5.6   "Place of Refuge"(cont'd)

Kilauea’s Great Lava Flow is a place of unyielding beauty and quiet treachery, a vast, tar black terrain of once molten earth. Waves of black stuff rise and fall, frozen in perennial silhouette; crevices form and run deep with red fire inside; ledges appear and then drop.

It may have seemed a faulty logic but it was true: the safest route out of Puna that night was across the Great Flow. Wide and barren, with no falling trees to jeopardize his exit, it afforded the Rinpoche the least likelihood of being seen or captured by the locals.

Lava skylight, Kilauea. Source: USGS HVO

As he approached the end of the Red Road he turned off the car's headlight and used the dim orange fog lights to guide him the last fifty yards or so. The end of Red Road was Kingdom of Hawaii territory. The few houses there were occupied by kanaka and their kin, any one of which might have known about or recognized him. Up ahead he could see people driving in and out of the road that led to Uncle Billy’s kipuka, and alongside the cul de sac the Kalapana Café and ‘awa bar still had people milling about.

He steered the car gently onto a grassy shoulder, parking as tightly as he could against a patch of shrubs and some low-growing palms along the perimeter of the flow.

The wind was gusting but it was nothing like what was happening in the rest of Puna Kai. The air current had wrapped itself around the eastern flank of the volcano and was hugging the ground as it tore along the rift zone, avoiding the ocean and thereby minimizing its impact on the coastal plain. The only real menace in Kalapana, in fact, was changing out of his guru garb and into a pair of hiking shorts. Crouched between the shrubbery and the opened door, the Rinpoche donned athletic socks and his running shoes and tossed his sandals onto the floor of the back seat. He kept his tunic top on and slung his shoulder bag around his neck: it contained his wallet, phone, a water bottle, prayer beads, some papers and a book. The rest of his things he tossed into the trunk of Pualani’s car. As he gently pushed the trunk shut, he closed his eyes and said a prayer, then set out across the perilous field.

The Rinpoche made a beeline for the ocean, following a red cinder trail toward the black sand beach. There, near the cliff’s edge, rocks were tumbling in the heavy surf. Each incoming wave rattled the stones along the angled coast, and as the sea exhaled it dragged itself across the treacherous ledge with a crackling sound.

Once near the ocean, and away from the hub-bub of the cul de sac, he left the trail and headed south, toward the plume. Subtle shifts in the landscape's shades of black marked the uneven boundary between the firmament and the fatal sea. The scent of sulfur wafted in and out of the inconsistent wind. Every now and then the Rinpoche looked back at Kalapana. As the lights at the end of Red Road started to fade, he picked up his pace, jogging carefully as he could, as quickly as he could, being wary of tripping on the unforgiving lava.

Prudence roused herself from some realm she’d been occupying. She was in between the otherworldly state of howling winds and the contrary calm of a nocturnal sea, cerulean blue and free – a swimmable refuge wherein she allowed herself to hide from the tempest in the sky.

“Prudence? Hi, it’s Pualani.”

“Mh?” Pru held the phone away from her face, unaware that she’d actually answered it. “Who is this?”

“It’s Pualani. I’m sorry. I know it’s getting late.”

Prudence still had starfish affixed to her limbs and there were mermaids floating in the rafters. “I—oh.” She had to think for a moment. The wind was still blasting, although it seemed to be coming in increments now: strong sustained gusts followed by a brief, sagging silence, as with waves. “Is it over?”

“What, the storm? It’s still raging down here.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“Oh, it’s me, Pru: Pualani. I’m sorry. I was just calling to see if you’d heard from Kyle. We can talk tomorrow. You sound like you’re out of it. I’m sorry.”

Prudence had thrown caution to the wind, literally, and fixed herself a cup of mushroom tea earlier. She was feeling now the full effects of it. “Mh,” she muttered again. Then when the voice on the other end of the phone stopped talking and she heard a click, she spoke into the device with confusion: “Hello? Hello..”

A slender sliver of smoke from the miniature pyramid of incense burning in the belly of the brass elephant on the dining table drifted skyward and snuck its way out of the house. Prudence dropped her phone to the floor. She closed her eyes and nestled herself back into the cushiony pillows of the sofa. She faded from her present existence and followed the line of smoke out through a transom window into the yard and down the hill past Manu's cottage, then over the jungle all the way to the ocean’s edge, where she mounted the back of a seahorse and rode a gossamer trail back into the sea.

