Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (15 page)

Taj directs us into a nearby
, and as soon as we step into the trees, the lava’s sun-baked surface turns to rich soil, the detritus of all sorts of things. Life pours forth around us. The leaves seem to envelop us like a traditional Hawaiian offering of sacred foods wrapped in cool ti leaves. In an instant, the hard, brimstone-born earth softens.

Taj stops to point out the curved purple fiddle of a uluhe. The creeping fern’s color is a defense against ultraviolet rays. “This symbol,” he says of its spiraling head, “is really important in the Polynesian culture. It represents new beginning.”

“
La vida
, life!” says Nellie, a group member of Puerto Rican descent.

Another nearby fern is at a further stage of development. “See how it bisects,” Taj says. One spiral becomes many.

“It’s like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon!” someone exclaims.

A breeze stirs as we start walking again. “The sounds of the trees,” Taj says as the forest acts as a towering wind-harp. “The sounds of nature.”

Trees have the capacity to communicate via infrasound and audible voices. Biologist Diana Beresford writes: “All trees of the global forest produce a fingerprint of sound. This sound is as individual as the iris is to the eye or the thumb-print to the hand . . . The sounds—both audible and inaudible—of the pine are sharper when compared to the rounder sounds of the red oak.”

I think of the sacred feeling I had in that Mexican forest, the sound of the butterflies’ beating wings, the whistling of pine trees. Beresford articulates: “Infrasound . . . is registered as an intense emotional experience. This experience is quite often felt in the cathedral of the forest.”

Maybe that God-bump guy was onto something.

I pant a little as we begin our ascent to a lookout that will offer one of the only on-the-ground views of Pu‘u‘O‘o. And under a swaying canopy of leaves, I realize the wind through branches sounds like human breathing. Once I make the comparison, I can’t stop hearing it.
Alo-haaa. Alo-haaa
.

And, just like that, I get it.
the wind that pierces the palm frond.
I’d imagined that it was named because of its geography, but maybe it was named for its voice. Even the hardened basalt stone of the volcano reveals its shape in song when wind caresses its contours. I recall the sound of the
brushing against the slender, piano-player-worthy fingers of the palm frond. It was a percussive rhythm, the song of shaking maracas.

If I spent enough time here in this landscape of volcanic ash formations, or on the island’s eastern coastline, I would likely recognize the voice of a given terrain as I would the voice of Matt, Archer, anyone I’ve ever loved. We are, after all, just players in a grander orchestra.

“The human body,” Beresford writes, “is built like a large cello.” This design, she believes, amplifies low-frequency sound waves. In other words, we resonate with the earth. And modern science decrees that the vibrating air that we take in—even when we’re driving down the freeway or sitting in a skyscraper—is full of oxygen that’s been exhaled by distant, singing trees.

 • • • 

We reach the lookout that allows us to see Pu‘u‘O‘o. The crater is a distant line of gray smoke, an umbilical cord that begins as fire in the core of the earth and ends as a ghostly gray plume infusing open sky. Taj takes the leaf of a lehua in his hand. The lehua is notable for its ability to close its stomata—or pores—during a volcanic eruption. It instinctively protects itself and waits for the gases to pass. Once the danger is gone, the flowering tree begins to breathe again. It’s one of the only plants on earth that can do this.

Taj tells us that some botanists think the lehua is the oldest flowering tree on the planet. The plant is famed for its ability to grow with great physical variation, always remaining the same genetically. He says, “It takes many shapes. It has many forms.” Just like lava. Just like Pele.

The goddess has been known to transform into a beautiful young woman, a craggy old lady, even a white dog. She constantly reinvents herself as she shapes the land, weaving herself, her story, into stone—malleable as it is. Magma is, after all, solid and liquid at the same time.

The group rambles around the small overlook and Taj launches into a story about Pele’s attraction to a demigod she noticed one day when he was in the forest cutting firewood. “She thought this guy was hot stuff,” Taj says. Pele transformed herself into human form of great beauty to offer herself to the demigod, but he already had a lover so he graciously declined. Distraught, Pele kept her eye on the demigod, and when his love appeared, Pele came ablaze with jealousy. In her wrath, she turned him into the ugliest tree she could imagine—the gnarled trunk of a lehua.

The demigod’s lover was inconsolable. She begged for Pele to transform him back into human form so they could be together. Pele, slightly regretful of what she’d done in haste, replied: “What I have done I cannot undo.” But, to ease the woman’s pain, she graced the tree with the lehua flower. It was through this beauty, the story goes, that the woman and her lover were reunited again.

