Myth is much larger than a story we just tell to amuse yourselves.  The legend regarding the migration of Pele, for example, and the way she traveled across the sea, digging pits to make a home for her family is quite similar to how the Hawaiian Islands were formed by volcanic activity.  The six major islands were created as a tectonic plate slid over plumes of lava and punctured the earth’s crust.  Each island is home to at least one dominant volcano.  The youngest island is the Big Island, with volcanic activity still occurring at Kilauea. 

When I was about five or six, we spent one long summer living in a commune in Kona called the House of David.  The last commune we’d lived in, God’s House, in Manoa, had disbanded when the landlord refused to renew our lease.  We were on the Big Island because we didn’t have anywhere else to go, but it is hard to imagine my father staying anywhere for any length of time if he couldn’t be in charge. 

As it was, our stay did turn out to be short, but one thing I’ll always remember is getting up in the middle of the night and riding in the back of a pickup to witness Kilauea erupting.  This was during the Maunaulu eruption, which lasted for 1,774 days and produced 460 million cubic yards of lava. It is easy to get lost in our mundane routines and overlook the cosmic collisions responsible for our very existence.  Life, and the creation of it, should be anything but boring.

Yet, here I sat in the dining room of the Downtowner Hostel, listen to my new friend Ryan eulogize the good old days in Hilo.  Once again, he had snored all night and was talking all day.  He was a native Hawaiian, however, born in Hilo, so I was interested to hear his story.  Like many Hawaiians he’d been forced to migrate to the mainland for much of his life and had spent time in Oregon and Washington.  He and his wife had returned to the Big Island when she got sick, and now he was staying at the hostel, which was close enough to the hospital for him to walk and visit.

Ryan told me how much people’s expectations of aloha had changed.  When he was a boy, it was available to everyone for free.  Now people wondered how much it was going to cost them.  Everything had become a business transaction.  Businessmen with enough money can buy whole islands if they wish, like Lanai, owned by Larry Ellison, while the people who actually live on the island may not have a roof over their head.

That day I was taking the bus to the volcano so I set out for the station before ten.  The night before an odd, intrusive traveler from Britain, in a safari hat, had checked in and had been loudly inquiring about the bus.  I was glad not to see him, mostly because I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.  There was a fire ambulance and ambulance sitting outside the station when I arrived, but I never learned what they were there for.  The last time I’d been in Hilo I’d seen two people have seizures on the street.  For the second one, the guy woke up right as they were loading him into the back of the ambulance and tried to escape.  They crammed him in the back anyways.  He probably didn’t have health insurance and knew he was screwed.  I could relate.

When the bus arrived, there were only a few of us on it.  It traveled through downtown and passed a business district, with a Walmart and Target, that could’ve been anywhere in America, before traveling up into tropical rainforest that was singular.  We passed the Volcano Village and then reached the front gate of the park, where I was able to use a National Park Pass to get in.  It had been a good investment.   Outside of the Visitor Center there was a painting of Pele in a flowing red-dress, a garland of red flowers around her long, black hair, lava flowing from her fingertips.

The section of the Kilauea Caldera that I chose to walk ran from the Visitor Center, behind the Lava House, and down to the Lava Tubes, a few miles each way.  There was a longer hike that took you closer to the rim, but I was worried about catching the bus back to Hilo in time.  I passed through a tunnel of ferns before reaching an overlook.  The volcano sat puffing away like the site of a recently exploded bomb, but there were no eruptions happening.  There were a lot of tourists on the trail and in the parking lots. 

When I reached the Lava Tubes, I got caught behind a family from India who were documenting every step of their journey.  What I was looking for, I didn’t know, only some kind of peace that was beyond my capacity.  Because it had been raining so much, I’d brought an umbrella along and had been carrying it under my arm the whole time.  Not only didn’t it rain, on this day the sky was nearly cloudless. On my way back to the Tourist Center, I stopped at the Lava House and bought a soda and bag of Doritos. 

Then, the bus arrived and the umbrella was nowhere in sight.  There were fifteen minutes before the bus left so I ran back to the Lava House.  The cashier remembered me with the umbrella under my arm, but it was gone, not in the gift shop, not in the bathroom, not on the ground.  It had mysteriously vanished.

As soon as we got back to town, I had the bus drop me off at Long’s Drug Store.  As far as I’m concerned, few things in life are a necessity, but to be in Hilo without an umbrella is insanity.  All they had was a little pink one, which I wasn’t crazy about, but I was going to need something.  It never rained again.