Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (14 page)

Well, actually, it chants.

Milton Garcés, a geophysicist with the University of Hawai‘i, says, “
has a beautiful voice, a sound that’s very unique.” His job is to make infrasound audible—and visible—via microphones and computer screens. The scientist, who refers to himself as a Sound Hunter, says, “What we think of as silence doesn’t exist . . . Our bodies are absorbing vibration all the time . . . There’s sound you can’t hear but you can feel, and that’s infrasound.”

It’s fascinating stuff, and it’s given me a new party trick. The next time I hear someone couch an I’m-getting-a-vibe comment with
I know this sounds crazy
, I get to say, “Actually, it sounds like geophysics.”

All volcanic processes—like the churning of lava and emission of hot gas—create sound, some audible, some infrasonic. Garcés begins his work by making eruption recordings in the field with specialized microphones. He then uses computers to process recordings of slow infrasonic vibrations until they’re fast enough for human hearing. Keikilani’s friend compared Pele’s surface-level voice to labored breathing. But when Garcés listens to Pele’s underground, ever-pumping heart, it sounds like a cathedral-quality pipe organ.

Pele’s infrasonic chant wasn’t known to exist until early 2000. Some scientists actually suspect that every place on earth has a distinctive, infrasonic song. The whole planet sings. The Halema‘uma‘u crater is just one of its more dramatic rock stars.

This brand of mysterious music isn’t just the domain of volcanic phenomena and earthquakes. Hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and the aurora borealis—which just happens to be the next phenomenon on my list—are all academically acknowledged as having their own infrasonic pulses. It’s really quite a bit to digest, this science-based idea that we really can pick up vibrations. Good vibrations. Bad vibrations. Sound we can
feel
. And it doesn’t all come from geologic and atmospheric phenomena. Garcés says of infrasound, “The earth, like us, is constantly stimulated from without as well as within . . . The whole planet vibrates and we’re actually pretty intimate with how it does that if we listen to our bodies. Our mother’s greatest gift, the heartbeat, is infrasonic. We have this coming out of the womb. We realize that we are not alone.”

We are never alone.

Katy Payne, an acoustic biologist, was working with elephants at a zoo in Oregon when she felt something that she describes in her book
Silent Thunder
as a “throb and flutter” in the air. In addition to rumbles she could hear, she sensed other rumbles. Her intuition led to the discovery that elephants communicate through infrasound, that 12,000-pound animals have been screaming all around us for millennia and we never knew—just as we didn’t know the volcano being chanted about was actually chanting back.

In
Silent Thunder
, Payne notes that Indian mythology was full of references to strange phenomena of the sky that could be traced to elephants. She wrote: “No one who knew elephants was entirely surprised by our discovery. ‘Of course!’ they all said.” It’s something they knew—figuratively or, maybe, via vibration, physically—all along in their gut. And there are other creatures that have infrasonic conversations. Spiders, for instance, are known to pluck their webs like banjo strings and tap their bellies like drums.

In 2003, a group of British researchers realized that church organs also have the potential to emit infrasound. The BBC reports that when they did a controlled experiment, pumping infrasound into a concert hall, they were able to “instill strange feelings in the audience . . .” Some shivered and felt there was a ghostly presence in the room, others were suddenly reminded of emotional loss.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist from the University of Hertfordshire, said: “It has been suggested that because some organ pipes in churches and cathedrals produce infrasound this could lead to people having weird experiences which they attribute to God . . . This was an experiment done under controlled conditions and it shows infrasound does have an impact, and that has implications . . . in a religious context and some of the unusual experiences people may be having in certain churches.” Not to mention the chicken-skin experiences of nature—where there are island-size pipe organs playing all the time.

Approximately 10 percent of the world’s population live within obvious reach of an active volcano. But, even if you’re not near a volcano, its activity—infrasonic or otherwise—can affect you. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted and sent twenty million tons of sulfur dioxide and ash into the atmosphere. They circled the globe for three weeks. And just as erupted particulates can travel the world, so can vibrations. There are corridors in the atmosphere that catch sound, too. Garcés says, “There is a wall of sound that originates on earth and goes all the way to the edge of space.”

Charlie, the Wavemaster of Vieques, is seeming less insane and more prophetic all the time.

Vibrations affect everybody and everything all the way up to the divine!

Oh, Charlie, if your neighbors only knew!

When the 2011 Japanese tsunami took place, the earth shook. The. Entire. Earth. First came a seismic wave, a vibration from the ground. Then there was rip-roaring song that turned our planet into a rolling stone, our atmosphere into a concert hall.

It sounds impossible.

It sounds like a huge orchestra tuning its string instruments with increasing velocity.

I know this because Garcés has a recording of the seismic shift and wave that made the planet tilt right off its axis. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that as in a shift of roughly eight centimeters. This axis adjustment made our days move a little faster. And I don’t mean that metaphorically, either. I mean that as in it shortened the 24-hour day by roughly 1.8 microseconds.

Garcés says of the event, “The world moved in ways we didn’t even think was possible . . . We’re still learning how the world works. We’re definitely not masters of the universe . . . The world has always [changed] and is always changing. And we can see it, but we can also hear it.”

 • • • 

Things change more rapidly and palpably on Hawai‘i than they do most other places. After leaving Keikilani’s gathering, I check into my room at Volcano Lodge, where I find a quilted welcome book waiting for me. It contains the logistical information one might expect, along with a list of attractions. Midway down the page, a listing has been covered in black ink like secret sections of a government document. I can’t make out what’s underneath. So, of course, I immediately want to.

