Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (9 page)

For the first time since we’ve arrived, it begins to rain over the village. The storm is no longer something to watch from a safe distance. Here, there is no shelter that is so far removed from the elements that one can feel totally safe, completely cocooned. No matter how many hatches you batten down out here, there’s no way to escape the storm.

“Thank God,” Alan says. At first, I think he’s just excited about the force of the winds, the ever-increasing power in the sky. But then he adds, “It’ll fill up the rainwater tank. We were about empty, dude.” Lightning: danger and savior.

The sky flashes. “Whoa, here it comes!” Alan shouts. The water laps. Alan jumps a little in place. The lightning is everywhere now. Romo is laughing like a madman. Hearty laughs, laughs that you might expect from a man whose snores could be mistaken for thunder.

“That’s only about eight kilometers out,” Alan says, pointing at the sky.

I feel a mosquito on my back. Pulling it from my flesh is like removing a needle. In the swamp, trees turn to shadows, their palms skeletal, backlit and sinister. Even the boatmen, used to the storms, have gotten out of their hammocks for this. They hop in their crafts and move them toward the bulkhead of the island so that they won’t smash against the house.

Horizontal bolts rip through the sky. We’re all on our feet now. When a particularly loud bolt crashes, I let out a little scream. The rest of the group laughs, but, on the next strike, a few of them follow my lead. “This too shall pass,” Alan says.

He appears the happiest I’ve seen him since we met. He shouts, “There are spirits in these clouds! Spirits!” I actually have a sense of otherworldliness myself, though I’m coming to understand this world—a blue dot on the cosmic map—as magical as magic can be. Maybe, I think, the lightning doesn’t bring so much a message as an opportunity to listen to our own fears, questions, doubts, needs. In the end, no source of light is as important as what it illuminates. No thunder is as loud as its resounding interpretation.

A bolt lights the porch. The group giggles nervously. Alan says, “Sometimes the bolts are so constant that, if it’s not raining, you can go onto the island and read a book by their light.” It is, of course, something he’s actually tried.

Sans Alan, our whole group is in a cluster now, which goes against NOAA instructions to separate so that if someone is hit by lightning there will be survivors to go for help. But, on Lake Maracaibo, this rule doesn’t really apply. There’s nowhere to go, no help to be had.

I’m relieved when Alan decides to join us under the awning, until I realize he’s just ducking under to get his tripod. When he steps into open air with the three metal rods, a bolt illuminates the jungle beyond, bright as day. I can see bark on the trees just beyond the cement bridge, previously unnoticed.

“It’s interesting how the thunder here sounds so different than the thunder in Mérida,” Alan shouts. “There, it just bounces off of the mountains, but here . . .” A high-tone boom cuts him off, barreling across open water as lightning strikes the center of Lake Maracaibo once, twice, oh, I don’t know,
a thousand times
.

 • • • 

Romo is already in performance mode, doing a graceful mash-up of tai chi and yoga in the swamp, when I wake up the next morning. He seems to be tracing the circle of the full sun, his palms pressed toward the sky like sun-soaking butterfly wings. Matt is sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee in his hand.

“Pretty wild night,” I say, helping myself to fresh-cut papaya. I fix him a plate, too. This is something I don’t always do at home, where Archer’s needs are my first concern. The trip has been full of many small, soft moments between us. These days, we’re both reaching out.

When I hand him his plate, he says, “I think what makes us most nervous about lightning is the fact that we can’t conquer it. We’ll never be able to hold it in our hands no matter how hard we try.”

He pauses to savor a bite of overripe fruit before continuing. “The lightning,” he says, “it’s what you’ll never get back. Watching these storms is like spending the night in life and death. A strike of lightning is a moment in time. We get thousands of moments, but the lightning reminds us that they’re all temporary.”

Now, this is not the sort of table talk we have over breakfast at home. In fact, when we’re in the daily grind, we hardly have time for talks about who’s going to pick up milk and bread. But this is one of our lightning-strike moments in time. The Catatumbo phenomenon has jolted us out of our routine, our ritual, our comfort zone so completely that it’s impossible to imagine ever settling back into it quite as deeply as we’d been before.

Alan stirs in his hammock. He emerges to join the group for
arepas
—fried corn pancakes—and eggs scrambled with tomatoes and onions, which is curiously called
perico
, or parrot, possibly an ode to the dish’s brilliant colors. The connection comes close to home as a scarlet macaw lands on the roof not far from where we sit, the sky momentarily splashed with a vivid, living rainbow.

