Ka Lea

“Only you would drive on a donut around the island, especially the Big Island,” Nina said just a few minutes before the donut blew out stranding us at Miloli’i Road, 30 miles from Ka Lea, 80 miles from home. Sitting in the seats again, the car moving backwards, high on top of the tow truck, we take in the sights, things we’d never seen driving car-low, things like matching jeep trucks parked in a circle, caribou and ostriches chewing cud, below the grade at Ka’u Macadamia Farm.

Enlightment is always possible, even though we’re two hundred in the hole now– but not all kids get to ride on a tow truck!

Back on the road, common again at heights not known for seeing beyond the standard limits, we stop at a restaurant instead of a park, to eat and blow the rest of our trip budget.

It’s late and we’ve missed all our appointments; Wolf with the Yurt, Sandra from Uganda, and the jewelry box we left on the last excursion to Ka Lea.

The Hawaiian pork was good and the ahi fresh and we feel fat and sleepy and we drive to Black Sands Park late and its full and we drive to Whittington and its full and it’s off to windy Ka Lae and we know the drill, don’t drive off the cliff in the night, into the ocean, into depths so deep and water so clear you could almost be thankful for such a splendid grave. We try to find some lee and by midnight we park in a little depression far enough from the cliffs that if you forgot where you were, and woke to pee, you’d probably wouldn’t walk that far.

The kids are awake and excited because they like Ka Lae, the red lights of the wind turbines flashing red in the distance, the wind and the sound of ocean swells pounding the volcanic crust below.

We pull out our sleeping bags – I don’t think it’s going to rain, although clouds are everywhere – but this is Ka Lae, a coastal desert and it’s never rained on us before and we’ve been through enough this night. Mesa and Reef wiggle between the sleeping bags, maybe they’ll sing together, sing themselves to sleep like they did here Christmas night but they horse around in a different way and then give it up – dead asleep now in the soft grass, next to the Crown Vic, our shield against wayward drivers in the night.

Two cars appear, their sound wholly muted by the wind and waves and only the lights glide by, like a mirage following a road, turning, climbing, gone.

Tomorrow might be a better day, in terms of things to accomplish, and maybe we’ll get to Puna and look at those 8 acres and they’ll be just what we want after all those months of looking, looking for the farm land and climate that will make everyone happy and give us reason to stay on the Big Island. But deep down I know that the wetness of Puna and the thin volcanic soil and the fact that no house exists will make it hard and I wonder if I really want that at this stage of life, might I play it safe and live in what’s already established?

The full moon backlights the dark clouds that push across the sky as the trades direct them east to west. We lie on the southern-most tip of the USA, latitude 19, a little over 1000 miles to the middle circumference of the earth and watch occasional stars beckon between clouds and the children sleep heavy and I want to file this moment, for the times ahead, maybe for the final reel, so that I can be happy before death.

Tomorrow is already itself, untouched and nothing I can do can to change that – so I ask to sleep as the first puff of rain drizzles down. It stops and starts again a little heavier this time and stops and then bursts but stops again and I stand and look at what’s coming and far out in the distance beyond the land, is that light over the sea?

The rain will pass, but doesn’t and now everybody is up, the tarp duck-taped to the car to make a poor lean to and the foot end of the sleeping bags sticking out, soaked and Nina sniffles and coughs and now sneezes and I say, “There’s some light just out there,” but I don’t really believe it myself.