Gift of the Golden Mountain

by Shirley Streshinsky

  For once, it was May who said, "I guess we'd better call another time-out."

  She did not see Sam for several days. When finally she came home and found the Winged Victory in the doorway, she could feel her pulse speed and throb. She knocked on the door of the cottage. He did not answer at once, and for a long moment she thought that maybe he would not, would leave her standing there, knocking until the knuckles on her hands became red and bloody and sore. When he opened the door, his face was cold and closed.

  "I think we need to talk," she said.

  "There's nothing to say," he told her.

  She wanted to get away, and Mauna Ulu cooperated. A new mountain on the eastern flank of Kilauea, it had been building for the better part of the year, pushing up, shooting fountains of lava as high as 1,800 feet into the tropical Hawaiian sky. This new volcano had pumped viscous hot lava into Alae crater until it was full to spilling over. Sinuous red lava streams slid down the mountains, snaking all the way to the pali, all the way to the cold ocean where it sizzled and surged and solidified and, finally, added hundreds of acres to the mountain. Kimo told her when she called to ask: "She's getting ready to blow. Come on over and watch the fireworks."

  "What does Auntie Abigail say?" May had asked, and Kimo answered, "She say no foolin', Pele messing around for sure."

  Sam took her to the airport. "I don't think I'll be here when you get back," he offered, his mouth tight.

  "I know," she said, "but if it comes through I think you should take it."

  "It doesn't matter what you think," he snapped back.

  "All right," she allowed. She had not been able to talk to him, to work anything out. She had tried but it hadn't been any good. She felt as if a thick, muffling wall had been sprayed between them, the way workmen sprayed insulation into buildings. He could not hear her, she could not get through to him.

  "Besides," he added, his voice cutting, "it'll be nice to be in a part of the world where everybody looks like me." She glanced at him. His face was handsome in its anger.

  "Nobody else looks like you," she said softly.

  He shot her a hard look that glanced off her face. "I understand there's a surgical procedure that changes the Mongolian eyelid from a single to a double. I thought you might like to know about it."

  "Don't," she said, determined not to let her anger take over, not now when she was leaving.

  "Don't," he mocked.

  The silence that had been disturbed rose like dust, then settled and thickened and swelled until her throat felt dry and sore. He stood, hands thrust into the pockets of his fatigues, while she checked her luggage.

  "Through to Hilo?" the attendant said. "Lucky you."

  "Lucky me," she repeated to Sam, grimacing. "You don't have to walk with me to the gate . . ."

  He walked half a step ahead of her down the long corridor and she did not try to catch up. She hated the hard, tangled knot that had come between them. She wanted to put her hand on his arm, to stop him and make him talk to her but she knew she couldn't. Time was out.

  She fell back into the practicalities, the only language they could speak now: "When did they say you might be leaving?"

  "Three weeks, maybe four. Whenever my credentials come through."

  "Vietnam," she said. "You're going after all."

  "If I'm not here when you get back I'll leave the keys with Karin and have her take care of things at the house."

  The loudspeaker switched on: "We are now boarding our first-class passengers," the voice said.

  "First class. That's you." Sam could not keep the acid from his voice. "I've been meaning to tell you—I thought I'd be able to pay you back before I left, but it doesn't look like I can. I should be able to send it to you from Saigon."

  She started to tell him to forget about the loan, but she didn't because she knew he would read it wrong, they had been through that labyrinth before. The money isn't important she would say and he would answer Nothing is important to you. She was afraid, even, to say she was sorry. The knot that had been lodged in her chest seemed to move into her throat. She swallowed and, before he could back away, put her cheek against his and then walked, quickly, into the aircraft.

  She did not know why she always felt better in Hawaii. The mountains had something to do with it, softly rising from the ocean floor. Mauna Loa was the biggest mountain in the world, more massive even than Everest, though most of that mass was hidden in the ocean depths. She loved the idea of treading these mountaintops, which rose so easily out of the sea. She thought of them as great beasts, gentle to the touch. There had been times, on the mountain, when that touch had given her a kind of peace she had known in no other place. She thought that the mountain had something to tell her and she listened for its whispers. Once, in the middle of Kilauea's great caldera, she had been certain that she felt the beat of its surging lava heart.

