On ‘Opihikao Road, the one-way lane running from Pähoa Highway down to the ocean, the guide suddenly stops, turns the car to face downhill and takes his foot off the brake. The car begins to roll uphill backward, slowly at first but with increasing speed, defying gravity. Grinning like a gargoyle, the driver says there’s some sort of vortex in the area — and that’s all. Apparently that’s all the explanation you need in Puna, Hawai‘i’s last frontier.
     Puna is in the path of several recent lava flows. It’s also in Hawai‘i’s most active earthquake zone. Understandably, its property is virtually uninsurable for commercial development. Yet it has become the fastest growing area in the state. Home prices have doubled and in some cases tripled in the last few years — and much of the growth appears due to an influx of gay men from the mainland. Liz, a woman from lower Puna who did not want her last name used, explained what she thought was going on: “When gays move in, property values go up and crime goes down.”
     Liz might have a point. According to Connie Salter, an agent for Pahoa Realty, all prices on the Big Island have risen, but they’ve risen most in Puna Beach Palisades, by about 250 percent in the last two years. The average price of half an acre of undeveloped land there was approximately $25,000 in 2001. In 2003, it was approximately $64,000. Flora Yamanaka, of the department of police records in Hilo, says the difference in Puna crime from 2000 to 2002 is statistically negligible, although burglaries dropped by 18 percent, from 468 to 386, and offenses against the family declined from 15 to just one. (2003 records are incomplete, Yamanaka said.)

Puna has undergone three major growth spurts in the past 10 years. The first came when limited insurance was offered for Puna homes in 1993. Arthur Johnsen, an artist who has lived in Puna since 1988, said the land was so risky in 1990, after Kïlauea wiped out Kalapana village, that people couldn’t get house insurance. “You actually thought of putting your house on wheels to get it out of the lava zone,” Johnsen said.
     The next spurt came in 1997, when the Hawaiian Electric Company connected most of lower Puna to its grid, following a protracted legal battle waged by a vocal minority who wanted to stick with generators.
     The third came in 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Avery Freed, a retired radiologist, bought 41 acres of undeveloped jungle in the area in 1990. “I used to call it my doomsday scenario,” Freed said. “After 9/11… this area really popped.”
     Of the three major developments in lower Puna — Kehena, Seaview and Puna Beach Palisades — it’s Puna Beach Palisades that’s skyrocketed. Lots there were selling for roughly $20,000 per half acre, with little appreciation, for years, while fifth-acre lots in Seaview were a bargain at $3,000. In Puna Beach Palisades — dubbed “Penis Palisades” by some after the recent boom triggered by gay buyers — lots were still going for $30,000 two years ago. Now those same properties sell for as much as $67,000.
     In the past two years, construction of the Robert Trickey house, in a pristine lava field near Kehena, gave the area new credibility. The house was designed by Bay Area architect Craig Steely and inspired by Richard Neutra, a proponent of flat-surfaced, industrial-looking residences. Trickey calls it “a statement house,” noting that it constituted “the first time traditional mainlanders really took this area seriously as a place to put down roots.”
     The Trickey house was bait in the risk zone. Property buyers from Northern California followed, including Steely, its architect, leading to a kind of frenzy. Now, “if someone hears about a good deal, word gets out fast,” said longtime Puna resident Mary Blair.
     Puna is not the most likely site for a real estate boom. It has little of the infrastructure people take for granted on much of the mainland. No TV or radio signal reaches behind the lip of Kïlauea unless residents invest in a satellite system, which few have done. National news reaches the area two days late, a virtual eternity in the age of the 24-hour news cycle. Cell phones work sporadically at best.
     For water, Puna residents either pay exorbitantly to have it shipped to them, or they use a rain catchment. “I’d never heard of (a catchment) until I moved here, but you learn to live with it,” said Didier Flament, who owns the Absolute Paradise B&B, near Kehena, with his partner, Philip Maise. Flament, who advertises his business as “gay Hawai‘i at its best!”, with Grecian urns atop curved lava rock walls, urges guests who are used to long showers to conserve water.
     “People come here with the fantasy of the simple life,” said David Gerson, a Puna horticulturist. “It is a simple life… but it’s not an easy life.”
     Catching rainwater may sound charmingly rustic, but catchment systems are prone to contamination from rat urine, which can cause leptospirosis, a debilitating bacterial disease. Rats, spiders, roaches and ants abound near the edge of the jungle. Said Dwight Stevens, a massage therapist originally from Oregon, “My boyfriend finally called it quits and left when he found the ants had eaten all the bait from the rat trap.”
     Proximity to nature in the raw can be a draw, too, however. In Chicago, Flament lived at the junction of two railroads with a fire station down the street. In Puna, he said, “I had to adjust to the quiet. Since I’ve lived here, I even stopped using an alarm clock. You wake up with the birds and you go to sleep to the sound of the waves.”

