Nature's Inspiration

Stillness in Movement
by Roxanne Bogart, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Anxiety began to overtake me as I stood in pelting rain on the high rim of Hawai`i’s Kilauea Volcano. Below, hidden from view by somber clouds and heavy fog, lay my destination: Halema`uma`u, a deep, simmering crater situated in the caldera of one of Earth’s most active volcanoes.

Uneasy but resolute, I began my descent, wending my way on a trail through lush tropical forest. Despite the distraction of the surrounding beauty, I couldn’t help but recall Halema`uma`u’s last awakening. On November 5, 1967, just 3 hours after hikers were evacuated, Kilauea belched churning magma from deep inside her volcanic body, breaking through Halema`uma`u’s hardened crust. My angst over what Fire Goddess Pele might be scheming just beneath my feet gave way to my determination to cross the now slumbering landscape.

Descending through the fog, the caldera’s surface came into view. At a distance, it appeared a barren, steamy moonscape, but when I warily stepped onto the ruptured and upheaved floor, I observed that life had not abandoned this place. Ferns and `ohi`a tree seedlings and saplings heroically grew from the inhospitable edges of immense lava slabs and from cracks and crevices in the buckled and bulging solidified magma. Delicate red blossoms adorned some of the saplings. I marveled at the emergence of life in such a forbidding place.

I continued my journey, following cairns of lava rocks. Gingerly, I made my way through the caldera’s landscape of once twisting, bubbling, and popping inferno-hot liquid. The now solid crust, cast in hues of metallic gray, brick red, and brown, still spoke of movement. I scrambled up lava boulders, carefully avoiding the jagged, razor-sharp edges of a`a lava and steam that hissed through fissures. A dense curtain of pungent fog warned that I was closing in on Halema`uma`u.

Pushing on through bulges of pahoehoe rock, swirled like meringue, I finally reached the steaming pit’s edge. Poised carefully on its precipice, I peered into the crater’s gaping maw, spattered in black, copper, and white and strewn with gray cobbles. I was enveloped by Halema`uma`u’s torrid breath and sensed the power of destruction held deep in his earthly chest. A sudden sense of loss, of emptiness overwhelmed me.

I don’t know how long I stood arrested in this state before I felt myself being pulled back to life by voices in the distance. I looked up. Above the distant rim, three elegant white-tailed tropicbirds calmly circled beneath the lifting fog, unencumbered by what had been or what might be. Their bright white bodies contrasted against the dark gray sky, transmitting a sense of hope, of possibility, of renewal.

At that moment, in that desolate volcanic landscape, I experienced an unspoken tranquility. As in the eye of a storm, a striking stillness exposed the incredible life force of my own humanity. This force, I realized, whether expressed in the `ohi`a blossom, Halema`uma`u’s breath, or me, is overflowing with possibilities for the life that is to come.