I've been wanting to write something about the volcanoes of Hawai'i for a while now, and I've found, after a couple of attempts, that I don't have very much to say on the subject. Nothing that hasn't been said already, at any rate, and by people much more knowledgeable than myself; I'm no geologist or vulcanologist, and what education I've received on Kilauea, Mauna Kea or Mauna Loa puts me in no better position than most tourists who come to the Big Island and manage a trip to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in between swimming with the dolphins and purchasing authentic Hawaiian clothes and jewelry made in the Philippines. Some of the lucky bastards have even gotten the privilege of seeing Kilauea as it disgorges lava in fiery streams. My wife and I have not been so fortunate.
I can tell you what things we have seen relating to the volcanoes here, as undramatic as some of it might seem. Who needs drama anyway? It's overrated. Sometimes it's the small details, the quiet details, that say the most.
There's a small, quiet thing locally referred to as vog, an airborne combination of volcanic gas and glassy particulates coughed up by Kilauea, and considered by most to be a health hazard. I've never heard of any vog-related deaths, but lung irritation is common to people who suffer prolonged exposure, much of which seems to occur on the western side (or mountain side) of the island, where Kona is. There's a gratifying poetic justice concealed in that fact, if you're at all class-conscious: the Kona side of the island is where most of the wealth has accumulated, where the majority of the fancy upscale homes and resorts and millionaires are found, and where most tourists wind up staying, for the simple reason that the Kona side gets more sun. Some folks might find a certain smug satisfaction in the fact that those on Hawaii with the most money also have to breathe its worst air.
It's important to take into account that resort and hotel workers bussed in from the poorer side of the island (the Hilo side, where we live) have to breathe that air as well, and possibly suffer the same ill effects. I was disappointed when I first considered that idea, but was disappointment has been mitigated somewhat by the fact that those working poor who wait on and service well-to-do mainlanders don't have to live with that shitty air all the time, and at least can go home at the end of their shifts and breathe easier.
Health food stores sell supplements that are supposed to counteract the effects of vog. I'm pretty sure one of them is called Vog Buster, although I could be making that up. I've never talked to anyone who's used them, and have no idea if they work. I suspect they're like a lot of supplements you can buy in health food stores, which might work, maybe, for some people, provided you take the right brand at the right dose, and even then you're probably wasting your time. My advice to anyone suffering from vog exposure is to get away from Kona.
Vog was one of the few things we got to enjoy about Kilauea when we made a visit to the park a few months ago. The trip came unexpectedly. An old farmer we've done some work for was heading to the creatively-named town of Volcano to have a look at an old shed the owner was thinking of parting with, and he offered to bring us along and stop by the park so we could take a gander at the famous volcano. Who could say no? We both grew up in a state that has had, to the best of my knowledge, the mainland's only recent volcanic eruption. St. Helen's exploded when we were very young, and living a couple of hundred miles away, so our chances of seeing it in action were slim at the time, not to mention fatal. Washington State has at least a couple of dormant volcanoes but, being dormant, they don't get up to much except freezing the occasional hiker to death. Here was an opportunity to see a volcano with a little something going on.
That something, at the time, was a very sedate, even tasteful, column of gas and steam coming out of the big vent in Kilauea's crater. It rises like the effluent of a refinery smokestack, at a slower pace but with greater volume, inspiring visions of underground factories or smelting plants beneath the apocalyptic ruin of the crater, which looks like a chunk of terrain transplanted from Mars then painted brown and gray, with vertical ridges all around its circumference and a variegated plain of lava rock making up its floor.
Along its edges steam emanates from unseen openings, as if someone left open the doors to several saunas at once. The steam clouds pass by you as you gaze out over the crater. You are, in a real sense I suppose, being touched by the volcano. To become even more intimate, you can hike out over the fields of sharp, granola-textured a'a, lava that has cooled at a different rate than the flat, undulant pahoehoe, a type of lava that looks a lot like spilled asphalt.
According to those who run the national park, people would be well-advised to spent their entire visit looking over their shoulders. Danger lurks everywhere, waiting to claim yet another life. Most nature preserves have some element of peril, but the video shown in the screening room of the visitors center could put a faint-hearted person off the idea of ever leaving the parking lot.
One should never walk on the a'a in flip-flops (called slippers or, more properly, “slippahs”, in Hawaii), only shoes or boots. Don't go without a flashlight, because if it gets dark while you're out there you don't have a hope of making your way along the bumpy, jagged, pointy rock and back to a trail without planting your face in some of it, and then Search and Rescue will have to bring their flashlights when they come and get you, an expense I'm sure the state government would rather not have to shell out on your account. The video shows a still photo of a cut and bleeding hand belonging to someone who neglected to heed the warnings of Parks and Recreation, and look where it got them—an uncredited spot in a safety video.
Probably happens all the time.
