HERB HILLER, SWITCHING GEARS TO A HIGHER CALLING

 

     Herb Hiller’s 10-speed got wings this week. It carried the Coconut Grove trailblazer up a steep, heavenly hill. He died in North Georgia at 93 this week. 

 

     Although he spent just 20 years living in the Grove, he had a huge impact on the seaside village and South Florida. After he moved to North Florida in the 80’s he’d return for visits often.

   The New York native found his niche helping to create South Florida’s modern cruise industry. With savvy PR skills he preached,  “Get on a ship and visit the sun-filled Caribbean!”, to a world filled with island dreams.     

    A friend told me as communications director for a major cruise line he was constantly on the phone and writing letters to make things happen. To create a closer bond to the neighboring Bahama Islands he led the effort to produce the Grove's popular Goombay Festival in the 70’s which still exists today.  Soon after, he got Coconut Grove’s first farmers market off the ground.

    He and his wife, Mary Lee, raised their two daughters in their spacious compound on South Main Highway. In the 70’s I’d see this tall, thin, man whizzing by on his 10-speed.  When he finally stopped to talk he told me his life had vastly improved since he traded his car for a bike.

He was changing in other ways too.

    Rather than stuffing people into cruise ships Heb started promoting something new, bicycle tourism. He wanted everyone to peddle their way to new adventures. He’d return to South Florida for bicycle events and Eco-tourism conferences.

     Herb biked all over Florida discovering the Sunshine State’s hidden wonders. As a  talented writer he would share them in his travel guides and numerous magazine articles. 

      For several years the brilliant Harvard grad led bicycle tours. He told me once, "Yes, you can look out on Lake Okeechobee but why not really get to know it and its people?  He invited me on one of his two-day, 135-mile bike tours that straddled the top of the dirt levee that surrounds the watery expanse. I politely declined as I think it would have killed me.

Visiting Herb on his island, 2010

     Fifteen years ago my wife and I caught up with Herb at his 1850's home. Being Herb, it was on an island in the middle of North Florida’s Lake George. You could only get there by boat.

    While he made sour-dough bread from scratch, he told us about his tireless work to create a 3,000-mile bike path stretching from Florida to Maine. Most 79-year olds don’t take on things like that.  

      A few years later, when we all became well aware of global warming, Mr. Hiller transformed into a formidable octogenarian climate warrior. He began working feverishly on ways to stop tourism from adding to the problem.

   

     He began writing his “Climate Traveler” blog. It became part of a continuing effort to get us thinking about how his baby -tourism- could stop contributing to the slow destruction of our planet. Each entry (the last just five weeks ago) was extremely well-written and included extensive footnotes.

     Last year he summed up his post-cruise-line life writing that after he quit the cruise lines he became "the maverick director" of the Caribbean Travel Association. His new career focused on promoting interactions between travelers and the people in the places that they visited. 

 

    He wrote about the importance of getting people off big ships and into nature, the growth of Eco-tourism, and the subsequent realization of how travel has a profound effect on climate change. "Trying to get people out of their houses and cars is not easy work,” he told me back in 2010. “Sometimes it feels like pushing boulders uphill”. 

     My maverick friend was still writing eloquently about saving the world a month ago when his health took a turn for the worse.  

     We should all be grateful for the likes of Herb Hiller. They are the ones that keep pushing the boulders, who open our eyes to new possibilities like home-made bread, stepping outside, and saving our marvelous planet.

• 
  

• ---

   

   

  Addendum:  Anyone can still share a bike ride with Herb. By going on his "The Climate Traveler" blog this morning, I was able to briefly escape to Trinidad. Here's his first sentence of a four-part series describing his 10-day bike ride across the island,

       Memories of cycling in Trinidad hang full  like a cluster of ripe papaya, like the fast flutter of feeding hummingbirds, the lure of pungent roti, of aromatic sweet cocoa, of bananas eaten four at a time, of a chin slobbered with coconut water, of the rippling sounds of steel drum, the jook of calypso, and everything from flocks of scarlet ibis to the regalia of Carnival in the vivid colors of the soda pop that Trinis swig.

Grande Riviere, Trinidad

.

                                     ________________________________________________