Sunday, October 13, 2024. Volcano Village, HI
Oh no! Today’s card is the Three of Swords! I’m interpreting this as Last Day of Vacation Mentation… or possibly having to choose which fun thing to visit first. The strategy that I should adopt for future visits is to have a coin to toss to expedite the decision making process.
Rising early (again!) made visiting steam vents rewarding, as the dawn air is cool and the vents are more dramatic.
This morning, we visited vents that go deeper into the Earth and hit pockets of sulphur. The rising vapors contain sulphur dioxide, which forms bright yellow crystal needles near the vents. I suspected and was rewarded when I looked under the wooden railings of the boardwalk we were on and saw very tiny crystals criss-crossing over the wood grain. I was lucky enough to get a nice close-up of the vent where larger crystals grew like lichen.
We visited an old-growth forest in Kīlauea park specifically to bird watch, but only sited pheasant/feral ground fowl. I think we had more fun than the bird-watchers from Connecticut, who had come specifically to sight a checklist of birds and had only found one.
9:30-ish, we med it back to Volcano House (more parking this time) for the buffet breakfast—shockingly, our meal only cost $50.00 instead of the usual $60.00.
We did more caldera site-seeing before returning to the Funky Motel for a nap. Mark saw a Hawiian hawk and other native birds outside on the (dirty) veranda. And also a sign encouraging folks to kill any tree frogs they might see.
In the afternoon, we drove to the end of Seven Craters Road and visited a petroglyph site at Pu’uloa. The site, a short boardwalk loop, was about a half-mile from the road, at the end of a wind-swept trail over a dusty lava flow. Families would chip a hole in the lava stone hills and place an umbilical cord there for a child’s long life. There were many geometric designs, and a few turtle and anthropomorphic signs as well.
I had expected the petroglyphs to be on canyon walls, like ones I’d encountered in Arizona, but these were mainly horizontal or on slight rises in the lava flow. I suspect the photography would have been better if we’d arrived closer to sunrise or sunset, but I still managed to get some interesting pictures of the designs.
We walked along the boardwalk above the markings and tried to fathom what they might mean—did thirteen holes in a row indicate a lunar cycle? What about nine holes around a circle? The strong wind clutched at my hat and blew the seed pods of a yellow, pea-like flower back and forth, which sounded like hundreds of wooden sistrums clack-clack-clacking in a mysterious language. The wind-borne sound ebbed and surged with the gusts and worked its way like a chant into my mind.
The mid-afternoon sun was frying Mark, and he endured my photographic questing for as long as he could before announcing that he needed to head back to the car. I admitted that the sounds and the wind were driving me into an overwhelming altered state (i.e. “freaking me out”), and after one more photograph, I followed him back to the car.
In the evening, we drove back to the Black Sands Beach for more quality turtle time. When we arrived at the beach, a tour bus was just leaving. The three turtles we’d see basking before were in about the same position in a closed off portion of the beach as they were on Friday.
The basking turtles were high up on the beach—we didn’t see their tracks in the sand and surmised they’d come ashore during high tide. Two more turtles were in the retreating surf and we watched them work themselves over boulders as the sun sank behind Kīlauea. Their shells were shaped like the builders—sometimes they looked like rocks; near sunset they looked like waves. I wondered how heavy the turtles were as they leveraged themselves by their flippers over the jumble of rocks between the shore and the open bay waters.
After the sun set, we left the three formerly-basking turtles on the moonlit shore. Venus came out, but no other stars were visible. We drove back up to the steam vents.
By the time we arrived, it was very dark—I think I saw the end of the comet’s tail over the summit of a volcano, but it looked too big, so maybe it was a sun column. Venus was about ten degrees off of the western horizon with Scorpio chasing after. Not where I was expecting it at all, and tilted ninety degrees sideways, was the Teapot; I realized the zodiac was arcing overhead through the zenith instead of floating over the southern horizon. I’m pretty sure I was saying, “Whoa!” for the rest of the night.
Mark still thinks it’s pretty funny that I think seeing stars in a different position from a lower latitude on the globe is the coolest, most mind-blowing thing ever.
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