  Others found the lava fields desolate. She thought them almost painfully beautiful and never failed to be moved by the ferns that pushed up through the burnt crust surface. New green and tender and perfect. Life at its most insistent.

  Her mother and father had been happy in these islands, those few brief weeks after Pearl Harbor. She had been conceived on Oahu. "In a little grass shack on the leeward coast," her father had told her once. He had been joking, she was certain, but whenever she pictured them together it was on a quiet little beach of their own, near a little thatched palm hut. There were times when she could almost feel their happiness, her father's laughter, her mother's arms.

  She looked forward to driving the two-lane blacktop from Hilo to the observatory on top of Kilauea. The road would be empty at this time of day. She could open the car windows and wait for the small popping of the ears which would signal that she was rising, steadily. These islands were, she sometimes thought, her high: moments after stepping onto the tarmac at Hilo or Lihue or Kahului, when the trade winds would catch and billow her slacks and blouse, the drifting scent of jasmine or plumeria would brush over her, and she would feel a euphoric rush.

  "Dr. Reade," a voice called, and when she didn't seem to hear repeated, louder, "Dr. Reade."

  She turned, her face registering pleasure when she saw him: "Clarence—what are you doing here?"

  The boy grinned, put a lei of plumeria and tube roses around her neck, and gave her a shy kiss on the cheek. "Aloha, Dr. Reade," he said, "Pop told me you were coming—I've got my wagon waiting." His brown muscled shoulders bulged under a tom T-shirt as he reached to take her bag.

  "How did you know what plane?" she asked.

  "I figured it pretty good, huh?" he laughed. The wilted flowers of the lei told her he had been waiting a good part of the day, but she said nothing. Clarence had been tagging after her since she had first come to the observatory four years before, when he was thirteen.

  "What's happening on the mountain?" she asked.

  "Everybody up there's wired, waiting for Mauna Ulu to go. Charlie at the ranger station is taking bets. Most of them put down in the next twenty-four hours, but that baby mountain, she can fool you."

  "What does Abigail think?"

  "Auntie's not saying."

  "Smart lady."

  Clarence Kaleikini should have graduated from high school that year, but wouldn't because he spent so much time on the mountain. He knew more about the Big Island volcanoes, May sometimes thought, than she did. It got in the way of his school-work. Clarence had once told her, "How can anybody think about English when the earthquakes are coming in clusters and you know the lava is making its way up, getting ready to go?" He had been born in Kalapana and so had his father, Kimo, who was one of the assistants at the observatory. Neither had any notion of leaving the island, or the volcanoes.

  "No school today?" May asked as she pulled herself into the old jeep.

  Clarence grinned sheepishly and changed the subject. "All the action is still in the east rift. Alae crater's full and flowing over, dropping down to the pali to make some new real estate. M
auna Ulu is growing up. You got to see her in her glory, Pop says maybe some dome fountains in one of the vents this time. I'm supposed to deliver you to Auntie's. She got your bed all made up, using her kamakani kaili aloha quilt."

  "What does it mean?"

  "It's the name of the quilt: Something like 'A gentle breeze that sends love from one to another.' Means you pretty important person."

  May smiled. "Do you know when I first came to the mountain I practically had to beg for a bed to sleep in? Now you guys have it all arranged."

  "Now you belong to this place, Dr. Reade."

  "What is this 'doctor' stuff, Clarence? I'd like it a whole lot better if you called me 'May.'"

  They could see a rain squall ahead, moving toward them. Clarence pulled over so they could raise the top and she jumped out to help. "Move it, May," he shouted as they tugged at the canvas, and they both laughed.

  She spotted a tiny vanda orchid growing wild in the ditch, picked it, and tucked it in her hair, behind her ear, before she climbed back into the jeep. The air was warm, the sky was blue all around, except there would be rainbows all around. But as the rain enveloped them she felt a quick, sharp chill and goosebumps appeared on her arms. For weeks she had been preoccupied with Hayes. Now he slipped into some safe, back compartment of mind and heart, where she could put him on hold.

