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efan By St
KeOlaMagazine.com | July - August 2021
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d e n r u t e R a v a L t h g Ni no
Verba
ruce Miller and Ed Clapp headed to the crater overlook that fateful December night to stargaze and celebrate the solstice. A cold, wet mist hung in the mountain air, surrounding them. They approached the volcano’s rim as an evening breeze carried sheets of drizzle out past the cliffs and down into the great chasm of slumping rock cloaked in darkness below. Beams of light from the crescent moon mingled with the mist in the distance creating a moonbow, its faint white glow reflected one moment and obscured the next by ranks of translucent clouds rolling past. The night was quiet and still at first. Bruce and Ed looked in all directions and saw only the cold darkness of a deserted overlook and parking lot. Stout ‘ōhi‘a trees stood silhouetted against a sky of intermittent stars. The formless black void of Halema‘uma‘u Crater lay beyond, swallowing up all of the falling moonbeams attempting to illuminate its elaborate, craggy pit and muddy lake. Ever since its dramatic expansion in 2018, this stepped canyon has filled the horizon at Kīlauea Volcanoʻs summit from end to end. Suddenly, with no warning—not even the slightest rumble felt—a tiny tinkle of light began to flicker somewhere deep within the craterʻs all-engulfing black hole. Ed noticed it first, and pointed it out to Bruce. It was just before 9:30pm. “He looked out and said: ‘Thereʻs a light down there,’” Bruce said, recalling the sequence of events that night. “I said: ‘Come on!’” The two men stood at the rim for a minute arguing about what could possibly be causing this flickering so far out there in the void...a geologist’s headlamp? A camera? A drone? They considered every other possible explanation besides the one creeping around at the back of their minds. Neither one at first wanted to entertain the idea that a year and a half after the formation of Halema‘uma‘u’s peaceful and unassuming gravel lake in July 2019, somehow, somewhere out there in the cold, misty abyss, the brilliant reddish-orange lava that is the lifeblood of Hawai‘i Island—that rained down such utter destruction onto its Lower Puna District nearly three years ago—had found its way back to the surface once again. Ten minutes later they knew it couldn’t be anything else; Kīlauea was erupting.
