River guide stakes future on recovery of Kaua‘i
WAILUA, Kaua‘i — Marnie Morgan slips reef shoes over her bare feet and hops into the river to haul her kayak — passenger and all — over the rocks it’s stuck on.
“This is how I earn my tips,” she says, tugging the tow rope.
Marnie is just shy of 5 feet tall with the same bouncy pep of the Calvin and Hobbes tattoo that dances around her right calf. The Philadelphia native came to Kaua‘i on a one-way ticket in 1994 and slowly took on its spirit, grinding taro into poi alongside aunties and uncles, and eventually finding her home on the island’s rivers and trails.
The 28-year-old single mom puts food on the table for herself and her 3-year-old son, Keanu, by working as a guide, office manager and all-around handy person for Kayak Kaua‘i, a fixture in the island’s mainstay adventure-activity industry.
More than a million people a year come to Kaua‘i to hike, bike, paddle on Hawai‘i’s only navigable rivers, take helicopter rides into canyons inaccessible by any other means, and to drink in the island’s fervent natural beauty, driving for dozens of two-laned miles past cane fields, taro patches and cow pastures. Roughly 80 percent of those visitors will pick up a paddle or engage in some sort of water sport, making Marnie, at least figuratively, the one who shows them around. She lives by their rhythms, pays rent by their arrivals. Whatever happens to tourism, happens to Marnie. And whatever happens to Marnie, happens to Kaua‘i, its economy and its people.
This drizzly spring day is a good one. After struggling all week to get 30 hours of work — not uncommon during the typically slow spring tourism season — Marnie has two people who want to paddle down the Wailua River. Maybe they’ll even tip her. Last year had its slow times as well, Marnie recalls, but in the end, 1999 turned out so well that she even treated herself to a two-week vacation in Alaska to visit friends. She’s been back already once this year, on a plane ticket sent by those friends, and hopes the rest of the year will be good enough to let her return one more time on her own steam.
“I’d like to go in the end of September, if I save enough money this summer,” she says, estimating airfare could run $800 to $1,000.
So far, the tourism numbers — and the marketers who try to boost them — are on her side. Kaua‘i has slowly clawed its way back since Hurricane Iniki tore through the island in 1992, destroying roads, homes and hotels. Last year, visitors increased nearly 5 percent to 1.09 million, just 200,000 people short of its pre-Iniki high. This year, Kaua‘i has beaten its targets every month, putting it well on the road toward its goal of 1.1 million visitors and 3.9 percent growth in visitor days, a key tourism indicator that measures the overall visitor mass by tracking how many visitors come and how long they stay.
Newly restored hotels and new airline flights deserve at least part of the credit for the growth. Kaua‘i lost 40 percent of its rooms overnight when Iniki blew through, but last year, accommodations grew 14 percent to 7,972 rooms — about 200 more than it started with. About 15 percent of those are time share, a development that economists say could stabilize the island’s tourism industry by bringing the longer-staying visitors state planners are looking for, and by evening out the seasonal ups and downs that hotels experience. Some of the island’s icon properties, such as the Waiohai Hotel and Coco Palms, where Elvis got married in “Blue Hawai‘i,” are expected to become time share. The Waiohai could see its first visitors late next year.
Filling the rooms has taken longer. United Airlines only resumed daily service from Los Angeles in 1998, and will upgrade its twice weekly San Francisco flight to a daily in October. Tour operators have also added planes as seasons demand, but Kaua‘i wants more, and like the state as a whole, has made increasing air service a priority.
Advertising and marketing efforts aim at nudging the numbers upward and keeping people coming in the off-seasons. This year, the Kaua‘i Visitors Bureau will spend $600,000 of its $2.5 million budget — double the budget of past years — on advertising year-round, something it used to do only in the spring and summer. A $150,000 public relations campaign also keeps a steady stream of writers coming to the island, which helps create a buzz that could take the edge off the punishing seasonality of tourism that is so troubling to folks like Marnie.
Lately, in fact, Marnie has been thinking of hitting her bosses up for a salary instead of her hourly wages, just to relieve some of the pressure. She makes $12 an hour and during the summer, when she works 60 to 80 hours a week, she can collect a decent stash. But a steady flow of cash matters this year perhaps more than others because she is hoping to send Keanu to pre-school in the fall, a cost of $350 a month, or $250 if she is approved for financial aid.
“In the summer, I don’t have any trouble, but in the winter it will be tough,” she says. “Sometimes I go on unemployment for a month just to let those who really don’t have any work get some hours.”
Since March, Marnie has split the $700-a-month rent on her two-bedroom place in Princeville with her boyfriend, Harley Morris, and that could help her save for pre-school. But although she and Harley are tight, the survivor in Marnie calls their living arrangement “month-to-month,” something that a salary would not be.
