"The Kite of Kilauea"

The Kite of Kilauea

by Carl L. Biemiller

Chapter Nine

There was a day not long after the Battle of the Beach which looked like any other day. It started like any other one, right on time, that is, and it put on its regular blue sky coat and sunshine cap and put a handful of breeze in its pocket. And it stopped right there being just another day.

The telephone rang before Terry and Doctor Tommy finished breakfast. It was Uncle George calling from Honolulu where he had gone quite early. Terry remembered that business in Honolulu starts early in the morning because it stops early in the afternoon so people can get about the real work of enjoying life. The telephone call brought Kimo out of the kitchen in a hurry.

Kimo was stirred up about something, and Terry had never seen Kimo excited about anything. Kimo rattled a burst of Hawaiian at Doctor Tommy, and Doctor Tommy stood up and looked like a man about to start a race.

"Whatever is the matter?" asked Terry.

"Pele has come home," said Kimo.

Doctor Tommy grinned.

"There has been a big volcanic eruption on Hawaii," he said. "The volcano Kilauea is spouting lava into the sky."

Kimo rattled off some more Hawaiian.

"Uncle George has the pineapple company's airplane and pilot," explained Doctor Tommy. "We are all flying over to the Big Island to see the show, and we're taking the Pachekos before they go to school. They know about it because Uncle George has already called there."

"When?" asked Terry.

"Right now," snapped Doctor Tommy. "Put on some dungarees and shoes, not loafers. We may be crawling around on some 'a'a, old lava rock. Go, boy, go!

"Hurry," added Kimo. "The car is ready now and so am I." Terry changed swiftly. He tried to think what Kimo had told him about volcanoes, especially about Kilauea. Kimo had said that its crater was active. It bubbled red in its house of fire, the crater pit called halemaumau. And, that when the goddess Pele was angry, it erupted, and, sometimes, killed people. He wondered why anybody would want to go near a volcano when it erupted.

Terry still had a great deal to learn about the Islands. Hawaiians have loved and feared their volcanoes forever and perhaps with more love than fear. The legends of Pele are deeply ingrained in the lore of the folk. The news of the eruption had already spread, by radio, newspapers, telephone, and the racing network of gossip and rumor called the "calabash vine". There would be visitors to the Puna District of Hawaii from all the Islands as soon as they could get there.

"Wikiwiki, wikiwiki, hurry!" boomed Kimo.

Terry glanced about the room. The tube kite container was lying on his table. He picked it up automatically and from habit. He was ready.

For once, so were the Pachekos and they dived into the car without chattering. But they looked like three child bombs about to go off. And Terry could feel their feeling.

Kimo drove as fast as he could without being reckless. Honolulu's streets buzzed with people acting like bees. The airport was crowded when they arrived, and cars were jammed any old jumbly in all the parking places. Kimo, Kimo the calm and dignified, pulled up before the airport entrance and simply left the car, and a thousand automobile horns blared in outrage as they walked away from it.

"Uncle Keoki will pay a big fine for this," said Maka darkly.

Uncle George was waiting for them. He was yelling.

"Come on out of this crowd. We're at Gate Three with the company plane. It's a twin engine Beech. Lots of room, and the pilot's ready."

Uncle George banged away ahead of them. Terry held on to Kim's hand and his kite. The Pachekos burrowed in Doctor Tommy's trail. Terry was breathless when they boarded the plane and sat down with Maka.

"You sit near the puka, window," she said.

"Pukalani, a window which opens on heaven," said Kimo behind them.

"You will see something when we fly over Maui. You will see Haleakala which means house of the sun. It was also once a home for Pele."

The plane taxied out to the runway. It shivered when the pineapple pilot gunned its engines, then skittered down the runway and lifted.

They were off!

Uncle George yelled happily at everybody. He was full of information.

"I heard about it just before I called Kimo and the Pachekos. I was talking to an associate at Hilo. He told me that Kilauea broke out on the mountainside this time. Not from the crater at all. The whole mountain is splitting in many places along its sides. People have left a few of the villages already. Many fields are in the path of the lava flow. Crops are cooking."

"What about Mauna Loa?" asked Doctor Tommy.

"Nothing," said Uncle George. "They're watching it. He turned to Terry. "Mauna Loa is another volcano, and it's supposed to be the biggest single mountain on earth. I remember when it went off some fifteen years ago. It wiped out a lot of coffee fields on the Kona side of the Island. It spilled so much hot lava into the sea that you could eat boiled fish fifty miles off shore."

