Heat (26 page)

My companion takes pictures. She complains of the difficulties of photographing black lava, of the lack of contrast, of the camera’s confusion with regard to light. I look back in time, peering down into tree molds. I find one in which a new tree has taken root. A young ‘ōhi‘a lehua tree grows from the death mask of an ancestor.

Back in the bungalow, weakened by our excursion, I work on plans to see fresh lava, liquid earth, rock caught in the throes of fever. I want to run a spoon through fresh lava and feel its viscosity.

I telephone my contact at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, a young geologist known for his work with infrared imaging of volcanoes. He has bad news. The volcano is quiet. It is exhibiting a deflation event, meaning that the lava has retreated into the vent, has subsided somewhat in the conduit that connects the surface to the magma chamber below. The bitch Pele is not cooperating.

Papandayan in Indonesia killed just fewer than three thousand people in 1772. Mount Pelée in Martinique took almost thirty thousand people in 1902. El Chichón in Mexico killed two thousand in 1982. These were deaths, for the most part, from hot ash and flows of hot gas mixed with rock, known as pyroclastic flows, or pyroclastic density currents, or simply PDCs. But volcanoes have other ways to kill. There are mudflows: 25,000 dead in Ruiz, Colombia, in 1985. There are tsunamis: 36,000 dead in Krakatoa, Indonesia, in 1883. There is starvation in the aftermath: 9,000 dead in Laki, Iceland, in 1783, and 92,000 dead in Tambora, Indonesia, in 1815.

Pliny the Younger, nephew of Pliny the Elder, wrote about the Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompeii in AD 79: “Gross darkness pressed upon our rear and came rolling over the land after us like a torrent.” He wrote of pumice and scorched rocks falling onto his ship anchored offshore. “Broad sheets of flame were lighting up many parts of Vesuvius. Their light and brightness were the more vivid for the darkness of the night. To alleviate people’s fears my uncle claimed that the flames came from the deserted homes of farmers who had left in a panic with the hearth fires still alight.”

Pliny the Elder went ashore south of Pompeii, in part to investigate the eruption and in part on a rescue mission. He headed, his nephew wrote, “straight for the danger zone.” Ash was falling, and fires continued to burn on the hillsides. The people were panicked. Pliny the Elder—again from his nephew’s account—took a bath and then slept. He was a large man, and his companions heard him breathing as he slept. They woke him when ash accumulated in the streets and in the courtyard outside his room. They strapped pillows to their heads, protection from falling pumice. They moved toward the sea. Pliny the Elder was not in the best of health. Today he would be considered grossly obese. On the beach, he collapsed and died. The volcano, aided by Pliny’s poor condition, killed him.

Thousands more died from heat and ash and fumes. Much later, scientists found rocks around Pompeii that had been hot enough to melt lead. The ash cloud billowing up from the ground exceeded 1,500 degrees. In nearby Herculaneum, the heat came so quickly that people had no time to panic. Human remains, preserved as imprints in volcanic ash, are frozen in various relaxed postures.

Vesuvius erupted again in AD 172, in 203, in 222, in 303, and so on, until 1944, with varying degrees of ferocity. For some time now, it has been quiescent. Today three million optimists live in its blast zone.

Two days later, we continue to wait for lava. I talk to the geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Satellite images show activity on the surface, he says. Instruments in the throat of Kilauea, the currently active volcano, show nothing but deflation.

“Don’t worry,” he tells me. “These deflation events never last long.” But Hawaii is dotted with dormant volcanoes. It is easy to say that Kilauea is alive and well, that its deflation will not last, but in fact it could go quiet for a long time. Forever. And we have only ten days left on the island.

Kilauea means “spewing” or “spreading” in Hawaiian, as in spewing ash or spreading lava. The volcano is said to be the most active volcano on the planet, with more or less reliable activity since 1983, and accounts of activity going much further into the past.

Most of the activity is contained within the huge and inaccessible pit of a caldera, magma roaring up, cooling, and then sinking back, sending up nothing but fumes. But some of the activity involves lava easing out of cracks in the side of the volcano, well removed from the crater, below and to the east of its summit, close to the sea. If we are to see live lava, we will see it at the east rift zone, but only after the deflation event ends and the lava reaches a level that allows a bit of it to overflow through the cracks in the mountain’s surface, openings from which flows issue forth to create new surfaces, to create new layers on the shield, which will themselves eventually be covered by younger surfaces, one covering another for as long as the mountain remains alive.

Waiting, we hike into the Ka‘ū Desert, a place spewed over by Kilauea, but also by Mauna Loa. We move slowly, still fever worn. The route takes us over 280-year-old rock, and then over 420-year-old rock, young earth in most places, but respectably old in this part of Hawaii. Ash and grit from 1790 cover certain areas, and we hope to find 220-year-old footprints, the footprints set down as ash fell from the sky—footprints of men and women who may have met James Cook himself.

