Not Unpleasant To A Sinner
By Atherton Bartelby
18 Oct 2008
Her teeth are sharp; they left lasting impressions.
If it wasn't karmic law that delivered an instant payback to me for mentally chastising a fellow "haole" tourist for wearing shorts while hiking the lava flow this weekend (she fell, she bled) only seconds before I took my own plunge onto the rocks, then surely it was Pele's chastisement of my own self-created superiority.
"And you think you're invincible?" I could almost hear Her whisper, as I slipped on the glassy surface of the cooled lava, saw the rocks rush up to meet my face, caught them with my hands to break my fall, embraced the great mounds of fine, glassy rock.
Thick ribbons of red flowed down the white appendages of my flesh, created flows of their own to the glistening ebony below. Surely She doesn't mind that I took indescribably small pieces of Her Earth with me, away from Her, embedded in my skin, since I left so much of my flesh, my blood, my self for Her to guard, to consume, to make new.
I remembered suddenly the words I had read in an article published in a local publication the previous month: "'You shouldn't poke a goddess with a stick, or toss coins at her, or roast marshmallows over her hot, steaming body.' That's what a geologist told me and my companion when, after treading over fresh 'pahoehoe,' we arrived at the spot where Pele steadily oozed through the Earth's surface. Some visitors poked, tossed, and roasted away. The geologist frowned at their juvenile, even dangerous, behavior. Me, I didn't even think about desecrating Pele, and not simply out of deference. I just didn't need to be any more entertained than I was. The slow-moving, fluorescent-orange light show a few yards from my feet was, is, a one-of-a-kind look at the pulsing Earth. There is a God, I humbly acknowledged, and She is alive...and on the move. The published photos and news video really don't capture what it's like to be up-close and personal with Pele. For one, they don't convey the heat - akin to a thermal blast from a cosmic oven. Or the sound: a soft, crinkly crumpling, like Rice Krispies after the milk's been poured. Then there's the smell...acrid sulfur dioxide that seeps from the vents to wrinkle the nose and burn the throat. Mark Twain, who visited Kilauea in 1866, wrote that 'the smell of sulfur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.'"
Sensory memories of this journey to record: the sight of steaming white waves caressing black shores, of turning back to see the Earth over which you walked in daylight that is now, in twilight, gleaming red; the feeling of rock slicing through flesh, of heat moving through my shoes and into my body; the smell of sulfur, of methane, of Earth; the sound, the frightening and beautiful sound, of Earth being born...the cracking, explosive, unimaginable sound of Earth.
