Pele’s Soup
| We couldn�t have timed it better even if we had known what we were doing.Back in December, we booked reservations for a week in Hilo, Hawaii (actually, in a tiny town about 15 miles outside of Hilo), for the week of the first week in April. We picked that week simply because it was the week that Alison had been able to get a vacation scheduled in the midst of her schoolteaching year.
Among the symptoms of our blessed timing: |
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(2)We were able to spend half a day in Volcano National Park, watching the smoke rising from vents in the caldera. The week after we were there, they closed the park (and a nearby town) for a while because the volcano was releasing potentially dangerous levels of sulfur dioxide. (3)They had the lava turned on all the way while we were there. We drove down to the coast, to the area where the lava was flowing into the sea, and spent several hours in fascination, as the sky turned from light to nighttime dark, and the relative brightness of the lava grew more and more breathtaking. The young Rangers on duty at the observation site told us that within the next day or two, they�d probably have to close the area, because the safety perimeter for observing the flow was moving steadily inland. |
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| On the way out to the viewing site (a little hike of a couple of hundred yards or so), you make your way over lava from previous flows, which has solidified into near-rocklike hardness, in twisted shapes that double back on themselves in wondrous ways.
There�s a primitive myth, held by many in the scientific community, that a flow of lava is caused by magma rising from deep in the Earth, under great pressure, and making its way through cracks in the Earth�s crust. The actual truth, of course, is that lava-flow is caused by Pele, Goddess of the Volcano. (It�s probably better to phrase that as, �Pele, the Volcano Goddess�, so as not to linguistically imply that the Goddess is SEPARATE FROM the Volcano.) |
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Pele the Volcano is the sister of the Ocean (whose proper name, alas, I don�t remember). Sometimes they have a friendly relationship, and sometimes they get locked in fierce struggle over just where Pele�s thick, viscous, way-beyond-boiling soup will end, and the cool waters of the sea begin. You wouldn�t want to try to come between those sisters, when they�re in �struggle� mode. What we were privileged to witness at length, that night, was the ongoing birth of the newest land-outcroppings on the planet. The timing wasn�t our doing. It was a gift of Pele and her sister. |
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