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.