Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (11 page)

I look down at the totally intact wood-sided house, its roof a dot of red in a small island of green, and imagine the ghosts of hundreds of other houses lying under a hardened mat of lava. I flick a handset switch that allows me to communicate with Noah: “It’s a little wild that the only house the volcano didn’t take belongs to the only person who would stay, isn’t it?”

“You’re right,” he says, somewhat taken aback. Later, when we’re back on the ground, he’ll tell me: “I’ve made this flight multiple times a day for years and no one’s ever said anything like that. They’re usually more focused on how crazy Jack must be for living there.” It’s only then that I realize I’ve been talking about the volcano like it’s in control of the situation. But isn’t it?

In a 1955 eruption of
rift zone, barriers were erected on the island to divert flows from destroying two separate plantations. But, ultimately, they found different routes and took both properties anyway. Diversions are little-researched and expensive to erect. So Pele continues to choose her course without much human resistance. Here, going with the flow is a metaphoric
and
physically observable thing—often simultaneously.

We have no way of knowing that, just months from now, Pele will decide that it’s time for Jack Thompson to move on. He’ll catch a ride on a helicopter as she takes the last standing structure in Royal Gardens, along with its
, which had already spread its seeds.

Noah flies the helicopter over the coastline where Royal Gardens’ lava tubes deposit their magma to create land that will, over time, be eroded to create habitat for coral. But, for now, the ring around this island is a drop-off into 15,000 feet of water. It’s too young for life to cling. These are the black cliffs of Hawai‘i, land created in my lifetime. The entire island is still a child in the geological scheme of things, a monument of newness, every plume of its smoke screaming, like a toddler in search of an audience:
Look at me!

At some point the eruptions here will stop, giving rain a chance to weather this down. This area will be forested again, and a different crater will start erupting. Noah says, “When that change is going to take place we don’t really know. It could go for twenty-eight years or it could stop next week. Hard to say.”

To many, this would be a nail-biting sort of ambiguity, but to Noah, it seems to be more than okay. Change brings joy, gains, happiness, blessings. It brings loss, hardship, and tragedy, too. But the underlying sentiment of conversations I’ve had thus far on Hawai‘i seems to be this: Accepting change isn’t fatalism; it’s a jump-or-be-dragged-into-it part of the holy process.

“Everything here is part of a big cycle,” Noah says, “a cycle we can see.”

He points out tiny dots of green below, ferns just beyond the orange-black of fresh flows, the first growth to emerge.
lehua trees, which are native to Hawai‘i, often follow. There are thirteen climate zones on earth. This 4,000-square-mile island hosts eleven of them. It’s proven a perfect canvas for evolutionary creativity. Ninety percent of plants on the island are endemic species, those that grow on Hawai‘i and nowhere else. Endemic species derive from seeds that grow here, unaccompanied by the species that threatened them in their homelands. In Hawai‘i, they relax. Berry bushes lose their thorns. Nettles shed their stinging parts. The island’s isolation breeds a chill sort of diversity.

The nose of the helicopter is pointed so that if we flew in a straight line we would fly over all seven of Hawaii’s inhabited islands. Conversely, if we took a right, we wouldn’t hit land until we reached Alaska, more than 3,000 miles away. “Big picture, we’re just a tiny little rock and we’re in the middle of the largest ocean on the planet,” Noah says.

Hawai‘i is, geographically, the most remote place on earth, but Pacific explorers found it as early as AD 200. In ancient Polynesian culture, everyday people—not just biologists—understood the natural world so well that they recognized patterns inherent in it, and this may have been what enabled the discovery. “They developed this idea that there was land here by watching the migration of birds,” Noah says. “That’s what gave them hope.”

We fly over landscapes shaped by earthquakes, erosion, landslides, collapsed lava tubes, photo-worthy waterfalls. These scenes are the progeny of ancient flows that have had time to break down, where the elements have made the soil loose enough to accept seeds. The Hawaiian islands are at their most luscious in their latter phases of life, just as fruit is sweetest on the verge of rotting. Every mile we travel brings more green.

Noah says, “The forest below us used to look like the barren landscape we’ve just seen. But this is the change that’s possible.” He nudges the helicopter toward younger flows. It’s time to head back. “We’ll be full circle pretty soon,” he says.