The eruption of Kilauea in 1790 may have killed as many as five thousand Hawaiians, or as few as eighty. They were part of an army of warriors, a raiding force crossing the island, or they were workers and their families, or both. Sheldon Dibble’s account, written five decades after the eruption, described one party of warriors catching up to another, only to discover that they were all dead. The warriors traveled with their wives and families. “Some were lying down,” Dibble wrote, “and others were sitting upright clasping with dying grasp, their wives and children. So much like life they looked, that they at first supposed them merely at rest, and it was not until they had come up to them and handled them, that they could detect their mistake.” Oral histories and tourist brochures repeat Dibble’s account, but most of the footprints are too small to have been made by warriors.

A roofed display covers a patch of footprints, but the footprints are badly eroded, better described as foot smears. Without the interpretive sign, I would not recognize them as footprints.

We search for more footprints but find none. We wander upslope across black rock. We step over cracks with the now familiar ferns and ‘ōhi‘a lehua shrubs. In places, our footsteps ring hollow. The ground beneath is an empty shell, a facade of hardened lava over air-filled space where hot rock exposed to air cooled, and hotter rock beneath it continued to flow and drained away.

We find a place where the hardened outer rock has formed a ledge, a shelf, with the dome of rock covering a cave that extends back twenty feet, a giant bubble of black rock. We find pisolites, beads of lava the size of BBs, formed when electrostatic charges pull together bits of ash inside the eruption cloud.

The volcanoes in Hawaii take the shape of warrior’s shields, shallow hills rather than sharp cones. After two miles, we climb to the top of Mauna Iki, a lava shield born in 1919. The shield grew for eight months. It is a scale model of the larger volcanoes of Hawaii, Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, Kohala, Hualalai, and Kilauea. Mauna Loa, visible from here, is the largest shield volcano on earth, lava piled on lava piled on lava. Mauna Iki, under our feet, is small enough to take in at a glance. It is really part of Kilauea, part of its southwest rift zone, the lava of Mauna Iki coming from an offshoot of the Kilauea plumbing system. Near the summit, a pit crater opened where a lava pond drained back into the plumbing system, letting the ground above collapse.

I find a fissure. If we are to see live lava, if the deflation event ends, the lava we see will come from fissures like this. The fissure is two feet wide at the surface, but it narrows as it descends into the darkness of the earth, deeper than I can see. The lava that once flowed from the fissure drained away before it hardened, falling back into the plumbing system to leave this open crack. I want to climb into the fissure, to explore it as I would explore a cave, but when I put my hands on the ground, I abandon the idea. The surface is sharp where tiny bubbles of molten glass had formed and burst. It is sharp enough to tear pants and shirts and the palms of hands.

I crouch next to the fissure and look into its darkness, imagining it full of lava, glowing hot and red and sulfurous, overflowing to build the shield of earth on which we walk, overflowing to create the ground beneath our boots.

Shield volcanoes tend not to explode. Their lava boils over slowly and flows at rates that can be outwalked, even by the infirm. When a shield volcano sends lava flowing toward your house, you will, in all likelihood, have time to remove your furniture.

Stratovolcanoes—volcanoes that form majestic cones—explode. Of the 1,511 volcanoes believed to have erupted in the past ten thousand years, 699 were stratovolcanoes. Papandayan in Indonesia was a stratovolcano, as was Mount Pelée in Martinique, and El Chichón in Mexico, and Krakatoa in Indonesia, and Vesuvius.

Novarupta in Alaska is a stratovolcano that exploded in June 1912. It eviscerated something like three cubic miles of material, projectile vomiting in a manner that could be heard more than seven hundred miles away. By volume of material released, it was the largest eruption of the twentieth century. It happened in the back of beyond, well north of Anchorage, in the middle of nowhere, far from cities, but its ash fell as far away as Seattle.

Closer to Seattle is Mount St. Helens, another stratovolcano. Its eruption in 1980 very suddenly killed fifty-seven people and wiped out hundreds of homes, forty-seven bridges, fifteen miles of railway, and 185 miles of highway.

Mount St. Helens offered warnings before it exploded. The earth swelled. The ground trembled.

Just before the mountain blew up, Stanley Lee, a longtime resident and store owner, sixty-seven years old, had this to say: “It’s just a crock cooked up by the federal forestry service or them environmentalists to delay a big development of the Spirit Lake recreation areas.”

A photographer was killed, his car half buried in ash, its windows gone. A geology student lived long enough to leave footprints in the ash that marked a looping path out and back to the place where he died, of asphyxiation, with ash in his throat. Sixteen others died in a similar manner. One man died eight miles from the explosion when a rock crashed through the window of his car. Twelve miles from the volcano, three died from burns.

If you want to visit a volcano, if you want to see flowing lava, to feel its heat, it is wise to focus on shield volcanoes.