  At the observatory she picked her way around the stacks of files and boxes that cluttered any spare space, and headed for the clattering machines. Kimo waved her in. "She's rumbling and she's grumbling," he said.

  "Maybe tonight?" she asked.

  He laughed. "It's like a woman having a baby. She's all swelled up, you know it's going to happen, all the signals are there. You can tell when she goes into labor, but nobody can predict when the baby's gonna come."

  "Any other action along the rift or on the summit? Kilauea quiet?"

  "All quiet on the western front," he said. "See for yourself."

  She walked out to the rim of the caldera, the top of the mountain, which had long ago collapsed in upon itself to form this vast crater, two miles across and four hundred feet deep. She had hiked across the crater any number of times, had come close enough to the firepit called Halemaumau to breathe the steam which issued from it. Nothing was happening today, not here. Then the ground lurched beneath her.

  "Felt that one," she said to Kimo.

  "Labor pains," he laughed. "The earthquakes are picking up, coming in clusters now . . . that one should tell us something. You got a helicopter standing by?"

  "Sure have. Corey's waiting for the call. Want to go with me?"

  "You trust that wild, bearded hippie?" he joked, then answered her question: "I can't go, but you know who will."

  "Tell Clarence to pick me up when it goes."

  Abigail Penwell was seventy-eight years old, tall and stately with the carriage of a dowager princess. She was, in fact, descended from Hawaiian royalty. Her full name was Abigail Victoria Kaumakaokalani I'i Penwell. Her great-grandfather had been a New England sailing man. She liked to say that as far as she knew there were no missionaries—she said the word as if she were holding it at arm's distance—in her family.

  "Sit, girl," Auntie Abigail said. "Eat." Half a pink papaya, May's favorite, was waiting on the table. May sat and spooned out the fruit while the older woman watched.

  "So," May said when she had finished. "When, Auntie?"

  "Why you ask me? You think I know something about this crazy place?"

  "I know you know something about this crazy place," May told her. "My personal scientific opinion is that you have some sort of a direct line to the fire goddess Pele, and she tells you what's going on."

  "You talk like that, girl, and they're going to lock you up. Some scientist. Who believes that Pele stuff?"

  "Sometimes I am very tempted," May told her.

  "Is that what they gave you that Ph.D. for?"

  "Okay," May said, "Tell me now. Mauna Ulu's getting ready . . ."

  "For sure."

  ". . . when do you think it's going to happen?"

  "How would an old lady like me know?" she asked, her face all mock surprise. "I'd sleep near the top of wakeful tonight though."

  They sat on the lanai of Abigail's little cottage until dark, listening. At nine May got up to call Corey and Clarence. "Auntie says to sleep light," she told them.

  It was the sound of jet engines revving. May looked at the clock: two in the morning. The sky was bright. She pulled on her jeans and a shirt, made a quick stop at the bathroom, grabbed her boots, and by the time she ran out of the cottage Clarence was waiting in the jeep.

  Corey lifted off, skimming sideways to gain speed. She could see the excitement in their faces in the red glow of the fountain.

  "There she blows!" Corey yipped. "Look at that Mother!"

  "Oh yes," May whispered.

  It was more than she had imagined, this birthing of a mountain. It was, she thought, creation. Blood-red bursting in a great fountain high into the night sky, trailing sparks and roaring bright. Neonatal fireworks; throbbing lava flows burning down the charred side of the mountain, dropping off the pali in licking tongues of fire. The copter lurched as a wave of heat hit it. She glanced at Clarence and looked away, knowing he would not want her to see the glistening wet on his brown face. She bit her lip to keep from crying out, then Corey did it for her: "Holy Mother of God," he shouted over the roar, "Armageddon!"

