Our initial plan on Tuesday morning was to take a late afternoon hike into the besieged Royal Gardens subdivision, which sits on the southeastern flank of Kilauea. Back in the late 1980s, eruptions sent massive and many-fingered lava flows into the area, cutting through the subdivision. Some homes were untouched, others destroyed and replaced by wide open plains of rolling pahoehoe (meaning: smoother, more flowing) lava.
The hike was supposed to be an hour and a half or so, much of it through the forested and mostly abandoned subdivision. But we ended up hanging around too late in the afternoon, enjoying a soak at the warm ponds down on the coast outside of Pahoa. By the time we returned to my cousin GlassGirl's house about 10 minutes north of Pahoa, my uncle was feeling too tired for a trek, and it was presumed we had to give up our Kilauea quest because of fading light. Hiking out in the dark would be one thing, but hiking in and out of an unfamiliar place on a moonless night could be dangerous. (GlassGirl, by the way, is a new, better nickname to replace "MiniMimi".)
After dinner, however, I inquired about something GlassGirl's husband had said the day before regarding a place where you could presumably look up the mountain and perhaps see with binoculars the orange glowing lava. He described a trip to the end of Red Road, and we decided to take it.
As the four of us -- GlassGirl, her husband, "Klutch," Spitfire and me -- prepared to leave, a downpour ensued. Klutch voiced a concern that clouds would prevent us from seeing much, but we all got in my uncle's SUV and headed out anyway. Having missed a turn for Red Road -- or perhaps GlassGirl just had her own plans in mind -- we ended up driving down Highway 130, the old highway that once connected Hilo to South Point and then on to the west side of the island. A little past mile marker 21, the highway comes to an abrupt end. An old lava flow moved across it 15 or 20 years ago. As we approached, warning signs told us to turn back. Flashing yellow road signs warned away "unauthorized vehicles." Saying that she didn't "feel like talking to anyone at a roadblock," GlassGirl turned the SUV around and tried a different route, which dead-ended. She decided then that it would be worth at least seeing if those headlights up at the end of the highway were cop cars or not, and we turned back around and headed up Hwy. 130.
At the road-closure signs, an auto driver and a motorcycle driver were talking to each other. Following another truck about 200 yards ahead of us, GlassGirl passed them right on by and drove onto a crudely paved one-lane path over a finger of an old lava flow. After about 150 yards on that, we returned to the old paved highway. Looking across the lava field, we could see a murky orange glow a ways up the mountain. Scale is hard to define without knowing the terrain, but given the dimness and diffuse nature of the light, I estimated it to be a mile away or so.
Klutch began talking about how it's dangerous to be downhill from lava, especially if you don't know the terrain, because it's possible that it could come down the hill behind you and cut off your escape route. As we approached a second old lava crossing, we saw a car heading on its way out across a similarly crude path like the first. We waited for him to pass, and GlassGirl waved him down. She asked what was out there.
"Lava's crossing the road up a ways," he said. "Just keep driving, and eventually you'll run into it."
This news freaked out Klutch, and he immediately insisted we take him home or "at least drop me off in Pahoa." A debate ensued, with Spitfire insisting he was being too anxious and conservative and reminding him that lava doesn't move very quickly. "It's not like we couldn't outrun it," she said.
But he was adamant, and even when GlassGirl asked him with a "pretty please" to indulge our desire to drive farther, he said he would not come. It was a 30-minute ride back to the house, and I could see all the way there that Spitfire was pissed. She thought Klutch was being a spoilsport.
By the time we got back to the house, GlassGirl was ready to call it a night. Her 3-year-old was going to be waking her up at 6:30, she said, and it was already 11. Spitfire and I looked at each other. She shrugged, "I'm willing to go if you still want to," she said. "I know it's late but...."
I'll sleep on the plane, I replied.
We hopped back into the SUV and took off. Another massive downpour started, and I secretly hoped Spitfire would not be discouraged by it, but I said nothing. She kept driving, speeding along through the night. We hit the end of the road in no time.
"This drive was much longer on the way back to the house," Spitfire observed. "I don't know why Klutch has to be such a puss. He is so scared of things sometimes. But I am rarely scared for my life. On Sunday I was, but this does not scare me. Maybe I'm just a sheep, but you would think that if this was dangerous, some of those drivers we passed on the way out would have said something to us about it. People may be assholes a lot, but when it comes to stuff like this around here, they tend to be pretty considerate and tell you when it's dangerous."
On Sunday, we had been out sailing along the Kohala Coast and had anchored over a reef less than 200 yards off shore to go snorkeling. We were swimming in water about 30 or 40 feet deep, but we were suddenly joined in the area by about four humpback whales who seemed to be engaged in some type of mating activity. (Either mating or contesting for a mate.) They were behaving oddly and were in waters a bit shallow for them.
