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T H I S+W E E K Acting on wild impulse
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+ + + + + + + + kilaueu-iki is a companion crater to the great caldera (iki meaning small, the smaller version). On my last day here, I hike out across this flat-bottomed bowl of steam and foggy mist, and it brings to mind a Zen garden we saw not long ago in the old temple town of Dazaifu, once the principal city of Kyushu. Listening to the silence of the crater, I finally understand the silence of that garden. It is the difference between the ripples made by a rock dropped into a pond, and the pond itself. Kilaueu-iki is about half a mile wide, an amphitheater of undulating stone, fractured, with hut-size chunks emerging. Though the crust you walk on has been hard for years, it's still molten down below. Steam rises everywhere, through dozens of vents and fissures, filling the air with wispy banners. While you're inside this crater you feel the bowl of it, shaped like a deeply-tiered stadium, like Stanford Stadium with all seats empty, its steep sides lined with 'ohi'a trees. In volcano country you measure age by the size of the 'ohi'a. In the most recent flows, tiny sprouts are poking through the cracks. On older slopes you find shaggy trunks three and four feet thick. On these walls the trunks are slender, saplings, growing close together, among huge ferns called hapu'u. You cross this bleak half mile of raw lava bed, with the vents seething, and step right into a tropical forest, where ground ferns climb the slopes. Over the small ferns, the high and pale-green hapu'u arch twenty-five and thirty feet. Halfway up the trail I stop, where a wide portal through fern and 'ohi'a branches gives me a fine view of the terrain I've just crossed. Sheets of feathery mist drift into the crater, under a sky that would be somber if it ever stopped moving. But the sky is never still, always opening, closing, opening again. A sheet of mist. A blue window above the mist. The lava is black and gray and chalked with white. Along the walls there are rusty streaks. It is harsh, unforgiving, the roughest kind of primal rock. You wouldn't want to be caught overnight in such a place. And yet it is contained, with narrow, cairn-marked paths leading into and out of the bowl, so it is observable, and somehow manageable, like an aquarium where sharks and barracuda prowl. It looks ancient, yet it is one of the world's newer places, having taken its present form and look as recently as 1959, when all of this belched out from the vent of what is now called Pu'u Pua'i. (Pu'u means hill; pua'i means flow or bubble or boil.) The bowl filled with four hundred feet of new lava, which has subsided some, leaving a bathtub ring. Fire columns spouted nineteen hundred feet, over a quarter mile straight up. That kind of energy, that contained pressure and the memory of explosive release is what hovers in the air and just below the surface, mixing with the mist. It makes the silence potent. Though the earth seems still, nothing is at rest. Dazaifu is thirty minutes south of Fukuoka, by train. Established in the seventh century, it was once the region's capitol and one of the more prominent cities in southern Japan. Now it's famous for its shrines and temples. Once in fall and once in winter, Jeanne and I rode out there. The first time, we went looking for the main attraction, a large and elaborate Shinto shrine -- gold leaf, red pillars, the entry roofed like a warrior's helmet. It is dedicated to Sugawara Michizane, the mortal man and revered leader who was later deified. Among other things he is known as the god of studies, so the courtyard is always packed with classes of uniformed school kids who arrive by train and bus, class after class, marching in two by two to buy good luck amulets from the many booths around the central courtyard, amulets to bless the next exam, or to bless the course of study, or to bless the general aptitude and long-term success. They bunch close to the barrier set up in front of the stairs that lead to the altar, where you clap your hands twice, bow your head to offer up your silent prayer, then throw a coin or two toward the stairs. It was very busy in there, in the courtyard of the Shinto shrine at Dazaifu, with hands clapping, and cameras clicking, and two or three hundred visitors milling around. Jeanne and I were much relieved to wander down a side street for a couple of blocks and come upon the Zen temple called Komyoji, considerably smaller and seldom visited, the lines simpler, the wooden buildings unpainted. In front, next to the road, nine stones rise out of gravel raked in curves and circles, the kind of rock garden that