Trips to the shoreline where the lava flow spills over into the Pacific, during those times when Kilauea is producing lava, opens up yet another possibility for injury. Death even, if you're one of those people incautious enough to wander along the extreme edge of the shore, close to the water, near to where lava has been splashing and cooling in the surf. It sometimes creates a ledge of fresh rock that looks to the untrained eye to be sturdy, but has a tendency to break away and sink. More than one person has perished this way. The helpful video demonstrates this phenomena with a crude computer-animated cartoon, followed by a newspaper clipping concerning a young man lost to the sea while standing on one of these trick ledges.
The volcanic gas contains sulfur dioxide, and in concentrated doses can cause harm to those with respiratory problems or heart problems, to kids, pregnant women, the elderly, and everyone else.
Overall, the park is a great place to take the family if you're not terribly fond of them.
Lava flows sometimes create lava tubes, long passages in the rock that look a lot like mining tunnels. One of the park's tubes is open to the public, lit for about the first 100 feet in. Another public tube has no lighting at all. You were supposed to bring a flashlight anyway.
The walls and ceiling are damp, fostering the growth of lichen that hangs from above like the tendrils of a cave-dwelling jellyfish. Footing is treacherous, as the way is uneven and rocks are strewn about the floor. We walked far enough that all traces of daylight from the opening were gone, and then turned off our flashlight. Predictably, the darkness was absolute, like deep space. Another couple that had been walking ahead of us snapped a flash photo, making a split-second burst of illumination that left a momentary after-image on our retinas. By then we were satisfied that we had come to appreciate the interior of a lava tube as best as we were able, and made our way back.
Months before I had heard a story on the radio about impoverished families sometimes living in lava tubes. A social worker made the discovery while doing some follow-up work on one of her cases. I wasn't surprised to hear that desperately poor people where improvising homes out of available space—poverty on the island is rampant—but in light of our tour through one of these tubes, I'm struck by how much people can bring themselves to tolerate when they're presented with few alternatives. That place did not look comfortable, let alone livable, and as I said, it was damp. I can't recall what the location of the tubes was said to be in the story, but if they were anywhere near Kilauea, those people must be terribly cold at night. The elevation is high, the air is chilly, and that part of the island receives the most rain. Still, I can empathize with folks who would rather live in a dank cave than pay the exorbitant rents asked for even small studio apartments on the Big Island. It could be said that Hawai'i is most like the mainland in its inability to provide affordable housing.
During Kilauea's most recent eruption, we received a few worried emails expressing concern for our safety. We never felt any sense of danger at the time, primarily because we live two hours away from the volcano, and the eruptions are always confined to a relatively small area. Without a doubt the island's vulcanism is something to take seriously and regard with a reserved wariness, as large swathes of the western side of the island attest. As you come down the saddle road, huge fields of a'a, adorned with innumerable “so-and-so was here” signs fashioned from chunks of white coral, take over from the rolling hills blanketed in dry scrub and the odd prickly pear cactus. That is where the island becomes an extraterrestrial landscape of geologic upheaval frozen in place, dark and crumbly and raggedly formed. On some slopes the hardened black pahoehoe fans out in a cone shape, and has been there long enough that grass has begun to break through it, cracking it into smaller pieces, beginning the slow process of turning rock to soil. From a distance these dark patches look like the aftermath of a brush fire. Over the years, neighborhoods have been swallowed up by lava flows; gift shop postcards sometimes depict objects such as street signs poking up from a field of hardened volcanic rock.
But it's probably not the lava that'll get you. The Pacific Ring of Fire, with all of its hyperactive plate tectonics, has other ways to interfere with the regular flow of human life. In the Jagger Museum, on the rim of Kilauea's crater, a seismograph indicates with lines scratched onto a scroll of paper the level of seismic activity on the island of Hawai'i. More than once people have mentioned to us the earthquakes that occur here from time to time. In 2007, the island was struck by a quake measuring greater than 7.0 on the Richter scale. The farming co-op where we stayed for several months had its water supply cut off by quake damage.
After the recent earthquake in Japan, a tsunami warning went throughout the island, and Hannah and I stayed up in bed at ten o'clock that night listening to the Pa'auilo air raid siren go off, as it did once an hour until about two in the morning. Our host came out to the shack periodically to give us updates on when the tsunami was supposed to hit, and to fill our heads with dire notions of tsunami-related destruction and how portions of the island might be cut off by flooded roadways. In hindsight, we realize we didn't have much to worry about—Japan is to the west of the islands, meaning the wave would hit with the greatest force on the side of Hawai'i opposite us. And even if the wave had been coming the other way, Pa'auilo and most of the Hamakua coast within several miles of it are a couple of hundred feet above sea level.
If you take a look at Big Island history over the last seventy years, you see good reasons to be nervous about tsunamis. On April 1st, 1946, a tsunami wave wiped out most of the bayfront area in the city of Hilo, destroying a predominantly Japanese settlement called Shinmachi and killing many. A memorial to the settlement stands in its old location, now Wailoa Park. The same tsunami destroyed a schoolhouse at Laupahoehoe Point, and killed twenty children who ran toward the water to pick up fish stranded by the first wave. Another memorial stands at that site. Photographs taken afterwards in Hilo show demolished buildings, boards and planks piled like scattered matchsticks, cars buried under debris.
