Borne of Fire

A while ago, around the time I wrote this post, I wrote an essay for the BYU Studies Essay Contest centered around some of the same thoughts and themes. Now that I know my essay isn't going to be published there, I'm putting it here just so I have it preserved somewhere! It felt so good to get a few of my swirling and frantic thoughts on paper during that time when Abe was preparing to leave on his mission, and even though I now seem to have moved into a place of less immediate…frantitude…I still feel like I could elaborate on this theme even more. There is just so much new ground in raising children, and the new ground grows and grows and grows! I sometimes feel like I have to learn to be a new mother every year. Every month, even!

At any rate, here is the essay:

Borne of fire

“It’s too soon to put words to it.” 

That’s what I keep telling myself as we hike away down the dark road through web-fine mist, unearthly pink light still warming the sky behind us. The stars are bright as glass.

I can’t help myself, though. I’m narrating fragments in my head already, trying to hold onto what we’ve seen. “A slick of fire spilled like oil across the ground.” “Orange threads, reaching like thin fingers into the smoke…” But it isn’t enough. The words can’t bring it back. I raise the camera instead, trying another photo I know will only catch the blur of violet sky.

We’d stood there far too long at the viewing area—long enough for me to grow tired of the wind whipping hair into my eyes and the camera strap pulling at my neck. But I couldn’t turn away. Baby Clementine, sleeping bundled against my husband Sam, had started to stir, and so at last he’d begun the return hike to the car alone, calling back to us “Take your time!”

We’d taken it. Beside me, just a shape in the darkness, my son Abraham had kept his eyes, like mine, locked on the glow radiating eerily up from below. It had seemed so flimsy, so inadequate, to break the silence for inanities—“Look, it’s so cool,” “Whoa,” “Did you see that?”—and yet we hadn’t been able stop whispering them, each of us too overwhelmed to bear the awe alone.

I’d always dreamed of seeing real lava—dreamed of it even longer than had this boy-turned-man beside me, he who’d played “Erupting Volcano” in leaf-piles and conversed about sulfuric acid and pyroclastic flows with half-terrified delight. Now, just minutes ago, we’d finally stood together on the slopes of real-life Kilauea, watching a lake of lava as it bubbled below us. In its center, intermittent surges of what looked like embers sprayed up from the mouth of a jagged ridge, boulder-size sparks that lagged impossibly at the top of their arcs before plunging back down into the boiling mass below.

We’d watched, hypnotized by the surging lava lake. It was elemental, literally: a soup of gas and mineral that could melt down stone and send it out recast in crystal. The black surface of the lake lifted and fell slowly under our eyes, like the rise and fall of breath, continually webbing and cracking to reveal pillows of flame-colored liquid only just-restrained beneath.

We’d hiked to the caldera in the light of morning first, and the volcano had awed us then with its surging smoke and occasional showy displays of sparks. But it was here in the midnight darkness that the lava found its true expression. What had seemed in daylight a more-or-less placid black reservoir, broken by a red flare or two, was now revealed to be the mouth of a restless, formless being, kept in check by nothing but its own cooled skin. This was the lava Abe and I had secretly hoped for—alive and breathing, mesmerizing in its power and its unrest, a glowing ocean that ebbed and flowed behind my eyelids long after we turned away to make the hike back in rocky darkness, picking our way under a truncated moon.

When we get back to Sam and the car, Clementine is crying, sleepy cries that sound like the squawks of agitated gulls. I nurse her, holding her tiny hand to stop it clutching at my hair, before we finally drive away.

It’s almost Christmas, but we’re a world away from winter. Instead of swirls of snowflakes and the scrape of evening snowplows, the air hums with tree frogs and warm rain. Only slightly less foreign than the mild, humid air is the sense that something’s missing. And something is—eight somethings, to be precise. How rarely have we traveled free like this, three adults now, plus a baby who barely slows us down? A rather unremarkable group we make this way—wife, husband, oldest child and youngest child—giving no hint of the eight other children in the middle, left at home under the care of that God who watches over fools, drunkards, and unaccompanied minors. I bless the large-family routine that makes its cessation feel so effortless by comparison.

