Our Moments with the Lava Hose

For the whole forever of Hawaii, it has been incessantly built by lava. The active volcanoes have long since passed on most of the islands; Kauai is the oldest of the islands, and Oahu, where we have spent the past few years, is the next oldest. In fact, our house is in the middle of an old volcano, and the bay closest to where we live is where the ocean rushed in when the other side of a volcano fell.

But the Big Island is still new, relentlessly being created, still home to red-hot lava and steam and layer after layer that keeps added on, constant change and the promise of a different island. The lava pouring out from volcanoes, then hardening, will eventually make future, fertile farmland; earth that will not be soft until 200 years has passed.

It’s not continuous, but it is perpetual, the eruptions of the active volcanoes on the Big Island, and the lava flow began again a few months back. Some friends of mine said they were here for years without anything to see except a little steam, but we got lucky, I guess, somehow here at the right time.

And we made it here not just when the lava started, but a few days after we landed it came gushing out of a cliff, 200 feet above the ocean. A ‘lava hose’, they call it, one of the rarest forms of volcanic activity, an orange so fluorescent and bright that even the pictures that we took looked like they were fake.

Somehow this liquid earth, so much out of place with our world here on the surface, came so far to bubble up like this, and so strongly that it flies out of rock and into sea, sending steam billowing up as the water dissolves in heat.

And, if we can close our eyes and picture under the clear waves, the lava falling dark and heavy down through the ocean, creating more land, yet another mountain growing underneath the waves, another add-on to this island that keeps on growing.

And to be here at this time, at this specific time in all of this island’s history, takes my breath away, and makes me wonder how that could have happened just for me. Even the pilot in the tightly packed helicopter lets us know over our headphones that this is the only time he’s seen this too, this day and the day before, and he has been flying over here for years.

And why he has been here for that long and I have not, yet we have seen the same amount of miracle, astonishes and humbles me. But it is not just that that can do it. It shows me, opens me to the other things in life around me that I am here and present and aware for; the things that are only mine because no one else occupies my particular space and time.

The way my oldest takes the hand of his brother, the smell of onions as they wither in the pan, how the hot and humid days change gradually throughout each day, a fraction of a degree each hour until a fresh and almost cold ocean breeze slides under and around the curtains in the evenings.

The fact is, after all, that we all are here for these moments that we can see and no one else is privy to like we are, and sometimes we miss them, sometimes we pass by them tired and exhausted and annoyed.

And there are things that I can see today that others can’t, and the other’s whole worlds are full of their own moments every day.

The sun rises through the window and gleams sharply through the breakfast glass, and in places where the winter is just about to pass, the barely formed light green buds have started erupting from the trees, like their own tiny green tribute to volcanoes. And in other places, a delicate and bright layer of ice atop all the branches.

All that, and the shining fire of a lava hose. It’s something, isn’t it? Almost a miracle?

It sure is.