After we returned to the boat from our snorkel, we stood on deck and watched them for a couple minutes. Suddenly, they turned and charged the boat -- a 50-foot sailboat. I grabbed my camera and attempted to take some photos. As they neared within about 20 yards of the boat, they veered off toward the bow. Spontaneously, Spitfire popped on her flippers and lowered her mask. "I'm going in," she said, and jumped off the side of the boat. I thought to follow her, but my fins were 10 feet away, and I was torn with the desire to take a photo of what I was seeing. Her green snorkel cutting through the water was absolutely miniscule in comparison to the hump of one whale that surfaced.
Spitfire swam to within 15 or 20 yards of the whales and suddenly stopped. Her head jerked up above water and she yelled, "I'm scared!" My uncle, El Capitan, and I urged her to stay or get closer. I wanted her to see them underwater since she was already there. But despite the amazing clarity of the water in the reef, there was too much sunlight filtering down to give good horizontal visibility. A couple of the whales breached partially one more time before disappearing.
When she climbed back onto the boat, Spitfire said simply, "That was a really cool idea, but when I saw them surface, I suddenly realized I was just a tiny speck in the ocean compared to them. I realized I could get seriously tossed even just by accident, and it scared the shit out of me. I totally froze in the water."
So there is some evidence that Spitfire knows her limitations, even if she does occasionally leap before thinking things through. On our second visit to the closed road on Tuesday night, I was hoping her intuition and experience with the volcano, on which she has hiked at night before, was in good working order. Having never been around it, I didn't know enough about lava and volcanoes to know if I was balancing a relative sense of safety with a sufficient dose of caution. All I knew was that I generally felt OK about what we were doing.
What scared me most was the speed at which Spitfire would drive across the crude paths across the lava and the pot-holed pavement of the old highway on such a dark night. The new moon isn't until Friday, but the night sky at 11 p.m. was awash in stars through wide openings in the clouds, no moon in sight. I worried more that we would break an axle than get trapped by lava.
After four or five interchanges between old highway and lava flows -- which eventually were no more than dirt paths -- we came to a mango grove next to which was parked a van with some kind of official seal on it. Through the edge of the mango trees, I could see a long strand of bright orange light. We saw a couple of cars parked near a formal-looking field tent. Spitfire stopped. We backed up and saw a University of Hawaii seal on the van. We decided to back up to the last stretch of paved highway, about 25 yards back, turn the SUV around in case we needed to make a quick get-away for any reason -- not the least of which were some of the sketchy cars we had seen coming out as we drove in. It was past 11:30 when we got out of SUV, grabbed our flashlights and each took a "weapon" -- Spitfire took a small umbrella, and I took a broken 1/2-inch dowel with a sharp, splintered tip.
Then we headed out onto the next old lava flow by foot, me in my Keene's and she in her flip-flops. "Not exactly the shoes for lava," Spitfire said of her own feet, "but it's what I brought with me."
A few minutes down the road, the old mango grove gave way completely to a wide open expanse of lava, which in the dark night was simply a vacant blackness. Cutting across the darkness to the north was a wide ribbon of firey orange lava, dropping in a wide and distorted S-curve toward the road.
"See the little white lights out there?" Spitfire said. "Those are people. They appear to be walking right up to the lava."
Based on the size of their headlamps and the occasional silhouette of human form against the orange, I estimate the distance to have been about 150 yards above the road. Klutch would have freaked out about this, I observed.
"No shit," Spitfire replied. "High-five to you, UCM, for having the cajones to come out here."
It seems like this trip specifically required ovaries tonight, I said.
"Let's go up to where those people are," she suggested.
Didn't that guy say it crossed the road? I asked. Let's walk on a little farther and see if we can avoid walking that far out there in these shoes.
No sooner had I uttered those words than we crested a hill on the road and were suddenly face-to-face with the most peculiar and spectacular scene I've ever witnessed.
About 40 yards away, a lava flow in excess of 100 yards wide -- 200 yards? 300? I lost all perspective, but it was HUGE -- had indeed crossed the road and had advanced several hundred yards below the road, heading toward the ocean. Yet everywhere along this amazing river of fire, a forceful, gloopy, slow-moving swell of molten earth was inching down the mountain like a melted marshmallow.
In the cool wind coming off the ocean, the molten rock would begin to cool into black crusts before the force of more firey earth would swell up from underneath and release more of itself into the air. To our south, really dramatic formations perhaps 10 or 12 feet high were piling up. As the orange goop would force itself up the core, the fresh crust on the outside would give way, falling backward up the hill while more molten rock would cascade down on top of it.
