sun glasses though the sun hadn’t risen.
Chicago was home, and he spoke in a heavy accent clotted with “dee’s,” “doh’s” and “youze.” Edward had come to Maui to take care of himself, he said; that he’d been through something bad and needed to get out of town. I saw emotional distress and an under-utilized intelligence.
Edward said he planned to find work on Maui and earn the right to stay on the island. He figured if he put all he had into the effort Maui would help put him back together.
“Chicago,” he spat. “People just want you to get the hell of out the way. But this…” He spread his arms to embrace land and sea, a gesture that included Kaho‘olawe to the southwest, though he couldn’t have known the island’s significance or anything about George Helm. “Never in my wildest dreams. Never.” Edward was seeing the Hawaiian universe with his first eyes, and his eyes were wet.
Dante would recognize the thirst, and upward thrust, of such a soul.
And I thought of George Helm.