As Kyle neared the plume, the scent of sulfur became mightily strong. Not far away, maybe another twenty minutes’ stumbling walk ahead, a surge of bright red, viscous lava poured from the opening of a subterranean channel in the side of the cliff like a spigot of fire left on high. The lava spewed into the ocean, where a boiling cauldron marked the thunderous collision of fire and sea. From the roiling emerged a massive plume of steam and particulate matter that rose into the grey-toned sky.

The plume rained steaming embers of acid and along with it blew strands of Pele’s hair, slender strands of fiberglass woven from lava and stretched out thin by the wind. The Rinpoche covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief and turned eastward, hurriedly, away from the plume. The light from the flashlight strapped to his forehead bounced around the blackened ground like the headlight on Pualani’s car had done earlier that night.

So close to the plume, he realized how close he was to the flow, which was moving, largely unseen, beneath him. He could feel the ground getting warmer. The heat shifted as he walked, intensifying as he strode further along. He moved carefully although with haste across the increasingly hot and delicate rock, knowing that when lava flows its upper layers cool relatively quickly, even though fire may still be racing beneath it. It becomes solid and yet will give way slightly under foot. The more readily the glassy layers sink beneath your shoes, the more recent the flow, and the nearer the danger.

Judiciously, and abundant with worry, he continued along, approaching each step nervously as the dried lava gave way with a crunch. At one juncture he came to a series of cracks and crevices. At the edge of one of them, the heat was intense and the glassy rock gave in to his footsteps too easily. He peered down. Through the fine sliver of the crevice he saw a sinuous artery of red. Breathless, he turned off his flashlight and let the pallid light of the moon become his guide – the better to see the distinction between fire and the ground.

Source: Harry Durgin © 2014

Auntie Lulu was roused from rest by a strange disturbance. Fatigued from listening to the wind storm, she had gone to bed early and almost immediately began having dreams of anger and retribution.  On the horizon of one of her dreams she saw a single flame of light approaching; it was a safe light, or so it seemed; regardless, it demanded attention, so she woke herself up. She groaned. She looked to her side. Beside her, her husband, Kale, slept noisily, the roundness of his belly like a rolling hillside atop the bed. Lulu stared up at the ceiling fan, its blades chopping methodically through the hot dry air. It provided little relief from the voggy night and even less so from her troubling dreams. She got out of bed slowly, trying not to wake Kale, and walked across the floor of their house.

In the front of the house, attached to the living area, there was a screened-in porch. She went there and stood looking out, quietly pondering the mood of the night: the crickets, the coqui frogs, and the three-quarters moon resting lugubriously in the starry sky as the wind continued to howl from the south.

There was a parking area to one side of the house where the family’s three pickup trucks were slumbering like giants. A gravel driveway snaked from there through a grove of o’hia trees out to the main road, at the near side of which appeared a flickering light. Lulu watched as the light wended its way along the bends of the driveway until it reached the clearing in the yard. She went outside and stood in the moon shadows of the palms that surrounded the house. “Violet?” she called quietly into the wind. "Is that you?"

“Aloha,” answered Cousin Violet as she appeared in the clearing. “I figured you’d be awake. Can you feel them?”

“Mh-hm,” said Lulu.

Violet turned off her flashlight and slipped it into the pocket of her black dress. “They’ll be on the move soon.”

Lulu nodded her head slowly in agreement.

“It feels ominous tonight.”

“Agreed.” Lulu looked skyward, in the direction of the long forest that led to the volcano and the great lava flow that stretched out around it. The fiery hillside of the southern rift zone turned the sky a pinkish orange.

Violet extracted a clove cigarette from her dress and the two women stood there in the clearing, biding their time, wondering—.

“Do you have an inkling?” the diminutive old woman eventually asked.

“I do,” replied Lulu, appearing as large as the night was long.

During the time of King Kamehameha the Great there was a King’s Trail that ran along the coast, circumventing the entire Big Island. It can still be seen in traces throughout the island, most notably in Puna Kai, where it travels alongside the Red Road, buried beneath time and weather, hidden by nature’s growth, buried in long stretches by lava, and mostly forgotten except to a few hundred warrior souls.

Lulu and Violet heard the harsh groan of a conch shell being blown. It was faint yet recognizable and they knew exactly where it was coming from: along the coast, where they both could sense the rumbling and gathering of men.

