Lava. One word retains so much power in it. That one word connotes the essence of life, the building blocks of our terrestrial existence. I was lucky enough to be able to visit the most current geography our planet Earth has to offer.




The Hawaiian Island Chain is growing each day, each hour - each second! And the fiery-orange glow was something to behold. My tour compadre was all over the logistics: arrive shortly before sunset, park way the bleep down a two-lane, deserted, dead-end-because-of-lava-flow highway, and then start the long walk towards the cascading pools of molten burning magma.

The closer that we got to the source, the stronger the fumes, the more intense and visible were the flows that plummeted into the ocean. Thick white clouds of the noxious variety rose into the sky, obscuring everything orange, then revealing it again . . . like a natural version of a laser light show.

The power of Pele finally became a reality to me during this journey to the south western edge of Hawaii. I was breathing a lot of fumes throughout hikes earlier in the day at the fumaroles, and I was coughing and spitting frequently. My companion kept warning me: "You shouldn't do that, bro. Pele will get you for that. It's disrespectful."

Quite frankly, I did not have any idea what he was talking about. What was this myth of the Pele curse that I kept hearing about? My mother had warned me about it and referenced "it" in the past after her adventures at this place years before.

I thought nothing of it, and unconsciously continued to cough and eject. It must have been the fact that I was inundating my sinuses with sea water and then subjected them to sharp elevation changes driving over the volcano. Couple that with the brutal air - thick with a potent mix of elements from the periodic table, and I was in trouble.

ER Harris