Anyway, about 10 miles out of town, 130 splits off Kea'au, where according to The Big Island Revealed, the cheapest gas on the island can be had. I didn't find that passage till after I'd returned, which sucks because gas really was damn expensive. Anyway, that's about the last gas station you see until the village of Volcano, which appears just before the park. Between there, it stays quiet. Trees spring up, thicken and then pretty quickly block your view beyond the roadsides. Again, it reminded me of northern Michigan. Volcano contributed to that atmosphere; it looks and feels very much like some of the small towns up north with only a handful of small businesses at hand. (And a lotta propane tanks.) From the road, only a few houses are visible as you pass through, which, not surprisingly, takes about a minute.
What is surprising is the way in which the road soon widens to accommodate an extra lane on each side and how, if you take a very broad, very open turn off, several lanes spring up. There is a row of booths, one for each lane, where attendants accept your $10 fee--good for up to a week's visits by a single vehicle. A sign states that exact change is very much appreciated, so I dug out a ten, pulled up and got my map and a little carbon type print out receipt--about 2" on a side, it quickly became more than a little dog-eared. It's surprising that it made it through the week.
If the receipts are a little, uh, cheap, the maps more than make up for it. They're classily assembled and printed, with very clear diagrams of the many trails, and the network of roads, including Crater Rim Drive, that run through the park. They also bear graphics indicating which areas of lava correspond to which historic points of volcanic activity and a thorough illustration of many types of plant and animal you might come across during your visit, including, among others, humpback whales, feral pigs, small Indian mongeese (you can say "mongooses" or "mongeese," in case you were wondering,) and predatory caterpillars.
I didn't see any of these animals during my first visit to the park. In fact, not to ruin the suspense, but I never saw a whale while I was in Hawaii. Nor a predatory caterpillar--though considering the amount of time I spent fumbling through various stretches of rain forest, I might have touched one w/o even knowing it.
I did see a mongoose or two. Or three. Or four. To tell ya the truth, I lost count after a while. There were just too fucking many of the things. Consequently, the wonder you might feel at the idea of a mongoose--I mean if you don't live on the Big Island or in India or someplace like that--well, it wears off pretty quickly. You realize that Riki-Tiki-Tavi really was a fantasy, and that mongeese can't talk--or at least they didn't talk to me--and I suspect if they did they wouldn't have much to say beyond "give me food" or "please don't run over me in yr. car." (I've never encountered a cobra, which is probably just as well, so I can't ascertain if they can talk, but I guess given how stupid mongeese really appear to be, we all better hope that the story of Riki-Tiki-Tavi exaggerated their intellect as well.
Anyway, Niko and I drove on into the park. I really wasn't sure where the hell to go. Not that negotiating the place is very complicated--at least, not if you just wanna stick to Crater Rim Drive, which for the time being, was our mission. Unless you take a quick left, the entrance spits you out more or less into a large parking lot that's bordered by a Visitor's Center on one side and Volcano House lodge on the other. The lodge is this big log cabin-lookin' structure wherein lies a hotel, an upscale (for a tourism setting) restaurant, and just the crappy kinda gift shop you'd expect--w/ classy pretensions, but hawkin’ the same sorta crap you'd've gotten if it'd been more like the gifts area at yr. local Cracker Barrel. T-shirts, snow globes, picture books, hunksa volcanic rock. Actually I may be doing the place an injustice. There really might've been other stuff as well. I didn't look too close.
And maybe there weren't any snow globes. I never saw any. I was just thinking of this crappy little snow globe I got my mom when I was like 6 or 8 or something & we were staying in FLA. A snow globe in FLA. Seriously. You can just imagine how bad this thing turned out: It was flamingo-themed, w/ a coupla those noble birds standing resplendent on either side of the interior scene. It was a diarrhea--dammit!--I mean diorama--I always fuck that up--w/ this molded green plastic line of grass and palm trees and behind it, if I remember it right, there was like a pink building w/ a banner that said "FLORIDA." The banner was all swirly as to suggest cloth blowin' in the wind (along w/ the answer, my friend,) and the bottom of the globe was made of the same bright pink plastic as the flamingoes. OK, are you picturing something really hideous yet? Well ya forgot about the snow, my friend: it was sparkly glitter shit, all silver and gold and iridescent! Ha! It was horrible!!! But 'twas a heartfelt token, so like, my mom hadda leave it out in plain sight for a while after that. Not too long. She didn’t love me that much, and my mom has an underdeveloped sense of either humor or sentiment, and she's inclined to throw shit away as soon as possible. Many casualties have come from this: my Mad magazines and comic book causing me the most pain, I suppose—though there was my collection of stolen hood ornaments—the bounty of a youthful indiscretion that, along w/ some light but persistent shoplifting, I couldn't resist. Anyhoo, I'd prob. be able to remember what the fuckin' thing looked like better, but it didn't stick around for too long. Nor did she keep it in a box somewhere to pull as a means of humiliating me or just as a conversation piece. Oddly, I'm not grateful for that.