The Night Marchers rose from their silent graves within MacKenzie Park. They lifted their sticks and brandished spears. They set fire to their torches and set out along the old King's Trail, heading south toward the sorrowful field of lava where once, beneath the resting legs of Kilauea, there had been a tiny fishing village called Kalapana and the beautiful Kaimu Bay.

Violet paused with her cigarette inches away from her mouth, poised to light it in spite of the wind. “I think,” she said, “we’d better go inside.”

The Rinpoche struggled to move himself along from safe patch to safe patch, ever cognizant of the surge of heat flowing feet or yards beneath the ground. To his right the hillside flank of the volcano glowed in gnarled, orange and red nodes of light. Back to the left the vigorous plume was rising from the cliff.

He stopped at one point for water and scanned the flow field ahead. Suddenly, it seemed endless, and his tennis shoes felt like they were melting. Down left, looking along the flow toward the plume, he spotted pockmarks of shimmering smoke emanating from a series of skylights open to the river of lava below. To his right, the crispy hillside was aglow; here and there a methane explosion sent a burst of fire into the sky. Ahead of him, seeping in all directions, were tendrils of smoke feeling their way across the vast, black landscape.

He was thoroughly in the thick of it, but miraculously, though, he was approaching the far side of the plume. Due east was the low mound of Kilauea, its summit caldera fuming. Further beyond, the magnificent slope of Mauna Loa stretched across the island, owning and occupying the bulk of it. By his estimation, if he survived the next hundred yards he’d be home free. His neck and arms stung from where the burning embers had landed on his skin. His sinuses ached from the sulfurous air. He was coughing from the massive, smoldering campfire surrounding him. But, still, he was moving forward.

Life, Manu once told Prudence, is a book whose pages are filled with the abundant mysteries of the universe shared in their entirety. “It’s all right there,” he said, stretching out his arms, “in front of you.” Prudence was sitting on the steps of the back lanai of Manu’s cottage; he was seated in an arm chair behind her.

Together they sat watching a hawk flying circles over the yard. It would hover and then fly south, then return again, wings astride, its weightless body carried effortlessly on the wind.

“However,” admonished the elder, “this book of the soul is written in a language nobody speaks. And its illustrations, while beautiful and magnificent, are indecipherable. They’re incomprehensibly sad.” This was several years after Manu moved into the ‘ohana, during one of those unspecific periods of time in which there’s a sort of immutable stasis, a warrantless perfection, a timeless state of being in which a single moment resides in perpetuity. “What you think you see in front of you,” Manu added, “is there, and also it's not.”

“Is that why a hawk flies with such ease, because it doesn’t have to worry about what’s right or what’s real?”

“The hawk flies because it has everything it needs for life. It is born free to fly. We like to think that we humans hold dominion over the animals, that we are better than them because we have the capacity to think. I would propose that the animals hold dominion over us. The moment they emerge in life they are already imbued with the idea that they are one with everything that surrounds them. For them there is unity, equilibrium, whereas we as a species are forced to continually contemplate our freedoms instead of embracing them.” He lifted his feet and stretched his legs out in front of him, holding them aloft. “Choice is our weapon.”

Kyle Weatherly – (he was once again Kyle, because his passage as Rinpoche the Magnificent had robbed him of the ill-earned title) – looked with disbelief at the ground ahead of him. It seemed impossible, implausible. But by all measures it was very much real. He had made it beyond the active flow. The ground beneath his blistered feet was firm again. No rivulets of fire snuck about the night. The toxic smoke from the plume was blowing behind him, well away from his direction. Up ahead the lava field yielded to scrub jungle, and quite possibly, if his eyes didn't deceive him, he spied a pathway heading up along the volcano's flank.

A few minutes later he stopped at the edge of the Great Flow and with gratitude bowed his head. As he took his first steps onto the cinder trail, a warm wind began blowing at his clothes. With the ocean crashing against Pele's cliffs in the distance and the constant hissing of the lava meeting the sea, he looked up at the climb awaiting him. He stopped and turned around to see if he could see any glimmer of Kalapana – to gauge how far he’d travelled and how much further he had to go.

From her resting spot on the sofa, Prudence could hear the Night Marchers drumming. Like Lulu and Violet, she'd been bestowed upon the strange gift of being able to see beyond seeing. As the Night Marchers moved along the coast, they reversed the direction of the wind, carrying it along with them, all fire, wind, and their entire chorus of anger moving south.

She drowsily got up and locked the doors.

Pu'u O'o (Kilauea), foreground. Mauna Loa, background. Source: USGS HVO

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