Thursday, November 20, 2008

Lovin' the Rubble (Sadly NOT about a Betty-Barney 3-Way)


The blueness of the light was deepening, saturating the other visible colors. We turned directly away from the ocean, and headed up the mountain. Surrounded by all of this lava, I was surprised to see tufts of hardy plants lining Kilauea. The mountain isn't steep, but its gradual slope is difficult thanks to the lava underfoot. Here it's mostly new stuff. The blacks are rich and vivid, and the rock is thinner and more brittle. It breaks off in to sharp, angular pieces. It’s hard to believe they are drawn from the long, smooth sheets you're walking on, until you stop and tap the ground below you and hear its crisp hollowness. The bending of the terrain is like the curving of human limbs and torsos, which adds to a feeling that the ground beneath you is alive. It's funny, because the ground is not esp. fertile—the soil, such as it is, is not rich.


Some of that organic feeling is doubtlessly drawn from our almost mythic view of lava. It's earth that takes on burning, moving shapes. It flows like blood. It's easy to project all kinds of anthropormorphia onto it. Some of it may come from the warmth of the newer, thinner sheets. It's like skin.


There is this weird vitality in the Kilauea lava field. I felt it. While I am imaginative to a fault, I am also a rationalist. I spend a lot of time in the ether, but I recognize that I'm stuck with the facts, much as they bore me at times. But this is one place where I felt something that could never be quantified.


And that's sorta cool, but hard to explain. I won't try. I'll just tell you what happened, Sloth.



In many places, the sheets of lava have broken into larger pieces, which lay at all sorts of crazy angles between the ground and sky. There are enormous angular gouges between these smooth but steep planes. You spend a lot of time hopping across the gouges—several feet at a time—and footing at both starting and landing points can be uncertain. Often, you have to struggle for your balance at the end of a leap. Even a small pack like mine did not help, as it drew further on yr. sense of equilibrium, not to mention adding the impact each time you landed. All of the leaping and landing on hard surfaces took a toll on my various joints even more quickly than it normally would have.


So we weren’t so much hiking as we were hopping. Painfully and awkwardly. I rarely fell, but when I did, it sucked. In one case, I miscalculated my landing and found the toe of one boot jammed pretty snugly into 6" crack. With some awkwardness, I'm sure I could've extracted myself, but I was grateful to have a couple of my companions help pull my loose. At the end of several other leaps, the slopes of the broken plates were so extreme that I had to catch my balance with an outstretched hand. By the end of the hike, I'd stopped wishing for gloves. My palms were pretty thoroughly raw and stinging.


As if all of this flagellation wasn’t bad enough, I had a more specific disturbing experience as I went springing across sheets of lava. At one point, when a little warm, shadowy sunlight was still hitting us from the very edge of the horizon, Stefan and were hopping and talking. Abruptly, he stopped and stood a broken section of the lava plain. I stopped, puzzled and just looking at him. He grasped his belt and started loosening it.


I’m not sure if I looked stunned or horrified. He waved a hand at me and sing-songed, “Excuuuse me…”


I was relieved that he was dismissing me, but still confused till I heard the familiar splatting of piss on a hard surface. Usually it would be piss on concrete or asphalt. Here, it was piss on lava.


Behind me was laughter, and there, a little way off, was Niko, his back to me, pissing as well. Surrounded by krauts, comforted only by the thoughts that I was not the first to end up in this situation, that they had dicks, rather than guns in their hands, and that I didn’t have to look at said dicks. (I was, however, somewhat disturbed by this father-son synchronized pissing.)


When Niko had finished, shook and zipped, I asked him what was so funny.


“Home, I have a friend who paints and draws. He likes to put a guy in the corner.”


“Of the picture?”


Blank look, a smile, and a slow shake of the head.


Bild Das Bild


“Oh.” Eager nodding now. “Yes. Und das Mensch?


“Yeah.”


Er… ah…”


My turn to do the blank look/smile/slow shake of the head spiel.


“Uh… pisses…” a quick look at Stefan, but no admonishment was coming… “behind the other things in das Bild!” Hysterical laughter.


We started moving again.


“Oh?” Still not entirely sure why the kid is bringing this up.


“You, uh…”


What feels like a half-hour long—but prob. wasn’t—attempt at bilingual communication finally leads us through a territory we’d fumbled through, in search of Kafka, and Niko tells me that as I’d stood there, sandwiched between my 2 pissing companions, I had reminded him of this dude in the background of his friends’ pictures. Whatta honor!



