Water, water everywhere

Without quite realizing it, I'm well into my second month living in Hilo. I'm still job-hunting, although I've just found out I'll be teaching a poetry workshop at the East Hawaii Cultural Center starting mid-April, which eases queasy feelings about taking less savory jobs to make ends meet. I'm proud to say that I have yet to enter the local Wal-mart, although that may change as I need to purchase a bike helmet in the near future. But people look for jobs and go or do not go to Wal-mart all over the U.S., so allow me to, as usual, rush over the minutiae of my daily life and go straight to more strange and marvelous little adventures.

A few weeks back, S. and I ventured out to Kaumana Caves with J., our future housemate. These caves are actually old lava tubes, so our hike provided the chance to survey the patterns and variations in the rock a bit more closely than I did on the lava field itself, when the main focus was to get to the red stuff. As we made our way through large and then smaller passageways, around streams and mini-waterfalls pouring through cracks in the rock (due to heavy rain), I let the boys scamper ahead to choose our path and shone my flashlight over the walls and floor.

In some places the lava was impossibly smooth, forming curved balustrades to run my hands along for balance. Often the roof of the cave was covered with thousands of tiny stone droplets, some of which grew long and curled around themselves in the manner of trimming on old Victorian houses. In case this reads like some geological pleasure-stroll, I should add that just as much, if not more, of the cave was the same jagged, razor-sharp rock I'd already encountered. By the end of the hike I sported a big gash on one leg and a fair number of lava paper-cuts on my hands, from trying to balance on the edge of the cave floor to avoid water, or squeeze through narrow spaces. Early on in the walk we encountered a 'skylight', a place where the roof of the tube had caved in or eroded, and found the inanimate black, gray, white and red covered with a coating of green -- moss, ferns, and other small plants. We followed the tubes on a seemingly random route, only to find, in what felt like a deep part of the caves, several children's toys. Peering around the corner we found an opening out to a street. We crouched and shimmied and tip-toed for nearly two hours, only to find ourselves about a ten-minute walk around the corner from the parking lot. We celebrated our good luck by spending the evening with a couple of other friends in the steam vents near Puna, not half an hour away from Hilo.

Shortly after that nighttime excursion I whisked myself off to Texas to visit my friend N., and to attend the annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference in Austin. If anything that's another post, one with a lot of exclamation points and excerpts from newly-purchased books of poetry, but when I came back from that big, flat, dry place I wanted to see water. So this past weekend, J. kindly took me on a tour of some local waterfalls. I'll just preface this by saying that it is hard to impress me with waterfalls. My boat-trip around Milford Sound occurred in the pouring rain, and I'll never forget the dozens of sheets of water, from thin streams to truly massive falls, rushing over the cliffs and trailing off into the wind. That being said, it's been raining in Hilo mostly nonstop for a couple of weeks now, and I couldn't believe the power of the water in these falls. Most of them were tea-colored from runoff, but the spray and the violent churning of the pools were impressive enough, even on a rainy day. Rainbow Falls is the best-known, or maybe just the most-visited, because it's not even ten minutes outside of Hilo, but my favorite was Akaka Falls, about a half-hour away, at the end of a drive that dives into dense, green ravines. Walking to Akaka on the short trail, I noticed a kind of fern-moss I'd never seen before covering the roots of larger fern-trees; I looked up at one point and noticed giant swaths of bamboo bowing to form a kind of dome over my head. The falls, when we reached them, were nearly invisible behind a giant drifting cloud of fog and spray -- the white water itself nearly a shadow, its sound became the focus of attention, that urgent and constant roar.

When I left New Zealand, I was terrified that I'd never feel emotionally connected to a place in the same way again. Not the people, the museums, the restaurants, but the place itself, its raw beauty that humans can never really access, only witness, because we are fundamentally irrelevant to its coming into being. It's wonderful to experience nature with a sense of privilege again, and to feel my favorite frustration: how much of this world can never be said.

Lava, or Local Color [Hilo]

Is it possible to be travel-jaded? Have I burnt myself out roaming from city to country to continent over the past three years? Hawaii is strange. Hilo is even stranger. It's a small town carved out of the rainforest, which means ugly split-level houses with fences made from volcanic rock, dogs chained outside, bored out of their minds and barking at everything that moves. It also means there's a pineapple growing in my yard, right under the tangerine tree. At night the undeveloped plot of jungle next to my house seems to pulse with the rhythmic chirps of frogs -- and perhaps I'm not so jaded, as I find the sound endearing, soothing even, rather than a nuisance.

It's a small town, and has kept some small-town charm in spite of the encroaching monolith chains on its outskirts. By luck my partner S. and I found a small Thai restaurant, the Garden Snack Cafe, which definitively tops any Thai food I've ever had in my life; and huge portions to boot. And nobody was lying about the pineapple. It's great. A big charm, to this city girl, is the clean, even fragrant smell of the town. In cities, when it rains (especially in summer), the true, deep smell of the city wafts up from the pavement, and you realize how many people and their trash are living and working so close to each other. Here, when it rains -- and it rains for days and days in the winter -- I'm reminded that it's actually water falling from the sky. The ground and the air seem to breathe deeply and easily.

I'm fairly certain nobody moves to Hawaii because it's a great cultural outpost of the world. Hawaiian culture is around, and it's respected, although I've noticed that the integration of Hawaiian language into English on a daily basis appears mainly when one (white person) wants to appear as a savant or as kitsch. Looking back, I'm sure I did the same learning a few Maori words while in New Zealand, but now it seems jarring. Anyway, the reason people are here is because it's a chain of tropical islands in the middle of the Pacific -- the Great Lonely Outdoors.

My first weekend in Hilo I went on a night hike with a few people in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. I'd seen photos from previous hikes S. had made, but in any event I had no idea what I was in for. Old (i.e. not molten) lava is quite gorgeous -- the minerals all manifest themselves in different colors, loops and ribbons of white and silver shot through rusty gray -- and anything but easy to walk on. Essentially it's boulder-climbing, with the constant sound of crunching glass -- the lava's sharp -- and the chatting of companions to distract one from the big, silent darkness all around. Approaching the 'living' lava is a humbling experience, not just because of the workout: the terrain and the air become very hot, and a red glow appears through the cracks of the cooled rocks. Up close the lava forms alien, red-orange blobs, and makes equally alien sounds as it makes it slow progress over whats come before. It's beautiful. It's terrifying, in part because it almost seems like an extremely lazy life form, a liquid sloth, with the extreme heat emanating from it as its only warning.

To leave that place, and return to this little town which seems just perched on top of and in-between raw wilderness, is nearly as surreal as the experience of the hike itself. In a way, too, it's comforting -- we are all outsiders here; some of us have just had more time to adjust.