Is there lava?
diary … 12? 13? from the big island
I am writing to you from between the elbows. On one side is the elbows of my sweetie. On the other side is the elbows of a stranger. In flight to Kona, Hawaii.
This was the first time that I’ve left LAX to go somewhere other than Pittsburgh, the first time that LAX has been my home base. It’s a weird feeling. For years and years and years, anytime I came here it was at the end of a trip and we were getting on the red eye. It’s so weird to be in the land of car rentals on Sepulveda, but I’m driving my own car.
One thing that’s really great about flying a budget airline for years and years is that even the most minor conveniences strike me as delightful and unearthly delights. Such as the multiple USB charge points located at my seat on this American Airlines flight. There is no need to ration my battery. No need to worry that my phone will be dead when I arrive. And further! The in-flight WiFi. The selection of free TV and movies. It’s totally luxurious feeling to me, even though this is very much not a luxury experience.
The thing about islands is that the isolation makes for high stakes. At night, there’s a frog we hear from the AirBnb room—it goes toh-WEET! toh-WEET!—and it only arrived on the big island 20 years ago, on a shipment of potted plants from somewhere else. Now it’s everywhere. An island ecosystem doesn’t easily accept newcomers. They typically overrun it. When brown tree snakes were introduced, they decimated bird populations because the birds had evolved out of their knowledge that snakes were dangerous.
These kinds of lessons are my favorite thing about traveling. As much as I love the beauty of a place (and the beauty here is INSANE). There’s a way of being, everywhere. There’s a method and a law, a system of decisions that are made again and again in a place. You can arrive and start looking around for your Starbucks and your favorite breakfast, or you can arrive and start looking around for the way the water moves. The low places and the logic.
We booked this trip a few weeks ago, when the eruptions started on the big island, hoping that we would be able to see some hot mf lava. But the eruptions stopped about a week ago. When we got off of our helicopter ride over the national park yesterday, a girl waiting to get on the next one asked me, “Any lava?” She looked disappointed when I said no, which is funny, because I imagine I’m not the first person she asked. (Someone on our flight asked, before we even got onboard, if there would be any lava. And someone told her “no” as well.) It makes me think that we’ve been conditioned into the expectation that we can have whatever entertainment we want if we demand it, if we pay for it. I feel like there’s a part of me that’s supposed to be disappointed that the eruption is over and I won’t get to see it with my own eyes. But, as you surely know about me by now, I’m easily moved to tears over all kinds of things that are not as momentous as the earth making itself. Just seeing the steaming vents coming out of the crater, and the waterfalls through uninhabitable jungle, and the rainbow corona cast onto the clouds from the helicopter’s shadow. All of that makes me cry.
On the first night, I found a flower on the ground and tucked it behind my ear. “Just doing girl shit,” I said to J. “I have to do this. If I don’t, I get reported to the girl tribunal.”
As we walked back from dinner, every single person who saw me with the flower behind my ear broke into a massive, beaming smile. It wasn’t like normal life. It was like a spell, like I had become someone from a fairy tale. It almost made me wonder if putting a flower behind your ear was something you aren’t allowed to do except with express cultural permission.
Or maybe it’s more like I picked up on the undercurrent, the underwater logic. The way of the place. I’ll have to get back to you on that. This dispatch will be shorter than usual since we are still mid-trip, and presently waffles must be obtained so that we can go into the national park and hike many hikes. XO! Till then!