Image: Sign in Lava Tree State Monument, Pahoa, HI: “STAY ON TRAIL. DANGEROUS EARTH CRACKS IN PARK AREA” (Photo: Ruth Adar)
Today I visited a most remarkable place: Lava Tree State Monument near Pahoa, on the Big Island of Hawai’i.
It is a place of profound beauty, and after watching videos of the eruption this summer that nearly obliterated this park, I also see it as a place of terror. The “Lava Trees” are actually molds of O’hi’a Lihua trees (Metrosideros polymorpha) formed during a 1790 eruption of Kilauea volcano. The lava flowed across the ground, burning everything in its path, coating the trunks of the trees, after which the trees burned away within their lava jackets. What is left is an eerie column of cooled lava, which looks as much like a person than a tree.
This is a photo of Linda standing next to one of the larger lava trees. As you can see, lichens, mosses and plants have taken root in the crevices of the “tree.”
Notice the asphalt path that runs through the park. It was a rare treat to visit a place for which I had truly equal access. As the sign in the photo at the top says, everyone has to stay on the path.
Volcanos always bring to mind the processes of creation and destruction, for the two happen simultaneously in an eruption. Nothing I know of, short of the ocean, can withstand a lava flow. It burns and destroys everything in its path. And yet it carries the seeds of creation: new land, hard and craggy at first, but the raw material for a lush landscape when the conditions come together. A bird drops an o’hi’a seed; the plant has the gift of breaking down lava into its elements, to slowly form soil. Other plants take advantage, and other birds drop other seeds. A forest grows, another eruption takes place, melting the old lava, burning the new growth, and the process begins again.
The opening of the book of Genesis is usually translated something like, “In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.” In fact, the Hebrew conveys a sense of ongoing creation, something more like, “In the beginning God is creating the heavens and the earth.”
“Is creating” – that is what I saw in Hawai’i this week. Only a short distance away, a lava flow destroyed over 700 homes this past summer. Priceless wildlife habitat was destroyed, along with many rare creatures, like the green sea turtles which essentially boiled to death in the Kipoho tide pools as the lava swamped the pools. About 35.5 square kilometers of the big island were covered with lava, including about 3.5 square kilometers of new real estate added to the island. There were awful losses buried under a new beginning. “God is creating the heavens and the earth.”
Kilauea is not finished, although she may be quiet for a while. If geological history is an indicator, it has all happened many times before and will happen many times again. There may be, as Kohelet said, “Nothing new under the sun,” (Ecclesiastes 1:9) but the process of creation is one new beginning after another.
The photo is roughly full-size.