  She was up for twenty-four hours, marking and measuring and making the kinds of observations you can make only in the hours during and after a major eruption. She slept for four hours, falling asleep in a cot in the observatory, not bothering to take off her clothes which reeked of the smell of burning wood, then she was up for another twenty. Clarence would not have slept at all, had she not insisted. She could feel the heat through the thick soles of her boots; Clarence wore rubber thongs, and seemed impervious to the heat. When she took off her boots, the bottoms of her feet were blistered. Clarence's were clear. "I'm oven-proof," he explained.

  After thirty-two hours of fireworks, Mauna Ulu settled down to the business of pumping molten lava down to the crater, and the staff of the observatory swung into their posteruptive phase routines. On the Wednesday following, Kimo came looking for May at Kealakomo, an ancient village site which lay directly in the path of the advancing lava flow.

  "You gotta call Peter Rensaeller," he told her. "He's in Honolulu and he says he wants to talk to you pretty fast." May had met Peter Rensaeller twice. Dr. Fuller, the head of her doctoral committee, had introduced them at a Washington symposium. Peter was, Fuller had explained with a wry little laugh, a "political geologist of international renown." His name seemed always to turn up on new commissions.

  "I heard you had moved to Washington," she said. "What brings you to the boonies?"

  He laughed. "Probably the same thing that brought you out: volcanoes."

  "Then why are you sitting on Oahu? The action is over here."

  "Not those volcanoes, May. I've come to talk to the fellows at the University of Hawaii about a major study. That's what this call is about. It's strange, you know, how things sometimes seem to fall into place through what seems like a series of accidents. I happened to be talking to Fuller a couple of weeks ago, and he mentioned that you hadn't decided on a postdoctoral project. The very next night your name came up again in a different context—my wife was reading Paris Match . . ."

  She groaned. "Actually," he said, "the position I'm about to try to talk you into taking is a volcanologist's dream, but like most dreams it has a nightmarish aspect. In this case it is the salary, which is an embarrassment. I won't say it is nonexistent, but almost. However, I thought perhaps you might be willing to consider . . . and if you decided, well, that you could afford to sign on . . . well, it would be an absolutely wonderful solution for us—a first-rate volcanologist to act as a kind of second in command on a U.N.-sponsored study. And I tell you, May—I believe, I expect it to be one of the most ex
citing scientific explorations to take place in this century . . ."

  Her future was settled in just five days. She would be a staff geologist supervising the field work on an international study of the volcanoes that rim the Pacific Ocean—called the Circumpacific Ring of Fire—aimed at accurately predicting eruptions. Heading the study would be Dr. Jorge Obregon-Mendonez of Guatemala, professor emeritus at Harvard, winner of the Penrose Prize for his work on tectonic plate theory, and, so far as May was concerned, the finest possible choice for such a major study.

  Most of the countries involved would be cooperating. Even the USSR had agreed to allow controlled access to the Kamchatka Peninsula, long off limits because of the number of military installations in that cold place so near the Aleutians. The U.S. and Canada, Mexico and Guatemala, and most of the rest of the South American countries on the Pacific Coast would cooperate, New Zealand and the Philippines were in, along with Taiwan and Japan, New Guinea and Indonesia. Each country would provide men and equipment, with the U.S. Geological Survey doing the lion's share of the work, especially in some of the underdeveloped countries. Because of its central location in the Pacific, Hawaii would be headquarters for the project and a staff was already being assembled. Officially, May would be a staff geologist, but she would not need to concern herself with administrative procedures, Peter had assured her. She was to work directly with Dr. Obregon-Mendonez, who had accepted the position on the condition that he have an assistant to act as his eyes and ears. "Jorge," Rensaeller explained, "is too old to go into the field himself. Unfortunately, the budget for the project includes no provision for such an assistant—which explains the tight money situation. I can come up with . . ."

  "You are right," she interrupted, "it does sound like a dream. But you said you were offering me the job. Wouldn't Dr. Obregon have to meet me first?"

  "I did get a bit ahead of myself, you're right," he answered. "We had to advertise the position in some of the scientific journals, but no one who is qualified will work for what we could offer. I persuaded Fuller to send me some of your records, and took the liberty of giving Jorge a rundown on your qualifications. I talked to the good doctor today—he says you seem 'impressive' and that he would like to meet you. I have no . . ."