The Edge of Land

Chapter 1

I kinohi (In the Beginning)

I can vividly recall the first time I saw the ocean. It was June 1959, and I had just turned three. Five of us lived in a two-bedroom sub-ground floor apartment in Far Rockaway, New York, a short walk over a dune to the beach.

As I began to climb, I could smell the ocean, a new and intoxicating scent, and I left my mother behind and hurried to the top. Then I stopped. I looked out. I stared. -I put my clothes and towel down—and I ran, as fast as my chubby legs would carry me, ignoring my mother’s calls. The hundred yards to the water seemed to me like a marathon. Finally, I was there, on the edge of land, my feet in the cold, gray water. I placed my hands on my hips. I smiled. I picked up my head and turned my face to the ocean. I squinted, enthralled, looking out at the seemingly endless water.

Since that time, I have been captivated by the vastness of the ocean.

I was born a couple of weeks prematurely on June 7, 1956, in Boston, Massachusetts. I am the middle child of a middle child. The doctor who delivered me also had delivered my older brother, Scott, almost four years earlier. Our brother Andrew came almost three years later. Scott and I have always been closer. Maybe it’s because the same hands brought us into the world, because we shared a bedroom until I was six, or because he included me in most of his activities with his friends, or maybe it is because we started to swim at the same time.

We lived in Far Rockaway for a couple of years while my father did his graduate work, and after he finished his PhD at Harvard in 1961, he got a job at the University of Hawaiʻi as an assistant professor in the College of Education. So, two years after Hawaiʻi became a state, we moved to the island of Oahʻu.

Before leaving the mainland, our family visited Boston to say goodbye to my grandparents, great-uncle, great-aunt, and pretty much every relative we owned and who owned us. There was a big going-away party. My grandmother was incredibly concerned about our move, believing Hawaiʻi to be a lonely place with no electricity, grass huts, and limited modern conveniences.

We took Pan American Airlines to Hawaiʻi. I’ll never forget the details of the trip, which happened during a time when passengers dressed well, when people were allowed to smoke on board the plane, and the flight crew gave out wings to little boys who asked. Our first leg was from Boston to Los Angeles, and then we flew over the Pacific Ocean for four more hours. Looking out the window and seeing blue everywhere, my mind raced. My mother leaned over and whispered, “Ocean. Water.” How big could the ocean actually be? I began to wonder.

A professor at the University of Hawaiʻi College of Education greeted us at Honolulu International Airport with plumeria leis, gracious greetings, and as much aloha as any person could ever want. She introduced herself as Pearl Yamashita, a four-foot-ten-inch dynamo I would come to call Auntie Pearl. She welcomed us wholeheartedly into her family. One of her sons, Bruce, would become my closest friend during these hanabuddah days. (This Hawaiʻian term refers to one’s youth, hanabuddah being what’s seen on the face of young children who do not wipe their runny noses.)

For the first few years in Hawaiʻi, we lived just outside downtown Honolulu on the side of Mount Tantalus (Puʻu ʻōhiʻa), which rises 2,014 feet above the Manoa Valley. From the Tantulus lookout, you can see past Diamond Head in the east all the way to the Waianae coast in the west, and the University of Hawaiʻi, as well of all of Waikiki, downtown, and the harbor stretch out below. We occupied the top floor of a wooden house with two bedrooms and a dining area. Scott slept in a screened-in lanai off our parents’ room. I shared the other bedroom with Andrew.

All kinds of wonderful fruit trees grew in the yard. There was an avocado tree off the lanai, along with plumeria trees, hibiscus bushes, and various other flowers. My mother even started growing pineapples.

There were a few things that we needed to digest about our new home. Hawaiʻi is the most isolated population center in the world; with no other land mass in any direction for thousands of miles, it is the southernmost point of the United States. Being an island, it is surrounded by the ocean. Most places on Oahʻu are only minutes away from the ocean, and water sports play a large part of recreational fun. When we moved there, the island of Oahʻu had a population of around half a million people. Among them, about one-third were white (haole). Although the original meaning of the word haole was “foreigner,” it had come to mean “white person,” denoting a certain skin color, not a place of origin. I was haole, and I grew up knowing that. During this period in Hawaiʻi, there were always two questions one was asked when first meeting someone. “What school you went?” That provided the geographical perspective. The second question was “What are you?” This was about race and ethnicity. On the mainland, it is a conversational faux pas to ask about other person’s race and or ethnicity after only one or two minutes. In Hawaiʻi, it was not only a conversation starter, but it was also expected.

