by Jake Halpern
“Babs, do you think you’ll ever leave here?” I asked.
Babs shrugged. She thought for a moment, then explained, “The best thing that could happen is that I would just die down there one day when I’m cooking hamburgers. I’d just drop dead, and they could just throw me on the grill and cremate me.” She laughed. “I guess that’s kind of sick, but you know, what else am I going to do?” Babs smiled, fumbled for another cigarette, and then headed back inside.
On the morning of my departure Babs offered to drive me to the airport. “You really want to haul me all the way to Anchorage?” I asked her.
“No,” she replied. “But I’ve enjoyed having you here and somebody has got to drive you, so hurry up before I change my mind.”
Around ten A.M. Babs and I set out in her pickup truck, driving south along the snow-covered bends of Portage Valley, through a forest of trees with branches that were hung with long, delicate icicles that fell and shattered like champagne glasses whenever the wind blew. We took the Seward Highway into Anchorage and, just to kill a bit of time, drove down Fourth Avenue past the honky-tonks where Babs had once tended bar. “Not much left here,” she muttered as we sped down the avenue so quickly that it was impossible for me to see much of anything.
About half an hour later we pulled into the airport. “I’m not big on goodbyes,” said Babs, “but you know where to find me if you ever want to come back.” Babs slammed on the brakes, stopping just long enough for me to plant both feet on the curb, and then she was gone.
The Lava-Side Inn
Royal Gardens Subdivision, Hawaii
UNLIKE EVERYONE ELSE waiting to board Flight 276 to Honolulu, I was in the unique situation of not knowing whether my final destination still existed. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do. On this particular trip I was dealing with something that was by definition unpredictable: a volcano.
Of all people, it was my eighty-two-year-old Grandma Norma who put me on to this story. A few years back, Norma visited Hawaii and took a helicopter ride over Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes. From her view in the sky, she could see how rivers of lava had oozed down the mountainside and taken out entire neighborhoods. “What’s really amazing are the houses that are still standing,” Norma told me. “They’re just sitting on these little lava-encircled islands.”
I was intrigued. Eventually I contacted the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and spoke with a staff geologist who told me that one of these islands was inhabited by a man named Jack Thompson, who’d been cut off by lava for almost fifteen years. “He now operates his house as a bed and breakfast,” the geologist told me, “though I’m not sure how many guests he gets.” In theory, Jack’s B&B sat on the eastern flank of Kilauea, right in the heart of the lava’s flow. I say “in theory” because no one seemed to know for sure whether his house was still standing. Jack’s cell phone did not take long distance calls, and his PR man, John Pillsbury, wasn’t returning my messages. When I finally reached Pillsbury after several weeks of trying, he had little to tell me other than that he no longer worked for Jack. “I guess I wasn’t able to bring in enough customers for him,” lamented Pillsbury bitterly. “It’s a hard sell—people are just scared of volcanoes.”
From what I could gather, Jack Thompson wasn’t scared of much. Before leaving for Hawaii, I called a number of local officials (volcanologists, civil defense coordinators, community association reps, and so on), and all of them described Jack in similar terms: stubborn, solitary, and fearlessly devoted to his home. Legends of Jack were ubiquitous. He allegedly ignored roadblocks, rode his motorcycle across molten lava, fended off hoards of wild pigs, and even kept the looters at bay. “I don’t know him personally,” the chief scientist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory told me, “but Jack is very well respected around here.”
The most current information that I was able to find on Jack’s house came from the observatory’s Web site, which put out daily “eruption updates.” I never found any direct mentions of Jack, but occasionally there were references to Royal Gardens—the abandoned, lava-encircled housing development in which he lived. I tried to visit this Web site or call the observatory every few weeks. This was one of the first things I did upon returning from Whittier, and what I learned convinced me to head directly for Hawaii. Apparently, the lava was now closer to Jack’s corner of Royal Gardens than it had been in a decade.
All of this was very much on my mind as I waited for the last ticketed passengers to board Flight 276. “You’ve got to get me on this flight,” I told the clerk behind the check-in counter. She nodded but didn’t look up. At last, with her eyes still fixed on the computer screen, she pursed her lips and asked me that most welcome of questions: “Mr. Halpern, what do you want: window or aisle?”