Today, for instance, could have been a bust. Early this morning, while the drizzle was still in the sky, two of the four people who had signed up for the kayak trip canceled, not only diminishing Marnie’s potential for tips, but threatening the trip itself. Guides don’t hit the river with just one person.
One of the paddlers was on business and committed, but the one who saved the day was Karen Van Wye, a lone traveler from South Pasadena, Calif. Karen has been to Hawai‘i many times, but it’s her first trip to Kaua‘i, and she wouldn’t be here at all, she says, if it weren’t for her travel agent, who extolled the island’s glories.
That’s why the Hawai‘i Visitors and Convention Bureau is trying to enrapture travel agents. The bureau visited dozens of cities across the country earlier this year with its travel agent training seminar, which teaches agents about Hawai‘i, it’s culture, history, geography and islands, and how to sell it effectively. At the end of the half-day sessions, agents take a test to become “certified” Hawai‘i specialists, a distinction that entitles them to their own free Hawai‘i vacation after they book a certain volume of business, and puts them on the bureau’s list of agents to throw leads. Bureau executives estimate that the 4,000 agents certified so far have booked roughly $17 million worth of business.
It’s unclear whether Karen’s travel agent ever attended the seminars, but the road show did pass through Pasadena in October.
If today had been a bust for Marnie, she would have had company. During the paddling lesson outside Kayak Kauai’s shed in the Coconut Marketplace, David Gregg, president of the family-run Sunny Side Farmer’s Market in Kapa‘a, arrives to deliver sandwiches for the trip. If what happens to tourism happens to Marnie, what happens to Marnie happens to David.
David delivers $50,000 a year in sandwiches to Kayak Kaua‘i and two other activities outlets. The deli sales make up about a quarter of his overall business, he says, and when it drops — like it did when fewer-than-expected visitors showed up for Christmas and New Year’s holidays last year — he can lose 60 percent of those sales. In that dark time, he says he knocked some of his full-time employees down to 18 hours a week. In those times, David says, everybody feels the heat, including people like his brother-in-law, a general contractor.
“It’s a circle,” he says. “If I’m not making money, I’m not going to call you to remodel my bathroom. The island is so small it affects us all.”
If business stays strong all summer, David says he might paint his truck, pointing to its dings and dirty spots.
With the sandwiches safely on board, Marnie launches her tiny crew onto the Wailua with Harvey as her co-guide. She points out the Sleeping Giant, a dozing mountain on Kaua‘i’s landscape, and the river’s tangle of hau bush, whose papery yellow flowers will turn orange, then red as the day wears on.
Before the summer season, when she works 80-hour weeks outfitting and advising intrepid paddlers bent on trying the 17-mile journey down the Na Pali coast, occasional river trips like this get Marnie by, bringing tips that can boost her day’s wages by as much as 30 percent.
“Especially when we get tours, that’s when you really pray for tips,” she says. “For me, that’s a bonus. I get to treat myself to dinner and rent a movie and forget to return it for a couple of days.”
In the lean months, Marnie also gets by with resourcefulness. She rents storage space in her walk-in closet to her friends, who are a fluid presence in her apartment.
“It depends on how much they have and how much they hang out,” she says of her sliding scale for monthly fees. “I don’t do it too often, but like 100 bucks. If you use my washer and dryer, 150 bucks.”
Tanya, who sleeps in Keanu’s room five nights a week when he is at his father’s house, pays $150 a month. Christie, who is between apartments, stores stuff at Marnie’s, but divides her other life tasks, like showering and laundry, among other friends; she pays $75 a month.
The arrangement has other advantages. If the money is flowing, Marnie likes to treat herself once or twice a week to dinner at the Hanalei Dolphin Restaurant & Fish Market or Bubba Burgers. But more often than not, there are friends using her kitchen, as they were that night after the paddling trip, and they’re happy to feed anyone who shows up.
“So I get to eat free,” Marnie says.
Keanu is absent this night, laid up at his father’s with a cold. Keanu stays with his father Wednesday through Sunday nights, so Marnie can work without having to pay a babysitter. Dad’s schedule is more flexible.
But even though Keanu’s not here, like any mom, Marnie has pictures. Lots of pictures. There’s the tow head on the beach, mugging for the camera. There he is naked, holding up a fist.
“He was born with a lampshade on his head,” Marnie says. “He can entertain himself pretty good.”
But she also wants him to be social, and to make new friends besides Mom and Dad, she says. Pre-school would give him that, she says, and would also give him a good leg up for school later.
She knows a salary would make it easier to meet the costs. But it would impose so much structure on her life, she says, demanding her “undivided attention” 40 hours a week, every week, that she’s leery. As the months roll by, she says she will continue to weigh the benefits, which she knows are great:
“It would take off some of the worries,” she says. “Even if there was a rainy day, I wouldn’t be sweating it too much.”