When Taj finishes the story, he tenderly cups a red bloom in his left hand. The plant’s hardy leaves gently rattle in the wind. “Hey,” he says, “I have a proposition for you guys.” He points toward a smoking caldera. It’s a sacred site, and he’d like to take us. It would be only his second time making the pilgrimage. He’s just gone through the cultural training required of guides who travel there. It’s a place where Pele is said to still visit occasionally. Do we want to go?

I’m already down the trail by the time everyone has agreed to the additional two-hour hike. Nellie is ahead of me. We’re not the fittest in the group, but we might be the most goddess-giddy. Taj catches up and warns, “We’re going over some places that are going to be unstable. You need to follow me. I can tell what’s unstable from walking on so much of this stuff.”

As we wait for the rest of the group, Nellie points to a nearby basalt flow and asks Taj, “Is this rock blue? Am I seeing blue?”

Another early-arriving group member teases as if she’s hallucinating: “Give that woman some water!”

But Taj confirms that she’s right. “Yes,” he says, “what you’re seeing is crystallized basalt.”

Ahead of us there is a huge indentation, the sort of collapsed tube I saw from the air with Noah. “Think about this channel feeding the lava lake that was once here,” Taj says. We follow him into the pit, into the very breath of brimstone. A fern hangs on the side of a glassy, black-stone wall. Taj walks up and puts his hand out as if he’s aiming to pet a puppy. “Look at this thing!” he exclaims, tugging at its lacy leaves. “Look at how tenacious life can be!”

We scramble up a trail of breakdown from a collapsed lava tube until the passageway ends. It’s taken us nearly to the top of the mount. “I’m going to ask permission,” Taj says. To enter this place it is proper to offer a chant. And chant he does.
E
mai
.
He asks, in Hawaiian, to be blessed with the knowledge of this place, the ancestors, the stories that have been handed down. He holds his hands out and shakes them a little, like he’s patting the ground around a newly planted sprig of botanical life. He means what he’s saying. He’s asking permission to see and be seen.

Taj pauses for a moment, as if he’s listening for permission to pass. Maybe he is.

David Abram thinks this might not be as unrealistic as it initially seems to the rationalized mind. It is premature, he believes, to assume that our presence isn’t experienced by a variety of sentient creatures—termites, bees, all kinds of things. He writes: “The material reverberation of your speaking spreads out from you and is taken up within the sensitive tissue of the place . . . The activity that we call prayer springs from just such a gesture, from the practice of directly addressing the animate surroundings . . . Volcanoes, bays, and bayous . . . participate in the mystery of language. Our own chatter erupts in response to the abundant articulations of the world: human speech is simply our part of a much broader conversation.”

Finally, Taj says, “I think we’re good. Let’s go.”

The caldera, collapsed land, is steaming from rain that’s fallen through the cracks to find stone that’s still skillet hot. “Stay away from the edge,” Taj says. “It’s really unstable.”

We cluster around the cracks near the crumbling edge of the pit, and I put my hand in the slit of earth. It feels like dragon breath. It smells like rain falling on hot asphalt.

“I could stay up here all day,” Nellie says when Taj indicates it’s time to leave.

“Me too,” I say, surprised to find that I can say anything. Maybe the steam from the vent has relaxed my vocal cords? Maybe it’s a gift from Pele? And—taking into account all I’ve learned—wouldn’t they be one and the same?

“This is the sort of place where you could really meditate,” Nellie says. “When I come to a place like this I feel more spiritual than I do in my everyday life in New York. It’s a connection.” And she doesn’t mean connection with lava and plants; she means a connection to each other. “We’re all beautiful inside. We all have something to offer. Places like this give us time to reflect on what those things are. When I was younger, I would express myself. But then I learned people might take it wrong, they might think I’m weird. But I’ve started to move away from worrying about that now. Expression is important. But people feel uncomfortable talking about the things that really matter.”

“Why do you think that is?” I ask, more forcibly, realizing that my voice—totally silenced at the beginning of our walk—has, since inhaling Pele’s steamy breath, made a remarkable recovery.

“I’m not sure,” Nellie says, “but I think we’re here to talk about our spirituality, to support each other on this journey that we have.”

Despite the fact that Archer is increasingly verbal, he often still communicates in blurs of physical action. Nellie, a grandmother, thinks young children—like awe-inspiring outdoor phenomena—have the potential to help us shed inhibition through their giving-it-all-I’ve-got physical conversation with the world around them. They can help us bring our spirits further toward the light if we let them. She says, “We express ourselves to children. We hug and kiss them. We show our love. We don’t care if we sound silly. We let them see us at our most exposed. When you’re with a child, you’re just you. You return to your essence.”