Some Thoughts on Fire, Water, Lawn Chairs, & the Insufficiency of Language

Above you will find a picture of a face that formed eerily in my sink. Frightening, isn’t it?

I’d just poured dish soap onto some old coffee that had mostly turned to mud by that time. Earth & Water: This is the sorta fury you can expect when the elements meet.

Which reminds me of where I left off when I was telling you about Hawaii…

So but then Stefan, Niko and I gathered our gear about us and headed up the road. There were clumps of people all ahead of us, walking along the cliffs that lined the ocean. Everyone was stopping and gaping downward as they walked ahead of us. When we got closer to the cliff line, it became apparent what they were looking at.

As I write Hawaii, I am consistently frustrated by just how inadequate language is. You can say these things are amazing. You can say that the sea was frothing like an infant’s saliva, that the cliffs were colored in hundreds of eggplant shades and had the texture of an ancient person's skin. And the lowering sunlight was, no shit, like the orange you find in one of the middle layers of an open flame. Clichéd? Maybe. Exaggerated? Sorry, no. And still, still, damn unequal to what I saw when I looked down toward the water. The wind coming off the water was powerful, but beautifully warm. Not at all what I expected. The waves, in truth, boomed.

So we gawked and snapped pictures. Stefan kept looking to me for a reaction. I don't know what he saw on my face. I do know that it was exhilarating. There really are experiences in life that are thrilling in this way. Somehow, strangely, it's easy to forget feelings of this nature, but I experienced them then. All I can offer you now are these paltry words and a picture. The truth, predictably and sadly, is that you had to be there.

Anyway, the light was quickly changing, so we shouldered our packs and got moving. I often walk around the city with the very same backpack that I was carrying then—sometimes for a few miles. What's more, when I was a kid, my parents had coerced me into several backpacking trips. So I figured the hike wouldn't be very difficult. Thing is, I underestimated the distance—not badly enough that it would've killed me, but, even worse, I’d also forgotten a piece of backpacking knowledge I'd picked up as a kid: hiking on irregular terrain is a bitch. Especially with a pack throwing off yr. sense of balance. Even if this had occurred to me I think I wouldn't still've been surprised by how punishing this hike was. These walking conditions weren't just difficult—they were downright bizarre—if you're not used to hiking across lava anyway.

And the beginning of the hike was deceptively easy. Even after we'd left the road, the first stretch was easy—level and stable. It was flat and open. There wasn't a proper trail, but the ocean was on yr. right. It was pretty obvious where you had to go. There was some scrubby vegetation, but for the most part, we'd entered abnormally rocky terrain. There wasn't even dirt to speak of, just these deep chocolate brown plains of rock.

If you remain in rough alignment with the road you left behind, you hit on a display of the profundity and peculiarity of volcanic forces. In fact, it's downright funny—I mean funny “ha”—chunk of paved road, complete with yellow line, embedded in the lava. It's maybe 10 feet long—and somehow it survived one of the recent eruptions, while all the rest of the road was obliterated. It appears that the lava just jumped over it.

Very slowly, dusk was building up around us. The light was becoming blue. We noticed a large group of people spread out on the rock in front of us. There were whole families—with plenty of kids in tow. They were seated on blankets—even a couple of lawn chairs—and looked, for all the world, like they were waiting for the fireworks to start in Grant Park. Thing is, they were looking east and down—toward the sea—where an enormous, violent cloud of steam was rising out of the sea.

The mood was something like I'd expect you’d find at one of those mass UFO campouts—friendly and outgoing—as 'tho everyone wanted to acknowledge your presence and the experience you were all having together. Many a beer can was lifted in our direction. Many a friendly salute was tipped our way. We reciprocated, then got down to the business of viewing the lava flow.

Here's where fire meets water: the lava flow empties into the Pacific. And people come from all over the world to just sit and watch—esp. at dusk when the darkness allows you to see the lava more clearly, but isn't so heavy that you can no longer appreciate the texture of the ocean and its angry response to the lava.

It grew even darker, and most of us there were getting out shit together and preparing to move on. At first I was surprised to see that so many people were going the other way—back to the cars. Somehow the communal spirit had led me to think we'd all just go on together. When I realized how many of them did not have packs of any sort, it became clearer to me. Also there were the kids. It was only then that I realized how much the difficulty of the walk might, understandably deter people.

There was also the fact that what we were proposing to do was not thoroughly endorsed by the park, 'tho due to intense demand, they do allow it. There have been shelves of lava that have taken hikers with them as they've collapsed into the sea. There are rope borders surrounding the safe area, but as you go further up the side of the mountain, they become few and far between. You've moved away from the sea, but the ground is unstable in places. There are the flashing buoys the ranger mentioned, which are fairly easy to find in the dark, but there were times over the course of the night when we lost them altogether.