I was headed for the island of Hawaii, also known as the “Big Island.” The five major Hawaiian Islands—Hawaii, Oahu, Molokai, Maui, and Kauai—are essentially the tops of gigantic volcanic mountains that have formed gradually over the course of several million years. The formation has occurred as magma from the earth’s liquid core oozed upward through cracks in the ocean floor. The magma, which is known as lava once it breaks the surface, immediately hardens and over time accumulates. The Hawaiian Islands are just a few of the several hundred volcanoes that have built up on the ocean floor along a ridge that stretches north all the way to the Aleutians. The Hawaiians are simply among the tallest of these volcanoes—some of them tower more than 30,000 feet above the ocean floor—and together they break through the crashing waves and form what Mark Twain called “the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean.”1
Hawaii is the largest of the five major islands, and it’s getting larger by the day. This rapid growth is the work of Kilauea, which produces the equivalent of 40,000 dump trucks full of lava each day.2 Unlike the legendary Mount St. Helens, which went off in one violent blast in 1980, Kilauea has vented gradually over the course of many years.3 Its most recent eruption began in the winter of 1983, and almost two decades later, it was still going strong. The steadiness of Kilauea’s flow is due to the highly fluid and runny form of its lava, which allows it to move freely both beneath the surface and upon eruption. Some scientists call volcanoes like Kilauea benign, which they pretty much are, unless you insist on living downslope of their lava flow, which is exactly what Jack Thompson was doing.4
Contacting Jack by telephone was an exercise in precise timing. The morning after I arrived in Hawaii, I awoke shortly after dawn and began dialing his number. From my brief chat with John Pillsbury, I knew I had to call the B&B at exactly 6:30 A.M. This was the time each morning when Jack turned on his phone and called Blue Hawaiian Helicopters to give his daily lava/weather report. Apparently, Jack had an informal deal with the company’s pilots: He told them where to find the best lava for the tourists, and in return, they provided him with an industrial-strength mobile phone to use whenever he wanted. According to Pillsbury, however, electricity and privacy were two of Jack’s most valued commodities on the volcano, and consequently, the phone was rarely turned on.
Just shy of 6:40, I reached Jack. It was a moment of great relief, and after explaining at length who I was and how glad I was to hear his voice, I finally let him get a word in edgewise.
“How long do you want to stay for?” he asked with a bit of a southern drawl. He sounded skeptical.
“I don’t know,” I said. “A week . . . maybe two.”
“Do you have a sleeping bag?” asked Jack. “I mean, do you mind sleeping on the floor?” This struck me as an odd request coming from a man who ran a bed and breakfast, but I didn’t press the point. In the end, this arrangement worked out because Jack offered me a special “floor rate,” which spared me from paying his usual hundred-dollar-per-person nightly “bedroom rate.” In any case, the floor sounded much better than camping outside near the lava.
“No problem,” I told him. “I love the floor.”
“Well . . .” There was a long p
ause. “All right, then.”
Jack and I arranged to meet the following morning in Hilo, a port town not too far from the slopes of Kilauea. In the meantime, I had the day to myself, so I decided to visit the Hawaii Volcano Observatory. I rented a compact car and ascended the eastern flank of Kilauea until I reached a large flattened area that appeared to be the summit. Unlike the perfectly conical volcanoes in the movies, Kilauea is flat-topped. Its cone collapsed long ago, and now all that remains is a plateau with a giant “caldera” or crater in the center. The observatory is dramatically perched on the brink of this caldera, but when I peered over the edge I was disappointed to find not a single trace of fiery red. As far as I could tell, the observatory was not positioned to observe much of anything.
When I finally ventured into the observatory, I learned that all of the action was taking place down slope, at a “vent” known as Pu’u ’O’o. Every so often the giant reservoir of magma beneath Kilauea shifted its flow and surfaced from a different vent. Most recently it was Pu’u ’O’o that was getting all of the flow. Meanwhile, the caldera and all other potential vents were getting bypassed, which meant that the observatory was up too high and over too far to see any real volcanic activity. Jack, however, was in the thick of it. After the lava gushed out of the Pu’u ’O’o vent, it rolled downhill directly past his place. “He’s got the best seat in the house,” one staff member told me quietly. “But I don’t know how much longer he’ll be around—his house has been condemned by the volcano.”
