Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (12 page)

Earlier this morning, I drove to the village of Volcano from the Kona side of the island, starting out before 7 a.m., taking Saddle Road, a route that was only recently opened for rental cars like the Jeep I’m using. It was like driving on a trackless roller coaster. There were more cinder cones than cars, more signs for sacred places than speed postings.

Volcano is famed as an artist colony. It’s home to poets, painters, weavers, and potters. The Roman god Vulcan, after whom volcanoes are named, was the god of welders, who represented the constructive, creative side of fire. The welders in Volcano—and there do seem to be more here than in an average township—are mostly sculptors. It seems more than coincidental that Pele, goddess of fire, is also the goddess of creativity, mother of flow.

Keikilani’s
will be performing on a stage of earth and stone, directly across from the Halema‘uma‘u crater. I’ve been told we’re only yards from a steep drop down, though nothing is visible beyond the performance area because of fog and vog. The girls are changing in the traditional
hale
, a hut of waxy leaves tied onto posts via coconut fiber. It’s part of the performance ground at Volcanoes National Park. The grassy area in front of the stage is full of onlookers, mostly locals with umbrellas and grass mats, teenage girls with bare feet covered in leafy debris.

It looks like the performance area has been filled by an offstage smoke machine by the time Keikilani appears. She is wearing a long white robe, and her head is encircled by muted flowers and silvery sage-like leaves. Outside of Hawai‘i, hula schools are likely to be commercial endeavors, but on Hawai‘i, many
kumu
are part of a genealogy that stretches into antiquity. Each genealogy might be considered a genre with characteristic nuance. Keikilani’s genealogy, her family tree, is known on the islands for its exceptionally fluid movement. “What we’re showing today has been passed on from our hula family,” she tells the audience.

When her students appear, they’re wearing
, hula skirts that are smocked at the top to leave copious gathers around the thigh. They have the same shape as traditional skirts made of ti leaves. If a camera adds ten pounds, a
skirt would add twenty, which is perhaps why Hollywood turned the traditional
into grass skirts, which—like coconut bras—can offend in Hawai‘i. Dancers following the spiritual protocols of traditional hula never bare their
piko
, their belly buttons. Doing so, Keikilani has told me, would reveal too much of their power.

The dancers—each wearing a fuzzy crown of native lehua flowers— perform a series of songs that can be followed, with imagination, through cycles of the moon, hands thrown around their heads. There are also stories of wayfarers paddling, invisible oars appearing in the dancers’ fists. Their
kumu
, sitting on the side of the platform with their
ipu
, chant. Every so often, the group chants back. But their main job is to communicate with Pele through their dance.

Cultural ecologist David Abram has studied oral-based societies in depth. “While persons brought up within literate culture often speak about the natural world,” he writes, “indigenous, oral peoples sometimes speak directly to that world, acknowledging certain animals, plants and even landforms as expressive subjects whom they might find themselves in conversation . . . Obviously these other beings do not speak with a human tongue, they do not speak in words. They may speak in song, like many birds, or in rhythm, like the crickets and the ocean waves. They may speak in a language of movements and gestures, or articulate themselves in shifting shadows . . . Language, for traditionally oral peoples, is not specifically human possession, but is a property of the animate earth, in which we humans participate . . . They feel the ground where they stand as it speaks through them. They feel themselves inside and a part of a vast and steadily unfolding story.”

I’m beginning to feel it, too.

I watch as the
becomes a mass of churning lava, a single wave in an infinite sea. There is a song about sunrise in Volcano. Hands hit the ground. Heads shake. Gourd rattles are a flash of red and yellow feathers. The dancers fall to their knees, as if they’re submitting to the sky. The older girls trade their gourds for water-smoothed lava stones, earth-turned instruments. They tap pieces of Pele in the palms of their hands.

The chant tells of Pele’s move toward the island’s Puna district, where she reaches the sea, her boundary. The dancers’ red skirts spin around them as if they are a flow of lava. Red, the color of Pele. Red, the color of life blood. The dancers’ clothes are covered in circular splotches of yellow and black. Their swishing hems give the appearance of a creeping flow of lava. Their skirts are bunched like fresh flows pushing forward, breaking through older, cooled layers. They are past, present, and future in one.
, the Hawaiian concept of now.

The dancers’ hands are smoke, hips are hot, feet are twisting, churning points of contact with the earth. And then, fluid as lava, they pour off the stage, flowing back into the
hale
from which they came. When the last girl has disappeared, I go over to greet Keikilani, hot-pink-laced high-top sneakers flashing from under her traditional
mu‘umu‘u
.

“Leigh Ann! My new friend!” she shouts, waving so excitedly that kukui-nut necklaces rattle against her chest. Before I can explain the disappearance of my voice, an onlooker approaches Keikilani. She has recently moved to Volcano from the mainland, and she’d like Keikilani’s permission to paint from some photos she took of the
today.

Painting, she explains, has been helping her integrate into the island. “Whenever I paint it helps bring things into the physical,” she says. “It helps me explore the feeling of a place. I paint things I don’t necessarily see. They’re the things I feel. I think art helps you feel a place and it makes you part of it.” Keikilani nods, understanding. This is what hula does for her.

She gives the woman her blessing and invites me to join the
ha
lau
for lunch, guiding me over to the thatched-roof
hale
to wait while she checks on some of her younger pupils. I hover by the structure’s gaping door with a purse-and-
ipu
-holding boyfriend. When a wayward dancer walks by us, feet turning on the grit of loose lava pebbles, he points to the ground and says, “I always get God bumps when I’m barefoot. I think that’s why the dancers don’t wear shoes.”

I furrow my brow and throw out my right hand like a question mark. I’ve had no fewer than five people get chicken skin with me since I’ve been here. Still, the God part throws me a little. He laughs: “I call it that because it’s a reaction I have when I feel the spirit. It’s how we communicate for real.”

Jaak Panksepp, a neurobiologist studying how music triggers emotion, proposes that goose bumps—chicken skin, God bumps, whatever you want to call them—are a physiological response handed down by ancestors who had a cold-evocative reaction to being separated from loved ones. In other words, he thinks it might be a physical reaction to the craving for connection. And it isn’t limited to physical connection with people. Sometimes, goose bumps are brought on due to an overwhelming sense of awe, the sort of wonder one might experience when in the presence of a wondrous natural phenomenon like, say, a volcano. God bumps might just be a physiological response to the oft-satirized, navel-gazing, and wholly real human yearning to be at one with the universe.