Hopes at a crossroad on the Big Island
HILO, Hawai‘i — It’s raining this Sunday in Hilo, but inside the shed at pier No. 1 dozens of bright-faced cruise passengers crowd the Tropical Colors booth to retrieve their complementary single-flower bouquet: a bird of paradise, fuschia anthurium, or stalk of pink ginger.
“They’re very hardy flowers so they’ll last through your cruise, just keep them in water,” Maryann Sullivan tells these springtime sailors, who got the free-bouquet vouchers from their travel agent. Overhearing a passenger several rows back say she will send an arrangement from the ship’s last stop, Maryann stage-whispers over the crowd that the Big Island and Tropical Colors will really be her best bet for getting fresh Hawai‘i flowers to friends and family back home.
“I try to touch base with everyone,” she says. “With 1,200 people to talk to, I have a good time.”
Maryann is the kinetic link with visitors for Steve and Susan Philips, the owners of Tropical Colors who have built a $150,000-a-year business on the Big Island’s rural east side growing and selling flowers to the folks who trundle off cruise ships in Hilo.
Spunky and undaunted as the nearby volcano, the Philips have carved a living from two of the East Side’s largest and most unpredictable businesses: farming and tourism. As flower growers, they are the very face of the Orchid Isle, which is the heart of Hawai‘i’s industry for the sensuous and feathery blooms. As vendors to the cruise ships, they are among the thousands who depend on the East Side’s most important piece of the Big Island’s $1.5 billion tourism pie. In 1999, the ships delivered 104,000 passengers and an estimated $12.6 million to the East Side economy with visitors who fanned out to Volcanoes National Park, the famous botanical garden, and shops, tours and restaurants.
Though adding “drought” and “floods” to the list of uncertainties that most tourism workers endure, the Philips have weathered the Big Island’s bad times, living through the loss of the sugar industry that plunged the place into decline in the mid-’90s, and even growing their business $20,000 a year since starting to sell at the pier in 1992.
But like the cruise industry they depend on, the Philips’ business could be at a crossroads. Even as Hilo prepares for a record number of ship arrivals in 2001, driven by the worldwide industry’s progress toward adding 57 new ships to the fleet by 2004, the harbor has been forced by shortcomings at the pier to turn away ships for the first time in history. The loss of ships – and the dollars they bring – could slap the lid on Tropical Colors’ growth. And weakness this year could dash Steve and Susan’s most immediate dream: to finish stocking the shade house they built to grow the Big Island’s famous orchids.
“We’re trying to fill the shade house, that’s our big thing,” Susan says. Cultivating their own orchids would save the $1,000 a month they currently spend to buy them from other growers.
Back at their farm near Pahoa, Steve and Susan have been cutting flowers and wrapping bouquets since 6 a.m., and Steve will soon head to the pier with another load for Maryann. A rainy mist wafts down on the fields that spread behind them, three acres of crunchy volcanic cinder that coaxes a rainbow of anthurium, heliconia, ginger and tiny yellow sunburst orchids called obdrobium.
Five-year-old Kevin and eight-year-old Sean bounce a basketball in the portico next door with German short-haired pointers Molly and Pips as referees. In a red flannel shirt and black fuzzy clogs to guard against the damp of their outdoor “office,” Susan pounds out computerized mailing labels as Steve staples boxes for shipments the next day. Tomorrow, dozens of orders from passengers, mail-order customers, and Mainland florists must make it to FedEx by 1 p.m.
“1:01 and they go out the next day,” Susan says.
The couple came to the Big Island from Los Angeles in 1986 expressly to grow flowers, after Steve’s cousin, then living in Hana, showed up for Thanksgiving with a box of gorgeous flora.
“He gave me one and that was it,” Susan says.
Business has been decent, but this year may hit a bump. Hilo will dock six fewer ships, 10,000 fewer passengers and roughly a million fewer dollars. The loss could mean the difference between filling the orchid house, which is 80 percent empty, and keeping the dream at arm’s length.
“Do we have $500 this month, or $300 or do we have $1,000?” she says. “We spent thousands on orchid plants. And we have thousands and thousands to go.”
Next year could bring better chances. American Hawai‘i Cruises, the Honolulu-based interisland line that provides the Philips with a sure-fire port call every single week, will add a second ship in December, doubling its calls – and sales opportunities – to two a week or 105 for the year. Combined with 50 calls during the year from international lines, Hilo is set to welcome a record 160,000 passengers with $19.7 million in their pockets in 2001.
But the numbers could have been higher. Hilo was forced to turn away three ships in 2001 because like some other Neighbor Island ports, its alternate pier is too small to handle the industry’s ever-larger ships. The loss of the people and their dollars will mean less business for the Philips, and could stunt the business they are trying to grow.
“It seems silly that we can’t find a way not to turn ships away,” Steve says.
