Heat (29 page)

We walk down into an adjacent crater, the Kilauea Iki crater, literally the “small spewing” crater. But Kilauea Iki spewed more than a small amount of lava in 1959, converting the crater floor from a lush rain forest into a lava lake four hundred feet deep. It was not the quiet flow typical of shield volcanoes. At times the eruption sent ash nineteen hundred feet into the air, spewing and spitting. At times it spewed for days on end, at other times for just a few seconds. Then it stopped, leaving behind the lava lake with floating islands of cooled lava crust.

A trail takes us across blocks of lava around the edge of the crater, a bathtub ring of basalt rubble left stuck to the crater walls when the lake cooled and collapsed. In the bottom of the crater, we pass steaming cracks. They are not sulfurous. The steam here is from groundwater, rain draining into the ground and encountering still-hot rock, rock that, though not molten since sometime before 1995, remains capable of boiling water.

I put my hand deep into a crack, and a sudden burp gives me a near scalding. I decide that I will no longer reach into the darkness of steaming cracks.

I wander off the trail to find holes drilled into the hardened lake. They were drilled in 1960, 1961, 1962, 1967, 1975, 1976, 1979, 1981, and 1988. In September 1960, the rock six feet below the surface was molten and nearly two thousand degrees. By 1962, drillers had to reach forty-two feet to find liquid rock. By 1981, they had to reach 190 feet. By the 1990s, after the drilling program ended, any remaining molten rock was trapped in tiny, scattered pockets. But the hardened rock, underground, remained incandescent, glowing red.

Now it would be difficult to find glowing rock. Glowing rock may no longer be present. But the mathematics of heat transfer and cooling suggest that earthen fevers of several hundred degrees remain alive and well.

Ferns have taken hold along the edges of steam vents. ‘Ōhi‘a lehua shrubs grow here and there. There are ‘ōhelo ‘ai shrubs, and kūpaoa, and pilo, and kopa. But we walk on rock. Plants have colonized the crater floor in the same way that they colonize sidewalks. That is, they have colonized cracks. And they began colonizing cracks by 1962, when the crater floor was clouded in acidic steam. First came the ferns, but the shrubs followed within two years, working their way inward from the edges of the crater.

We walk to the vent itself, the opening from which lava, ash, gas, and heat once spewed. Now it lies cool and disappointing, not even a considerable hole in the ground, only a depression full of rock. Twain, had he been alive to see this, would not have been impressed. I sit on the edge of the depression and eat a candy bar. Small raindrops fall. A rainbow appears, arcing across the crater floor, its ends touching the crater’s walls.

In the rain, I think of Twain and Tyndall. In 1863, just three years before Twain sailed for Hawaii, John Tyndall wrote about the temperature of the earth, explaining why the planet was as warm as it was. “Aqueous vapour is a blanket more necessary to the vegetable life of England than clothing is to man,” Tyndall wrote. “Remove for a single summer-night the aqueous vapour from the air which overspreads this country, and you would assuredly destroy every plant capable of being destroyed by a freezing temperature. The warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost.”

The realities of atmospheric physics do not change the reality of cold water on still feverish skin. We walk out of the crater, under the arc of the rainbow. Immediately above the bathtub ring left by the now dried and shrunken lava lake, we walk beneath a thick canopy of trees. A forest just like this once grew in what is now the basin of Kilauea Iki. That forest was buried under four hundred feet of liquid rock.

Farther away, well out of the crater, we come to a place where Kilauea Iki killed more trees, but here it did the job with ash rather than lava. In places, the ash was forty feet deep. Only the tops of dead trees stood above the ash. Leafless, ‘ōhi‘a lehua trees were bleached by the sun. I touch one and feel a smooth surface, something like driftwood. They appear dead. But in places there is new growth, fresh branches growing from bleached wood. I look closely. The new growth, I know, is not from seeds that have fallen on these bleached trees. It is from the trees themselves. Ten years after being buried under hot ash, the tops of certain ‘ōhi‘a lehua trees sprouted new growth, thumbing their noses at those who thought they were dead, thumbing their noses at the goddess Pele.