An aside: much as I, Steve Forceman, figure of action—if not a full-on action figure am always armed w/ the appropriate gear, it quickly became clear that my acquisition of gear had been somewhat haphazard—not to mention entirely insufficient in some areas. Not only did my companions bear the classic handheld electric torches we all know and love from those times when there’s a black out, (‘tho they mostly left theirs in their packs,) they also had these silly-ass lamps strapped to their heads. Yep. Silly-ass. Until you realize how many open wounds they might’ve saved you as you hopped across the lava, trying to hold a fucking flashlight in one of yr. hands.)


Ha! But I wasn’t the only naïve moron on this fool’s errand! My companion, Mr. Utility Belt himself, must’ve noticed something that I’d observed myself: it was becoming warmer as we travelled, in part due to our level of exertion, but also to a growing warmth. Somewhat sheepishly, he asked me how much water I’d brought.


“Ummm… 2 liters.”


“Oh. Then we should be fine—if I may have some of your water.”


“OK.”


“I was stupid. I thought 1/2 liter would be enough. I left the rest back at the Jeep.”


Dumbass.



Despite all of my bitching, I know that I was very, very lucky throughout almost all of my trip. For example: Aside from my own travel plans, I hadn't given much thought to the calendar. As it happened, we were hiking to the lava flow on the night of a full moon. For almost the entire hike, it never got really dark, even after the dusk failed. We only used our flashlights near the end, when we were negotiating some of the more tricky cracks in the lava fields. We didn't really need them otherwise, and they detracted from the absolute beauty of the moonlight.


It was unearthly, breathtaking: plains of raw black rock, stretched far into the space in front of us, bathed in pale blue light. They seemed to glimmer like calm water at night. It might have felt aquatic, but there was the wind, growing noticeably warmer as we moved. Despite the thudding of our footsteps and the cracking of rolling pieces of lava, here was a hushed feeling of outright awe like you were in this spirit place. We all became quiet. There wasn't anything to say.


The moon was bright, as I said, but it was dark enough that we noticed something that the sunlight had hidden: a little way in front of us, further up the slope of Kilauea, was a capillary network of bright twisting orange-gold lines. They varied in thickness from what appeared to be very narrow cracks to open holes. It was difficult to tell much about the ground around them—not only was it dark, and were we still some distance from the lines, but the brilliance of the lights made your irises close down so that they didn't do much to cut the darkness around the lines.


The lava grew even darker beneath us and the thumping of our footsteps grew more resonant. It was clear that we were standing on crust that was very new and very thin. To say that I'd been distracted by the wonders around me would be a gross understatement. I'd been bewitched. But the wind was growing very warm and dry, drawing even more sweat from me after the walk. Stefan advised me to touch my boot sole. Its temperature was moving past warmth and becoming very nearly hot. The ground was thumping ever more hollowly beneath us.


My enchantment faded. I wasn't freaking out, but it did occur to me that there might be some danger signs here. I considered the ambiguity of our course. Just where the fuck were we going and how far? Had we stopped outside the area that park directions urge you to inhabit? There were no clear boundaries now. We'd lost the rope a ways back. We were getting closer to the fiery lines.


I asked Stefan how much further we were going. He mistook this for a statement of weariness. I was tired of course, and sore, and the walk back was sounding pretty brutal. Come to think of it, had I left the interior lights on? I'd had some trouble figuring out the Neon's headlight controls and had flashed the dome light on at least once in the process. I pictured us returning, exhausted to a car with a dead battery.


But still, no, that wasn't why I'd asked him about our plans. I was just wondering how close were we trying to get to the lava, and like, were we past the point of stupidity here? I wouldn't know, and although he had access to more lava trivia than I did, I wasn't sure that Stefan would know much about our proximity to the point of stupidity either. What’s more, he was starting to remind me of some lava-mad Captain Ahab, or at the very least, Quint from Jaws. Even if he knew that we’d left the rational world behind, I’m not sure he would have cared. Or said anything.


It was finally beginning to sink in that I was in the vicinity not just of unstable ground, but also of molten lava. If the ground beneath you gave, might you actually fall into a pool of the stuff? And if so, how fast would you burn? I pictured an exposed knee bone, blackened flesh. And like what would be the best way to season someone who's been lava roasted? Hmmm???


But these images arose more from curiosity than they did from fear—'tho there was some of that there too. I was more enticed than worried, and when Stefan said they could slow down to accommodate me, I said that was OK. Looking at those cracks of light, I was eager to see more.