Braving Home

by Jake Halpern

  We continued walking upward through the heart of the kipuka until we came to Plumeria, the street on which Jack lived. We turned onto Plumeria, but almost immediately it was cut off by a massive finger of hardened lava, roughly fifty yards across. This was the “Warrior Flow,” a monumental vein of lava that had infiltrated the kipuka a decade ago. Apparently, it was just one of Jack’s many close calls. “The lava has been within a block of my house four or five times,” Jack told us as we paused to catch our breath. “I just hope it’s not coming again.”

  We hiked across the Warrior Flow and continued along the other side of Plumeria. Right away, however, I noticed something peculiar about the street. Its pavement was sleek, and its shoulders were carefully trimmed. Someone had been maintaining the road. Then, at the far end of the block, I saw a modern two-story house with an unmistakable bright red roof.

  The front end of the house was propped up on stilts, allowing it to soar off the hillside and offer a commanding view—down the mountain, across the flats, and far out over the Pacific Ocean. A wooden deck wrapped around the house on all sides, and the front section was furnished with a dining area and a swinging loveseat. The best view, however, appeared to be from the second floor; this was Jack’s room, a small crow’s nest with windows on all sides. Beneath the house were two Machu Picchu-style stone terraces, each overflowing with yellow orchids. A small gravel path led the way upward, along the edge of a palm tree-lined garden and over to a narrow set of steps that ascended to the front deck.

  As the three of us strolled down the remainder of the street, Jack explained that the house practically took care of itself. The roof was outfitted with solar panels, which provided him with all the electricity he needed. His drinking water was gathered by a “catch system,” which drained rainwater from his upper roof into a large, elevated basin beside his house. This water was filtered and then channeled downward into the house’s pipes. Water was always on tap, and, as I would soon learn, even the shower pressure was good.

  Food was just as plentiful, Jack explained, as he took us behind the house to visit his two-tiered garden. The upper tier was lined with palm trees and giant red hibiscus flowers, but the real stunner was the lower tier, which Jack referred to as his “Hobbit Land Garden.” A secret wooded path led down into a miniature valley buttressed by a number of sturdy mountain rocks and concealed overhead by a canopy of trees. The entrance path was booby trapped with a number of “pig snares,” which kept the fruit safe from the hoards of roaming pigs. The fruits were plentiful, including papayas, bananas, poha berries, and ava (a cure-all herbal medicine, according to Jack). The walls of the Hobbit Land Garden were lined with thumbilina vines, which grew delicate white flowers known to glow radiantly in the light of a full moon.

  Together with the upper tier, Jack’s garden grew an astounding range of produce, including four different types of avocados, seven different types of mangos, an abundance of cherries, bread fruit, mandarin oranges, tangerines, Key limes, star fruit, white pineapples (some as big as twelve pounds), string beans, tomatoes, zucchinis, and occasionally eggplants. To spice things up, he also had a steady crop of black pepper, cilantro, and basil.

  As Jack gave us the quick tour around his garden, he identified various flowers, offered samples of fruit from each tree, and promised to make fresh guacamole for dinner.

  “This place is beautiful,” I told him at one point.

  Jack nodded his head in agreement. “And I know it’s beautiful out there too,” he said, gesturing back toward the direction from which we came. “I can just appreciate it more in here.”

  After touring the garden, we climbed the front steps up to Jack’s house and sat for a moment on his deck, taking in the sweeping views of the Pacific. Yet our attention soon shifted to some thin wisps of black smoke rising in the distance. “Shit,” said Jack. “Looks like some trees are on fire.”

  “How close?” asked Don.

  “Don’t know,” replied Jack, “but it looks like it’s somewhere in the kipuka.”