“This is another cool part of the storm sequence,” Alan says. “You get that gnarly storm at night and then this!” He waves toward the morning’s unblemished sky, and then he sets about whittling a brick of hardened
panela
, a regional confection created by boiling fresh sugarcane until all that remains is its essence.

The
panela
is covered with wasps, their dark bodies pierced by brilliant yellow streaks. Alan brushes them off as if they’re harmless houseflies before pushing caramel shavings into his coffee. Then, he offers the wasp-covered block to me.

The insects look like living lightning. I hesitate. Alan notices.

“These guys can really hurt you,” he says. “But they rarely do sting.”

I laugh and extend an open hand. The
panela
is earthy and rich. I fill my cup and return to the block, daringly, again and again. Why wouldn’t I? All of life is a trust fall, and I’m awakening to the thrill, rather than the fear, of being suspended midair.

November 2011

MY UNDERSTANDING OF HAWAIIAN HULA HAS, UNTIL RE
CENTLY, BEEN
limited to Hollywood portrayals and tourist luaus. But when I discovered that the dance is considered a direct conduit to the goddess of fire, Pele, who lives in
volcano, I decided that the next phenomenon on my list might be better explored via gyrating hips than geological surveys. That’s why I’m headed to the Big Island of Hawai‘i to see the volcano in action and attend the Moku O Keawe Hula Festival, where I’ll learn about hula as an expression of nature-based Hawaiian spirituality. Then, I’m slated to join up with a hula
, or hula school, performing an actual crater-side offering to Pele. But my departure is still two weeks away.

Today, I’m hanging with Archer.

Some people think a seven-course meal is the pinnacle of culinary pageantry. I suspect these people have never dined with a two-year-old. Archer can make a one-course meal last for nearly an hour. He sings to it. He caresses it. He squeezes it just to feel the sensation of it between his fingers. He paints the table with it. He paints himself. He explores the texture, savors the flavors, plays with the colors. Dinner isn’t composed of food groups. It is the creaminess of mashed potatoes and the oozing satisfaction of soft-enough-to-smash green beans.

Food often ends up on the floor and, during the messiest of meals, the wall. This is exasperating. It’s also strangely beautiful. Unless we’re in a hurry.

I’m not necessarily in a rush on this fine fall day, but I am hoping to check the mail. This seems like a simple task, one that shouldn’t take much effort or cause frustration, I know, but checking my mailbox is easy like lunch with a toddler is quick. The box is located roughly a quarter mile from my house, down a gravel road that makes getting to and from my place in winter—and for nervous drivers, in summer—a challenging prospect.

I used to be able to strap Archer into a big-wheeled stroller, but he’s gotten too curious for rides. He bucks like a baby bronco if I try to get him in the thing. I’m longing for a beeline; he’s more interested in actual bees.

Our road is a curve cut into a mountainside, and it’s the fringes of the path that Archer is drawn to. It isn’t long before he is ahead of me. He throws out his arms and screams: “Outside!” It’s the sort of enthusiasm some kids reserve for ice cream.

We stop by a drainage ditch that Archer has taken to calling his “garden.” He studies weeds as if they’re flower-show roses. I try to convince him that there might be something interesting in the mailbox when we get there—a letter from his grandmother, a magazine with pretty pictures—but he’s insistent on continuing in the opposite direction.

I’ve been holding the arm of his coat. But, tired of trying to control a situation where there isn’t any immediate danger, I let go. He takes off. I follow.

When we get to a small wooded area, he yells, “Pine forest! Path!” and shoots off into sheltering trees. There are three stumps on the trail, memorials to trees sacrificed to show us the way. They are covered in bristly moss. Archer touches it and quickly recoils as if it might bite him. Then he starts to chuckle. There’s really no other word for it. He smiles smugly until his eyes are slits, and he throws back his head.

“What are you laughing at?” I ask.

“Laughing at the trees waving,” he tells me. I look up, at the spindly arms of the pines. They look like big-haired cheerleaders enthusiastically waving green pom-poms. I start laughing, too.

He climbs on a stump. I throw my hands up and shout, in supreme Archer fashion, “Be the tree!” He smiles and stretches his arms to the sky, elbows turned knots on a limb; fingers, splayed pine needles. This spontaneous game, I soon learn, might be fine pretraining if he ever expresses interest in learning the Hawaiian art of embodiment otherwise known as hula dancing.

 • • • 

Ancient Hawaiians identified so closely with nature that there was a term for every observed phenomenon, no matter how small. Winds were named based on their subtlety. Raindrops, their size. Lava flows, their shape. These site-specific observations have been passed down for millennia through myth-heavy
oli
, or chants, and dance.

