Braving Home

by Jake Halpern

  After showing us around his place, Jack invited us to sit on the couches that surrounded his TV, and before long, he and Don were reminiscing about Bakersfield, California, their hometown. “Bakersfield is just an old oil refinery town,” Jack explained to me. “It’s not California the way most people think of it.” According to Jack, his home life offered little reprieve from the bleak, industrial surroundings of Bakersfield. Both his father and his older brother bullied him, he recalled, and by the age of ten he was already dreaming of a life somewhere else—he would travel westward, leaping across the Pacific to a place where things would almost certainly be better. “Or that’s what I thought,” said Jack with a wry smile. “I never imagined I was going to end up like this—I mean, living on an erupting volcano.”

  “But you’re one in a million,” added Don. “No one gets to see what you see. No one has what you have up there.”

  “It’s true,” said Jack with a nod of his head. “You’re right.”

  As the evening progressed, the prospect of our imminent return to the volcano seemed to infuse Jack with a rousing sense of purpose, and around dinnertime he explained the plan. We would spend the night here at his city house and then wake up early the next morning and set out for the volcano. Ideally, if money weren’t a factor, we’d just fly in by helicopter; in fact, this was how many of Jack’s wealthier guests often arrived. There was a cheaper path, however, a sort of “economy route” that fit my budget and Jack’s sense of adventure. In short, we’d be trekking across the active lava. It would be a strenuous journey, explained Jack, and we needed all the rest we could get.

  Before going to sleep, Jack told us about a TV show called Living on the Edge on the Home & Garden Television channel. Each week, the show featured a different location where people were living in extreme circumstances. “Pretty soon,” explained Jack, “my house is going to be on the show.” At this point I noticed a look on Jack’s face that I hadn’t seen before: He seemed pleased.

  Moments later Jack popped a tape into the VCR. The people at Living on the Edge had sent him a recording of some past shows. Together we huddled around the TV. From the start it was clear Jack had watched the tape before, perhaps several times, and before long he was providing a line of running commentary. One episode featured an extremely obese woman living in a yurt (a circular, domed tent traditionally used by the Mongols). The woman’s foremost complaint was fueling her stove, which required her to chop wood. “Oh no,” said Jack dramatically, with a quick roll of his eyes. “She has to chop her own wooooood!” Not long after this, the show’s narrator revealed that the woman had only recently moved into her yurt. Don and I both shook our heads. I think both of us felt a brief, vicarious swell of pride: Our man Jack had lasted twenty years.

  Another episode featured a family living in an old powerhouse situated at the edge of a cliff in Telluride, Colorado. Midway through the show, there was footage of a wobbly, open-air cable car that the family used to get down from the cliff. Jack conceded that this was pretty amazing. “I would consider doing a house swap with them,” he told us later. “But just for a few months.”

  Near midnight, as Don and I bedded down to sleep on the floor of Jack’s living room, we got a chance to chat briefly about the purpose of his visit. Don told me that this was his third time vacationing on the volcano. “If it weren’t for the fact that my lifelong buddy was living here I probably wouldn’t be doing this,” he told me.

  “So what’s it like on the volcano?” I asked him finally.

  “It’s just like another world,” replied Don.

  The next morning Don and I sat braced in the back bay of a dusty pickup truck, bouncing up and down like kids on a carnival ride as we made our way across a field of hardened lava. It was the very first leg of our journey onto the volcano. Our driver was a frail man with a hearing aid and a long braid of white hair. His name was Olympus Israel, and he used to be a neighbor of Jack’s back before the lava came and took his house. Today he had agreed to take us as far as his truck would go.

  As Jack and Olympus chatted in the front seat, swapping opinions on the latest lava flows, Don and I sat in back and gaped at the landscape. All around us the lava had hardened in wild, surging patterns. In some places it was draped in folds like a wet blanket; in others, it formed long doodles, as if squeezed from a giant tube of toothpaste; and still elsewhere it cast one dome after another, unfolding like the rooftops of some Byzantine city. The rocks were a lustrous black, and they shone with a metallic gleam in the morning sun. None of this hardened lava seemed even remotely hot, which meant we still had a very long way to go.