Another third of the population had Japanese ethnicity. And the last third included native Hawaiʻian, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and African American, among others. I grew up in a diverse environment and never thought about any ethnic themes and divisive lines. In Hawaiʻi it was never considered to be racist to inquire about a person’s racial background. Because of all the different people mixtures, it was really just a question of interest and clarification to which no one took offense.

Teaching such subjects as Diversity, Ethnicity, and Poverty in Education, my father made $5,000 a year in 1961. While that was only around $40,000 in today’s dollars, it was enough. Still, we never believed that we were anywhere close to being rich.

Since my father had served in World War II (in the Coast Guard in the Pacific Theater), we were entitled to enjoy many facilities accessible to families of servicemen. For example, we could go to any military beach on Oahʻu. To get in to these beaches, park, and buy food, you needed to show a military ID. The land had sometimes been bought to make these oases, but more often, it had been taken for this use. Some were open to the public only on weekends, even for indigenous persons who might have grown up going there. The beach we visited most often was Fort DeRussy, a beautiful stretch of white sand adjacent to the Hilton Hawaiʻian Village in the heart of Waikiki Beach.

One may ask how a military beach ended up here. On January 17, 1893, Hawaiʻi’s monarchy was overthrown when a group of white businessmen and sugar planters led by Sanford Dole deposed Queen Liliuokalani. Dole became president of Hawaiʻi. On July 7, 1898, the United States officially annexed the territory, laying claim to certain “vital” lands.

As a child, I loved our daylong beach excursions. They cost nothing and were the best part of every week. I thought nothing about the fact that the only people on the beach were soldiers and sailors and their families. However, these days, my acknowledgment of the wrongs done during Hawaiʻi’s colonial past do complicate my feelings.

The first time I was at the edge of water in Hawaiʻi, I noticed that the beach had coconut trees, no seaweed, and brilliant white sand. The water called to me. It was warm and blue, not the cold gray of Far Rockaway Beach. The sun was shining, there was a warm trade wind blowing, Diamond Head was to my left, and in front of me was the vastness that is the Pacific Ocean.

There was just one problem—I could not swim. I could float, but I could not swim. I was never allowed to go any deeper than the water reaching my stomach. At first, it did not bother me much, as long as I was in the water. I could lie flat on the surface with the cheap plastic mask and snorkel my parents had bought me. The movement of the small waves was incredibly intriguing. I would watch for hours as they gently came ashore, moving the sand on the ocean floor. They mesmerized a young kid who had plenty of time on his hands.

Because we spent so much time in the water, and the fact that Oahʻu is surrounded by ocean, my parents decided that my older brother and I should learn to swim. Scott suffered from asthma, and physicians recommended swimming to help him build his lung capacity. As for me, I was very chubby, and my mother believed that regular swimming would help me lose weight, although my enthusiasm for food offset any good the exercise would do.

Since the Coast Guard did not offer swimming lessons in a pool, for my first venture into organized swimming, I was taken to Pearl Harbor, where a navy instructor taught recruits to swim. He was a chief petty officer. So, at the age of six, my first swim lesson was at the hands of someone who taught grown men going to war. There were a bunch of us there that day. I was the youngest, and others ranged up to about twelve. The instructor approached and barked orders at us. Every time he told us to do something, we discussed it among ourselves; obviously, this was something that was neither done nor approved of in the navy. He bellowed that he wanted everyone to be quiet or he would throw us all in the water. “Not one more peep!”

However, I made a sound. The actual utterance that emanated from my mouth was “Peep!” He rushed me. He took his large military arms and caught me in a bear hug. He lifted me off my feet, pulled me close, and in an embrace better for a girlfriend or wife jumped in the pool, straight to the bottom. This was the first time I was ever in a swimming pool. It smelled and tasted different from the ocean. I tried to get loose. I twisted, I turned, I kicked, and I was running out of breath. While I wish I could say that my life passed before my eyes, but at six, there really is not much life to view. He held me underwater for what seemed like an eternity. I clearly remember that when I finally did surface, I was gasping for air, and he was laughing.

At that point, my parents figured out that I was not best suited for the military way.

My father then hired Soichi Sakamoto, who worked in the physical education department at the University of Hawaiʻi and coached their team as well as a swim club (Hawaiʻi Swim Club, or HSC) for age-group swimmers. Everyone called him “Coach.” He taught his swimmers about interval training, the combination of dry-land exercise with weights, character-building, training discipline, and hard work. Many of his disciples went on to achieve remarkable success. In fact, a number became successful Olympians. In 1939, his team won the amateur swimming national championship. In 1940, his swimmers were supposed to lead the United States Olympic Swimming Team, but the cancellation of the 1940 and 1944 Olympics due to World War II put an end to any dreams of immediate worldwide recognition. I can say that his enormous impact on both my swimming and my personal discipline has stayed with me for my entire life.

