Lala unearths graves and caskets at Big Island cemetery

NAALEHU, Hawaii >> Hurricane Lala tore the dead from the earth on the Big Island. On Monday, Jukwa Balos had to know whether her son still was at rest.

Flooding from the storm had washed through a small cemetery in the ravaged hamlet of Naalehu where Lejje Balos lay, leaving behind a macabre field of mud, cracked and crumbled headstones and violently disinterred coffins and caskets.

On Monday, a body stripped of clothes lay crushed beneath a boulder. About a half dozen caskets were visible, most empty and torn apart. The smell of the unearthed dead suffused parts of the debris field.

“It’s really eerie driving through our town right now,” said John Masters, 46, the owner of Ka’u Auto Repair, a shop down the road from the cemetery that is now buried under several feet of mud and debris. “It’s like your worst nightmare,” he added.

Families came to check on graves as earth movers nearby in the village pushed boulders. In the cemetery, mountains of mud were filled with the flotsam of human lives — refrigerators, clothes, a mattress, a hammer.

A few people huddled near the sodden remnants of Punalu’u Bakery downhill from the cemetery.

About 2 feet of mud surrounded the building’s base, a moldering brown ring showing a water line from Lala almost 4 feet high. Trucks and outbuildings had slid down the hill, half submerged in mud.

What used to be an access road to the cemetery had completely washed out into the former parking lot of the bakery. Gaping ravines some 50 feet deep stood on either side of the remnants of the road. “Tombstones, with people’s names, everywhere,” were scattered about, uprooted, said the bakery’s general manager, Zach Kennedy, 35.

A gray casket sat atop the rubble, upside down.

Up the road, outside Ka’u Auto Repair, dozens of trucks and cars were mired in mud piles, and more caskets lined the street.

The shop’s doors were blown off their hinges and the windows were cracked. Inside, employees discovered what looked like a human femur in the center of the floor.

“I no longer have a place that I get to call my shop,” said Masters, who began working there as a teenager and took over the shop nearly 20 years ago from his father, who is buried at the cemetery. (Masters said his father’s grave is intact, according to a friend who checked the site.)

“I don’t even know where to go from here,” he added.

Below the debris field were Balos, 42, and her nephew and niece, Manny Hirata, 19, and his sister, Laurina, 17. They had driven south from their home in Kona, a little over an hour away, where damage was minimal, to see the cemetery.

Most of the family had been buried there: “Aunties, uncles, siblings,” Manny Hirata said.

Looking up toward the rubble, Balos said, “My son’s buried up there.”

Lejje Balos died suddenly about eight months ago at 25.

“We were going to come this Saturday — his birthday is on Saturday,” his mother said, her voice cracking. “He was my only child.”

Reflecting the Marshallese custom of expansive family bonds, she cares for her sibling’s children, Manny and Laurina, as if they were her biological offspring.

The family had been told by “someone who looked like military” that they could not go up the hill to check; it was too dangerous.

But they were desperate to know that the resting place of their loved ones was safe. They started making their way through the rubble, up to the cemetery some 500 feet to the top of the hill.

Others followed them up the rivulets of dried debris between boulders where it was easier to get a foothold.

Officials are working to identify where remains from the cemetery, which contains nearly 500 burials, may have ended up, said Tom Callis, a spokesperson for the mayor of Hawaii County.

“As they are identified, we are ensuring that they are secured, working with the proper authorities and connecting with families for their eventual return,” he said. He added that in the meantime, debris will not be cleared from the area, which is blocked off.

Maka Gallinger, 38, charged up the debris field with eight relatives in tow. “We’re going to find my mom,” she said. “We got to know. We’ve got to take care of our family bones.”

Gallinger’s mother died 10 years ago and she visited every year or so to check on her grave. “She expressed aloha to its fullest. Her gift was hospitality,” Gallinger said.

Gallinger’s children followed behind, and her husband held an abalone filled with smoking sage. The family walked amid clothing scraps and ruined headstones. They remembered that the casket had been white and that the dead woman had been buried in a red dress.

As Gallinger approached her mother’s grave, she gathered her family around.

“Here she is,” she said. “All right, mom. We’re just checking.”

Gallinger turned toward her family. “She knows how to get us up here,” she said.

Looking down, the scope of the floodwaters felt immense. The side of the hill holding some of the oldest graves had collapsed, exposing coffins, strewing their contents toward the bakery. A light wind blew and the dominant sound was birdsong. In the grass beyond the standing graves, drifts of debris came at intervals like high tide lines.

“How will they know who is who and what is what to put everything back into place?” Gallinger said. “What is Mother Nature trying to tell us? The way the rivers moved in the past, maybe it was where they belonged.”

The trunks of the tall trees that lined the side of the cemetery and served as a wind block were shredded to splinters.

Among the rows of headstones, Balos walked and pointed out the resting places of family — a cousin, an auntie. A baby cousin who had died at birth “must have been in one of the graves that flowed away,” Balos said.

Rounding the bend to part of the grounds spared by the floodwaters, Balos came to her son’s grave.

She sighed.

“He is here,” she said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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