Kimo interrupted. "At night," he said, "The sky was a great torch. And great red rivers formed blazing waterfalls as they poured over the cliffs at Kona into the sea."

Terry was amazed. He had never heard Hawaiians talk about their volcanoes. Everybody had something to add.

"We studied Kilauea in school," said Buster. "There was a king named Keoua. He led an army over the mountain to fight an enemy in Kau. Bam! Bam! Bam! Kilauea exploded and killed all his men. You can still see their footprints in the 'a'a, the old lava…"

"Hawaii's official flower is the blossom of the chia lehua tree," said Maka. "It is red and sacred to Pele."

"You're supposed to offer Pele the first one you pick," grinned Bobby. "So she won't get burned up and do the same to you."

The plane droned through the crystal clear air. Uncle George leaned and tapped Terry on the shoulder.

"Look down," he commanded. "We're going to circle here right over the island of Maui."

The whole island tilted and leaned against the sky. Terry looked into the heart of the earth. As far as he could see, which was from horizon to horizon, was one great orange, crimson, yellow, brown crater. It was so large that he could see other craters within it which looked like dunce hats.

"That's Haleakala," yelled Uncle George. "Someday we'll come over to Maui and climb the mountain on horseback. There are days when clouds fill the entire crater, all twenty-one, round miles of it. When you look down into it from the rim, all you see is a giant mass of rainbow."

Terry said nothing which is about the finest thing anybody can say who sees Haleakala for the first time.

It is just about an hour by air, across 200 miles of water, from Honolulu to Hawaii. They were going to land at Hilo, a bustling, little Big Island town, in time for lunch. Uncle George yelled his plans at everybody.

"We're going to eat at the Naniloa Hotel. I've got an office there, too. And we'll make arrangements to spend the night. Then we're going to ride out into the Puna District in a sampan bus to see what we can see. Everything's set. I've had people working on this for hours."

"What's a sampan bus?" asked Terry.

"Auwe," groaned Doctor Tommy. "You'll see. It's nothing built on some old auto frame that the pineapple people use to haul workers around in. It has a roof and leaky drop curtains in case it rains. It always rains in Hilo and the curtains always leak very well. Then the rain warps the wooden seats. What a ride! My okole hurts now."

The horizon ahead of them was filled with smoke, some black, some white, and all of it slashed in places with pink fire stripes. It stained the sky for quite a distance.

Uncle George pointed. "That's where the business is gong on," he said. The whole Puna side of Kilauea must be leaking."

They flew fairly low along the Puna coastline coming into Hawaii. Terry could see the ocean break against the land and cane fields and groves and strips of toy road. He sniffed.

"What is that awful, awful smell?" he asked.

Every nose in the plane wrinkled as the odor hit them.

"Gaaaagghhh!" cried Doctor Tommy. "That's boiling rock and sulfur gas and what all else I couldn't guess. It's Kilauea cooking."

"It makes me think of lunch," said Bobby.

"It makes me think of you," said Buster.

"Very rich, very ripe," yelled Uncle George.

"Very rotten," sniffed Maka.

The airport at Hilo was busy when they landed. There were commercial planes, private planes, Navy planes and a clot of Air force helicopters. People milled about in all directions. Their pilot said goodbye to them and vanished as if he had urgent business elsewhere, but he smiled broadly at the children as he left.

Traffic snorted and squealed about the airport building driveways. Taxicabs or what passed for them were out in full force. Terry clenched his kite tube nervously as Uncle George moved among them as imposingly as though he were mounted on an elephant and kidnapped a cab. It was a wreck. It had a hat tied over the radiator cap and no windshield. But it had seats and somehow, with much lap sitting, they all fitted into it. Terry's kite tube jammed Uncle George in the ribs and he rumbled.

The driver was barefooted. He was dressed in a T-shirt decorated with a single word, "Batman", and dungarees cut off at the knees. He wore a smile which ran into both of his ears.

"Aloha, cousins Buster, Bobby and Maka," he said to the Pachekos.

"Aloha nui loa," they chorused right back. "Cousin Sterling."

"I knew it; I knew it; I knew it," groaned Uncle George. "Take us to the Naniloa," he yelled.

Terry saw cars that didn't exist in New Jersey. There were jeeps with tires that didn't match. There was a six-wheeled Army vehicle from World War II. It was painted blue with the word "sweetie" painted in red on the river's door. Everything that could move was moving in Hilo including the stately black Cadillacs from the tourist driver services which waddled snobbishly among the rest.