conveys the sense of islands in the sea. Behind the buildings there is another garden, hidden from the road. The second time we made this trip, winter had stripped the trees. The first time we stood on the shaded wooded porch, the inner garden was subtly brilliant with the colors of autumn, slender trunks, leaves of lime green and darker green, yellow and rust and russet leaves in layers and canopies over stones and mosses in their lakes of contoured gravel. A steep hillside rises up behind the garden, adding more layers of foliage, bamboo and pine, creating the illusion of an endless forest. There is never any wind. The serenity of the place is perfect. It has been perfected. The silence has been eloquently sculpted, shaped by humans, to acknowledge the absolute, giving the garden the quality of a fine poem or a fine novel or piece of music, another version of the dialogue between the mind and whatever you want to call the vast and all-surrounding presence we move through, as it moves through us. At Kilaueu-iki steam comes rising through the scorched rock twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, whether or not anyone watches or cares. The rocks move of their own volition, whenever they are ready to move. The waiting, loaded silence that pervades the place is outside any time or season. At Komyoji temple, you stand in awe of what man can do with the ingredients of nature, the immaculate managing of space and foliage. You admire the reverent attentiveness of the gardener, as much as you admire the trees, the rocks, the shrubs. The gardener has had a hand in the quality of that silence. When the mist clears, the late sun's shadow moves along the broken floor. Then the bowl is all in shadow, as cloud cover crosses the sky. I climb the zigzag trail to the rim and look back. What was cloud cover lower down becomes misty fog, shreds of gauzy curtain that give me intermittent glimpses of the flat-floored bowl. From the rim I can't tell which is shredding fog and which is steam seeping from distant cracks. Half a mile along the rim, then through a long 'ohi'a grove, and I come out near the brink of Kilauea, its farther side in deep shadow, after the sun drops. Soon I am standing at the vista point called Waldron Ledge, looking west at a silver sky that makes the vast caldera blacker than black, while the light itself tints steam plumes wavering against the void. After I have gazed a while across this burnt and monumental terrain, I find myself wondering, again, how it is possible for an empty dish of rocks, dark lava, misty plumes to command one's full attention. What do such places speak to? In their silence what do we hear? Why is primal landscape so compelling? Is this the kinship that runs deeper than all others, deeper than family or clan or nation or culture? Yes. Of course. The sense of wonder comes from being reminded of something profound you have almost forgotten. This is the point of origin. This is the source. The Polynesians knew it. The Apache knew it. The Lakota Sioux. The Wintu. The Miwok. We all knew it. Once. We city-bound and media-dazed, our tribes knew it too, many centuries ago, and now, in this crises time of spiritual yearning we gradually begin to remember where we all have come from. In these mirrors we remember our oldest selves. The rocks are us. The peaks are us, the bluffs, the canyons, the coves, the plains, ancestors sprung from the same stuff, the original stuff. Old old tribal memories come surfacing as "an aesthetic." Raw nature, we generally agree, is pleasing to behold. We call it "scenery." Standing at the vista point, we gaze. The tears well up. The chest fills with unsociable feeling. What are you gazing at? Ancestral portraits. Pictures of home. Another cloud has filled the sky. The light grows somehow larger, brighter, moving in underneath this cloud. Unaware of sound, I am watching the light, watch until the west turns red-maroon, while overhead half a moon breaks through, making shadows on the cliff where I stand. I watch the near-night colors merge and change until a white spirit comes rising from somewhere farther down the precipice, right below me. Huge white wings are lifting in slow undulation. It is a white owl, the one Hawaiians call pueo, top-lit by the moon. With a feathery whoosh it swings wide, and behind that whoosh comes the non-sound of its sudden passage, a silence with a shape to it, like the dark blur the owl leaves on my retina, rising, curving, swooping, gone.
From "In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey," © 1997 by James D. Houston. Published by Mercury House, San Francisco, and reprinted by permission. + + + + + + + + Select |
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