It was already dark when we set out on the trail, the sky glowing red like a demon rising to the west. We had come straight from the Hilo International Airport, changing into shoes and sweatshirts in the car as we approached. There was no time to lose: Kīlauea was erupting. Jets of fiery lava were shooting from the north vent of Halemaʻumaʻu Crater, the most recent episode in a year-long eruption with brief bursts of activity — each lasting only a few hours.
I remember coming to Kīlauea as a child, several times, watching the slow seeping lava creating twisted ropes of rock, a type of lava called pāhoehoe. On one of those trips we drove down near the coast in Puna; we saw lava cracking and creeping across a road that would never be a road again. We watched slow-moving lava meet the ocean in a violent explosion of hissing steam, creating clouds of vapor.
I had learned in elementary school that Kīlauea was the home of the volcano goddess Pele, a powerful deity who commanded both destruction and creation through her fiery temper and earth-shaking eruptions. Many of the chants and dances we performed in hula class were about Pele, her sister Hiʻiaka, and their adventures. But learning about Pele through stories and dances and experiencing her fabled firepower first-hand are two completely different things.
I also came to Kīlauea 16 years ago, as an adult, with my mother. At the time she was deep in a four-year battle with terminal cancer and had requested a special trip with each of her daughters. For our trip we chose to come here, to the volcano, because I think we both needed to purge some of the turmoil within. At Kīlauea, you can gaze into the gaping maw of the Earth itself and see its churning, burning bowels. In this place solid rock is both created and destroyed, liquefied and reborn. On that trip we watched the magma pulsing below through the cracks. But that day Kīlauea’s power only bubbled beneath the surface, quietly simmering with potential.
This time was different. If that was Kīlauea whispering, murmuring, speaking, this past year it seems it’s been shouting for attention. The vivid violence of this ongoing eruption feels like a manifestation of the vivid violence of our present sociopolitical moment. It’s an eerie parallel, perfectly timed. Because it’s also been a year of dramatic social upheaval, global conflicts, and cruel and relentless assaults on a wide swath of humanity and our environment. The destruction of it all has been breathtaking in its speed and intensity. At times it feels like the ground is crumbling beneath our feet — scary and disorienting. If Kīlauea has a message to give meaning to this mess, I was eager to hear what it might be.
It was a cool night as we hiked to the crater, as it often is on Kīlauea, about 4,000 feet above sea level. We had one headlamp, but mostly we were stumbling around in the darkness, the distant glow of the eruption lighting our way above the trees. After 10 minutes of hiking, my 11-year-old son grabbed my hand and said he was cold, so we started running down the trail, the crimson sky beckoning us.
Soon the arcs of fire came into view above the scraggly trees. We were racing toward this glowing hellscape in a kind of euphoria — I was laughing and crying at the same time — it felt like some kind of joyful madness. Rivers of lava flowed in curling ribbons across the crater floor, ripples of molten rock pooling at one end in a luminous lake. I had never seen Kīlauea like this before. We stopped at the top of a hill, stunned, then scrambled down the rocky slope to get closer to the crater’s edge. Even from a distance, we could hear the low roar of the lava fountain as it shot 600 feet into the air and rained down hard onto bare rock.
This was it. This felt like an answer to every meaningful question I’d ever had. This was the message my mother and I had been seeking all those years ago, perched on the crater’s edge before her approaching death. Destruction and creation, happening all at once, in one vivid, visceral scene.
This was also the message I needed to hear in this present moment, in the midst of our frightening sociopolitical meltdown.
We think we’re so important. We argue over who belongs where, we fight wars over boundaries we dreamed up ourselves. We spend our lives filling and hoarding bank accounts with money, another product of human imagination. Meanwhile the Earth continues to turn, lava continues to burn, and the oceans continue to churn — as they will long after we’re gone.
There is a kind of solace in that: Knowing that the universe will go on. And that we will somehow still be a part of it, even when we ourselves become dust and ash and wind. Massive continents collide, the Earth’s crust crumbles and is pulled back into the mantle, melts down into magma, and is reborn in eruptions like this, building new land. Everything, including us, eventually goes back to the source to begin again.
