Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (16 page)

My essence. If I were to boil myself down, I might be left with a description like this: I’m short. I’m blond. I’m bubbly. And, trust me, no matter how endearingly it’s used, “bubbly” isn’t a word you want to see on a professional year-end review. To be enthusiastic is to be a Pollyanna, not-to-be-taken-seriously naïve.
Isn’t it?

When I’ve been called bubbly in the past, I’ve always thought: bubblegum, unsubstantial, inconsequential. But, on Hawai‘i, bubbles are powerful. Bubbles are the language of boiling water and smoking-hot, molten stone. They’re the foundation of primordial creation. They’re what comes from stoking the fire in one’s belly. And the fire—the passion of living, replete with uncontained, flailing hand gestures—is what it’s all about. In a world that mistakes anything fun for fluff, in a culture that frantically studies depression but tends to dismiss happiness, I’ve been somehow mistaking shadow for substance.

As we navigate basalt stone, Nellie continues her Pele-inspired musings. “You know, a lot of people never share their feelings, their thoughts and experiences, their spiritual side.” And then she tells me how she came to know this. There was a night in her childhood when her father found her crying. He came to her and asked what was wrong and she said, “I’m crying because you don’t love me.” He never showed affection. Not even then.

“His body was a capsule,” she says. “He was afraid of expressing himself. He died, and I never got to know him. It’s strange, you know, to have a parent—someone who gave birth to you—never really know you. I never really knew who he was either. He was never willing to make himself vulnerable.”

As we navigate the basalt path, trying to catch up to Taj, who’s gone ahead, I begin to wonder how an encapsulated man could have raised a woman like Nellie. I think about how—if I want to welcome the inevitable transformations of my life—I’m going to have to fully open myself to spirit-speak, to a seemingly cheesy-Earth-Momma vulnerability. I’m going to have to cede control—not just mentally or physically but also spiritually. As Plato once wrote: “We can forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

I ask Nellie: “Was your mother an expressive person?”

She doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she talks story. She tells me that her grown son—a professional toy designer—recently painted a mural in her Long Island backyard. It’s a Hawaiian landscape, and it includes three hula dancers. The women represent her and her sisters. In the middle of the scene, there sits a volcano.

“The volcano represents my mother because that is how I see her,” Nellie says. “She’s the one who really taught me how to live. She never held back.”

 • • • 

When I arrive at Keikilani’s cabin, to join the
on their trip to Hawai‘i Volcano Observatory, I find a group divided. Some girls are practicing chants in a back bedroom, others are lounging on the living room floor, immersed in video games. When Keikilani directs them all out of the cabin’s warm interior into the damp night air, one semisulking teen of the gaming sect shouts, “Aw, I was killing a zombie!” She recovers fairly quickly because, really, who needs computer-generated characters when a fire-breathing goddess awaits?

Keikilani counts the kids off into the cars of various
kumu
. I ride with Keikilani and one of the younger dancers in a small SUV with a silk lei hanging from its rearview mirror. As she drives, Keikilani tells us about a lava fountain she saw as a youth, a spewing cone that seemed to take cues from the paint splatter of Jackson Pollock.

“Which crater erupted?” her student asks.

“Pele!” Keikilani exclaims. “It was Pele’s crater! It shot 1,200 feet into the air! I hope you get to see something like that in your lifetime,” Keikilani tells her. Such eruptions are known to throw fine crystallized jewels and stuff that looks like
ipu
innards. The debris is referred to—even among hardened scientists—as Pele’s tears and hair.

The parking lot of the observatory, which overlooks Pele’s crater, is enveloped in vog when we arrive. The air is cool at 4,200 feet, and a low-hanging cloud feels like menthol vapor hitting the warm membranes of my mouth, my throat, my lungs. As we walk toward the lookout point, a stone wall that’s a full mile from Pele, we spy the crater’s glow. It looks like the sun slipping into earth at sunset.

Twain, after witnessing Halema‘uma‘u, wrote: “Here was room for the imagination to work . . . You could not compass it—it was the idea of eternity made tangible—and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!”

