Lava Flows

I mentioned before that lava—hot flowing lava—has always fascinated me. I guess it fascinates everyone. You can lose yourself watching videos like this and this*—

*(those links will break, no doubt, but type "Hawaii lava timelapse" or a similar search into YouTube)

—captivated by the slow unfolding of each orange wave as it flows forward, the way the dark edges set and hold and then burst again, letting the next bright line break free. 

So yes, I knew I would love the lava. What I was unprepared for was the way its inexorable twisting, surging motion has been caught and held in the shapes of the cooled lava rock as well! You see lava rock it bits and pieces all over the island, of course, but it's particularly amazing to see the big lava flows where you can trace the length of the lava's path and imagine its motion. From some vantage points you can see all the way down to where the black land juts into the ocean, where the coastline is still being built inch by inch with every new eruption.

Walking over the lava and seeing that new earth growing into the ocean was a deeply spiritual experience for me. Part of what I felt was just awe at the stark beauty and pure power of God in nature. In one area, we hiked around on the lava flows from 2018, when a bunch of fissures opened in the earth and lava rivers poured out to swallow roads and cars and houses. So recent, so present. How can you not marvel at the upheaval caused by liquid stone as it blazes a path through trees and foliage, superimposing canyons and hillsides, destroying anything manmade? 

But then—I kept wondering—is destroying really the right word for what happened here? The 2018 Kilauea eruption created 875 new acres of land, as high as 919 feet in some places, I read. That new land is strange and beautiful—you'll see a hundred pictures of it here. Creation or destruction, then?

On the eve of sending my oldest child off into the world, with my emotions constantly close to the surface, the symbolism was almost too much for me. I've been trying to write and sort out my thoughts ever since I walked those lava fields, and my thoughts keep cycling around creation and destruction, beginnings and endings. Aren't we all Adam and Eve leaving Eden to create a place of our own? When I think back over all these years of motherhood, I can see the slow destruction of my babies as the layers of time and experience cover them—creating something new, certainly, but also losing those early layers as surely as if they'd been swallowed by lava. It's not something you can explain to the children themselves. They think they're the same people they always were. And yes. It's true that there's something consistent there—the germ, the seed, the spirit. I realize that what I see in mortality is only a slice of who they really are. Also, of course, as they grow up, I'd hate them to think I don't appreciate who they are now. I do! There comes a point in older childhood when every child realizes he's not as cute as he used to be, and I always try to be extra reassuring to my children at that point: oh no, you're even better now—so smart, so fun, so funny. I wouldn't trade you for your baby self. The current you is too delightful.

It's mostly true when I say that. And occasionally one of the children's past selves was difficult enough that I really am relieved to see it go. But what I don't tell them is that I've started to see each self as almost a living ghost, born only to start immediately fading. It's why as I get older, I cling to them a little longer, try to take their pictures, embarrass them with words like these. Even then it hardly seems to be enough. Where is this Abe now? And this one? And this one? 

And what I can't tell them is that sometimes the ache of where those previous selves used to be burns like a gaping hole in my heart. It's not quite like a death. But there's death in the air around it. Neil Peart has words for it, of course:

In the rise and the set of the sun

As the stars go spinning, spinning round the night

It is what it is, and forever

Each moment a memory of light

The arrow flies while you breathe

The hours tick away, the selves tick away

The watchmaker has time up his sleeve

The hours tick away, they tick away

But they don't tick away forever—right? Because the watchmaker does have time up his sleeve? It's one thing I hold onto, when I think of eternity; I guess you could say it's part of my testimony. At least, it's a hope I cling to—that somehow, in some form, the good parts of those past selves will live again, that what was lost will be restored. That someday, we will go home again, and home will be everything it was and everything it should have been, all at once.

Abe's leaving on his mission in a week (he may be gone already, by the time I manage to get these thoughts sorted through and publish this). I don't think he'd love the idea that any part of his mission is about ME. Ha! I only hope that by the time he reads this he can begin to understand—because in ways I'm only beginning to understand myself, his leaving is about me as well as him—my sacrifice, my refinement, my progression. 

I knew I would have to give things up for my children. But to continually give them up to their next selves…I didn't comprehend what that would mean. Somehow, I didn't foresee how inevitably it would lead them away—until what began as part of my very breath and body and soul becomes wholly new and wholly its own.

I'm also aware that I'm only halfway through this journey, in multiple ways. One child leaving home—eh, what's that? I don't know what it's like once they're all gone. I don't know what it's like to lose children to death, or to mourn their complete loss of faith. And I don't know what it's like to have them turn back to me, to grow into consecration, to begin to share the journey of parenthood, to see them lose and find treasures of their own. All of that may still be ahead. She's just a child herself, my mom said once to me a little disapprovingly about a mother she knew, but almost every day I think to myself, That's what I am too.