But parental resentments aside, there should've been snow globes if there weren't. Cantcha just see the mountains molded outta dark brown plastic and a glop of orange plastic lava in front of 'em and best of all when you shake the thing, all you get is a cloud a soot!!! Brilliant! Ooo but maybe at least as good or prob. even better: howwa bouta hybrid snow globe/lava lamp--y'know w/ that lava shit stirring itself up every time you shook the little glass-encased scene up, except for that that lava shit requires a heat source, I think, to work its special mojo. But like maybe we could use real live lava to heat it!!! But I guess that'd ruin the portability of the shit, the lava cools so quickly so like you'd need an ever-replenishing supply of the shit to keep yr. lava globe going. And plus the real shit's prob. too hot and would melt the whole snow globe inta plastic slag and then quickly into nothin' and anyone nearby would prob. go w/ it, so you couldn't really use the thing w/o staying stationary by a live volcano, and even that wouldn't work, cuz w/ a live volcano, the lava flows are always movin' around and so you'd be like on the move all the time except for that you wouldn't cuz you'd be dead, consumed by all that fuckin live lava. So maybe it's not sucha hot idea after all. "Hot idea!!!" HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!
I didn't sample the cuisine, & I didn't get a room there, so I can't speak to the quality of these features. I can tell you that Volcano House does have at least one really remarkable highlight: the incredible view it offers you. Though you're near a parking lot, the outskirts of the road are lined with trees, so it's pretty easy to miss just how close Volcano House is to the edge of the Kilauea Crater. If you walk through the ski lodge style lobby all the way to the lodge's back wall, you'll find a sort of balcony area. You can see clear across the crater over the sorta infernal territory that lines the crater floor. Everywhere you can see plumes of smoke rising from the ground. The ground is ragged and without visible vegetation. There is vast chaotic space for as far as you can see.
And hey! They got those nifty telescope viewin' things!!! And once you're done being stunned by the view, you realize that there's also lush plant growth on either side of you, as well as some tall, dense grass running in front of you all the way to the crater's edge. You actually feel a dry heat rising up below.
That was the first picture I took in HI. Well actually, I made Niko take a picture of me, leaning on the short stone wall that contains the balcony. I look pretty bitchin' w/ all that cool shit behind me!
I was gonna take a picture of Niko too, but the stupid little kraut wouldn't let me. Really. He would like literally run to stay out of the way. Fucker. So now I'll just have to live w/ my rapidly deteriorating memories of him. Which is too bad because he really was a striking kid. And besides, I'd just like to remember things.
We still had a few hours to kill. We debated what we should do next. Or rather I did. Niko's contributions tended to touch on how whatever I wanted to do was fine. I decided to go clockwise around the curve. Stefan had encouraged me to encourage the kid to take some interest in Crater Rim Drive. On their previous visit, the kid had become impatient w/ him. Stefan had also told me that while the actual loop would probably take maybe 45 minutes tops to drive, it would take almost anyone else longer. (Except possibly for Niko.)
He was right. Pretty soon I was kicking myself for not having gotten my shit together sooner. There was just so much fucking shit to see as you circled the crater. So much of what you'd see looked like some incredible painting. It was disorienting and exhilarating every time you pulled off onto one of the many small lots or just on the side of the fucking road and moved through the shit, your perspective constantly changing. There were great towers of mist that shot up into the air. There were sun blasted rocks in swirls of red and brown and pale yellow--all so jagged or rough, seeming to have nothing but angles. There were fields of black lava on the crater floor. There were long stretches of forest, lining the crater. There were the crater walls themselves, steep and gouged. It just constantly changed, becoming a completely different place at each stop.
Well, you can imagine how Niko felt about all of this. He indulged me for a while, but as the stops became more frequent, I could see that he was getting bored. While I walked around one of the overlooks, gasping and snapping pictures, Niko settled onto a stretch of scrub grass and began writing poetry! Later I asked him what his poems were about, and he told me that they were about nature, but also about the same themes and images touched on in his novel--i.e., hobbits, dragons, dungeons undsoweiter. He reiterated how much the Big Island's landscape--particularly the mountains—was affecting him. Sitting on the grass, writing, he did look very spiritual, peaceful, like some medieval Christian hermit--even if he was bored with all the stops.
Quite a kid. But OK, in addition to impressing me, he was starting to get on my nerves. It wasn't anything general--just the fact that he started worrying about the time. We had over an hour till we had to meet his dad on a trail near the park entrance. Even if I lingered here & there, that left us plenty of time. But Niko started in busting my balls in his mix of teutonicized English and anglicized Deutsch. Were we going to make it in time? 'Cuz while he was not an expert chronologist, he was getting concerned that his dad was gonna be left waiting. Very touching, I'm sure, but at the time it just pissed me off. Up until I'd started taking in the landscape here, I'd feeling pretty burntout--tired and a little tense from the trip and from the consequences of Akiko's plotting. I'd been handling it fine, but this was the first time I was really enjoying myself. Naturally, w/ some of the over-efficiency for which his people are known, this little prick—well I liked him, but he was really raining on my fucking parade.
So Niko and I headed back over to the parking lot where Stefan had parked his rented jeep. There were two trailheads there, leading off into the forest around the crater rim, but neither Niko nor I were clear on whether we were supposed to just wait there or maybe head on up the trail and meet Stefan along the way. And if we did go in search of him, we were pretty sure we knew which trail to follow, but well, you know...
