12:00 HST
A quick stop at Panalu’u beach. Black sands and obsidian shores. A sticker, and a bottle of the ink-dark sand as a keepsake — not to remember that beaches differ, but maybe just to remember the four sea turtles I noticed as I walked in, motionless on the shore like stones that learned to breathe. The sands are blistering, making their way through the grips of my shoes. My legs ache, my back hurts, and all I can think of is the heat, and the way that even the water here would betray me — cold, sharp, indifferent. The shores are littered with tourists who, just like me, are curious about these shores. In the distance you can hear the laughter as diver after diver throws their body off a cliff into the cold waters below.
Two hours later I arrive at the twin furnaces of . Thirty dollars is the price of entry to view the island’s forge. The visitors center is closed for renovations, and the welcome center is little more than a help desk attached to a gift shop fronting military barracks that remind me of basic. As if on cue the old mannerisms sink back in. No covers inside. Lockstep to the person at your side. The drizzle at four thousand feet is a welcome reprieve from the seventy-five degree heat. Seventy-five on the mainland is nothing, but at this elevation where oxygen is thinner than a thread and you feel closer to the sun, seventy-five feels like ninety in the humidity with no breeze. The volcano is quiet, resting — a nap before its violent awakening — and if you look long enough you can almost see the rising steam of its snore at the far end of the crater.
Below, I descend into Nāhuku. A single cave structure that extends for a quarter mile beneath the earth. The lights are snuffed — either because the volcano forgot to pay its light bill or just because the parks are short on funding. Into the dark we travel, phone torches in hand, as the earth around us moves. A thin wall of solidified magma older than the roads it took us to get here, and for a moment you can hear movement behind the walls through the crack of the cave. The darkness is absolute, the stone warm against your palm. There’s something almost holy about walking through a lava tube in the dark. The same reverence as when you step into a cathedral. It feels old, ancient, as if reminding you that the blood that courses through this island is not just heat, but fire. You keep walking.