The clerk who has the early morning shift at the Volcano House comes in
to poke the fire in the great fireplace of volcanic stone. On the
wall a framed page from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, circa 1935,
reports that this fire has been kept burning continuously since
1874. One likes to think the same fire still burns
today. And what a journey it must have been to get here in 1874, to
the lodge that stands in this place, when some man laid his kindling in the
hearth and set the fire that crackles gently here, adding just a touch of smoke
to my morning coffee.
After breakfast we head out onto
the trail behind the lodge, through the tropical forest, down into the Kilauea
Iki Crater. We walk across the broken, black surface of the crater,
picking our way up and down jagged ridges, bathing our faces in the warm steam
that rises from the crevasses and broken mounds of cooled lava, snapping photos
of the ferns and the flowering, berried plants and small trees the grow,
impossibly, from the smallest cracks in the lava crust. The morning
fog and a light mist give way to pleasing sun and, on the higher ridges in the
crater, a perfectly cooling wind. The crater is a mile or more
across. Less a portion of our hike than some fantastic, outsized
playground.
Someone in our little band of
four wonders aloud what time it is. For the first time in a very
long time, no one knows. Or cares.
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