“Come back and tell me how it was,” the woman says, as we leave the open air lobby of the hotel.
By Jamie Borgan
It’s 6:00 a.m. on a November Saturday, the morning dark and unwelcoming, and I’m dazedly making sure my backpack is prepared for all contingencies. The serendipity of having a close and generous friend who happens to be an airline employee means that by early afternoon, we’ll be hundreds, hopefully thousands, of miles from Spokane, having flown stand-by to an as yet undetermined location. We’d decided weeks ago to take a long weekend and fly somewhere, but due to the unpredictable nature of flying stand-by, at 6:00 a.m. we remain (as I once heard twenty-somethings described), “open to everything and committed to nothing.”
In the time leading up to our trip, I’d downplayed my impending jaunt, casually referencing Monday’s absence from work as due to being “out of town.” We’d narrowed our wish list down to three choices, with priority going to Hawai’i as our final destination. However, the very real possibilities that we might soon touch down in Chicago or Arizona means that my suitcase contains sandals and shorts artfully situated between wool sweaters. In what seems an almost disarmingly simple series of events, we arrive at the airport a half an hour before the desired Hawai’i flight connection and magically find ourselves Kona-bound within the next hour.
Walking out of the plane into eighty degree heat and an open-air airport instantly induced a re-examination of my earlier position.
Quite a bit has been written, and rightfully so, on the beauty and paradisiacal quality of Hawai’i. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t even desired to visit Hawai’i that strongly before we’d conjured up this plan–what my friend later referred to as my “millionaire junket” weekend. As a get-away Hawai’i’ has always struck me as too much of a cliché, a bit too pleasurable and accessible to be enticing.
It seems that everyone who’s been to Hawai’i smiles beatifically as if smelling some imaginary hibiscus when speaking of their excursion, and something about its mass popularity, plus my usual angst about over-development and commercialization, kept Hawai’i in my outer circle of interesting places.
Walking out of the plane into eighty degree heat and an open-air airport instantly induced a re-examination of my earlier position. Funny how that happens. Today, as Spokane heads back to work with remnants of its first snowfall of the season lingering, I’m still marveling at the audacious confidence of a place that refuses to fully enclose almost any structure. Every restaurant or business we entered during our time in Hawai’i made only minimal efforts to keep the weather at bay.
On the big island, splendor abounds. I spent the weekend jogging through flower strewn roads, walking down sidewalks being destroyed from beneath by the persistent roots of banyan trees, stumbling upon sea turtles, and traversing the geological whimsy that is 
Volcanoes National Park.
Nothing captured my imagination quite like watching molten lava flow unedited into the ocean in Kalapana. The first and perhaps most delightful element of this event is that the pre-lava viewers need to ascertain whether or not lava is flowing on any given day. In the same way that Northwesterners might call a ski resort to find out if a drive up to the mountain is really worth it, a Lava Flow Hotline dispenses updated daily lava information.
Upon phoning the hotline (toll-free, not to worry), we learn that the drive to Kalapana most likely will yield the sight of lava flowing unrestrained into the ocean. We go to the hotel lobby at 7:00 p.m. and are given flashlights and a map by a kindly woman who tells us we have to hurry, because we won’t be let in to see the lava after 7:55. She gives us directions that leave just enough ambiguity in the route for me to feel an impish and slightly anxious delight. “Come back and tell me how it was,” she says as we leave the open air lobby of the hotel.
The twenty-five mile drive isn’t completely straightforward, and with our looming 7:55 p.m. deadline, we don’t have time to find ourselves fumbling through small towns advertising “Big Island Iced Tea” specials. For not the first time that weekend, it occurs to me how well-marked my driving life is most of time. I’m used to being shown mileage markers, street signs, and even given friendly road sign admonitions to pull off at a rest stop if I feel tired while cruising down the interstate. In contrast, the road I’m currently traveling contains precious few signs, and the end of the road is nearly blocked by a sign in the middle, cautioning us not to enter the area after 8:00 p.m. The next sign we see on the unpaved winding road that follows warns us to watch for “loose rocks, cracks, and drop offs.” I feel fairly confident about my ability to guard against “loose rocks” and “cracks,” but the term “drop offs” is a bit too ominous.
Occasionally from the dark, someone murmurs something appreciative or makes impressed noises upon hearing and seeing the larger collisions of water and rock, but mostly we just listen and stare, shaking our heads occasionally in happy disbelief at the lucky string of events that, had they gone another way, could have us wrapped in wool coats on the shores of Lake Superior.
We blaze on regardless, and I still have no idea what to expect as I run old National Geographic photos of red, glowing rivers through my head. I continue to aim the car down what I think is the road, exclaiming at every glittering light I see in the distance, “Oooo, do you think that’s lava?”
We find a parking lot and trek past a row of vendors peddling volcano photos, lava amulets, and bottled water. Following the other flashlight-toting tourists, we turn down a path over rippled hardened lava beds; the path is marked only by small white strips affixed to the rock; the strips catch the beam of the flashlight as we stumble forward over cracks and loose rock. We arrive at a small fenced off paddock, where a group of people is already standing, listening to the sound of crashing waves and staring off into the distance at the glow of the lava as it enters the ocean.
I’m aware as I stand there that I’m not quite sure what I expected this experience to be. I am simultaneously more impressed by the sight of the oozing, flowing rock and somehow disappointed at its distance. I understand why a fence separates us from the lava (I can just picture unwitting tourists burning their shoes off while trying to take their latest facebook profile picture), but as always, I’m a bit amused and saddened when I see an element of nature prohibited from exploration. Even at a distance, the molten rock is mesmerizing; churning forward red and glowing and often met by a crashing wave whose dynamism causes a spray of red sparks and smoke to catapult upward.
Torn between watching the Hephaestean antics of the hot lava and lying on the rocks to better see the millions of glittering stars in the nightscape (there’s virtually no ambient light out here), we linger speechless and happy for a long time, along with the other lava-struck visitors. Occasionally from the dark, someone murmurs something appreciative or makes impressed noises upon hearing and seeing the larger collisions of water and rock, but mostly we just listen and stare, shaking our heads occasionally in happy disbelief at the lucky string of events that, had they gone another way, could have us wrapped in wool coats on the shores of Lake Superior right now.
The experience only happened a week ago, but it has already taken on the nostalgic quality of distant memory. However, as winter nips close at our Inland Northwest heels, it’s comforting to know the Lava Flow Hotline is toll-free and operational 24 hours a day.
–CFJ