Kilauea inflates. From space, the lava looks promising. The warm spots seen by yesterday’s satellites have grown into hot spots. “But they’re a long way up,” my geologist tells me. “Four and half miles as the crow flies.”

We are not crows. We have to walk up Kilauea, four and a half miles as the crow flies, or six miles as the writer walks, up a trailless slope of recently hardened lava. We work for our scenery.

These slopes were not always trailless. They once sported not only trails but roads. And houses stood along those roads, looking down on the Pacific. But in 1990 lava came down Royal Avenue and Princess Avenue, flowing toward the sea. Traveling at a pace slower than a slowly walking man, the lava did not stop for stop signs. It overwhelmed speed limit signs. It flooded houses. It entombed an entire subdivision. That subdivision, still present beneath hardened black rock, was called Royal Gardens.

We park at the end of the access road to Royal Gardens, at a point where lava flowed across the road, drying and igniting wet brush along the way, burning the grass along the road’s shoulder and finally burning the asphalt itself. We strap on packs full of water. I also carry my thermometer and a pan of Jiffy Pop popcorn.

We walk around mounds of boot-eating ‘a‘a lava. We tread on the smooth, hardened pillows and ropes and intestines of pahoehoe lava. In places, the way forward looks like a hardened whitewater river, frozen and blackened. We walk up and down across big standing waves and step on smaller ripples and cross main currents and back eddies. This rock hardened years ago, yet steam still rises from cracks.

We walk over Royal Gardens. It is beneath our feet, under six separate flows of lava, one on top of the other and all on top of the subdivision, twenty feet below us, or twenty-five feet. Under the lava is a treasure trove of fire artifacts, of metal toys and silverware and nails and iron plumbing, with the plastic and wood and rubber and glass burned or melted away.

Ahead of us we hope to see thick steam, but instead we see only clear skies and shadeless black rock under a glaring sun. The uphill climb is hot work. I lag behind, letting the geologist and my companion move forward without me. I drink water, fighting off what is left of my fever.

I search, with little hope of success, for the chirpless cricket,
Caconemobius fori,
an insect known only from the unvegetated lava flows of Hawaii. The chirpless cricket is the fresh basalt equivalent of the fire beetle. It was for some time assumed that animals followed plants in the colonization of new lava, but in fact the cricket comes first, moving onto the lava to feed on whatever the wind provides, hiding in crevices during the day and foraging at night, chirpless throughout to avoid attracting predators. In 1969, 153 silent crickets were captured during six days of trapping, all of them well away from the edge of the flow, well away from any sign of vegetation, on terrain similar to this. But I have neither traps nor time. I push ahead.

It is two quarts of water and another hour to the crest of the hill, to where we expect to see live lava. On this part of the mountain there is no steam. Nor is there smoke. But in places heat shimmer cloaks the horizon, turning sharp outlines to vague, wavering shapes. It is the same heat shimmer that appears above hot ground to create mirage lakes in the desert near Las Vegas. Hot ground heats the air. The hot air expands, becoming less dense, leaving more space between molecules. It rises, forming chaotic eddies. Light travels fastest where the air is hottest, and each time light changes speed, it bends. It creates a shimmer.

Hot air over hot rocks would show up on satellite images. Some of it could be heated by the sun, but geological heat is at play here. We walk on rock that has recently been molten, some of it no more than a few weeks old. We walk on a solid shell above incandescent rock. Heat finds its way up my pants legs to the bare skin of my calves and thighs.

Now the air smells. It smells of sulfur but also of something organic, of drying vegetation or burning wet leaves.

I pull my thermometer from my pack. Under my feet, the ground offers 130 degrees. This is not Death Valley. The sun, acting alone in this part of Hawaii, would not warm the ground to 130 degrees.

Things are looking up.

