From a childhood spent in pre-development Kalama Valley through 40-plus years as a driver for TheBus, Gerard Noa has become a keen observer of the ways in which his island home has changed over the years.
And for Noa, as old-school local as it gets, the ground (and whatever else) beneath his feet offers ample evidence that not all change is for the better.
“When I was growing up, we never saw trash all over the place,” he said. “The island was just a lot cleaner. And if you saw opala (trash) on the ground, you just picked it up. That’s just what you did.”
And that’s just what he continues to do, even as the community around him seems to have disengaged from the very notion of civic pride and shared responsibility.
A self-described “loner” who enjoys his solitude, Noa is nonetheless an admired figure in his Kailua neighborhood, where he regularly walks the blocks surrounding his Aulike Street apartment, broom and dustpan in hand, to clean up the mess others leave behind.
Noa began his quite-literal sweeps a dozen years ago when he noticed trash accumulating in the stairwell of his three-story apartment building, where homeless people sometimes sleep. His cleanup radius later expanded to the nearby Laundromat and on to Kailua Road, where, to Noa’s disappointment, many area businesses had abandoned the traditional practice of keeping the areas outside their storefronts clean and swept.
Noa said he does this for himself as well as for others in his neighborhood.
“I like to walk on clean streets,” he said, matter-of-factly. “And there’s a senior home near here, and a lot of the residents walk to McDonald’s for breakfast every morning. I don’t want them walking on rubbish.”
Noa’s sense of everyman stewardship was well known to the regulars on his bus runs.
Noa, who graduated from Kalani High School in 1972, joined Oahu Transit Services in 1974 and spent 30 of his nearly 42 years of service driving Route 65 (Honolulu-Kahaluu). He worked the late shift, from 2:30 to 10:30 p.m., which suited his night owl tendencies.
“Once the day shift gets off, it’s a different world,” Noa said. “In addition to people who are going to or from work, you also have a lot of homeless, a lot of people who don’t necessarily have a place to go.”
NOA performed his duties with courtesy and a fair amount of patience. At the same time, he made sure that his riders behaved civilly around each other. He was particularly protective of the many seniors who rode with him, and of the young working women who reminded him so much of his two daughters.
“My goal every run was to get people from Point A to Point B safely,” he said. “If there was a problem, I’d go right up to the person and ask them to stop. I let them know that if I had to come back again, it was going to be their stop.”
Noa waited until his youngest child graduated from high school before he turned in his papers. Aside from a bit of boredom, he said, he’s enjoying his retirement. He’s even entertaining thoughts of moving to a neighbor island to escape a pace of living on Oahu that is “getting too fast.”
Until that happens, though, Noa intends to keep making the rounds with his broom and dustpan.
“Hopefully, I’ll plant a seed,” he said. “Maybe people will see what I’m doing and take it on themselves to do the same.”
Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