We knew these things as we listened in the dark to the air raid siren wailing like an enormous, lonely hound. We also knew those towns were at sea level, unlike Pa'auilo, and more likely to be hit in the event the wave hit the east side of the island. Despite what we knew, a sense of urgency and apprehension kept us from sleeping every bit as much as the siren did. Would the damage be bad? Were we going to need to lend a hand in aid work, maybe pulling victims from the wreckage of their flattened houses? Would we be busy the next day helping crews pull fallen trees and other objects out of the roads?
As we considered what the near future would hold for us, the shack began to tremble. Not a lot, not even visibly, but a rumbling coming up from the ground and through our mattress simulated the sensation of sitting in the back of a moving pickup truck. Some of the dishes, jars, and other odds and ends rattled. The tremor lasted no more than three seconds, followed by another, smaller one that was even briefer.
It was a good deal more unsettling than waiting to see if we'd get doused with salt water. This was happening right now. And what if it got worse? As I mentioned, we've heard from longtime residents that earthquakes, though uncommon, can sometimes be strong. Earlier that day Japan's quake had caused unprecedented damage; maybe we were going to get residual vibrations from that quake, or maybe the tectonic activity over there was aggravating fault lines over here. We sure as hell had no idea.
Earthquakes are unnerving; I've been through two tremors before, and nothing makes you feel as helpless as the idea that the ground beneath you, which you normally regard as being so dependably motionless, might start to buck and vibrate like a washing machine with an uneven load, and shake much of the town you live in to the ground.
I would have felt a lot safer if the tsunami had been the only possible natural disaster we had to worry about.
It's important to reflect at such times, when the natural world seems to have taken a keen dislike to the human race, that some wonderful things result from all that geologic fury. If it were all anxiety and dread, no one would ever bother to come here, and the islands hardly ever act up the way I've been describing.
We experience the volcanoes only peripherally, in a second-hand kind of way, and mainly by the visual evidence they leave. Lava rock is the most obvious example; the beaches are strewn with it, or at least that's the case with the ones on the Hamakua coast. If the beaches have black sand, that's another sign—black sand is pulverized lava rock, and not as popular with the tourists as the white sand beaches that result from pulverized coral.
The biggest volcanic icon we've seen, the most prominent in our day to day lives in the last eight months, is Mauna Kea. It's a monolithic growth, over 13,000 feet high, that comprises much of the western horizon. While we stayed at the farming co-op, the mountain stood almost directly in our line of sight whenever we had to hike the steep road uphill to get drinking water. On some days, banks of clouds blown to the northwest by the trade winds obscure the peak, hiding from view the battery of stellar observatories nestled atop it like a cluster of bulbous white mushrooms. On other days, the peak is wholly covered in a layer of snow, incongruous under the brilliant light of the sun, and disregarding the tropical heat stewing much of the rest of the island.
Mauna Kea is broad, squat, and immense, imposing in the way mountains are always imposing. The only thing I can liken it to in my personal experience is Mount Ranier; it has some of the same disquieting presence as that other sleeping volcano, and it gives a similar impression of something eternal, almost godlike in its scope and impervious solidity, a natural cathedral that will continue on, immobile and gargantuan, long after the human race is no longer around to contemplate it.
Seen from the window of a bus as you pull into the town of Waimea, it becomes the scaly brow of a buried colossus. It arrogantly pushes most of the horizon out of the way and tells it not to come back. With a rumpled blanket of rolling hills and meadows spread about its base, and rain-darkened clouds crawling over its peak the way a slug inches over a stone, it becomes a spectacle out of The Lord of the Rings, if Middle Earth had more cattle ranching in its economy.
It was the view of the mountain from Waimea that caused me to understand how big the island of Hawaii really is. All of the visible land surrounding it, from the foothills to the barrier of haze miles beyond, appear to stretch on to infinity, and even if one is aware that the ocean comes into view again just outside of town, the sense that this emerald world is endless subsides only gradually. Up until that point, I'd thought the island was about the size of two or possibly three counties squeezed together. Now I had to consider the idea that I was standing on something much larger. It's only recently that I've learned the Big Island is approximately the same size as Connecticut. I was a little shocked to realize how far off I was in my estimation. It's the size of a goddamn state. No wonder it takes hours to drive around the whole thing.
It would be nice if, at some while we're still here, Kilauea were to erupt again, and we were to have the opportunity to see it. It probably won't work out that way, but it would be great to see. I suppose we'll have to settle for that view of the crater, and the sight of Mauna Kea, and a few pumice stones brought home as souvenirs. That would be fine with us. Without having seen the volcanoes at their most dramatic, we've still seen what they've made possible in the form of the island and everything that comes from it. For myself, I've come to respect the natural world a little more, and I feel just a little less intimidated by it...
...at least, until hurricane season starts.
