Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (13 page)

When Keikilani reappears, she tells me that she needs to stop by the Volcano Arts Center to say good-bye to a friend. Keikilani tells the woman that she’s going to take the girls to see Pele before they leave the area. Her friend immediately begins rubbing her arms. I can see what’s coming. Hawai‘i is a seriously pimpled-out place.

“Oh, ho!” she says. “I get chicken skin every time I go! I could almost cry at the thought of it, and I see it all the time!”

Recently, she says, the sound of the churning lava was so loud she and her husband were convinced there was an eighteen-wheeler barreling across the island. I muster all the vocal-cord vibration I can to whisper: “You can hear it, actually hear the volcano like you’d hear the ocean?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “It sounds like breathing.
Pele was breathing really hard that night. She was so loud, my husband and I jumped in the car to see if I could catch sight of her.”

I whisper-croak.

“Grandmother,” she says.

 • • • 

The
is staying at
Military Camp, a government-run compound of small stone buildings that’s been in operation since 1916. It’s intended as a place of rest and relaxation for military families, and it has the feel of a summer camp with creaky screen doors. The living room of Keikilani’s cottage—secured by a student from a military family—has been designated a gathering place. Lunch is potluck, a mix of the cultures that have contributed to modern Hawai‘i—part Polynesian, part Japanese, part Hamburger Helper.

Over a paper plate full of potato salad mixed with rice noodles, Kika Kahiluonapuaapiilani Nixon, a small, forty-something woman who has shark-tooth tribal symbols tattooed on her calf, gives me the scoop on the gathered
kumu
. “A lot of
kumu
are like Hollywood in teaching dance,” she says, “but not these
kumu
. They go deep. They teach the spirituality of hula.”

Kika’s
kumu
, Alva Kamalani, often takes her students to experience the phenomena they’re dancing about. They slip into little-known lava tubes and chant so that their voices resonate. They swim in storied ponds to splash each other, laughing as they master the art of embodying sacred waters.

Kika takes a bite of a sushi roll and says, “By knowing these places and their phenomena, we can better become them. And then, through our dance, we get to take people there who might never get to go otherwise.”

Alva, a large woman with a spiraling gray bun perched on top of her head, has taken the chair beside Kika. The
kumu
says, “In hula, understand, we’re not dancing about lava. We
are
the lava!”

Kika smiles. “We get to see it all, be it all . . .”

“And eat it all!” Alva says, playfully, pointing toward a box of cookies on the kitchen counter. She gestures to a woman seated near the buffet that she’d like an extra serving. Then she turns her attention to me. Her expression makes it appear that she’s going to break out in laughter at any moment, but her words are sincere: “We know we’re blessed to be here,” she says. “It’s a blessing that extends to everything!”

I lean in to whisper that it seems people are saying things just as I need to hear them, that I can’t stop seeing connections everywhere I look now. Alva nods, “You know this stuff. But you’re putting it all together now. What you
thought
was, what you
see
is.”

‘Ike
, in Hawaiian, means “to see.” It also means “to know.” To experience the physical is to understand it in some way. Traditional Hawaiian spiritual practices—of which hula is a part—still begin with the phenomenal: direct observation. It’s the essence of the philosophical discipline of phenomenology, the study of consciousness from the first-person field of view, which can be traced back to Aristotle, a scientist philosopher who depended on his own senses to make use of the world and believed that theory mattered only when it could be applied to day-to-day life. The school of thought was popularized by philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early twentieth century. He believed that direct experience, or the phenomenal, is the origin of all human knowledge and meaning.

This is, of course, at odds with much of modern science, a pursuit that has convinced us that human senses are subjective and, therefore—in a world that values the peer-reviewed abstract more than the first-person visceral—unreliable. But Hawaiian culture doesn’t seem to subscribe to this. Not even in this technological age.
Maka‘ala
,
Makawalu
,
, the local saying goes.
Be alert to the physical. Be alert to the spiritual.
Then you will be ready.

Quietly, I tell the women about my drum-making experience at Moku O Keawe. My instructor, Kalim Smith, explained—in between cutting and grinding instructions—that the
ipu
is a cosmology to have and to hold. The seeds of the gourd, scattered through the sky, become stars. Its pulpy innards, clouds. The smooth exterior of the emerging drum—polished during high tide with handfuls of sand—can be viewed as the solid dome of heaven. Through the process of creating the instrument, I acknowledged that I was connected to them all.

In hula, implements are considered an extension of the body. It is the same sort of thinking that allows dancers to become the phenomena they’re dancing about. It’s the ability to morph, change, evolve. It is spirit given to physical, observable form.

When I jokingly point out the curious reality that I created a drum voice and lost the use of my vocal cords the very next day, the women don’t laugh and they don’t look bewildered by the wild connection. It’s almost as if they’ve been waiting for me to make it. “The
ipu
is
your voice,” Kika says. “You speak through it now.”

Alva nods and adds, “It’s an extension of you. Everything is, understand. You’re having trouble with your voice right now because you’ve extended it so greatly through your
ipu
.” I imagine my voice unfurling like the outer edges of this island. In my imagination, it looks not unlike the films I’ve watched of lava hitting the ocean, where magma cools into giant orbs and then cracks under the weight of itself, continually, like dinosaur eggs hatching fire in the depths of the sea.

After plates have been cleared and the kitchen counter made bare, I shyly bring my
ipu
from my Jeep to comply with Keikilani’s request to see what came of my time at Moku O Keawe. When she sees my drum, she proclaims it beautiful and gently taps it like one might test the ripeness of a melon.

“I want them to show you how to use it,” she says, gesturing toward her students, who are lounging on the floor texting and playing card games. She waves to get their attention and asks: “Who will help Leigh Ann learn to play her
ipu
?”

I’m surprised when a handful of them abandon what they’re doing to help me hone my voice. A young girl, maybe fifteen, slaps the
ipu
with her palm and taps it with fingertips as she moves it around her head, her torso, making it appear as the rotation of the sun. The rest of the group—six or so—chant as they swim across the living room, arms turned to glinting waves. We’re underwater, swimming in a sea of surreal magic.

They twirl the drum. They pound it. When they hand it back to me, after half an hour of dance, Keikilani guides my hands with her words, instructing me on how to make my gourd vibrate with the same resonance. “Not on the bottom,” she says, “on the side.”

I reluctantly drum-sing: Palm,
tap.
Palm,
tap
,
tap
.

I gain confidence, pound a little harder, a little louder.

Palm,
tap
. The girls smile. Palm,
tap
,
tap.

“Good sound!” Keikilani exclaims.

When Alva works her way around the living room, saying her good-byes, she draws me into a hug and holds me for a long time, inhaling. It feels like I’ve been taken into a cloud. “Don’t worry,” she says when she finally releases me. “You’ll get used to the new shape of your voice. The awkwardness you’re experiencing is just a consequence of growth.”

Her floral
mu‘umu‘u
swishes around her bare feet as she moves toward the front door of the cabin. I raise my hands to my throat and touch my heart with an open palm to indicate that there’s more I’d like to say, that it pains me not to express myself as fully as I would like. She nods, as if to confirm she’s heard what I have not spoken.

 • • • 

Volcanoes emanate sound at frequencies below the threshold of human hearing. These elusive vibrations are known as infrasound. Through infrasound,
Halema‘uma‘u crater sings.