For more than thirty years, Eli Jr. taught English and coached football at Kahuku, Ko‘olau Loa’s only public high school, several miles north of Punalu‘u.

“Education was big for us,” he says, talking and smiling at the same time. “Everybody said this was a poor community, but I'd say, ‘We’re not poor!’ I always thought we were rich, because our supermarket was right here … it’s the ocean, see? It’s plentiful! Get mullet, manini, kumu and aholehole in the reef holes, so you spear ’em.”

We both look up and out across the highway to the blazing morning reef yards away, all milky blue and green, with a distant horizon of thumping, hissing white breakers. The narrow beach park screens the brightness a little, with its purple and violet silhouettes of coconut trunks, spiky hala (pandanus), wispy ironwood and milo.

“Get plenty he‘e [octopus] right out here, too, you know,” he says as if telling me a secret, motioning his head toward the reef and the outflow of Punalu‘u Stream.

“It’s a haven for them. You know why? ’Cuz the ‘opae [shrimp] come down from the stream, and you get all the different shellfish that coagulate there to eat whatever washes down, and the fish, the mullet, they also need little bit fresh water to spawn, so the octopus eat the little mullet, too.”

I flash on a dim, slightly spooky childhood memory: The sight of dozens of octopus strung up on clotheslines like laundry, tentacles dangling, in this very beach park.

“Plus, we get bananas, coconuts and our taro!”

A hundred yards or so down the highway from Eli’s property is an old lava-rock wall and gate that opens to a lush overgrown estate, spread out under a towering coconut grove. Small rock-lined ponds and pathways and mature milo and breadfruit trees denote years of careful tending and cultivation. Two modest houses and a stranded canoe sit in the silent, cool shade amid a ground cover of laua‘e fern and an encroaching bank of hau.

This is the old homestead of the famous David Ka‘apu, aka Prince David of Punalu‘u, Eli Keolanui’s deceased uncle. Born a Kauka and the brother of Eli’s mother, David was, in the Hawaiian way, adopted by the Ka‘apu family at birth as a hanai son. But it was through his biological family that he gained ownership over the idyllic three-acre plot sandwiched between Punalu‘u Beach Park and the ancient, now-overgrown fish ponds and taro patches carved out of the sluggish muliwai of Punalu‘u Stream. (A muliwai is the typical Hawaiian ponding of a stream near its mouth, caused by a barrier beach or sandbar that slows the water’s progress into the sea.)