“It’s getting redder and redder!” one of the girls shouts.

“That’s so cool!” another says.

They are clustered around me, a shivering mass of hooded sweatshirts and flashlights.

“Look at my light!”

“Zoom in!”

They point their flashlights into the foggy night and proceed to have a Luke Skywalker–style sword fight with the slender streams of light, white threads weaving through the night. Finally, the
kumu
clap their hands to bring the girls to attention. “If you’re chanting to the crater, where should you face?” one of them asks. Their haphazard formation changes and they fall into line so that their vocal cords will be directed toward the volcano. The girls slowly move into a tiny clump, some of them standing on a stone viewing platform.

“We’re seeing things we chant and sing and dance about,” Keikilani says. “So, let’s do the best we can.” Their chatter has dimmed to a whisper now, as mild as my voice has temporarily become.

“Just be quiet for a minute, first,” she says. “Just watch.”

It’s what I’ve been doing for days.

The
and I gaze into the earth’s navel for a few minutes until, finally, it is time to sing
back to itself. I am encircled by the tiny dancers when they begin, each voice building one on top of the other until they make a sound so large, so moving, that the two sightseers who’d been near argument about what f-stop they’d need to get a clear photo of the crater are rendered mute, as I have been.

There are no flashes of light from the crater, only the subtle reflection of molten lava in a cloud of sulfuric gas, a hint of all the complexity that lies beneath. Each line of the chant is a flow of smooth lava, new slipping over old, building, strengthening, taking them higher. It is a show of transformation, life longing for itself in molten stone and the soft tones of voices just beginning to come into their own.

Matter can’t be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed. It is a law of science. It is a tenet at the root of many religions around the world. It is at the center, the
piko
, of Pele’s mythology. The caterpillar becomes the butterfly. The infant becomes the young woman. The young woman, the mother. The forest becomes the barren lava field. The lava becomes the forest. The star stuff of our lost loved ones becomes the flower of the lehua, reborn every time the vog lifts.

 • • • 

For many years, scientists didn’t appreciate Pele’s chants as anything other than entertainment. But in 2006, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) suggested that the orally transmitted story of a climactic battle between Pele and her sister was inspired by geological events in AD 1500. That year, the north coast of
was covered by lava. “Such a flow is likely recorded in the oral tradition as Pele’s revenge for what she thought was a lingering romantic liaison between her lover, Lohi‘au, and her sister, Hi‘iaka. The subsequent collapse of
summit is told as Hi‘iaka digging for Lohi‘au.”

“Taken at face value,” the USGS reported, “the change tells us that the caldera formed immediately after a huge lava flow, exactly what we scientists have come to recognize only recently . . . Had we been willing to believe Hawaiian chants about Pele and Hi‘iaka, and oral tradition, we would have known this 100 years ago.”

For all of my life, I’ve subconsciously—despite my best efforts and strong belief in the power of narrative—accepted the euphemism of “telling a story” as a way of suggesting that something is a lie. There is danger in taking mythology literally, of course—as all sorts of fundamentalism can attest—but there’s also danger in ignoring the knowledge that mythological traditions have to transmit.

Joseph Campbell has said that when a myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it dies. But I wonder if Pele’s unexpected twist might not be an invitation to rethink and redefine myth in the modern age. I don’t think any of the poetry in Keikilani’s dance is lost by looking at the historical or scientific knowledge it might have to share. In fact, biocycling and infrasound and
oli
unexpectedly mashing together has awed me beyond measure. Biography, history, science, and myth are not always separate things.

When Keikilani’s girls tell the stories of Pele’s journey to her current home, they are revealing not only the spiritual knowledge of their home place in a storied, subjective way, but also the intimate physical realities that their ancestors faced. In chants—enlivened history—these realities are not at odds; they’re the same thing. They’re practical, experience-earned stories that relay information and issue warnings. They’re artistic illustrations of tellers’ innermost landscapes and knowledge. And this braiding of scientific and spiritual knowledge is not limited to Hawai‘i or Pele.