When the end of the road takes you
back to the beginning BY MICHELLE PLOTKIN Makena Road, Maui, Hawaii
M
akena Road, on the southwestern side of Maui, ends at a lava field. The remnants from the last time a volcano erupted on Maui, over 200 years ago. Dark, jagged volcanic rock, as far as you can see. When you pick up a piece, it is porous, light yet sharp, cutting into your hand if you hold too tightly. Scattered vegetation has struggled to poke through the harsh terrain in places, but it is otherwise barren. Warm trade winds gently roll in from the Pacific Ocean to the west as waves break close to the shore. To the east, green hills roll across the landscape. We had driven Makena Road many times before, usually stopping at beaches or a coconut stand, but we’d never gone all the way to the end.
middle of the ocean. This remote, bountiful, inspiring land—a land rich with diverse micro-climates that create abundant ecosystems to feed the souls, appetites, and livelihoods of the people who live and play here, and majestic sunsets that gently end each glorious day. You should wear rigid shoes to the lava field, the guidebooks all tell me. And sunscreen. Bring lots of water. Maybe a snack. The guidebooks all sound like my mother.
The guidebooks. My mother. Both are partially responsible for where I have ended up today. But getting to the lava field at the end of the road, like getting these words to the page with commas neatly inserted—hopefully in the appropriate places—to submitting articles and pitching story ideas, starting my first book, My considering myself a writer and not an impostor…this has been my journey. mind split
I’m standing in a parking lot with my husband and our nine-year-old daughter, staring at the vastness of the lava field in the scorching, The desire to write percolated inside open, and the blinding sunlight. It takes a moment me for years. Like the magma under to sink in. This exact point—where words, like lava, the ocean, I felt the pressure. It was the dirt road transitions to rock— fear, creating a physical force, that held came rushing is a portal, echoing back to the the words inside. I was afraid to write, beginning of Maui. This primordial out. fearing I would not be good at it, that I panorama beckons to the time before might embarrass myself. Fearing I wouldn’t there was a road, before there was an island, have anything interesting to say, that no one before there was anything here but water. would listen. And, psychologically, fearing what The end of the road has taken us to the beginning. might come out once I started. Fearing I might not Deep within the earth, a million years ago, magma burst through the ocean floor, became lava as it hit the surface, and created an island in the sea. A million years ago, this is all that Maui was—a volcanic mountain tapering to a field of molten rock. In Hawaiian, Makena means abundance, a gift, a reward. The lava emerged in great abundance; it was a gift. A gift that put this magnificent place here in the 26
wordworks | 2022 Volume I
be able to stop. Fearing it would consume me. For a long time, the feeling was there, and I ignored it. Like the volcanoes under the Pacific, whose immense power built the massive Hawaiian archipelago, the pressure inside me could hardly be contained. Until it couldn’t. My mind split open, and the words, like lava, came rushing out. Flowing across the landscape of my life, past my family, my friends, my work, my