We make our way toward an island of trees covering a third of an acre. They are optimistic trees, growing on ground that was liquid only decades earlier and surrounded by ground that was liquid within the past few months. I dub the tree island Fort Apache. Heat shimmer shrouds the left and right of Fort Apache. Steam rises from the right edge of Fort Apache.

A Fort Apache shrub bursts into flame.

This is it: live lava. We can see it now, close to the burning shrub. Little tongues of liquid earth make their way along the edge of Fort Apache. Through binoculars, I watch glassy gray ground suddenly crack, and the cracks glow red, and lava emerges, flowing with a consistency something like that of melted chocolate. The lava advances an inch every one or two seconds.

We move in. From ten feet away, I point my thermometer at flowing lava and read a temperature of 1,560 degrees. In fact, it is probably hotter. My thermometer does not provide accurate readings at temperatures this high. From here, I feel as if I am standing next to an open furnace. And, in fact, that is exactly what I am doing.

We move closer.

Inches behind the molten red tongue of fluid, the surface fades from glowing red to the color of brushed mercury, a dull metallic shine. It pops, sending tiny shards of rock upward as the surface cools and contracts. The shards cut fine arcs two feet into the air. I wrap a shirt around my face and don leather gloves. I step closer. To stumble forward would be to stumble into liquid rock. With a geologist’s hammer in hand—a little pick the size of a carpenter’s hammer but with a metal
handle
—I stretch my arm toward the source of heat. I reach into the lava.

Moving the hammer through lava is something like moving a spoon through cold maple syrup, or like moving a shovel through newly mixed thick concrete, but at the same time like neither one. It is perhaps not like anything other than moving a hammer through liquid rock.

The heat discourages lingering. My face—where my eyes are exposed, but also under the shirt that I am using as a shroud—feels unbearably hot, close to blistering. My hand—the hand holding the hammer—is burning through the leather glove. I am not sure if it is the heat on my face or on my hand that forces my retreat. Either one would be enough. I step back and cast off my glove, throwing the hot leather to the ground.

“It is possible to dip the hand for a short time into melted lead,” Harry Houdini wrote, “or even into melted copper, the moisture of the skin supplying a vapor which prevents direct contact with the molten metal.” I have no interest in proving him right and even less interest in proving him wrong. I retrieve my glove and move back to the lava flow, dipping the hammer in again, scooping out a gob of new rock, then letting it cool enough to take the shape of the tip of the hammer, a lava souvenir.

On the side of the mountain, as the glowing red tongue of lava extends outward, the hardening rock behind it swells and contracts, as if alive. The breathing contortions occur in the freshly cooled rock with the color of brushed mercury, but also in the rock farther back, rock that has faded to a duller shine, and even farther back, in the black rock behind it that has been cooling for several minutes and now looks hard and brittle but is not.

In places, the rock swells to the point of cracking, and the cracks glow.

We move away, working our way around Fort Apache, looking for more flows, for more of what the geologist calls “breakouts.” He moves straight across ground recently solidified, ground that had been liquid within the past hour. In places, the ground flexes beneath his feet. I take a longer route on cooler ground.

“You just have to keep moving,” he calls, “to keep your boots from melting.”

I follow him. The tip of my walking stick, made of soft rubber, bursts into flame. I snuff it out against hot young rocks. I keep moving.  My boots do not melt.

We find a breakout with multiple tongues of fresh lava. One tongue is moving quicker than the others, forming a red stream, its outer edges hardening to form levees. The levees contain the tongue, preventing it from spreading sideways and sending it forward. The tongue flows like a stream over older lava, ground already hardened and cooled. Scattered ferns growing in the old lava are overwhelmed one by one. They steam for a moment and then flame, surprisingly large and long-burning flares at the lava front, releasing a smell of baked fern. The lava finds an ‘ōhi‘a lehua shrub, surrounding its trunk, riding up the wood to form a tube several inches tall. Its leaves steam and then flame, the bottom leaves first. Ultimately all the leaves ignite. The trunk and its branches steam but persist for several minutes. The lava around the trunk turns black, forming a mold before the wood itself finally burns.