  Earlier in the day Jack had expressed his concerns that lava was on the verge of infiltrating the kipuka once again. Jack’s house was positioned on the western edge of the kipuka, roughly a quarter of a mile from where the trees stopped and lava began to flow. The lava here was no small trickle. As Jack explained, it was one of the main channels flowing directly downward from the Pu’u ’O’o vent. Here, at this most important juncture between jungle and fire, stood Jack’s saving grace: a massive rock wall that stretched all the way down the mountainside, keeping the lava at bay. This wall formed in the mid-1980s when a large finger of lava worked its way down the mountainside, grazing the side of the kipuka. Much like a rivulet of wax running down the side of a candle, this rivulet hardened and left a decisive trail—only it was made of solid stone and stood at least twenty feet high. The other factor working in Jack’s favor was that the ground on the far side of the wall was sunken, creating a kind of chute that guided the lava downward. Crucial as these natural fortifications were, Jack hardly ever saw them because the trees around his house were too thick and too high. Consequently, if and when his protective wall was ever breached, Jack would know only because of indirect warning signs, much like the black smoke that was currently billowing in the distance.

  “Do your hear that?” Jack asked. As the three of us stood in silence, we began to hear a faint popping noise in the distance. Gradually the popping got louder, and after two or three minutes we heard the sound of several small explosions. “Definitely trees on fire,” said Jack. “Those are methane explosions.”

  The floor of the jungle is actually filled with pockets of methane gas, which are created by tree roots. When these pockets explode it’s a sure sign that trees are burning. I gave Don a mild look of concern, but he just nodded his head as if everything were normal, as if this is the way his volcano vacations always began.

  Moments later, as we were entering the house, Jack discovered a small note tucked into the front door. The note was scrawled hastily across the face of a business card from a local helicopter pilot named Richard Gruno. It read: “Jack, stopped by to talk to you about lava. Call me, Richard.”

  Jack shook his head, chuckled, and then pondered aloud, “Why didn’t he just say, ‘Run like hell’?”

  The inside of Jack’s house centered around his living room, a large, airy space with vaulted cathedral ceilings and an abundance of windows looking out in all directions. The room was furnished with several couches, a hand-woven rug emblazoned with the Hawaii state emblem, and a television set that no longer received much of a signal from its vine-entangled satellite dish. Off the living room were two guest bedrooms, a bathroom, and a modern kitchen (furnished with a refrigerator that Jack left unplugged and used as a giant Tupperware container). At the far end of the living room was a narrow stairway leading to the crow’s nest above, where Jack’s bedroom was located. The entire place was immaculately clean, with every last item placed just so, as if arranged for a photo shoot.

  “The place looks great,” said Don. In the background the methane explosions were still very much audible.

  “Thanks,” said Jack. “What I’d really like to do is put on a new roof, but with the lava just over there, I can’t really justify doing that right now.” In the coming days Jack named a number of home improvement projects that were currently on hold until the situation with the lava improved. “Otherwise,” he explained, “I’m just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

  As we settled down and unpacked our bags, I asked Jack if his house had sustained any serious damage since the eruption began in 1983. “You know,” he replied, “it was actually an earthquake that got me the worst.” Jack went on to explain that one morning, several years ago, he was working in his garden when a ten-foot “land wave” rolled down the mountain, through the woods, and across his back yard.* It popped his house up in the air like a toy, he recalled, and plunked it down on the roof of his Toyota. This was a good thing,
insisted Jack. If it weren’t for the Toyota, which was quickly crushed under the front end of the house, the whole structure might have hit the ground much harder or simply toppled forward down the hill.

  In the weeks after the quake Jack lived in a veritable funhouse, with the floors slanting at wild angles and the staircase running nearly flat. In order to sleep properly, Jack recalled, he placed wooden blocks under his bed to stop himself from rolling onto the floor. Eventually he went to Western Auto, bought two twenty-ton hydraulic jacks, and proceeded to crank his house back up to its proper height. The only problem was that he applied too much pressure on one small point, creating such torque that the window above him started to crack. Eventually Jack decided to crank his house upward very slowly, two inches at a time, along forty different posts. When his house was at its proper height once again, Jack set to work on his Toyota. He used a sledgehammer to pound the roof back into shape, got back into his car, and started the engine. “It still drove quite well,” Jack recalled.

