JOHN vs. CATHLEEN & THE VOLCANO
He wanted to see lava at the source. His pregnant wife? Not so much.

By John Briley
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, December 31, 2006

"The volcano?" our innkeeper says. "My son was down there last week. Saw lava flowing into the sea. Couldn't stop talking about it."

I receive this news on a piney hillside overlooking Waipio Valley, on the Big Island of Hawaii, enjoying one of the most beautiful views I've ever seen. Between three gray-wood guest cottages, fruit trees dot a grassy slope atop a verdant cliff 1,000 feet above Waipio Bay. Across the water, more jungly cliffs rise from the sea.

But now my mind is focused 80 miles south, on the Kilauea volcano and its eruptive drama. I want to be there. Which presents a problem.

My wife, Cathleen, is pregnant, and in preparing for this trip she came across myriad warnings about the health threats that live volcanoes pose to developing fetuses. Something about exposure to sulfur dioxide. Also, she's worried about the fall risk posed by hiking long distances over uneven, hardened lava for a glimpse of a live eruption.

These are reasonable apprehensions -- and, one might think, deal killers -- but we are both torn, having reveled in Kilauea's magic in 2002.

During that visit, we'd found ourselves among hundreds of tourists trudging, at night, up the south slope of Kilauea, which has been erupting continuously since 1983 (mostly in a slow ooze, not a geyser-like fountain). Using headlamps to guide our hiking, we'd joined small circles of people crouched inches from mini-creeks of molten lava globbing down the hillside, spreading out in glowing bulbs, like slow-melting wax, then hardening into a gray crust in the cool night air.

We were mesmerized. Rivulets of lava were emerging all around us, each drawing its own huddle of onlookers. We looked up the hill at one point to see a group of shirtless hippies, wielding shovels and pitchforks (to poke at the lava), silhouetted against the sky by a tree that had caught fire. At one point an underground methane explosion -- a feature of erupting volcanoes -- shook the earth. The scene was biblical, and we stayed well into the wee hours of the morning.

But we'd also seen photos of lava pouring into the ocean and figured that would be the climax of volcano viewing.

For now, though, we are here, above Waipio Valley, in the tiny hamlet of Kukuihaele on the northeast corner of the Big Island -- another natural nirvana. The next morning we drop down Waipio's ridiculously steep access road and park in a pine grove, near where the Waipio River wends out of the valley and into the sea.

Waipio Valley is roughly six square miles of fertile farmland (mostly taro fields), fronting a mile of black-sand beach and horseshoed by severe, waterfall-bridled mountains. The valley itself has no electricity, running water or phone service, but it does boast a handful of hardy residents who farm, fish, surf and wallow in this off-the-grid paradise.

At the river mouth, a burly, shirtless Hawaiian man casts his net into the estuarine currents. A surfer naps on the riverbank, board propped on the rocks.

We pick our way across the shin-deep river and head up the beach. The only other people around are a couple from Los Angeles, Taymour Ghazi, a multi-visit Waipio veteran, and his girlfriend, Lara Vaidya. Tay is energized.

"You doing the waterfall hike? Awesome! You'll love it. See you there!"

They head off, tossing a coconut down the beach like a football. Where the sand ends, beneath the cliffs, is a patch of grass, and we stop where Tay and Lara did to don our shoes. Set on the grass like a blooming flower is a freshly peeled guava surrounded by a half-dozen wedges of coconut. (Remember that next time someone starts giving L.A. a bad rap.) The trail back into the valley takes us through dark forest, then loamy land replete with exotic flowers and fruit trees. Ripe guava and passion fruit drop at our feet.

Spaced along this Alice-in-Wonderland route are a handful of dwellings -- including more than one family treehouse -- along with tumbledown shacks and a couple of farm homes with well-tended gardens.

The trail ends at an idyllic jungle pool fed by a 20-foot waterfall. Our new friends are nowhere in sight, but I hear the faint murmur of voices coming from . . . above the waterfall?

Preggo stays behind (wet-rock scrambling being a known fall risk) while I clamber up the falls to another pool. No people but -- aha! -- yet another falls. Two more levels up I find Tay and Lara (clothed, since you asked), frolicking in a pool. Tay is delighted. "What'd I tell you! Cool, huh?" I climb up under the falls, plant my butt on a rock and let the pounding water massage my shoulders.

By Jeep, Bike and Foot

If we can't go to the volcano (and I haven't given up yet), we'll at least go to a volcano. A half-hour west of Waipio, we pull into the town of Waimea, which sits at 2,600 feet above sea level, just below the north slope of the 13,796-foot Mauna Kea volcano. Trade winds are raking a steady stream of clouds between the colossal peak and the Kohala Mountains, lime-green hills north of Waimea.

Mauna Kea is dormant, but that doesn't mean we can't coax some fun out of it. We rent mountain bikes in town, toss 'em in the Jeep and head up.

Just beyond a modest neighborhood are miles of cattle-dotted ranchland, most of it past or current parcels of Parker Ranch, where today's quietude belies a colorful history.

The short version: In the 1790s, Hawaiian king gets cattle, wants more, orders a 10-year kapu (ban) on cattle killing. Herd gets out of hand, taking over hillsides and goring passersby. King calls in marksman John Parker, from Massachusetts, who thins herd, keeps some animals for himself, marries king's granddaughter and starts what eventually became the largest privately owned cattle ranch in the United States. (It peaked at 225,000 acres.)