The state has sent mixed signals on the cruise industry. Tourism officials say they support bringing more ships, and this year have given $174,000 to groups that greet cruise ships with hula and festivities. But Hawai‘i can’t actively invite more ships, they say, until port issues like the ones that plague Hilo and other Neighbor Islands are corrected. A study commissioned by the Department of Transportation found $54 million in improvements statewide are needed by 2004 to accommodate cruise arrivals, which the study estimates could reach half-a-million passengers who spend $295 million by 2020. So far, only $14.5 million has been approved.
Ship on the horizon
But for now, Steve and Susan will focus on the business they have, and on the added stability American Hawai‘i’s 1,212-passenger ms Patriot could bring. The line’s 1,068-passenger Independence has been running nearly full, executives say, and a marketing campaign launched last November with twice the budget of the past is aimed at keeping both vessels completely booked. With any luck, the full ships will bring the Philips and others less stressful summers.
“I’m hoping the addition of this other cruise ship will give us another boost of passengers,” Susan says. Otherwise, she says, “We might have to get into weddings or something.”
Summer is always a slow time for the Philips, and this summer not a single international line stopped in Hilo in June or July. And even when the Independence rolls in each week, Susan says, it is full of budget-conscious family travelers.
“It’s not the spendy crowd,” Susan says. “The spendy crowd is in Alaska.”
To make ends meet, Steve, whose architect-grandfather was Clifford May, father of the California ranch style and designer of the Mondavi Winery, sometimes tries to get work as a draftsman.
“I hopefully pick up some jobs drawing plans,” says Steve, who also built the Philips’ home, a rugged place of wood and skylights, with solid mango-wood fixtures.
But mostly, they try to gather nuts during the spring. From April 1 to Mother’s Day — one of the busiest days of the year — the Philips sell much and sleep little. Any stumbling during that too short window — a defect in the harbor that keeps ships away, a ferocious storm, a dive in the stock market that causes people to grip their wallets more tightly — could create a potentially devastating cash shortage.
The kind of shortage that could make it tough to get the kids medical attention when they need it, like Sean did last month.
The Philips haven’t had health insurance for about three years. But when Sean began struggling with his classes and school officials suggested they test him for dyslexia, they signed up for a program – at $355 a month. In June, they took advantage of it, spending another several hundred dollars to bring Sean to a specialist in Honolulu. With the diagnosis of mild dyslexia came more expenses.
“It was $588 for the vision exercises alone,” Susan says.
If there’s anything left this year after Steve and Susan fill the orchid house and keep the kids healthy, they say, they would like to contribute to their retirement account, something they didn’t do last year and don’t do with any regularity.
“Our whole deal is to grow the business,” Steve says. “Everything we have goes into the business.”
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| “I’m hoping the addition of this other cruise ship will give us another boost of passengers. (Otherwise) we might have to get into weddings or something.”
– Susan Philips, flower grower
Steve and Susan Philips |
Keeping it local
And what goes into the business often comes out in the community. Steve and Susan try to spread their money locally – as in, no farther than the nearby town of Pahoa — and mostly they’re successful.
“First we’ll try Leilani, then Pahoa, then Hilo,” Steve says. “I really believe in keeping our pool of money circulating around here.”
Newspaper shred for packing comes from a friend a few blocks away; cinder from a puka up the road is hauled by another local friend, and orchids come from Kama‘ili Nursery in Opihikao.
The Philips are only about three percent of the nursery’s business, says owner Beverly Tuaolo, but they fill a special niche by taking lots of her smaller flowers as filler in their arrangements. If Tropical Colors faltered, Beverly says she would survive, but she would have to replace them somehow.
“Everything helps,” she says. “It’s the overall picture. Everybody’s important.”
And Maryann, the cruise hawker and their only employee, lives just one street over from the Philips in the Leilani Estates subdivision. Maryann left Tropical Colors in June to put her considerable sales talent toward a business with her husband — selling satellite dishes, which Tim Sullivan says he can’t install fast enough.
Taking over for Maryann is another neighbor, Silvia Calvino, a mom to 8-year-old Nicole and 4-year-old Maile, who took the job to step out on her own a bit. Silvia, whose husband, Joseph, supplies most of the family income through day-trading, says she took the job to have some of her own pocket money, but also because she fell in love: with a horse.
The object of her affection is an Arabian-Polish cross named Lehua, whom she lately has been riding at a friend’s farm in Hamakua and who happens to be for sale. She is hoping by Christmas she will have saved the $4,000.
“The woman who owns her right now is sort of holding her, thinking I should take her,” Silvia says.
While the Philips keep the hopes of others fresh, they also try to look out for their own, keeping their eyes ever trained on that shade house.
“We keep our dreams alive,” Steve says. “Maybe we’ll hit it big.”
