Idyll

One summer I lived in Hawaii. Not in the jungle. Not in a ramshackle hut rotting around me. I lived in a lovely and primitive guest house on a cattle ranch cut out of the jungle in the heart of the Big Island’s drug culture.

Michigan was the ranch caretaker. I was the caretaker’s sidekick. There were eight cows.

In the mornings after rain, visitors showed up. They walked through the pastures, harvesting mushrooms. Several times a week Michigan and I walked into the jungle. He was the point man, keeping an eye out for trip wires and such. The jungle was full of wahines, all named Mary Jane.

A mystery: Planted amid sumptuous beauty, life furling and unfurling all over the place, the locals tuned out. What can explain this? I conclude they were all lousy lovers.

Michigan and I drugged ourselves on adventure. We walked at night through standing-dead forests, hugged the shore at beaches too rough and sharky for swimming. We descended into fumaroles for steam baths, swam in hot springs as large as ponds. We crossed lava fields, sneaking past Danger! Kapu! signs to climb to a barren, windswept summit, crept to the edge and peeked over into the still-steaming crater.

The earth’s crust was fragile as eggshell. Beneath the shell there was nothing. Twice my foot broke through. The sharp edges of the hole scraped my ankle going in and coming back out. Escaping steam burned.

The main attraction of this island is Kilauea. It is a pretty, domesticated volcano, showy with lava in approachable, well-defined flows, with drive-through points of interest and rangers to interpret the scene. At a safe distance, visitors leave gifts; the volcano goddess Pele has a known weakness for flowers and gin.

Michigan and I found only harsh gifts at our backwoods summit. Rock burned to death. Sulfurous steam. This is what you get when lava subsides but refuses to cool. Below the surface, heat rises and burns. There is no safe distance. If you left gifts, the flowers would shrivel, the gin bottles explode.

A’a lava, the cool, clinkerish kind, creaks and groans as it crawls over the land. Pahoehoe, the fast-flowing kind, when it reaches the ocean, explodes into sand. This is the source of black-sand beaches.

At old beaches the sand caresses your skin like fine powder. At young ones, the unpulverized grains hold their edge. The surf tumbles you, the sand cuts and scrapes; you walk out of the ocean bleeding.

When the flow is turbulent some bits of lava spin into long, golden filaments. It is called Pele’s hair. It is glass. The wind tosses it up to the cliffs. Some of it lands in crevices and footholds, much of it falls into the sea.

We swam before we walked; we still do. The ocean smells of salt, of course, and of fish and floating mats of weeds, alive and rotting all at once. And of blood, fresh and warm.

The jungle smells of leaves green and plump with water and brown leaves gone to slime. Everything living is dying, and everything dying is alive still, in this sumptuous, procreant grave.


* * *

Michigan and I were buddies. In that spirit he invited me to Hawaii, and in that spirit I went. Silly, naive boy and girl. All that sumptuous beauty, all that procreant urge.

Time lost track of itself. We lived in every present moment.

It was our idyll. I thought we were charmed.