This trip came about almost on a whim several weeks ago, when a sudden cluster of possibilities—cheap flights, changed plans, avoidable responsibilities—had urged us into snatching up the chance for some unbroken time with Abe before he left on his mission. Now it feels like we’ve snatched up a dreamworld with it. In the tropical air, everything feels new, leaving me looking at Abe as if through turned glass—one side showing the baby he was only a heartbeat ago, the other the grown young adult I usually forget to be surprised at. 

Clementine reminds me of him. “I remember carrying you around with us  everywhere just like this, kissing your cheeks just like this,” I keep saying, involuntarily, knowing he’s weary of the telling of it. “I remember when you started really talking, filling the day so full of words and questions, I’d startle awake to ghosts of them at night.” 

It was around that time he’d started liking volcanoes, reading about them thirstily in science books too heavy to hold in his small hands. His interest flickered between curiosity and fearful trepidation for a while, until he grew brave and conquered the lava through hours of play. There was another baby by then, useful mostly as a prop to lie unsuspectingly on the slopes of dormant Mount Whatever-it-was and get swallowed gleefully by sound and blankets when the inevitable eruption began.

An eye-blink—a drawn-in breath—and now he’s grown, poised on the brink of leaving us, at once more knowledgeable and less willing to prattle about what he knows, but still composed of pieces of that boy, the one who burst through the front door shouting “I…love…everything!”

His mission call came two weeks ago. “And how are you doing?” other mothers ask me, their raised eyebrows ushering me into a silent society of which I’ve only in the last few years become aware. We don’t name it, the mothers’ silence tells me, but if we did, it might be The League of Watching, The Alliance of Waiting and Wondering, The Society of Staying Behind. The Institute of Closing Your Eyes and Opening Your Arms, Not Sure If Something Will Fly Out or Fly Back In.

You can write volumes about young children, passing stories around like sparkling punch at Book Group, filling notebooks with their funniest words. It becomes instinctive after a while: catching them, specimen-like, in nets of anecdote, a scientist sharing notes on a new species. But as they grow into themselves, children become perversely harder to pin down. I have had to learn to watch my young adults covertly, drawing fewer conclusions, but still keeping all these things and pondering them in my heart. Mothering young adults feels terrifyingly like beginning again.

I miss the days of catering to Abe’s latest enthusiasm, the ability to supply him with both the satisfying answers he wants and the initiating questions he needs. It was for him we learned first about volcanoes for Family School, but we kept coming back to them—three times, maybe four, as different children grew into curiosity and that delicious thrill at the thought of earth’s raw power. We read about the melting and refashioning of element and mineral, ancient rock swallowed and blended by the earth, stirred by convection, only to recombine and come forth new. We searched out lava rock and wonderstone in the Black Rock Desert, obsidian at Topaz Mountain, the older children always boldly climbing to the top of the next rise, and me continually scrambling behind with a baby on my back and a toddler’s hand yanking my restraining one, calling “Don’t go too far ahead!” During each adventure I’d watch the children’s faces lit with wonder and think, “This is why I do it. This is what it all means.”

Now, as we drive away from the glowing caldera, I stretch my ankles, sore from hiking uneven ground. Abe’s face glows by the pale light of his phone as I turn to look at him in the backseat next to his sleeping baby sister. He smiles to himself at a text message coming in, the contents of which he would no doubt rather cast into the volcano than reveal to me. I can’t help but realize that his experiences now, whether we share them physically or not, are mostly his alone. 

The next day we visit the cooled lava flows. I’m prepared for it to feel anticlimactic after the visceral energy of the living, breathing lava lake, but to my surprise, the cooled stone holds captured life nearly as strongly as its molten counterpart. Walking the flows is like traversing a river stopped midstream, the current balanced precariously between one ripple and the next. At any moment, you feel, the earth might soften again, carrying you forward with it in a vast black wave. 

The three of us (with the fourth strapped snugly across the front of Sam’s “Look, a  rock!” shirt) wind our way downhill, over huge swaths of black lava which turn out to be surprisingly varied in texture, up close. I recognize the types from countless readings of books with names like “Nature’s Deadliest!” and “Kids Explore Disasters!” The rough, jagged sections are ‘a‘ā. “I knew it was sharp,” Sam says, shaking his head. “But this…it’s like shards of feathered glass.” Already, his shoes are ragged from it. ‘A‘ā lava looks almost spongy, but it feels dangerous and brittle, tossed up in blocks and tumbled carelessly over itself. But my favorite parts are pāhoehoe lava, especially where the rock swirls and drapes like cloth, the softest of visual senses meeting the hardest of tactile ones. Pāhoehoe is smoother and more reflective, tracing a silvery trail to the ocean. It seems strange that something so jet-black can still shine bright enough to hurt my eyes.

