April 4, 2016
Crazy-early next morning, B snuck out to the Pololu Valley Overlook for sunrise photos. He returned hours later ripping and raring to go as the family crawled from their rooms. It was their last morning in their Basement Ohana.
“Do you want to go the beach a little? It’ll be your last chance to go boogie-boarding,” he asked first thing.
“No,” TwoSon said. OneSon, face still glowing from where the sun smacked him around the day before, grimaced, pretending not to hear the question through his headphones.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” A little bit of beach goes a long way for the family. Michigan-style beaches, with their three months of swimming and six months of shore-walking were just right. They were more of a hiking family. A wait-while-Dad-takes-pictures family.
B and AJ colluded to shuffle and change the schedule due to sunburn, beach exhaustion and weather while the boys packed up their stuff and helped put it in the car.
They drove the sneakily steep Saddle Road back to Hilo, stopping at Rainbow Falls just as a bus-load of selfie-taking tourists flocked to the spot. Rainbow Falls is a large arch with water falling over it. Stairs along the cliff lead up to a beautiful banyan tree. The tree spanned for yards in all directions, standing like a tall woman, spreading her arms which were draped with a string shawl. Except this tree-woman had hundreds of arms.
After lunch at a cafe in downtown Hilo the family stopped for dessert at Hawaiian Brain Freeze, a little shop in a strip mall known for their Hawaiian Ice where the boys ordered … ice cream. Unaccustomed to eating ice-cream in hot weather, TwoSon dripped more ice-cream on his clothes than in his mouth.
To fill up some time, they stopped at the Asian-inspired Lili-Uokalami Gardens and walked out to Coconut Island. The park was filled with tremendous monkey pod trees, expansive banyans and camouflaged feral cats. Eventually B’s early morning jaunt caught up with him, so they mostly sat and rested, taking in the scene.
The forty-minute drive to Hale Ma’ukele (the name of the house) in Volcano, Hawaii took them past stores and commerce which dwindled into dense woods and lonely roads the farther they drove, reminiscent of the the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. GPS directed them off the highway into a veritable jungle where they found their next Ohana hidden behind palms, tropical trees and lush greenery.
The owner of the house built and designed it himself with rich brown-red native woods, cement countertops and open house plan, complete with a rain-water tank outside.
The small store nearby supplied milk and information. At Volcano National Park they registered TwoSon (4th graders and their families got in free), then picked up a quick meal at what was at one time a Military Training Center, complete with little cabins and a mess hall.
While they ate, the sun snuck down below the horizon, but that was what B was waiting for. There were still sights to see after dark in this National Park. At a turn-off at the end of one of the roads, in the dark, the family followed lighted walks, stopping at a fence that overlooked a vast space of darkness, punctured violently by a huge glowing red light in the distance. It was the volcano, burning, smoking, glowing with the most natural light around.
As a northeasterner, fire, smoke and liquid rock coming from the ground is a weird, wild and wonder–inducing concept for AJ. Shivering in the cold, watching the glow of molten earth from afar, breathing in the charred, sulfur air, a smile crossed her lips, and sank deep to touch her heart.Although she didn’t know it at the time, something else existed at that spot for her, other than the glowing red hole in the distance. Something hidden in the dark, safe but enlivening, something AJ seemed to sense but not see. Whether it was the dark, or the power of the orange glowing, molten lava far in the distance, or that yet-to-be-discovered something, her mind started to turn faster, dig deeper and see more clearer than she had since stepping foot on The Big Island.
Not I 