What the island gives, the island also takes away

By Kathleen Merryman

The vog cloaked all of Hawaii as we flew in to visit our grandchildren and their parents.
The cloud of volcanic smog was born in the 4,000 tons of sulphur dioxide that Madam Pele has been blowing out of one old and one new vent on the Kilauea Volcano every day lately. When you’re the goddess who’s still summoning the lava to enlarge paradise in the midst of an ocean, you’re allowed a spate of heavy breathing. Vog’s a fact of life on the Big Island, where Pele’s been increasing the acreage around Kilauea for 20-some years.
Generally, the island keeps its atmosphere to itself. But in the middle of May, the trade winds died for a few days, and suddenly, vog was veiling Maui, Lanai, Molokai, Oahu and Kauai.
It made the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser, in a story about what sulphur dioxide diluted with soft sea air will do to crops, the water supply, tourism and lungs.
It was the vocabulary lesson on Northwest Airlines Flight 219 on May 17, as locals explained the haze to tourists puzzled by the lack of clarity in Honolulu.
“Vog,” we said, pointing our rental car north on Kauai, the Garden Island where our granddaughter Eden and grandson Devon are sprouting like peppers.
Kauai, the sweetest of the islands, is dancing a hula in geologic time. In flames, she rose from the ocean and formed herself to catch the winds and the rains in a crater that remains the wettest place on Earth. The eldest of her sisters, she is relaxing now, and sinking. Under her mantle of soil, she is the patient island, welcoming the newly married, embracing families, and putting up with tourists.
On her slow dance downward, she is also the island of loss.
In Old Kapaa Town and at the beaches, a young man with starter dreadlocks and heartbreaking, vulnerable blue eyes smiled out of posters.
“We miss you, son,” his parents had written. “Please call us.”
The parents had come to Kauai to find the boy who had fallen out of touch. As our week passed peacefully, with grandchildren laughing in their happy family, the people tacking up the pictures grew desperate. They had to return to the mainland.
Please, they begged their boy in a second round of posters, contact them at a certain restaurant, a certain address.
Young people come to Kauai to live not just on, but with, the island, said my stepdaughter Amy the gardener and her husband, Derek, the adventure guide. Both of them had done exactly that.
But some of those young people forget that Kauai is an island in motion. Three of Amy and Derek’s friends – a couple and their infant – were washed away in a flood. An acquaintance of theirs, a baker, slipped on the black rocks of the Napali Coast, with fatal results. From time to time, young people walk out by themselves and never return.
For all her gentleness, Kauai demands toughness and resourcefulness of her people. We tourists can holo holo from beach to beach in fleets of rental cars, dropping cash as if we would never need it again. But for residents, expenses are high, and opportunities are limited.
Derek, our adventure guide, had reached as high as he was going to get looking after ziplining and kayaking tourists. Even with two part-time jobs, it was not enough on an island of star-high rents and $5 gallons of milk.
He looked into the vog, and found the change his family needed.
This summer, he will take a job managing a new adventure ranch just up the highway from where Pele is at work now, puffing out vog. The family will move to the corner of the Big Island of Hawaii with favorable winds and clear skies.
They will move to the young island where creation looks disconcertingly like destruction.
Aloha, Pele, to you and your vog.
Mahalo, Kauai. Mahalo.