Koamalu : a story of pioneers on Kauai, and of what they built in that island garden / by Ethel M. Damon. [Vol. 1, no. 2]

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K A M A L U

turn off trash dry enough to be fed directly into the modern system of furnaces. The process of speeding up
keeps two twelve-hour shifts of men at work in the mill,
which now operates twenty-four hours out of every
working day during grinding season. Turning up old
fields with caterpillar-tractor plows and hauling cane by
rail are now carried on almost as much during the night
as by day. And, pitting their wits against nature herself,
men have contrived to divert into constructive channels
the action of two elements usually found destructive in
character. The trick of working against the wind for a
quick fire and adroitly setting a match to the masses of
dry, sharp-edged leaves on a standing crop is now
accomplished with such everyday skill as to obviate much
of the labor formerly involved in cane cutting; and contractors will not, as a rule, agree to cut a field except on
condition that it may first be burned off. In ratoon fields
the hana-wai men, or irrigators, often stand at their
water gates alert for the signal to let water into last
year's furrow before the cane from it has reached the
mill or the sections of portable track have been taken
from the field. Bags of nitrate of soda lie ready to hand
for fertilizing the moistened furrows the next day, and
in a week's time the harvested field is green again with
the slender, waving blades of a second growth. Mill
work and field work have always gone hand in hand, and
the development in either one, during the eighty years
since plows first broke ground at Lihue, would fill a
treatise of many pages.
Yet, notwithstanding these marked industrial gains, it
may well be that future days will judge the fairest influence of these fourscore years at Lihue to have lain in the
domestic and social sphere even more than in the domain
of industry or agriculture. One feels it often today in the
successful replanting which the old Koamalu home has
undergone on the Molokoa hillside. One who perceived