After this visit to the observatory I still had some time to kill, so I drove to a nearby airport, where I bought a ticket for a helicopter tour. I chose Blue Hawaiian’s “Ring of Fire” tour because it went directly over Jack’s house. According to Blue Hawaiian’s ground crew, pilots used his house as a landmark (as in, “I just passed Jack’s place, over and out”), while tourists used it as a photo op (as in, “Wow, some nut actually lives down there”—snap, flash). So I loaded into a helicopter with a bunch of tourists from the Rhapsody, a five-star cruise ship, and darted off toward the lava.
After twenty minutes in the air, we reached the Pu’u ’O’o vent. Here at last was the classic cone of volcanic rock, roughly six hundred feet tall and puffing out a giant plume of white smoke. My first impression was that it seemed conspicuously misplaced. Instead of being on the summit, where I still felt certain it belonged, it was nestled on a nondescript eastern flank of the mountain. Although the vent was smoking, it was not visibly spewing any lava. Instead, the lava was rising from the earth’s fiery depths and being channeled into a series of tubes that lay buried just beneath the surface, like a network of giant water pipes. These tubes insulated the lava, keeping it warm and allowing it to flow much farther before it cooled and then hardened. As the lava made its journey downhill, it often broke out of its tubes and flowed freely along the surface, meandered down the face of the mountain, taking out anything in its path. This was exactly the sort of renegade stream that was now drawing dangerously close to Jack’s house.
From the Pu’u ’O’o vent, we flew downhill, across a sprawling path of destruction that the lava had created. Over the years, various surface flows had wiped out almost all of the vegetation and houses that once covered this side of the mountain. Now all that remained were endless fields of hardened lava.* Its charred, black crust covered the landscape like a blanket, sprawling in every direction as far as the eye could see, and was broken only by the occasional glimmer of red where a new flow was oozing out.
As our helicopter crested the final bluff that led down to the sea, an unexpected clump of trees came into view. This is what the Hawaiians called a “kipuka,” an isolated piece of land that the volcano has spared. Basically it’s an oasis of greenery, surrounded on all sides by miles and miles of smoldering lava. We passed over a number of these kipukas on the way, but this one looked different. It was larger, much larger, encompassing several hundred acres. Eventually I realized that this had to be Royal Gardens, the abandoned suburban development in which Jack lived. Royal Gardens had been cut off from the world since the late 1980s, and it showed—streets were overgrown with vegetation, buildings were falling apart, and absolutely nothing was stirring.
A moment later, our helicopter angled downward and we were hovering over the bright red roof of a perfectly intact house. Our pilot turned on his microphone and told us that this house belonged to a man named Jack Thompson. He then gave a brief spiel on the volcano’s legendary hermit. At last, in a perfectly choreographed maneuver, our pilot’s monologue gave way to the helicopter’s sound system, which was playing Jimmy Buffet’s famous volcano ditty: “I don’t know where I’m a-gonna go when the volcano blows!” The schmaltz was flowing faster than the lava, creating a decidedly Epcot Center-like effect, only there was the added rush of reality. Despite all the gimmicky hoopla, there was actually a man down there. Exactly who he was and how he got there was unclear, but, quite certainly, he was making a rather extraordinary stand.
For a minute our helicopter hovered over Jack’s place. All of us wanted to have a good, long look. The woman in the seat next to me leaned across my lap in order to get a better view out the window. Eventually she glanced back at me with her eyebrows raised and her mouth hanging open. Of course, I recognized the look on her face—that curious, baffled, utterly confused stare. Even if briefly, she and all the other passengers in my helicopter were contemplating the same question that I did almost every day.
