Shiftless Seattlite Tour : Hawaii (Stop 4)

There are many legends that start, “A young couple who were deeply in love, but…” For what else arches the back of a story and gives it blood-filled lips like passion? And what complicated mess of emotions and thought is more simplistically and universally understood and misunderstood than is love? It is our blessing, our curse, creating and destroying and creating us all.

This particular tale involves a young Hawaiian warrior and his maiden lover whose flame of union burned so brightly that Pele herself noticed it. Distracted from her tireless nation-building at the island’s edge, she peered upon the young man’s beauty and decided instantly that she would have him for herself.

Appearing as an exotic, beautiful stranger, she attempted to woo him, entwined her hot fingers around his hollowness, carved a channel of seduction before him to fill with her slow, rolling flow. Not knowing who she was, he refused her.

And this, of course, is where all these stories get interesting.

Pele, outraged, pursued him up the side of a mountain, tossing lava at his retreating form. But her sister goddesses, hearing the racket, espied what was happening and intervened, turning the young man into a beautiful, white flower. And today on the side of the mountains in Hawai’i there grow strange plants with only the top half of a flower, delicate little four-petalled garnishes sliced neatly in two.

They are called the mountain naupaka and this is where my story starts as well.



“Hello, Pele,” I spoke to her.

“Speak,” she answered back.

“So many of your daughters I have loved, madam. I have been ignited by their flame, quickened and destroyed. Each of these marks, a pocked past of burning hearts, a long and wide plain of cratered evidence. I love you through them, dearest, but I need to know what you want of me.”

“You have brought me a present.” And this, in the true way of Goddesses was a question that formed a statement, answering my question with nothing, the answer hidden and yet fully revealed. Tricky things, goddesses.

“I have…”

I stood, one booted foot balanced on the tip of a steaming lava rock and the other planted behind me upon a crumbling plateau of stone and char, the red glow under me the only light visible. I peered down into the fissure, which bubbled and hissed.

“… but not tonight.”

My hand returned to my pocket and patted the little leather pouch in which the ring remained.

Behind me lay a mile of rugged terrain that had been traversed under the wide, yawning skies of a sunset in paradise. This had not been a gentle bleeding of colors, but the sexuality of an orgy of light and shadow pressed sweatily upon a prism, each aspect oozing and caressing cloud and horizon, a lazy blur of hue meeting hue, becoming one, and erupting in wide arcs over the coolness of ocean.

Before me stretched a mile of rock and heat that wound in pitch blackness up the coast towards the beach where Pele was playing in the sand. Only a thin, white rope, barely seen to one side, marked any sort of path. A long line of flashlight tips danced a serpentine route like the candles borne by centuries of wise women at the march of the final harvest. There was silence, only the crunch of still smoldering rocks underfoot, the occasional misplaced frenticism of adolescents, surrounded by a swirling, suffocating perfume of brimstone and sulfur.

People die doing this every year. If you stumble and fall, you will almost certainly be cut upon the razor-sharp tips of the stone, or burned by the heat. As we walk along, I spy several bleeding wounds and makeshift triages hastily patching them up. These pass by me, illuminated briefly by flashlight. It’s as if I’m seeing artillery-shell bursts that reveal medics and soldiers, their faces frozen with worried glances toward the sudden source of illumination. And then the darkness comes again, and only the afterimage of them remains on my retina, that and an unspoken uneasiness that grows steadily among the group.

At several places in the roundtrip journey, there will be panic when the hollowness is heard, when the exhalation of her workshop burns the backs of throats, when footsteps falter and are uncertain. There is the smell of melting rubber soles, ash-danger and sudden, thin crevasses that threaten to widen with the right application of pressure and bad luck. People die doing this every year, I think, rubbing my sweaty hair with the back of my gloved hand, gripping my only source of light, which feels in my tenseness like a wet, oily fish about to pop through my fingers.

Later, under the mist rain which wets the stones just enough to make them slippery, we are without any candle train to follow. Only the stars and the false and random moonlight of our hand-held torches give us any guidance. The cold water feels good on my lips and my knees ache with every single step. By the end of the four mile round trip, I’m not relieved that I’ve escaped death.

I am thrilled at being alive.

There in the middle, Pele’s passions tumble into the sea, roil in contact and erupt with fireworks into the starry night. From our ledge, we can see the orange-white lava sear the surface of dark waters. The bubbling, hissing acid-steam rises. It is like old Toho footage of Godzilla emerging from the waves, turning once towards Tokyo, and then with a steel-saw bellow, beating amphibian feet against the waterline.

Around us are shadowed faces, awed by what they are seeing. A river of fire, molten rock disgorged from the furnace of the earth, floats down crevassed veins and falls in burning meteorites through the in-between. The flame and the water embrace, grip each other with long fingernails and straining muscles, writhe and undulate. The ground shakes. The air explodes. It rains heat and light. And then the white-caps roll over the coast, burying the hearth in darkness and sea-salt. Exhale. Pause. Ignite.

“Let your heart burn, William, for you are a thing of fire,” she said.

“I am a child of wind and wood, my lover,” I answered.

“Your heart has wolf paws made of flame, not wings, nor roots, and I do not have time for maybes. Maybe does not tower the mountains or spread out the land. Maybe does not a world create. Act or be acted upon.”