We stop at last on huge bluffs above the ocean, looking back at the layers upon layers of black rock that pour over each other like sheets of honey, folds and ripples surging ever downward only to plunge and break off in improbable whorls of foam at cliff’s edge. “This land didn’t exist three years ago,” Sam says, looking at the black curve of coast against sea. We can see the incursions where the new land has extended itself, drip by drip, into the unknown.

It’s all new, this ground we’re walking on—the newest place I’ve ever been. Back home, I have pictures of 8-year-old Abe on Antelope Island, gap-toothed and triumphant atop smooth boulders of 4-billion-year-old gneiss. And yet it’s this place that feels ancient. Primeval, almost—that stark conjunction of rock and fire. Creation belongs in the beginning, doesn’t it? Here on the Hawaiian lava fields, I feel transported in time rather than space, to an earlier age full of lava lakes and jagged rocks, the earth churning and restless under skies that burn with falling stars. Continents forming, mountains rising out of the endless sea…it doesn’t feel like something that could happen now. And yet, today, here we are, walking this infant earth on fragile human feet. 

Abe has made his way to the precarious fringe of the cliff, leaning forward for a better view, then turning back and waving us closer, his face alight with interest. I can see all the reflections of his past selves in that face. He’ll be fine away from home, I think. He’s ready, poised at the edge of an unknown world. He still can’t conceive of his mission being about anyone but himself—his choice, his adventure, his sacrifice. He’s right, in a way. I won’t be there with him as he runs from rise to rise, turning back at the top to see if I’m still watching from behind.

We joke about it sometimes: “I made you,” I’ll say, taking exaggerated credit for his accomplishments, but I can tell he doesn’t really understand. In his mind, he wasn’t formed, he just is, ex nihilo. I felt the same when I was his age. My inner world was hard-won, close-held, and mine alone. But I can see further now. It’s not really the credit I want—Abe astonishes me as often as he reflects me, surely. His inner world is real. It’s just that this time, I was there in the beginning. I saw Abe grow into himself, inch by inch. He can’t see the elements he’s made of—me, Sam, grandfathers, great-grandmothers, the base minerals melted and combined and folding now before our eyes. Look away for a moment, and they’ll flow forward again into something new. Someone new.

I don’t know why it so often takes a change of routine to bring truths close to home. Amid the obscurity of habit, it’s hard for me to see the ground I’m standing on. But here on distant shores and at the land’s end, I keep finding unexpected convergences. Oldest child and youngest child. Beginnings and ends. Clementine won’t remember she ever saw lava, any more than she’ll remember Abe when he comes home after his mission. How long will our home be home, in his mind? He’s already just humoring me when I want to take a picture or steal a hug, knowing the time grows short now. And afterwards—well. It’s not the end of everything, but it’s the end of something. How many times did we get to sit together, all of us, at the dinner table these last nineteen years? The meaning of “all of us” kept growing to encompass more and more people, but as the years went on our intersections became rarer and more precious. We weren’t “all” there at the first, nor will we be when he goes.…will we ever be complete? The fabric that once seemed static has taken motion, folding itself over as it goes.

The sun is low as we drive away from the lava fields. We see smoke rising from the caldera, beginning to glow pink in the dusk. The landscape changes impossibly fast, from barren rock-covered desert to forest that looms up to either side of the road. It has started to rain. “Take a picture!” says Abe from the back seat. “I love the way the trees rise out of the mist.” I am already taking one, having loved trees and mist since before he was born. Which of his loves were first mine? Which words my echoes? Or are we responding to some current running beneath us both, turned slowly over as it flows through time?

My eyes are blurry with fatigue, or maybe it’s this mist that materializes out of the air to coat the windows and my camera lens. Five more weeks till he goes. It’s too soon to put it into words. This new ground grows beneath us, borne of fire.