 • • • 

By the time Captain Cook got to Hawai‘i in 1778, making the first known European contact, it seemed unbelievable that Polynesians navigated based on their observations of birds, stars, winds, and waves. But, still, Cook and his crew were likely nagged by curiosity: Could it be true? Would I have had the fortitude to set out with no compass? If I tried, could I learn to use my senses to read the sea?

It’s something lots of people ask. Danny Akaka can assuredly answer: Yes.

In 1999, Danny—a Hawaiian
kahu
, or spiritual leader—was part of an eight-month traditional canoe voyage to Chile’s volcanic Easter Island. His crew used traditional Polynesian star-compass navigation to travel the globe. At Keikilani’s urging, I’ve joined up with him for a group tour of the Mauna Lani resort, where he serves as director of cultural affairs.

He’s wearing a tucked-in Hawaiian shirt and glasses that turn amber when he’s standing in direct sun. In his revered role as a
kahu
, he has performed blessing ceremonies at high-end resorts, biodiesel stations, and highway openings. When the Dalai Lama visited the state, Danny was chosen to represent Hawaii’s spiritual heritage. He’s known for earnestly saying things like: “We’re all strings on God’s ukulele.”

There are roughly 400,000 deities in Hawai‘i. Danny says of the deities, “When you call on all those parts to come together, that’s the whole. Holy, to become whole.”
Holi
is an Old English word, derived from
halig
. Whole. Complete. In traditional Hawaiian culture, it is understood that everything in the universe is part of this completion.

But many of the deities and ancestor names of Hawai‘i have been forgotten over time. Though they have been experiencing a renaissance along with hula, some residents of the Big Island recognize only one of the ancient deities: Pele. “Pele is talked about very carefully still because she can see and hear everything,” Danny says. “She’s been quite active, so she’s survived.”

Danny begins to walk fast and it strikes me that I don’t know where we’re ultimately headed. This bothers me. I’m calibrated for destination. It’s partly why I’ve been imagining divinity as some sort of beam-me- up-Scotty experience. But maybe transcendence isn’t about leaving. It’s about being present. Life is a performance piece. Like dance and song, the art is in the process. Like hula and
oli
, the process is the prayer.

“Christianity,” Danny tells me as our strides begin to match, “tends to go straight to the source. But to get to God there is a process. There’s the acknowledgment of the ancestors, the addressing of the land. You’ve got to go through all of that to get to the purpose of why you’re here.”

Ma ka hana ka ‘ike
. In the journey of the task is the knowledge.

Danny’s wife, Anna, a slight woman in a floral sundress, is walking nearby. She points to the sky, as if the air might be visible if I look long enough.
she says; “frond-piercing wind.” It is a wind that lives only on this coastline, only on this island.

When we near a hut surrounded by primary-colored kayaks, Danny and Anna spot a visiting elder they have been looking for all day. They ask the group to wait while they greet him. Anna approaches him and lifts her arms upward to unravel a yellow lei that’s been wrapped around the brim of her sun hat. She places it around his neck.

Danny gently leans forward, piercing what I perceive as the man’s personal space, until the two are standing forehead-pressed-against-forehead. He inhales. Dramatically. Audibly.

This is a traditional Hawaiian greeting. It represents an exchange of spiritual power between two people. In Hawaiian
, alo
means being present together.
is breath, the sound every human makes when exhaling. It is a greeting meant to acknowledge that we all share the same breath of life.

Aloha
.

 • • • 

I’ve been breathing on people, and people have been breathing on me. Not in an intentional,
aloha
way, but in a you’re-spitting-on-me-in-coach-class sort of way. Maybe this is why I am losing my voice. Or maybe I’m suffering from the effects of vog. I’ve seen herbal supplements advertising relief from its harshness in local magazines. Or maybe my vocal cords are just irritated from all the mold and dust that flew from the shell of my
ipu
—one of the sacred gourd drums used in hula—when I crafted it in a Moku O Keawe workshop. In any case, all chatter has fallen to the back of my throat. And, as anyone who knows me can attest, that means there’s a whole lotta story-talk rattling around in there.