Jack Thompson looked nothing like I’d imagined. He had no gnarled walking staff or Rip Van Winkle beard, no Mad Max motorcycle gear or lava-scorched boots, no zipperless Amish-style clothing or partially melted glass eye. Jack was a handsome man with a rugged, freckled face, long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a lean but powerful build. He was at once the image of a stoic: modestly dressed, efficient in his movements, and deeply contemplative. He was also immaculately clean—his T-shirt looked ironed, his face was meticulously shaven, and his skin seemed to glisten. At the age of fifty he was the personification of good health. And as I stood next to him, with scruffy hair and a wrinkled shirt, a passerby could easily have mistaken me for the hermit and him for the travel writer.
More than anything else, however, Jack struck me as grouchy. Unlike the other home-keepers I’d met thus far, he was hardly welcoming. As planned, we met up the following morning at ten A.M. sharp, and from the start he seemed to be in a foul mood. As he drove me around Hilo in his 1985 Toyota Tercel, I tried to keep conversation light. I started with the golden safety net for grown men with almost nothing in common—I asked him if he followed sports. “If any kind of game comes on the TV or radio, it comes off immediately,” he replied. “You see all these people jumping up and down for a ballgame, but they wouldn’t lift a finger to save a tree, or a bird, or an animal species!” Unfortunately, every question I asked seemed to elicit a similar response. “Yeah, I was married,” he told me, none too enthused about this brief mistake. As for kids: “Kids? No thanks. Then you’re a family man, driving down the freeway, stuck in traffic . . . and they only end up hating you when they grow up.” Over lunch he told me, “In my fifty years of living I can count on one hand the people who have treated me fairly.” When I later asked him who those five people were, he replied, “Five was being generous.”
As the day progressed, Jack’s many misgivings seemed to form a decidedly apocalyptic vision for the future, where overpopulation, hoof-and-mouth disease, deadly grain-eating molds, fish-depleted oceans, and air-polluting SUVs had ruined the earth. Much of what Jack said was well reasoned and quite true, but there was something aggressively misanthropic about his manner, and I began to wonder whether it was really such a good idea to follow him home to such an extremely isolated area.
My saving grace was Don Bartel, one of Jack’s best friends from high school. As chance would have it, Don was flying in from Los Angeles that very afternoon to spend a few days of “rest and relaxation” up on the volcano. We picked Don up at the Hil
o airport early in the evening. Don struck me as a quintessential Californian: well tanned, smiling, friendly, and imbued with a commanding sense of leisure. He wore surfer’s shades and a sun-bleached baseball cap, which masked his soft, almost boyish features. Like Jack, he was a young fifty, yet there was something decidedly paternal about Don. I would later learn that he had two adolescent children who lived with his ex-wife in Oregon, as well as a grown daughter from a previous marriage. Currently Don was on marriage number three. Overall, his life seemed to be full of exactly the sort of messy familial entanglements that seemed to scare the hell out of Jack. Nonetheless, the two men appeared to be good friends, and Don’s arrival definitely lifted Jack’s spirits.
From the airport, the three of us drove to the outskirts of Hilo and pulled into the driveway of Jack’s one-bedroom city house. It was a simple prefab, a bachelor’s pad with wall-to-wall carpeting, a handful of drying dishes in the sink, and your basic TV/VCR centerpiece. Jack bought this place to avoid a daily commute across the lava. As he explained, “I built this house so I could go to work.” In the early years of the eruption, Jack’s commute was manageable. He simply drove around the lava on a series of back roads that led to Hilo, where he worked as an air-conditioning/refrigeration technician. By the late 1980s, however, he was surrounded by lava on all sides. “When the lava cut us off, my neighbors really started to leave,” explained Jack. By 1991, he was the last resident left in Royal Gardens. Even still, he tried to make his arrangement work. For a while he hiked to a nearby lot where he kept his car, but as the lava flows widened, this became increasingly difficult. “I had to hike one mile, then two miles, then it just became too much,” said Jack. By the mid-1990s, Jack had no choice but to build a house on the outside. For a while he spent his weekdays in Hilo and his weekends up on the volcano, but this proved exhausting. Finally, in 1998, he opted for early retirement. He quit his job, opened a B&B, and moved back to the volcano full-time. Now, despite the fact that Jack rarely had any paying guests, he spent most of his time manning his B&B.