Kelly King and Norm DuFresne traveled from Denver to Hilo for the Merrie Monarch Festival and fell in love with the area. They were looking for a change when they spotted a 70-acre banana farm for sale. They bought it and arrived to take possession on September 9, 2001. What they found was an overgrown jungle in the hands of stubborn squatters, they recalled. An ugly confrontation was averted when DuFresne and one of the squatters discovered they had the same surname and originally came from the same part of French Canada. The squatters left peacefully, the couple said, but it still took months to clear the property of trash and clear the land. Today, King and DuFresne farm 12 acres of bananas there, as well as some mango and pineapple, providing fruit for area restaurants and schools as well as the local food bank.
     Puna’s newest colonizers say the area demands patience. It took Robert Trickey two years to have his home built, work that he guesses would have taken half that time on the mainland. “A little thing like getting the workmen to come on time, or at all, becomes a real issue,” he said.
     Michael Fennelly, the award-winning chef of Mecca Restaurant, in San Francisco, recently relocated and bought property in lower Puna with his partner. Now, in the midst of construction of his home, Fennelly, too, is encountering delays. But, he said, “part of that is good because it forces you to slow down... to relax and realize that it will get done when it’s meant to get done…
     “Living here has been a bit of an adjustment… You’re really faced with how small you are and how big nature is… If there’s work you need to do on yourself, it’s right there in front of you and you can’t escape it. In the big city, it’s easy to lose yourself in the motion of your life. You can’t really do that here because there isn’t that much motion.”
     Pastry chef Jeff Roselli, another Puna resident, says the area can be hard on transplanted couples, especially if their relationship isn’t firm. “This experience just pushes it over the edge… It doesn’t work out to be that pretty picture they have of living together happily in paradise.”
     Avery Freed, who struggled with neurological problems for years, built a Buddhist retreat on 40 acres of cleared jungle on ‘Opihikao Road. “The beauty and healing energy of this part of the island can be a catalyst for personal transformation, if you’re ripe,” he said. “Those are the people that are drawn here. I was drawn and repelled at the same time, but eventually my resistance was broken down and I surrendered. And in surrendering, I found I was happier.”
     Because Puna’s gay community is so remote, its members are forced to rely upon one another, they say, forging a greater sense of community. Puna has “that old-fashioned neighborhood feeling,” Trickey says.
     The remoteness also reinforces the need for tolerance between gay and straight people, residents say. Didier Flament, the B&B owner, calls it “a straight-friendly community… If they don’t have a problem, we don’t have a problem.”

Tom Kane and Matt Schwartz moved to Puna from Phoenix. In December, they opened The LavaZone, a bar on Pähoa’s main street, replacing the old, rundown Pähoa Lounge. In the vanguard of Pähoa’s gentrification, they plan to lighten the dark walls and put down imported slate floors.
     Kane learned his lesson from running Hamburger Mary’s on Maui, which he sold in 1992, he said. “If you don’t associate with the community and become part of it, you won’t make it here. We want to make it inclusive... to make this a comfortable place for gay men and straight people and lesbians, too.”
     The LavaZone aside, residents also have learned that they have to make their own entertainment. King and DuFresne, known as “The Banana Boys,” host a popular nude volleyball game Saturday afternoons. On weekends, residents often go bowling and host movie potlucks in their homes.
     Kehena’s black sand beach has been a magnet for nudists and others. Gays typically congregate at one end of the strand. “Going there is like a huge cocktail party,” said Arthur Johnsen, the artist. “Sometimes it’s difficult to walk the length of the beach without stopping to talk to everyone and give everybody a big hug.”
     Davis Dalbok, a landscape architect, sees sharing within the gay community as a connection to Hawai‘i nei. “Everyone (is) swapping plant material, saying, ‘I’ve got this and I’ll give you a cutting of that,’” Dalbok said. “That’s very traditional Hawaiian... spreading the gardens around. It’s bringing this great garden energy back into this part of the island, where so much is possible because of the rainfall and the climate.”
     Puna’s gay community may be cohesive, but with its showpiece homes and amenities, is it also the thin wedge of development that so many islanders fear?
     Not necessarily, Dalbok says. “Part of the challenge of living here is being a proponent in keeping the charm and beauty so that it isn’t overrun.
     “There’s a lot of anti-development sentiment here. It’s really up to the community to keep it out.”
     It’s amazing that Puna exists at all, says Fennelly, the chef, “and it’s a magical place, so there’s a big respect issue. We’re just caretaking this amazing land the Hawaiian people have held in such regard for such a long time.”
     Not everyone is thought to tread as lightly as Fennelly’s ideal. New to the area, and with apparently unlimited capital, Justin Hilton has several Puna development projects going. One entailed building Indonesian-style pavilions on the ‘Opihikao Road as guesthouses; the huts were removed after the community erupted in protest. Now Hilton is building a yoga retreat across from the Kehena beach, and it, too, is viewed with suspicion by some residents.
     Still, it’s doubtful whether development can extend beyond Hilton’s scale for now, since the risk of volcanic activity makes it all but impossible to insure major commercial projects. As former California B&B owner Jeff Seyfried notes, that’s one good reason to thank the volcano.

The art on the cover is by island artist Arthur Johnsen. His painting of the Goddess Pele, was chosen for the Volcano Visitors Center. His Web site: www.arthurjohnsen.com