A New Yorker Abroad

City Girls and Volcanoes

I stepped onto the cracked, slate-colored earth and glanced up at the sky. Blue. One speck of color in this otherwise grey and barren landscape. The caldera floor stretched for miles before me, lying in wait beneath the towering cliff sides I had unintentionally followed down.

The lush foliage of the trail had not prepared me for the bleak moonscape that I’d come upon. A stark lava field at the edge of a flourishing rainforest. Fullness, then nothing. Only in Hawaii.

I narrowed my eyes in search of the nearest trail-head. Nothing but rock formations and burnt out vegetation. A few determined plants had crawled their way up through the cracks in the earth. They leaned against the wind, fighting for survival amidst the desolation.

The ground was damp and steam shot into the air around me. It billowed toward the gentle blue sky, dancing upward to the beat of the wind. But there was no campfire—no matches, no wood. This land had set itself ablaze. The earth was on fire.

I had to walk. I had to find my way out from this wrong turn.

Cautiously, I eased my way over millions of years of lava flows. With my eye on the illusive edge of the horizon, I plowed forward, crawling over the deep jagged rocks and avoiding the devious-looking plants.

The blue of the sky disappeared behind a haze of clouds and the rains came. Soft, at first, then thunderous and plummeting. They aggravated the steam. It pummeled upward now, fiery and vengeful.

I walked faster toward my invisible destination as smoke hissed around me. It was so foreign, yet so familiar. The streets back home were prone to their own kind of steam. New York City’s underworld is filled with the smoke of life, of machines that whirl and swirl to keep the pulse of the city afloat. But here, the smoke was less predictable. The earth was on fire and the certainty of safety regulations had ceased to exist.

At last, a cliff side appeared before me. I inched toward it and found a trail-head leading back into the rainforest. I stepped into the sanctuary of the canopy of trees and glanced back at the caldera floor. It seemed smaller from this angle—less daunting, more mystical.

I turned and headed up the trail. I was a long way from home.