Parents always laugh about how their oldest children bear the brunt of their inexperience, and it's still true with Abe even now—I don't know how to mother a young adult. I'm a child at it. It astounds me to realize, after all the things I learned in my first forty years, that there's that much again I still don't know! Forty times forty more lifetimes couldn't hold it all. And most of what I do know seems impossible to pass on. But the other thing I felt so viscerally on the lava fields was a sense of time and scale; inklings about change and how God might see it. We watched a volcano documentary where scientists were taking samples of the lava. They plunged metal shovels into the glowing river, lifting it like you'd lift a shovelful of dirt or mud—but it isn't mud, it's rock, with all the heft and mass of rock, and they stagger under the weight of it—and it's only then that it suddenly strikes you: something is wrong with this; the rock is flowing. It's so foreign to everything we "know" from everyday experience.

As you stand on the hardened lava fields you can almost feel time shift, and imagine the rock still flowing around you, eddying like water—movement where there should be no movement, change where there should be permanence. I can't help wondering: is this how God sees the ancient landforms—always in motion? As our years narrow to his days, does he see the mountains sliding into hills, erosion compressed into landfall, and weathering applied like instant lacquer to the stones? Is the most fixed of landscapes actually ephemeral—what seems to us immutable flowing like lava over His eternal landscape?

I think maybe God hints at that view when He prophesies about the Last Days here: 

And also that of element shall melt with fervent heat; and all things shall become new, that my knowledge and glory may dwell upon all the earth.

It's strange thinking about what that might mean—"all things becoming new." A hopeful phrase, but with loss inherent in it—that fervent heat destroying what came before. Am I really ready to melt into a new creature, with everything that will entail? I said before that my children don't know they're changing from year to year—well, neither do I, for the most part. I always feel like ME. Of course I've run up against the refining process by now, and it has been painful, leaving selfish parts of myself behind. I haven't managed to shed them all yet. But mostly, it feels like I'm still so much who I've always been. I don't even know how many of my selves have slipped away. Does God mourn the loss of any of them? Does he see me flowing and changing, even now? Does he see destruction in it, or only glorious creation? 

I like to think God sees the best parts of all of me preserved in who I will someday become. And I'm trying to trust that I'll see it too in my children—after the fire flows through us.

*    *    *

It feels like there should be an ending there, but I'm not done telling you about it! Which is fitting, after all—a beginning after an end. Don't let the reflective quality of this post fool you into thinking I have anything figured out. I've been trying to write about it for a couple months now, hoping that writing will help me see what I think! But during the days of the trip itself, mostly I was just enjoying being with Abe and Sam and marveling at this new place and trying to take it all in. (At night is a different story. My brain doesn't seem to be able to decide between falling into an exhausted and inadequate sleep and lying fretfully awake all night thinking about things. It likes to vacillate between the two.) I loved everything about Hawaii—the tropical air, the steaming volcano, the lava that was black and silver all at once. The warm rain blowing through; Sam in his "Look, a Rock" shirt ("I have never worn this in a more appropriate place," he said); Clementine wide-eyed and squirmy in the baby wrap; Abe standing too close to the cliff's edge. I wanted to remember every second of it.

It was amazing to drive away from the active caldera and get some idea of the scope of all this lava. You can see the black stripes cutting the land all the way to the ocean, but it's weird when you realize they're making the land as well. Here in this picture I'm standing on an old flow; you can tell because it's green and growing, but you can see newer, blacker flows not far away.

Here, looking back away from the ocean, you can see the steam coming from the caldera again.You'd think, facing this direction, that you were in a desert! 

You might remember learning about the types of lava in school. (I certainly do, but then I've taught a Volcano Unit more than once in the past several years!) A'a is the jagged, spiky, frothy lava that's made when lava is flowing fast. Sometimes it looks bubbly where the gases have escaped as it flows. And pahoehoe is the slower-moving, less viscous lava that leaves ropy, twisty formations behind. You can see both kinds in the picture above: the smooth, flat places are pahoehoe and the jagged section close to the camera is a'a.

You can see both kinds here too, as they've flowed down the hillside at an angle.

Another good view of a'a and pahoehoe together. Sam had gotten out of the car here to inspect the lava closer. He came back and I said, "Is it worth us all getting out to see?" "That depends," he said. "On how much you like rocks." Well, that answered that, of course. We all got out.

I can't really overstate HOW spiky the a'a lava is. Sam's shoes were all ripped up from just walking over this part for a minute. You can barely put your hand on it, and I shudder to think what it would feel like to fall down here!

If you look at this tiny part (enlarged from the picture above), you can see the sharp little shards sticking out on the edges—like tiny needles! Or like slivers of glass, which I guess they sort of are. I can't believe these hadn't been weathered away by now.

You can drive all the way down the flows to where they abruptly end at the ocean. It would be amazing to see the lava flowing hot into the ocean and boiling up into steam (I've only seen videos!) but it is also pretty amazing to see these huge black cliffs just—dropping off into the water. And the water is so turquoise and beautiful! The waves crash up against the cliffs terrifyingly—at least when you're standing up there looking down.

It was windy, and I was glad it was only Abe I had to keep track of on the cliff-edges! I managed to refrain from constantly telling him to be careful. But he kept reminding ME to be careful and not get too close, which served him right, I guess.

There were some sea-arches along one stretch of coast. An older area, I think.

