The Earth Factory

Communities at the southeast end of The Big Island, namely around Pahoa and Kalapana, have been devastated by a seaward lava flow that has cut through communities, damaged infrastructure, eliminated idyllic beach fronts and left open questions for residents and politicians who struggle to respond in human time frames to the unpredictability of a geological cycle.

At this time, local authorities continuously allow trips to observe the lava with minimal policing, though access to the area is limited to bikes and sneakers after dusk. I paid one of the many entrepreneurial families some $10-hr to rent a bike to ride the 5 miles across a gravel roadway -- in pitch black, alone -- to get to the site of entry to the Atlantic Ocean. While the journey is somewhat easier during the day, only at night is the soft glow visible of yet uncooled rocks, poised to swamp wayward feet.

Somehow, the trip takes an hour, or so it seems. You tie up your bike with the chain you've been rented and with no one to guide you, you look to parades of headlamps, having formed lines to both the main flow and the edge of the sea. Navigating the cooled lava field under a black sky involves a scramble over swirls you jump between like boulders. They crinkle under your foot as though you are grinding fiberglass. Walking close to the active flow, gassy emissions can be seen leaving the glowing orange crease; it stretches one way to the ocean, and the other a far-off hill.
The steady flow of sulfur dioxide wisps away from you only so long as the wind remains at your back. Both the brave and ill-informed, the romantic and the family encumbered, choke in stoccato, early and often.

At the ocean's edge, you stop upon a newly-resolved overlook, 30ft above the waves below. It is a platform of flaky, black, igneous rock with features that respond to stumbled slaps with lacerations.
But then there it is, 100 yards away: the Earth Factory. It is the ocean, continuously lapping against gooey, orange fingers that hiss as the Earth itself is manufactured in an otherwise quiet moment of genesis, Biblical Genesis.
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