Waimea is a different Hawaii -- locals in jeans and flannel shirts mosey about in the cool, hilly setting, amid ranch-themed stores and restaurants -- but you're never far from the stereotype: carloads of salty wave rats, surfboards strapped atop, bounce by, to or from sessions on the nearby coasts. We rise along Mana Road, a lonely dirt track that wraps halfway around Mauna Kea. The early miles are as green and misty as the Irish countryside, but after 15 minutes we bust through the top of the clouds, somewhere around 4,000 feet, and into startling sunlight. To the west, beyond the clouds, we see the sun-baked Kohala coast. Above us, the volcano summit and its stark white observation domes stand out against a crystalline blue sky.

There isn't another soul in sight. We park the Jeep and pedal uphill on a dirt road into the steady trade winds, taking lots of rest stops. Below us, fog rolls into the expansive grassy slopes, demarcated by barbed wire and cut by oh-so-tempting (but off-limits) single-track trails.

The scenery up here is so wide and unchanging that it's hard to perceive progress, as if we're ants crawling across a movie screen. Then, in the eastern distance past the cloud band, we glimpse the ocean and realize we've been riding for 90 minutes and are starting to wrap around Mauna Kea's east flank.

More stellar days tick by -- hiking the remote valleys south of Pololu, snorkeling with sea turtles off of Puako, touring Hilo's busy farmers market in the rain -- but I can't shake my Vulcanian obsession. With two days left in the trip, we pull into the town of Volcano, just outside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, near dusk.

"We'll just check it out," I tell Cathleen. "I won't be unreasonable."

Perhaps because we've been driving most of the day -- we swung down from the Kona coast, sightseeing along the way -- or maybe due to the autumnal crispness in the air (Volcano sits at 4,000 feet above sea level), the evening has a heaviness to it, as if we are trying to force too much out of one vacation.

We find a room, scarf down a Thai dinner and head into the national park at 8 p.m. Seeing the eruption up close entails a 20-mile drive down Chain of Craters Road -- to sea level -- then a hike of varying length, depending on where the lava is flowing.

We park in the dark amid dozens of other cars on the side of the road and walk a few hundred yards to a ranger station, a temporary structure built for portability when threatened by lava flows. (As if to emphasize that threat, just beyond the station, the road's double yellow line disappears almost comically beneath an old flow, and a speed limit sign juts from the solidified lava.)

There we learn the hard truth: The oceanic display requires a hike of two-plus miles. The rangers have set flashing beacons along the route, one every third of a mile, to help guide hikers, which is no meaningful comfort for the pregnant.

Cue the soft sell. "Hey, honey," I say, "we could walk out there just a little ways, see how it goes . . ."

For the uninitiated, walking on hardened magma is like stumbling over a miniature mountain range, complete with bus-sized canyons, sheer drops and ankle-snaring crevasses (see: fall risk).

And so my pregnant wife and I find ourselves stepping uncertainly across this irregular terrain, guided by the dim glow of our headlamps and following distant blinking beacons like shepherds tracking the North Star.

We make it to the third beacon before conceding that attaining the viewing spot would take half the night. So we retreat, shutting off our lamps and basking in the sparkle of a billion stars before heading back.

'I Smell Sulfur'

The next morning, we learn of one last hope: A ranger tells us that the approach from the east side, outside the national park boundary, affords a closer view of lava-hitting-ocean with a shorter hike. It is treacherous at night (no beacons) but, he assures us, fine by day.

Our drive down from Volcano takes us east of the park, through the funky town of Pahoa -- coffee shops, colorful stores, seriously dreadlocked hippies and kids on skateboards toting boogie boards to the beach -- then into a no man's land where lava flows had wiped out entire subdivisions. The road ends before acres of hardened magma.

The sun is beating down. Cartoon-like columns of heat radiate from the ground. The only hint that we might not fry to death is the blue Hawaiian sea, well off to our left. And straight ahead, cutting the distant horizon, is a billowing white plume -- the money shot.

Cathleen is quiet as we set out. In the clarity of day we make quick time and notice the austere beauty of this tortured landscape. Lava twisted like rope, contorted like impressionist sculpture, bunched up like a ruffled quilt.

After 30 minutes, Cathleen finally pipes up. "How close do you want to get?"

"Close enough to see."

Finally we come to a rise, and the end is in sight: another 15 minutes, max, to the overlook. The sulfuric cloud is streaming away from us.

"Are you going farther?" Cathleen asks. The ambiguity is gone: She is annoyed.

"We walked all the way out here. I'd just like to see this."

"Is it safe? I smell sulfur. I think we're near a vent."

I walk on. I am like a lab rat drawn to the cheese. I care about my wife and our unborn child -- really, I do -- but I cannot will my legs to cease moving. Cathleen follows, at a distance.

Finally we reach the spot. A prayer flag flutters on a stick next to small pile of flowers left by other lava pilgrims. And? Well, I can see, sort of, faintly at the base of a column of steam, the glow of lava dumping into the sea. It's not the huge streams of lava pouring from a hole in a cliff, like I'd seen on postcards. More like soccer ball-size boluses crawling out of a low opening and dripping into the Pacific.

Every few minutes the hot lava takes partially solidified lava with it, exploding when it hits the water and sending fragments skyward, the still-smoking detritus floating away on the waves.

On the one hand, this is remarkable: our planet belching and gasping and expanding before our eyes. But with the weight of the expectations I had hitched to this mission and all I put my wife through to achieve it, my wonder is tempered. Plus, from a special-effects standpoint, it's like watching a fireworks display during daylight.

Ah, well. Like the Earth, we must endure a certain degree of turmoil to grow. Our marriage emerged from the ordeal healthy. And when we bring our kid back here some day, we'll have a hell of a tale to share about his or her first trip to the great volcano.

John Briley last wrote for Travel on Cape Hatteras, N.C., vs. Cape Cod, Mass.