  We were driving along a makeshift access road that cut its way through the rippling rock flows around us. I later learned that the road was made with a lone bulldozer, which used its front blade to break apart the brittle rocks and then clear the way. The project was financed by the Royal Gardens’ Community Association. Despite the fact that most of Royal Gardens no longer existed—and that its official population was down to approximately one—the association still collected dues. The thinking was that someday the volcano would stop erupting and people would return home, even if home was just a pile of black rocks. In the meantime, the association occasionally used the dues to rebulldoze the road when it disappeared. The disappearances occurred when a tube burst and the surface was flooded with molten lava. Apparently this was happening a lot lately. Several miles of road were lost within the last three months alone.*

  Roughly twenty minutes later our truck rolled to a halt. Several meters ahead of us, the road tapered into a much rougher stretch of rocks that appeared to be still smoldering. All around us the horizon line was warped by massive heat waves shimmying off the rocks. Ahead of us was a sprawling flatland, roughly two miles wide and ten miles long. To the right of these flats were the first slopes of Kilauea, rising up toward Jack’s house and to the Pu’u ’O’o vent beyond; to the left was the Pacific Ocean, deeply blue and rippled, stretching southward all the way to Antarctica. Along the coastline I could see a massive mushroom cloud of steam where the molten lava was pouring into the ocean and boiling the water. Off to the side of us I now noticed a wooden sign posted by the park services. It stood precariously close to the active lava, and I had to assume it wouldn’t be around long. It read:

  DANGER

  AVOID FUMES: Lava entering the ocean creates a toxic cloud that contains hydrochloric acid, superheated steam, and volcanic glass.

  Do not approach areas where lava enters the ocean. . . . Steam explosions hurl hot lava rocks inland.

  Be aware of getting trapped by lava. Never enter areas where molten lava may cut off an escape route. Keep a safe distance from fresh lava, which is about 2000°.

  Jack Thompson pauses for a breather as he crosses the miles of lava that surround his house. For the most part, the volcanic crust here is stable, but there is always the possibility of taking a bad step and falling downward into an active lava tube.

  Rather uneasily, I thumbed through my copy of the Hawaii Moon Handbook, which is generally considered one of the best references on the island. The author, Robert Nilsen, included a brief passage on the area we were about to enter. In addition to listing many of the same risks that the park services’ sign mentioned, he also had this to say: “For those of you who are still intrigued, realize that you are standing on the most unstable piece of real estate on the face of the earth. For those maniacs, fools, adventurers, and thrill-seekers who just can’t stay away, give yourself up for dead and proceed.”5

  Jack stepped out of the driver’s seat and raised his eyebrows. “Ready?” he asked. Moments later the wind shifted and we were hit with a gust of hot dry air, the sort that blasts out of the oven when you open the door to check on dinner. I nodded my head vaguely.

  “If you have to evacuate you can stay at my place, and pitch some tents in the back yard,” said Olympus with a shrug. “But don’t worry,” he added. “I think this one is going to miss you.”


  “Me, worry?” said Jack, with a slight chuckle. In the days to come I would recognize this as Jack’s lava-laugh. Whenever things got a bit touchy on the volcano, I came to expect this dry laughter and the cathartic effect that it seemed to have on all of us.

  We set out along the sprawling flatlands, packs strapped to our backs and brittle lava rock crunching underfoot. I could soon feel the rocks heating up beneath me, warming my feet, softening the worn-out soles of my running sneakers until it seemed that I would soon be barefoot. A short while later, the ground began to split along a series of small crevices, through which we could see a bright red glow. We were now treading across an active flow. The rocks beneath us were just a thin crust, floating atop a large river of molten lava. Jack paused for a moment to admire a crevice with me. “My neighbors used to cook potatoes in cracks like those,” he told me. “It’s a nice little oven.” Gingerly, we stepped our way across a latticework of these crevices. I couldn’t help but remember doing the same thing as a child, tiptoeing across the splintered sidewalk in front of our house, joking about not falling into a sea of make-believe lava. As I recalled, the game usually ended with my tumbling head over foot into an imaginary cauldron of fiery red. “Remember now,” said Jack, perhaps sensing my uncertainty. “Falling is not an option.”