  Later in the afternoon, as Jack and I ventured into his garden to pick avocados for dinner, I asked him about the current situation with the lava. “The lava is always on my mind,” he said as we both eyed the black smoke in the distance, “but I can’t jump out of my skin every time I get a warning.”

  In Jack’s two decades on the volcano he had received dozens of warnings like Richard Gruno’s, he explained. They came from the police, the civil defense, his former neighbors, helicopter pilots, and countless others. He didn’t ignore these tips or doubt their veracity. Somewhere in the back of his head he took note, put himself on alert, and in his own quiet way readied himself to walk away from it all. If and when the time came, there would be no need to run, explained Jack, because new lava creeps through the jungle very slowly.

  “But isn’t the lava closer now than it has been in ten years?” I asked.

  “No,” replied Jack. “The lava is closer now than it has been in about twelve years.”

  “So doesn’t that make you nervous?”

  “Sure it does,” said Jack. “But that’s just part of the deal here. And besides, I can deal with Mother Nature. It’s people I can’t handle, especially mean people who want to take advantage of you. Dealing with the volcano, she lets you know she’s there, but she isn’t malicious like some of the bosses I’ve had. The volcano is just nature stirring—it is not somebody that is deliberately abusing you or deriving some perverse pleasure from it. You know what I mean?”

  Actually, Jack’s preference for isolation made me think of the other home-keepers I’d met—like Thad Knight, who preferred the company of “bygones” in the Princeville cemetery, and Babs Reynolds, who opted for the solitude of a gated mountain hideaway. The drawbacks to all of these places were obvious, perhaps even overwhelming, but the payoff was the absence of society and all of its hassles. Nobody wanted to live on an erupting volcano, and this (among other things) made it the perfect place for Jack. Of course, there were undeniable downsides to his arrangement, but Jack had come to terms with them. As he put it: “For me, the lava is just the price of paradise.”

  Together, Jack and I picked almost a dozen perfect jade-green avocados. We then returned to the kitchen, where Jack proceeded to mash them up and mix in tomatoes, onions, and lime juice. Around twilight we all sat down for dinner on the front porch. Don grilled a chicken that he’d carried in, Jack presented his guacamole, and I uncorked a bottle of red wine that I had schlepped across the lava. As night rolled in from the east and the last hues of orange and violet sank into the sea, darkness arrived and the lava began to gleam. Beneath us on the flats, all the cracks and crevices, all the trickles and streams, every last trace of lava that had barely been discernable in the glare of the noonday sun, now exuded a deep, fiery glow. A vast network of flickering veins stretched across the flats for miles, as if the earth itself were coming apart at the seams. Occasionally, one of these veins overflowed, and within minutes a small pond of lava accumulated. These outbreaks were especially beautiful, and we took turns admiring them with Jack’s binoculars.

  “You’ll never meet another guy like Lava Jack,” said Don after a while. “My wife thinks he’s crazy. ‘Why in God’s name is he out there?’ she asks me. Any other place I go, she wants to go with me. ‘Why can’t I come?’ she says. But not here. She won’t come here.”

  Throughout the day Jack had quipped that Don came to the volcano to take a “mind shit”—to clear his head of all his worldly troubles. This was Don’s third vacation on the volcano, and once again he seemed to be enjoying himself. “It is such a fantastic show,” concluded Don. “When this thing is all lit up and the lava is flowing, you just can’t experience that anywhere else.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack finally. “I feel kind of privileged that I’ve been able to witness this.”

  After dinner, Jack turned off all the lights and appliances in order to conserve electricity. We bussed our dishes and then returned to the darkened comfort of the front deck to continue our volcano gazing. Far off in the distance, we could still hear the methane explosions, and off to the side of the house, above the curtain of trees, the sky was now glowing red.

