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.