  Any passage across the flats poses a number of dangers. For the most part, the surface crust is relatively stable, but there is always the possibility of taking a bad step and falling downward into an active lava tube. A far more common problem, however, is the arrival of rain. When raindrops hit hot lava, they produce steam, which can create instant whiteout conditions. Later in my stay I would see a heavy rain roll in off the Pacific, causing most of the flats to disappear in a giant steam cloud. Other concerns on the flats include the mini-cyclones or dust devils that occasionally sweep through. These swirling air movements pick up not just dust but copious chards of volcanic glass as well. Jack witnessed a dust devil of this sort just once, and luckily it never got close enough to spray him with any volcanic shrapnel. In all likelihood, Jack Thompson had seen just about every danger the flats have to offer. Yet the greatest danger of all was still in the making. Eventually the flats themselves—which are forever extending further seaward as new lava accumulates—will simply extend too far and break off into the Pacific Ocean. This would most likely trigger a tsunami, which would blitz across the Pacific Ocean at the speed of a jumbo jet. “We’re hoping that doesn’t happen any time soon,” explained Jack.

  We continued hiking along a stretch of smoldering rocks until we came to our first stream of lava. The lava was oozing from a gash in the rocks and beginning to snake toward us, inch by inch, at a slow pace. Luckily, it was a newly hatched flow, and it wasn’t big enough to cut us off or pose any real dangers. We set our packs down and played with it a little, tossing in pennies and watching them shrivel and squirm into blackened rivulets.

  “I’d usually ride my motorcycle right over a flow like this,” Jack told us. “The tires move so quickly they won’t burn or anything.”

  “You ride your bike over lava like this?” I asked incredulously.

  “Sure,” replied Jack. “And I’ve ridden over much worse. That’s how I get my supplies into the kipuka. What, did you think I took a chopper?”

  “What if your bike gets stuck in the lava?” asked Don.

  “Once it did,” said Jack. “My back wheel broke through the crust and sunk into the red. Just as I feel that tire sink in, the engine stalls. So I just hit the starter, the engine comes back on, and I was out of there.”

  “What if the starter hadn’t worked?” I asked.

  “Well,” said Jack. “I probably would have set the bike down and run like hell, just in case it blew up or something.”

  “So when you get home, you just pour water on your tires to cool them off?” I asked.

  “That’s a new one,” said Jack. “Who told you that?”

  “My helicopter pilot,” I explained. “He gave a whole monologue on you as we passed over your house.”

  “Really?” said Jack.

  As it turns out, most of what the pilot had told me was bunk—including his opening story on Jack’s first encounter with lava. According to my pilot, Jack was hammering the last nail into his roof when the lava first appeared on the horizon in 1983. In truth, Jack was urinating when he first saw the eruption—he had woken up early to relieve himself. “Guess you heard the romanticized version,” said Jack.

  For the most part, Jack didn’t seem to mind the many myths and half-truths that circulated about him. Yet nothing irked him more than being compared to Harry R. Truman, another highly mythologized volcano dweller. Truman was a hard-nosed, craggy-faced eighty-four-year-old man who defied the authorities and kept his home on Mount St. Helens until the volcano blew in 1980, burying him beneath three hundred feet of rubble. “Truman didn’t think the volcano would hurt him,” Jack told me as we continued our hike. “He was out of touch—he took the science and the danger of it too lightly—and that was what killed him.”

  We knew we were getting close to Jack’s kipuka when we came upon our first tree hole, which was basically a deep round shaft that had formed in the hardened lava. At one time, a tree trunk inhabited this space, then a flow of molten lava rolled in, cooled itself off, and hardened around its base. The tree itself didn’t last long. It quickly burst into flames and burned down to nothing, leaving just an empty cavity in its place. This particular tree hole went down roughly two yards to the earth below. Here there was actual soil, and from its fertile base, a new tree was now growing upward.