Pele now turned her attentions to the maiden who had fled towards the ocean. Again, she hurled her lava rocks at the young woman who cowered in fear of her life. And again, Pele’s sister goddesses intervened. Taking pity on the maiden, they turned her into a beautiful, white flower. And today on the coastline of Hawai’i there grow strange plants with only the bottom half of a flower, delicate little four-petalled garnishes sliced neatly in two.

They are called the ocean naupaka and this is where my story ends as well.

The sentence would either begin, “Since I was a child” or “Even before I was a child,” depending on exactly what you believe. The point is that I’ve always been afraid of drowning just as I’ve always been afraid of falling. However, I’m not afraid of being tossed from a boat or slipping from a ledge. I’m afraid of willingly diving or walking into the water or of willingly jumping from a cliff. The impulse I have to do either of these things is sometimes so overwhelming that I have to spot-meditate to clear my mind so that I can continue, well, being alive.

I hear the ocean call to me when I am on it. It has the sweet serenity lull of a past lover inviting you down to visit for one last kiss. It tugs at my skin, pulls at the hairs on my arms. “Jump in,” it says, “come and see me”. And so it was that I found myself alone, in the middle of Kealakekua Bay in a kayak in the fringe-start of a storm.

I had paddled the length of the bay and then half the length back, a few miles in all. And then the rain had come. It was sharp, seeming to fall from a height far greater than the sky, seeming to attain the ripflesh velocity of free flight. It slapped upon my forehead and the grey waves sloshed over the side of my little plastic castle. A few yards away, a few hours ago, the dolphins had swum out to meet us, and now the empty spot resonated with the past.

I held that ring for a long time there at the end of the road. And I spoke at length to every manner of bird and beast, every ghost that lingered and every new swirling intent. I spoke to the hundreds of fish I had seen snorkeling in the urchin-rich waters off the old monument, spoke to the deep, glowing, bottomless blue void that plunged from the coral’s edge. I spoke to my father who is somewhere trying to rewire the light switches on the far side of the galaxy, in some other dimension, testing the tip of the soldering iron with his wet finger.

“My lovers, my partners, I know now that I cannot save them. I cannot heal them. I cannot split myself open and make myself a canoe for them. I cannot fashion a domed house from my ribs for them. I cannot unhinge my shoulders to spread my arms in a steel-feathered shield for them. I can't be a vessel, or the silent, unseen boddivista, or the thing made of cellophane hung in the corners that only reacts to the breeze as it is allowed to pass through the open window." I said.

“And yet, you love women, and they will still come.” Pele answered.

"They will, and of course, I will continue to love them, and continue to open, as you all wish. But I think there is a difference between that and destroying myself in order to create."

She smiled. “There is. Give me that ring and there is no going back.”

“Will you accept it if I give it away to you?” I asked.

“You are a trickster, but not in this place, not with me. Speak your fire. By giving me your ring, you know what else it means. If you give it away to me, you will never escape me,” Pele answered.

I nodded, knowing that’s what I had intended all along.

We as westerners don’t have the giveaway as a tradition. Those of us who follow it in any form have had the experience of giving away objects of great personal worth and attachment to other people, the earth, the fire. And for me, the most powerful giveaway has to do with giving away to water. There is something unworldly and chillingly permanent about the moment when you arc your arm up and feel your fingers release, sense every single minute muscular contraction and every drop of blood that passes through your veins, and every pathway of every synapse firing to control a second of action.

There is something amazing about how quickly an object in flight gives in to gravity and vanishes underneath. There it is, something so powerful grasped in your hand, something that holds so many memories and so much attachment, and in a few seconds it impacts the surface and is gone with only a small plop of water, and a quickly fading ripple, impossible to retrieve or retract.

“So be it,” she said.

“So mote it be,” I answered.

I paddled away from the spot where my wedding ring would see the next dawn, in that quiet cove sacred to all things, there in the shadow of dolphins and rainbow fish, there where tourists find unending joy and the mist hangs in early mornings over coffee fields and parakeets. Arms and hands aching, I turned the kayak north and made for the cobbled shoreline so far away.

When you put both flowers together, the mountain naupaka and the ocean naupaka, they made one complete flower. Which shows that even being two halves of the same flower, it’s still nearly impossible to make a connection.

This had been Hawai'i. I had walked through cloud forests along bamboo-lined flumes and gawked out over the wide canyon and the waterfall that toppled into the darkness below. I had soaked in a palm-tree-encircled volcanic-heated pool, had exfoliated on a black sand beach at the fringes of a virgin coconut grove, had communed with geckoes and gars, had scrambled over stones to reach the lush wave-cauldron tidal pools. I had trekked over lava fields and had kayaked to that small dot I studied from the cliff height, the indentation on the wide crescent shoreline. I would return scarred, scratched, nicked, burned and sore.

A year ago, I never would have done any of this, but here at last I was on my edge. I was on fire with fullness and eager to expand. I was all of me, all I had remembered and all I had once left behind.

Sometimes you have to travel to the ends of the earth to find enough of yourself to be pressed together, to be joined and reveal the complete picture..

To make a whole again.