The volcano was producing a holiday fever.

Terry found himself laughing without reason during lunch. The Pachekos stuffed. Kimo and Doctor Tommy never stopped waving at friends. Uncle George bounced up and down like a silly-putty ball. He talked to a reporter from the Hilo Tribune Herald. He yelled at the hotel manager about rooms.

"I don't care," he yelled. "Put in cots. Lots of cots for lots of tots. Cart-loads of cots at cost!"

"And rootitootitootitoot," added Maka!

They were all very happy while Uncle George arranged. He arranged box lunches to be packed in one big basket for snacks later. He arranged them into bathrooms and out again—twice. He arranged them all outside to the sampan bus which was ready.

Terry didn't think it was as bad as Doctor Tommy had said it might be. It was just some different. It had a name painted on both sides of its radiator. Its name was "Mother." Mother was a reconstructed truck. It had no sides, just railings to keep people from spilling out. A series of used automobile seats were placed side by side with an aisle in the middle and anchored in wooden frames raised off the floor. They had springs. They were comfortable, too, even if the seats had come from a variety of cars originally. The whole interior was covered with a canvas roof painted white.

Mother's driver was stocky and friendly. He had gray hair. He wore white sneakers, dungarees and a red T-shirt. It had a word on the chest. "Dropout."

"Aloha, cousin Kimo," he said.

"Aloha, aloha," beamed Kimo. "Cousin Roosevelt."

"Cousins, kissing cousins, calabash cousins," grunted Uncle George.

They all climbed aboard Mother who reared with a deep-throated growl of power, lurched and moved. Terry held the kite tub between his knees automatically, without thinking and, indeed, unaware of it.

The sampan bus rolled out of Hilo. It shouldered other traffic out of its way and headed briskly along a narrow black top road into the countryside.

Terry sat with Buster and watched it unfold. They zipped through villages and small towns, through Olaa, across the Puna region to Pahoa and on to Kalapana where the sands of the beaches are coal black and the breaking seas upon them turn violet.

Buster pointed out the sights of the Big Island. He had been there many times visiting relatives as had Bobby and Maka. He was not a good guide. He pointed to a grove of trees.

"Macadamia nuts," he said. "I wish I had a jar full of them."

He pointed out four brown rats in a sugar cane field and three mongooses strolling by a drainage ditch. He pointed out a scratch on the back of his hand. He pointed out the lunch basket and said he guessed he'd join Bobby and see what they could do about it.

Doctor Tommy joined Terry and asked how he felt.

"Fine," said Terry. He did, too.

Doctor Tommy told him about Kilauea, shouting some above the wind blowing about them as Mother rolled down the road. He spoke of a forest of tree ferns which grew upon its slopes and which was a part of Hawaii National Park. He told Terry about a hotel on the mountain where the hot water for baths came from the depths of the volcano, piped up hot by nature.

"The sky! The sky!" yelled Uncle George.

Terry clutched his kite tube and stared.

There were yellow clouds hanging low ahead of the bus. They rolled into rolls on top of rolls, and then spread to hang a saffron curtain.

Terry could smell that biting, tangy, choking odor again.

He could hear Kimo's booming voice.

"Not much farther. They'll have the road blocked up ahead. Especially if the flow is coming from the sides of the mountain."

"We'll walk in for a better look," yelled Uncle George.

Terry darted a glance at Kimo. Kimo looked like a man remembering very strange things.

The road was blocked below a place called Punuluu where the old Kalapana Trail began a slant up the side of Kilauea to join Chain of Craters, old ones, once active.

Men waved them to a stop. They were special policemen from one of the sugar companies. The head policeman knew Uncle George.

"Hi, Keoki," he said. "Bring your whole family?"

"How is it?" asked Uncle George. "Can we walk in and see any thing?"

"Sure," answered the man. "There are some volcano students, vulcanists, from the University up ahead, and some park rangers. A new cone is building in one of our fields. They're watching it. Come and see."

All of them except Mother's driver jumped from the bus and followed Uncle George who followed the head policeman.

Chapter One	Chapter Two	Chapter Three	Chapter Four	Chapter Five
Chapter Six	Chapter Seven	Chapter Eight	Chapter Ten	Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve

If you have any comments about this manuscript, please contact me at: eric@biemiller.com

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