On the edge of the road, a handful of cars were parked. A few guys sat in lawn chairs next to a van. Bob Marley blared from their speakers, and so even about 50 yards away, where Spitfire and I stood and watched the lava inching toward us, we were treated to a backdrop of reggae music. They were drinking beer and smoking pot.
Down the way, a couple stood making out in the glow of the lava on the farthest spit of the road jutting into the flow. Three or four people in their 20s were aiming their cell phones at the creeping lava and trying to take photos and videos of it. There were perhaps a dozen people on the road and perhaps a dozen more up the hill at the site above the road.
We walked up to this amazing scene and got to within 10 feet of where it crossed the road. The air was alive with a crackling sound, as if a massive campfire had burned down to hot embers popping and sizzling in the evening breeze. Periodically, small vents of gas would flame up, "Poof!" and burn momentarily before dying down.
"When they do that, I kinda feel like I'm in hell," Spitfire said. "I mean, if there were such a place."
This is without question a good depiction of hell, I replied. But I personally find it far too beautiful.
"I know," she said. "We are totally watching earth being born right here."
A few thousand feet up Kilauea's flank, above the Royal Gardens subdivision, we could see what appeared to be the origin of all this lava. From that distance, it looked like a large crucible filled with fire overflowing its edge. It was impossible from our vantage point to determine if the flow we were seeing before us and back along the road was a continuous one. Neither was moving fast enough to pose a danger to us, and so we stood there for well over an hour as this birthing scene played out before our eyes.
We also watched a few people do totally asinine stuff. One of the 20-somethings with the cell phones walked up to a pocket of dense, glowing lava and stepped on it with his boots. Rather than puncture its surface, however, the lava gave way like a balloon. With a sharp stick, he might have punctured it, but his boot -- even with a second punch -- could not. Spitfire and I were unimpressed. "I did not come out here to watch someone burn their foot off," she said.
Later, two young men approached the lava. One threw a glass bottle onto it. I wondered why they were doing that, and Spitfire said people often make gifts of gin to Pele, the volcano goddess who Hawaiian spiritualists believe lives in the Kilauea crater. However, the bottle these guys threw contained water, and after a few minutes of sitting on top of the lava, the steam pressure and heat caused the bottle to explode violently, spraying glass everywhere. Spitfire and I were unharmed, but the glass hit the couple that were smooching downwind. The man came over to tell the guys not to do that. In the meantime, they had thrown a bottle of plastic water on to the lava, and Spitfire got pissed. "Plastic?!" she called out to them. "Why did you throw plastic garbage onto the lava?"
"Just to see what would happen," came the reply.
"That is so douche," she retorted. "Really, really uncool."
Eventually, standing so close to rock which has melted at about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit became a bit hot for my taste, and it was also getting very late. So we decided, very reluctantly, to leave. As we passed where the cars were parked, however, I turned around and took in the scene again. So long was the river of orange-hot lava oozing down the mountain that it encompassed the complete panorama of my visual field. I turned and looked up into the heavens and was treated by another spectacular sight -- a massive opening in the clouds and steam above revealed an absolute riot of stars.
Standing there with the molten core of the earth flowing across all the terrain I could see before of me and a dizzying expanse of stars above me, I felt like I was at a mystical intersection, a spot of timelessness, a point of infinite creation and destruction, birth and death, light and darkness. It was all there. And it was all so matter-of-fact.
When we returned to the SUV, we took a few moments to take in the night skies. In that brief time, I saw two shooting stars. With the first one, I made a huge but simple wish. With the second one, I made none. After such an experience as the lava and those heavens, I found I had no other want than the first wish I made. In this moment, I was completely satisfied.
Except that I would have liked to stay longer. I could have stayed there all night.
The next day, when we told our other family members what we'd seen, we all tried to return to the spot. The police had closed the road for the day, however, while crews attempted to make a public viewing area. (I later read the viewing area had been overrun by lava.) I forgot to bring my camera with me on the first adventure and was unable to get close enough for photos on the daytime trip. However, below are some photos from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory web page, which has updates from the recent Kilauea eruption.
All these photos were taken at daytime, so they are not as dramatic as what is visible in the dark, when much more of the molten orange is visible. This first photo, taken on Wednesday afternoon, shows the smooth pahoehoe crossing the road where Spitfire and I had been standing the night before.
This one shows the lava up close. Magnify this scene, which appears to be a few feet across, by hundreds of feet, and you'll understand a little better what Spitfire and I saw along the edge of the road.
This one below shows a small section of the lava flow we observed.
And finally, this one below is an aerial view of the lava uphill from where we saw it. I believe this is the same road on which we were standing. The fresh crusty lava appears silver in color until it cools to black.
1 comment:
Wow.
I wish we would travel together again.
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