Hula is, at its core, a collective sort of muscle memory.

During my first morning on the Big Island, I dine with a woman who has the ability to morph into twisting flows of lava. At least, she does when she’s dancing. Keikilani Curnan—a soft-featured woman with long brown hair and lips coated in coral-colored lipstick—is a
kumu
hula, or hula teacher. She can, with the flick of a wrist, turn herself into phenomena of all sorts. And, as a keeper of Pele’s stories, she is—according to Hawaiian tradition—the closest one can get to meeting the fire goddess made flesh.

It’s actually a fluke that I’m having breakfast with Keikilani today. When I was checking into the Waikoloa Beach Marriott, the receptionist realized that Keikilani—teacher of the
I’ve ultimately come to see, days from now, miles from here—worked in the sales office of the very hotel I was standing in.

Maybe geography really is destiny.

Hawai‘i—declared a state in 1959 after an overthrow of Hawaiian monarchy—sits in the center of the Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped area of volcanic activity anchored by the Pacific Basin. The Big Island was constructed by five major volcanoes:
, Mauna Loa, Hualalai Loa, and Kohala.
is a shield volcano, categorized by its gentle lava flows. Through them, Pele’s presence can be found everywhere.

Keikilani, native of Hawai‘i, sees Moku O Keawe as an opportunity for hula dancers from outside of the islands to get to know the place they’re dancing about. She explains that the festival is a celebration of the islands as not only the center of volcanic activity on earth, but also the center of the hula world. “We reference this place as the
piko
, or belly button,” she says. This is more important than one might think.

“To Hawaiians,” Keikilani says, “your gut or intuition, your navel, is almost more important than the brain. You know when something is right or when you feel something is good.” She puts a hand on her belly and moves it up her chest until it rests on the top of her head. “When it needs to,” she says, “that knowledge flows up.”

She is—without hesitation—telling me that she comes from a culture of navel gazers.

To call someone a navel gazer on the mainland is to say that they’re narcissistic, self-absorbed in their introspective pursuits. This perspective, I realize, might be the very reason I’ve come to think of a spiritual life as some sort of luxury. I’m suddenly struck by the irony of a culture that seems to point to personal spiritual quests as somehow selfish when, in the end, those journeys, like the discredited belly button, are ultimately a search for connectivity.

Hawaiians don’t use the word chat. They say, “talk story.” So, I ask Keikilani to talk story about her upcoming performance at the Halema‘uma‘u crater. “Everyone wants to dance there,” she explains. “That’s where Pele resides.” Keikilani rubs her hand along her arm as if she’s trying to warm herself. “I’ve got chicken skin just thinking about it!” she says, using the Hawaiian term for goose bumps.

Keikilani was born into a dancing dynasty. In 1938, her mother was crowned the first Queen of Hula. At eighteen, she briefly went to Hollywood, where she got a small part in an MGM movie. She ultimately returned to Hawai‘i and married a man of Irish descent. Keikilani may have inherited her mother’s moves, but she got her father’s blue eyes and chestnut hair. They’re part of the reason she originally became interested in hula. “I was teased as a child because of the way I look,” she says, “but I
am
Hawaiian.”

Though dancing has always been a way for Keikilani to assert her cultural identity, it wasn’t until the late seventies that she began to understand it as a moving sort of prayer. “Some people just want to learn to dance,” she says, “but others want to experience the
mana
, spiritual power.”

Mana
is something her mother, despite her crown, never quite understood. One day, when she was in her nineties, she called out to her grown daughter, who was rushing out the door to dance class: “Where you going?”

“I go to hula,” Keikilani reminded her.

“You’re
still
taking hula?” her mother said. “Don’t you know it all by now?”

Keikilani smiles at the memory, and she gives me a sideways glance: “But you see, there is no end to the hula, no ultimate mastery,” she says. “Hula is an ongoing thing.”

She nods toward my cell phone, where a digital photo of Archer stares at us from the screen. “It’s like parenting, yeah? It doesn’t end and it’s always changing. You’re learning, but you’re also creating. There’s new hula music being created and there are new chants all the time. This is all part of the birthing.”

 • • • 

My radio-equipped headset can’t mask the
thwamp, thwamp
of the helicopter’s whirling blades. They’ve turned the sun into a strobe light. The nose of the craft is glass, and when taking off, I feel like I’m floating rather than flying. There goes the blue car, the white bits of bleached coral placed on the dark ground as geological graffiti. There goes the strip of asphalt that’s been overtaken by stone. There goes the earth itself.