  The next tree hole we encountered was only knee deep, and the one after that was shallower yet. Slowly the lava was thinning out, and before long it receded completely into a field of grass. After treading across several miles of smoldering lava, we had finally reached the edge of Jack’s kipuka.

  In front of us, almost out of nowhere, a road emerged and sloped its way upward into an expanse of dense, tropical vegetation. Its pavement quickly narrowed to the width of a bike path. Years of abandonment had allowed weeds and shrubbery to cover much of the pavement. Off to the side, in the thick roadside grass, were two rusty traces of civilization: a faded street sign and the corroded wreck of a car.

  We set our packs down on what was once probably a busy suburban intersection, and Jack quickly slipped off into the woods. Moments later he returned with two coconuts. Together we hacked open their thick shells, then passed them around like flasks, sipping the cool watery milk inside. For a second course, Jack rustled up an armful of wild guavas. “Eat up,” said Jack encouragingly. “There are plenty more.” When we’d eaten all the wild fruit that we could stomach, we hoisted on our packs and continued along this road. It climbed steeply in an almost vertical, San Francisco fashion, cresting the bluff above us and disappearing into the depths of the kipuka.

  An overgrown intersection near Jack’s house, where a sun-bleached road sign still stands—a last relic of the Royal Gardens subdivision, which has been cut off by lava since the late 1980s.

  Jack’s kipuka was even larger than I had imagined. It sprawled for some six hundred acres and was lined with almost thirteen miles of road. Through the extremely dense roadside vegetation it was still possible to see the crumbling remains of Royal Gardens. Often, not much was left—a cement foundation, a broken-down doorway, and perhaps a few steps—all shrouded in a frenzy of dark jungle vines. Now and then the façade of a dank corroding house showed itself, revealing a darkened window or two. They were the sort of gaping sockets that invited the imagination to play tricks, and perhaps flicker for an instant with the image of a face that once belonged. It was no wonder that Jack nurtured so many apocalyptic fantasies, for he was living amid a landscape of ruins, in a spooky cobwebbed world that still seemed to be reeling from some Armageddon. As if on cue, we soon encountered a wild boar trotting across the road in front of us. Apparently the kipuka’s fragile ecosystem was overrun with these animals. To
gether with the rats, they had the run of the place.

  The absence of other people in Royal Gardens did not seem to depress Jack in the least. His take was that the lava had “cleaned up the neighborhood.” Apparently Royal Gardens was once filled with squatters—nomadic surfers living in little sheds nestled back in the woods. Jack didn’t mind them at first, but they quickly proved to be terrible neighbors who blasted their music at night and left their garbage everywhere. Jack recalled how the squatters directly behind him treated their pets: “Their dog had puppies and they let them wander back into the woods behind my house, where they yapped and yapped while a mongoose ate them alive.”

  As I would later learn, Royal Gardens had never been a particularly well planned or managed development. Technically it was a subdivision, a cross between suburbia and the frontier, a vast tract of mountainside that was divided into one-acre parcels and bisected with a handful of paved roads. There were no power lines, water mains, or public sewers, but the price for a lot (as low as a hundred dollars cash down in the 1960s) couldn’t be beat. According to George Cooper and Gavan Daws, who wrote a detailed history of Royal Gardens in their book Land and Power in Hawaii, the subdivision’s developers advertised far and wide. In brochures and in promotional videos they billed Royal Gardens as a suburban paradise. In 1961, one plot was even given away as a prize on ABC’s hit TV show Queen for a Day. Most of the lots in the subdivision were sold sight unseen, and ultimately the subdivision’s building codes—which forbid temporary structures, dirt driveways, or the use of second-hand lumber—were ignored. Some areas looked like shantytowns, Jack told me. The other major problem with Royal Gardens was its location. One promotional brochure touted the subdivision as being located “directly adjacent to Hawaii Volcano National Park with its spectacular attractions,” but as Cooper and Daws point out, one of these spectacular attractions was an active volcano.6