One day after school, my father took Scott and me to the Hawaiʻi Swim Club, located on the University of Hawaiʻi campus. It was an old installation, twenty-five yards long, six lanes, with a diving board at one end; it had rough, cracked cement walls, made in 1921, and it looked every day of its forty years. While it was a “body” of water, a pool is not the edge of water. It did not taste of salt. There were no ocean breezes, no sand, and no real pull. You can see the other end. In fact, you can swim the entire surface of the water in seconds.

Coach Sakamoto developed some innovative methods to instruct young kids. For instance, he would put a kind of belt around my waist and attach a rope to it. My father would hold the other end to prevent me from drowning as I made my way across the pool. We did this for an hour a day for at least two weeks. It was undoubtedly quite effective, as it allowed kids to get over their fear of water, put their faces down in the water, and use their arms to stroke.

After the two weeks, I had become comfortable in the water and was ready to take on the more vigorous aspects of competitive swim training. Scott had taken to the water more quickly and was already training with the team. Hawaiʻi Swim Club membership was ten dollars a month per kid. Not much really, but at that time it was going to cost almost 5 percent of our family’s income for us to continue to swim there.

At the Hawaiʻi Swim Club, high school kids, younger ones like me, and every age in between trained at the same time. It offered an excellent learning environment for young ones, who could see the more accomplished older athletes. We learned stroke technique, discipline, and the virtue of hard work from each other.

It must be stated that Coach was the master when it came to teaching swimming techniques. He would personally make sure that your stroke was as close to perfect as you could get it. Although never a swimmer himself, he had an innate understanding of stroke mechanics. He could see every tiny detail and help you develop more efficiency in each stroke. Coach believed that swimming was like life, that energy should not be wasted in movements that would not propel you forward with as little resistance as possible. He could look at a swimmer once and know where mistakes were being made. He could look at a human and know where energy was being wasted. By the time I began with Coach, he had been doing it for more than thirty years.

Part of my motivation for learning to swim at six did not involve weight loss or competition. At the beach at Fort DeRussy, there were three large wooden rafts with diving boards on them about a hundred yards offshore. I wanted more than anything to go to these rafts. I thought there was something magical about them and that I was missing out on forbidden fun. However, my parents told me that I could only go out there if I could swim out to them by myself. That was very motivating. Swimming to the rafts extended what I did on the trips to the beach. It also meant that I would no longer be just at the edge of land; I would be in a place where I could look back at it.

Scott and I attended the University of Hawaiʻi Lab School, which was established for the families of university faculty and staff. When professors at the university developed a curriculum, we were the guinea pigs who tested its effectiveness. There were about forty or fifty students per grade level, two classes. The racial makeup was what is now called cosmopolitan, including kids who were Japanese, Chinese, haole, Hawaiʻian, part Hawaiʻian, Filipino, and pretty much every combination of all of those.

Each school day, Scott and I took the ten-minute walk from school to the pool, establishing a routine that would last many years.

Chapter 2

ʻO nā makahiki hānau (The Formative Years)

My parents were not swimmers; they were floaters. In my entire life, I never once saw either of my parents swim one lap in a swimming pool. I never saw them swim in the ocean, I never saw them swim in a river, a lake, or any other body of water. I had never seen any grandparent in a swimsuit. I had no family history of any relative being a swimmer. And yet, my parents became impassioned zealots when it came to having me and my older brother swim. Perhaps it was the fact that they were “spending good money” on keeping us on the swim team. I really cannot say. What I do know is that they were committed—and by the ripe old age of eight, so was I.

Competitive swimmers are divided into age groups: ten and under, eleven to twelve, thirteen to fourteen, and fifteen to eighteen. At eight, I was entered into my first competition, which meant both more money for entry fees and the loss of a weekend swimming in the ocean. My first meet was held at Richardson Pool on the Schofield Barracks army base. Once again, a first for me on a military base.

The Schofield Pool is unusually long. At that time, it was 103 meters by 25 meters (337 feet by 82 feet), almost the length of an American football field, from the back of one end zone to the back of the other, and about half as wide. (By contrast, Olympic swimming pools are fifty meters by twenty-five meters.)