A storm was blowing in as we walked along the lava cliffs—you could see the rain coming across the ocean. But when it reached us, it was warm and the rain was so light and fine. Almost like it was just materializing from the air. It did soak us pretty thoroughly, but then we didn't feel soaked! Because we weren't cold at all. So strange to be wet and not cold! It was just lovely being out in it.

Lots of wind and rain!

Clementine didn't mind it too much, in spite of her furrowed brow here.

The most recent (2018) lava flow covered up this road that used to circle back up north around the island. You can't drive on it now, but they've obviously done something…scraped some lava away? Just covered it up with gravel? I'm not even sure how you'd go about fixing it. But you can walk along here now, anyway. It has a sort of apocalyptic feel to it—a road to nowhere.

I'm not sure what makes the rock so reflective. It is smooth, but not completely! It's strange to have something so black also look so silvery when the sun hits it. (Also, I like the look of that little palm tree grove way off in the distance.)

These 2018 flows were my favorite because they are so stark, as if they only stopped flowing yesterday. And they really do butt right up against the ocean without a hint of slope or hesitation. They're fun to walk on because you have to watch your step and climb over little dips and hills. It reminded me of hiking at Arches or the petrified dunes at Snow Canyon—except those were eroded and formed over millennia and this lava took shape this way in just days or weeks, which is mind-boggling.

You can see huge boulders at the bottom of the cliffs where pieces of the rock have cracked off and fallen. There are lots of fissures and probably lava tubes beneath the surface as well, so we tried to be mindful of where we were stepping. I wish I could capture in a picture the feeling of standing at the edge here. The wind was whipping our hair and there was a roar of sound and spray from the waves. And then there was the twist and sweep of that black, silvery lava running under our feet and racing for the edge. And no one else around besides ourselves for miles and miles—it felt dangerous and elemental and breathtaking. I can't even imagine being there when the lava is actually flowing. (But now I want to! I can't get enough!) I kept yelling "Can you believe this? It's so amazing!!" at Abe over the sound of the waves and wondering if he felt the same way. I know Sam did. He said as we were walking back toward our car, "I think this is my favorite place I've ever been."

Look! Just look at that fall of lava washing over and then breaking off at the edge of the cliff!

Dripping layers—I can imagine exactly how bubbly and stretchy this looked when it was hot

And then I haven't even been talking about the individual, close-up patterns in the lava rock. They were endlessly fascinating, each one unique and surprising. You expect the patterns to behave like ripples in the water, and they sort of do—but then with the strangest twists and gravity-defying swirls, and so many places where you think "How could this pattern possibly have been produced by the actions I know produced it?" It would be surprising to see such variation even in liquid or cloth—but in rock?? It scrambles your sense of reality a bit.

It was so beautiful with the rain shimmering in the air. Everywhere you looked, the air sparkled, especially against the dark black of the rock. Rainbows kept appearing and disappearing all around, like mirages. The rain was blowing pretty hard one direction and soaking our backs, which was surprising because it felt light, like mist, and the sun was shining through it and everything was bright and warm.

I wonder what makes that color in this rock? Maybe more iron in the lava?

Spongy! This must have been from a very bubbly lava river.

Sam teaches a class on drapery (how to draw drapery, that is) and some of these pahoehoe rocks look like they could be examples for his class. (Will be examples for it, no doubt, based on the number of pictures he was taking.) When I felt the rock with my hand, my brain just couldn't process how something so wrinkled could feel stiff!

There were several places where the lava had collapsed down and you could see tunnels or holes from where the lava river had flowed under a harder surface. Mini lava tubes.

This is pillow lava, made of big bubbles that look like they just hardened and then cracked as they cooled. I love it.

I also love this—it looks like a big cushion of lava cooled enough to be brittle, and then shattered apart as a bubble of hotter lava forced its way out from below.

But this is my absolute favorite kind of lava formation to see. I don't know quite what I love so much about it, but every time I saw a rock that looked like this, I was so pleased, and kept calling the others over to see. I think I just love the neat folds and how soft it looks? It reminds me of caramel as it's starting to set, or hot fudge being poured over ice cream. Or a velvet dress pooling in folds at the floor…

It's pretty easy (if you watch one of those videos I linked at the top) to see how the lava makes these simple folds. It oozes along and the presenting edge cools as it flows, and then the hotter lava behind pushes it forward, but only a little way, before the next fold slows and cools as well. You can imagine honey or corn syrup acting the same way. 

And this part seems logical too— a hotter, less viscous lava river must have flowed over the top of some cooler pillow lava, and the center part flowed slower and folded as it went. But…

how on earth did THIS happen?

Or this??

Or THIS??? Those twisted, ropy, rootlike fingers are so interesting!!

What about this? Flat and draped just like cloth.

What caused the spiral folding here—one spiral within another?? And the ropy edges?

Were these bubbles that popped?

What drew the center of this spiral inward? A lava whirlpool?

What happened HERE???

This is like a pleated fan! Or a pleated skirt.

I love this section—two little waterfalls of my favorite kind of folds, surrounded by little eddies of more folds.

IT'S SO GOOD

I LOVE IT SO MUCH

AAAAAAHHH

Well. It was indeed a magical, amazing place. The most fascinating place in the world? Could be…