I walk the short gravel path to the lodge’s dining hall, a retrofitted YMCA bunkhouse circa 1938, to find the innkeeper, Lorna Jeyte, sitting in a corner booth near an oversized fireplace. Lorna, in her seventies, has the jazzy energy and style of someone who’s twenty-five, and her bobbed hair reveals metallic purple earrings that flutter when she talks.

Somehow, despite the fact that I can’t raise my voice above a whisper, Lorna and I hit it off. We order snacks from the inn’s gourmet menu, and she gives me the scoop on the blacked-out documents in my room. The site in question hasn’t been overrun by hooligans or closed by the county. No, the beach, one of her favorites on the island, simply just doesn’t exist anymore.

When Lorna learned that the beach was going to be taken by lava flows, she didn’t get upset; she packed a picnic basket and grabbed a bottle of wine. Her mother was still living then. It was a cold night, so Lorna wrapped her mother’s wheelchair in blankets and they took off for the Pacific. She brought extra scarves to protect their lungs from volcanic gas.

When they reached the beach, they realized they weren’t the only ones who’d felt the urge to come one last time. Dozens of people were there to say good-bye. It was a sacred area in Hawaiian culture—the flows ultimately destroyed a 700-year-old temple—but it was special in other ways. This was where couples had first revealed their love, where children had taken their first steps, where ashes of family members had been scattered to the wind. It was well known as the site of monthly full-moon parties. And Pele was coming for it.

But instead of mourning the imminent loss, the residents of Volcano celebrated the arrival of Pele. The goddess had built the beach, and she would take it away. They talked story about how they were blessed to be alive—at that very moment—to bear witness. They toasted to the dark sand of their beach, acknowledging that it was, itself, remnants of flows that had come before. They celebrated all that had been and all that would be again. They laughed and sang and hugged each other in the lava light that was illuminating the coastline like dripping candle wax. And when lava flows reached a nearby stand of trees, they left. “Coconut trees have a tendency to explode when the lava hits them,” Lorna says.

She has just bought a small lot on the jungle-covered coastline of the nearby Puna district, where she plans to build a small cabin that will allow for more time spent swimming in the island’s thermal pools and lava-warmed ocean lagoons.

Yes, Puna is paradise. It’s also an open-air arsenal.

The Big Island is divided into Zones 1–9. The most likely to be hit by lava is Zone 1. Lorna’s lot is in Zone 2. She probably won’t be able to get insurance for the cottage she plans to build, and she admits that the whole venture is more than a little risky. But it’s the realization of a lifelong dream.

“If not now, when?” she says.

 • • • 

The following day, I think of Lorna when my hiking guide, Taj Flora, points to a knee-high, torso-size lump of coal and says: “These weird protrusions are all trees.” We’re standing in the middle of a charbroiled forest. “Every now and then,” he says, “a tree will actually survive.” We walk by a fruit-bearing tree that is, miraculously, still standing. Taj tells our group of roughly fifteen hikers: “I call that the god of the forest’s last stand against Pele.”

It is, in essence, a
of a single tree.

Taj, a slender thirty-something with straw-straight brown hair, leans down to the volcanic sand we’re walking on and scoops up a handful. He pushes black grit around his palm until it catches on small bits of emerald-looking stone. “Olivine,” he says.

“Did you know that was there?” someone asks.

Taj shrugs. “Once you know about olivine,” he says, “you see it everywhere.”

He tells us that a meteor made of the stuff once crashed into the island. He shakes his head: “It’s the only place they’ve ever seen that much olivine and it was on a meteorite flying by this island, an island made of olivine. Seriously, it makes you wonder.” He points to the cooked earth, the surface of an island that is anchored to an ocean vent. “All the amino acids that make up life start down there.” He oscillates his arm to point to the sky. “Well, actually, they start up there. We’re all stardust, right?”

According to science writer Nigel Calder: “Nearly every atom in the human body . . . was fashioned in stars that formed, grew old and exploded most violently . . . And from the rocks, atoms escaped for eventual incorporation in living things . . . phosphorus and sulfur for all living tissue; calcium for bones and teeth . . . No other conclusion of modern research testifies more clearly to mankind’s intimate connections with the universe at large and with the cosmic forces at work among the stars.”

I’ve always considered this sort of science-speak to be over my head. Now I’m coming to understand it as part of my head. It’s dizzying. It’s thrilling. It’s making me feel like I’ve been underestimating my star-born, flesh-and-bone body in some way.

The human body biocycles just like plants, animals, and volcanoes. A full 98 percent of the atoms that make up our bodies are replaced within a year. There is only a very small percentage that stays throughout one’s entire life. Most of the atoms that do are woven into DNA like flowers tucked into a braided lei.

We continue walking, moving onto lava that has hardened, creating a field of lava stones that look like stair steps and arches. “Could this collapse?” a hiker asks Taj, who responds, “Well, there’s always the possibility.”

Taj has a habit of making dangerous treks. During a recent lava-blowing-eruption of Pu‘u‘O‘o, he snuck into restricted areas with friends to get the action on video. What he remembers most about the experience was the smell. “It was like cooked earth,” he says. “I don’t know how else to describe it.” Some geologically minded friends have told him that it might have been brimstone. He shares his favorite Mark Twain quote about the island: “The smell of sulfur was strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.” The group laughs.