Eight Minutes

    Add sixteen seconds to that figure of eight minutes and you have the time it takes for the heat of the sun to reach you here on earth.  Not a big deal you think, except that when looking at our sun's core --all those hydrogen atoms struggling to avoid turning into helium and later becoming the gamma & x-rays that emerge as light and heat on the surface-- that process can take anywhere from 15,000 years to a million years.  And where did all that come from, that massive (well, the sun is just a medium-sized star by astronomers' standards) well of bursting energy we call our sun?  Theories are that other gases and particles slammed together at some point to create a star which then went through its own cycle of fusing atoms and generating heat and light and eventually exhausting itself only to collapse inward billions of years later and release even more energy in its exploding that it helped create another new star...our sun is the third such star to be so created and will suffer the same fate in about a dozen billion years, moving on to probably be the catalyst to create another star somewhere else.  And so the life of the universe goes on...

    As you can likely guess, all of the above info came from biologist Bill Streever as I finished his book, Heat.   At about the same time I watched the movie Deepwater Horizon about the British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf of Mexico some seven years ago.  What struck me about both the book and the movie were the untamed pressures that tie the two, the gravitational crust of our stars holding back the forces underneath that want out.  Volcanoes are a good example, a subject Streever also covers.  In scientific terms the lava flowing from Hawaii's volcanoes are a collection of basalt...aphyric andesine, chrysophytic oligoclase, pictrite, aphyric labradorite, ophitic olivine, and even feldspar phyric.  Don't worry, it's gobbledygook to all but true geologists (I am not such a person).   Think Vesuvius and Krakatoa and their power to move tectonic plates (Mount St. Helens) and you have everything but the workings of Hawaii's volcanoes which Streever says "...tend to be bigger than the volcanoes of colliding plates (and) tend to be hotter than the volcanoes arising from colliding plates.  Their heat comes from deeper in the earth."

    I used to hike the volcanoes of the Big Island of Hawaii almost yearly, that rising cloud of sulphuric steam and the black razor-like rock flow of the surface somehow ripping my being as easily as it tore through the soles of my lungs and boots.  I always felt oddly at peace there as if something primal was calling; and at such times it was easy to understand how ancient warriors could believe that the spurned goddess Pele was calling them back and taking their energy, life they both respected and sacrificed.  I've climbed both down into craters at Halemaumau and Kilauea Iki (trails are well-marked and easily ventured onto for a 10-mile loop if you so desire) and climbed up the slopes of Mauna Loa, still considered the tallest mountain in the world if measured from base to peak (at 33000 feet it tops Mt. Everest by nearly 5000 feet).  Up on Mauna Loa's slopes the word "olivine" doesn't prepare you for arriving in a field of green, lava crystals that are like smooth pieces of olive-green glass and cover the surface for as far as you can see in all directions.  Nor are you ready for coming upon vent holes side by side, each of which can easily swallow half a dozen school buses and are lined with shale-like crystals that tempt you to venture closer and closer until, like the deadly pitcher plant, you slide into the trap...an easy gift for Pele.  On the bottom end as you cross Halemaumau, you spot ferns growing through the cracks and wonder at the marvel of life as if bearing witness to the give and take cycle.  When the wind changes, the fumes head your way and involuntarily cut your breathing, a drowning in dry air.   It often passes, but not before you seem to catch a glimpse of Pele snickering, her beautiful and tempting features transforming into the angry goddess she reputedly remains (Hawaiian lore tells of car drivers seeing such a young woman hitchhiking near the area, only to turn and find that she is gone as quickly as they can look in the mirror).  Cross past chunks of frozen lava the size of houses as if a bulldozer of gigantic proportions had been ordered to tear up this nature-made parking lot.  And should you be able to walk the shortened path to witness an actual lava flow (rangers and geologists carefully create and test such paths to provide visitors a closer view of this creation in action), you may glance over the rim into the flowing stream or into the bubbling caldera below and feel as it you unexpectedly opened a foundry door, the blast of heat far greater than any oven you've peered into and all coming from something five stories down.  Rock melts and so does most everything else in its path...perhaps at that point even your own hesitation to not believe in Pele.

Photo Grant Kaye; other photos Virginia Quarterly

    Today's world is evolving as quickly as exploding vents and trapped atoms.  Even on the Big Island, as astronomers fight to erect yet another telescope on Mauna Kea (the extinct twin of Mauna Loa), many native Hawaiians are saying "hands off."  Mauna Kea is sacred (my brother used to tell me tales of Kahoolawe, the smallest of the Hawaiian islands and once used for bombing runs and target practice by the Navy; word was that ancient Hawaiian elders would feel each and every explosion as if the island was hurting and transferring its pain to them...the Navy has since stopped such drills).  In a piece in the Virginia Quarterly, writer Trevor Quirk wrote about the conflict and mentioned David Keanu Sai, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a political scientist specializing in Hawaiian state sovereignty and international law: “The term for future in the Hawaiian language is kawamahope,” he said.  These words translate literally as “the time of the past.”  To understand how you should behave and the nature of the problems you face, you must consider history.  “When you tell a Hawaiian to look to the future,” Sai said, “he turns to the past.”  To author Quirk, however, he saw the conflict in another way, not as pressure trapped or light & heat or give & take: Life seemed anything but hostile here.  The lush flora, their sumptuous fruits, their flowers, the polychromatic fish, the birds, many and lyrical—it was all of indescribable diversity, and in some cases biological mystery.  Even the obsidian logic of natural selection softened a bit: almost any plant, no matter its unfitness, thrived on the Big Island.  Defenses became superfluous: poison sumac, here, was just sumac.  Even in the Big Island’s darkest venue, on the side of forbidding Mauna Kea, when trace sunlight had vanished and I nearly fell asleep, you could gather some confidence that the world had a place for people, as it did for everything else that lived here.  I reached out to navigate the boulders and curbs and brambles and trunks; my eyes were no good for that now.  Nearby things were purpled and outlined—hazy dreams of objects.  I looked up.  The night sky had suddenly become the realest thing around, with its pitch as black as ignorance, and its stars begging to be renamed.  Go outside, feel the heat then feel the ground and then feel what comes up inside yourself...like the volcanoes and the pounding oil underground, you might just feel the flow of life happening.