I have heard that before a big wave, the sky turns orange as the shore widens. The birds fly away and the legged animals take themselves uphill. In the emptiness there is an eerie silence, one that used to be more powerful than sirens and news alerts on every television, back when we used to know how to listen, how to hear.
I have heard that before Kīlauea erupts, you are to offer Pele ohelo berries and leis. You are not to take anything from the land that doesn’t belong to you. You are not to leave anything that wasn’t already there. The mother does not take kindly to messy house guests. The mother is protective of all she has created: her lush forests, her plumerias, her black sand shores. That is to say, she is angry.
Pele provides. But in their joy and abundance, her children forget their mother. They leave their shoes out. The counters get sticky. They bruise her because in their haste to get out the door, they don’t see where she is standing, and they forget to say goodbye. They imagine a home of their own, one where they call the shots. It is in this cloud of movement and forgetfulness that Pele begins to anger. It starts in her stomach, a low simmer into a boil. As the pressure mounts, it moves to her chest. Eventually, she opens her mouth to scream.
I have heard that the lava flows don’t take every house. They don’t take every person, or every car, or every pasture. The hot liquid rock moves down the sides of the mountain, overtaking some life, and precisely moving around others, forming little circles around the homes of the people who don’t forget to feed Pele, to brush her hair, to lay with her, to listen.
In the aftermath, her children peek out to assess the damage. They lay flowers down on the hardened rock. They count what needs to be rebuilt. They remember — Pele is my mother. I shall not take shells from her shores. I shall not slip rocks in my pockets. This is my mother’s house, and I will let it be her sanctuary.
On the island that Pele rules, the rock is not just rock, and the ocean is not just ocean; these are the burial grounds where the ancestors rest. The island is haunted with ghosts who retain their particular humanity. The spirits can leave the island, and they will follow you if you take anything from it, only returning when you put back what was taken.
But I have heard that sometimes, the spirit is lonely and unanchored. In these cases, it may choose to stay, finding a home in your family. Many years ago, a man wearing a big hat came home with a young boy on account of a pocketed rock. Though it was mailed back, the ghost chose to stay to oversee his sister. For two generations, the courting husband-to-be has been visited in a dream at the moment the daughter considers marrying him. The man in the big hat watches him, appraising his choices.
This island, out in the center of the loneliest ocean, remembers everything. It remembers when the great ships came to shore. It remembers the canoes before that. It remembers being born, and the first time it saw the sky. It likes the fresh warm rock that forms another layer of skin, how it feels so bare before everything grows back. It likes the smell of plumerias and guava and sea salt once it does. Its sister islands have stopped renewing, but it will not stop yet. It doesn’t know how to remember without being reborn.