  The following morning I awoke to a chorus of songbirds, which sounded much better than the methane explosions I had fallen asleep to. It was seven A.M. and Jack was already up. When he saw me stirring, he brewed us a pot of coffee and poured it into two large mugs. We carried our mugs onto the front deck, leaned up against the wooden rail, and listened sleepily to the buzz and hum of the jungle.

  “When I first moved up here I thought my ears were ringing,” said Jack. “Then I realized it was just the sound of the insects.” Over the years Jack had grown accustomed to these sounds and the deep, familiar solitude that they invited. “People rarely spend an hour alone—I’ve spent years alone,” he told me. “When you’re by yourself, it’s just your own movie spinning through your head. You’re dealing with your own problems. Once I nearly forgot how to talk. I opened my mouth and just a bunch of babble came out.” Jack smiled as he took another sip of his coffee. He seemed quite content, and it was almost impossible to believe that this was the same man I’d met just the day before.

  For breakfast Jack prepared some delicious french toast and another round of coffee. By then Don was awake, and the three of us sat together in the kitchen, chatting and eating. “It’s kind of nice having people up here,” said Jack as chewed his eggy bread and stared dreamily out the window toward the Pacific Ocean.

  “Sure,” said Don, “but we don’t want to get in the way of you doing whatever it is that you do up here.”

  “This is what I do up here,” replied Jack as he continued to stare at the Pacific.

  For the next several days our mornings began exactly in this manner—a cup of coffee on the deck, a leisurely breakfast of french toast in the kitchen, and then a few good hours of reading, walking, or simply staring out over the lava and into the sea. At one point, several days into our visit, Don asked what the date was. It took the three of us a minute or so to come up with an answer. Afterward, I asked Jack if the days often blend together on the volcano.

  “The days? Hell, the months blend together,” he replied. “Sometimes I don’t know what month it is. I open the calendar and I don’t know where to look.” This was a good thing, according to Jack, for he’d already wasted too much of life being a slave to the clock.

  Over the course of my stay, Jack recalled a number of his less-than-memorable job experiences. As a boy he had worked at a chinchilla farm, cleaning up sawdust in one musty cage after the next. The females would sometimes stand on their hind legs and fire out a spray of urine. “And they were deadly accurate,” added Jack. When he was still living in Bakersfield, he became a sheet metal apprentice, where he worked in a poorly ventilated attic that cooked him in 125-degree heat. After coming to Hawaii, things didn’t improve much when he took a job working on the air-conditioning system at Hilo International Airport. “I had dirt on me fr
om all over the world,” he remembered. Perhaps his worst job of all was working under the pier in Hilo, reinforcing its underside with gunite, a concrete mixture that is pumped through a hose and sprayed from a special gun. Jack worked all day in the dark, firing out tons and tons of gunite from the discomfort of a small raft. At the end of his shift he emerged with hardened concrete strewn across his cheeks and hair, as if his weary looks were forever to be etched in stone.

  In 1998, Jack finally devised a way to end his occupational drudgery: He would open a bed and breakfast. Initially, the idea made perfect sense: Jack was a homebody living in an incredible natural setting who wanted to make some extra cash without having to leave the kipuka. However, a few problems soon cropped up. To begin with, as John Pillsbury explained to me, most people were scared of volcanoes. But even if Pillsbury had managed to lure in a great many guests, there was the added problem that Jack was—by his own admission—not a people person. He was ill at ease with strangers, let alone strangers living in his house. What’s more, Jack loathed self-promotion. As I would find out months later, when the TV crew from Living on the Edge finally visited, Jack didn’t plug his B&B, he refused to do anything too stagy, and he didn’t really encourage the crew to stay for the night (when the lava is at its best). All in all, this did not make for good business. Since the grand opening, Jack’s B&B had hosted a few memorable guests, including William Shatner and a high-level Russian dignitary, but nothing resembling a steady flow of customers. Of course, Jack was disappointed by this, but I also got the sense that he was somewhat relieved.