High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [80]
Finally, very late, I left Ouidah to return to Cotonou in a bush taxi. There were eight of us wedged in. Incredibly, we took on a ninth. In the way of oxygen we had to accept each other’s exhalations. Conversations erupted in at least three different languages. I found myself pressed—too tightly to draw a full breath—against the shoulders and thighs of two handsome men. My love charm was burning a hole in my pocket.
It’s a hot place, Benin, where everybody has a different story to tell, but every creature has its rapport with nature. It’s best to be prepared.
INFERNAL PARADISE
In the darkness before dawn I stood on the precipice of a wilderness. Inches in front of my toes, a lava cliff dropped away into the mammoth bowl of Haleakala, the world’s largest dormant volcano. Behind me lay a long green slope where clouds rolled up from the sea, great tumbleweeds of vapor, passing through the pastures and eucalyptus forests of upland Maui to the volcano’s crest, then spilling over its edge into the abyss.
Above the rimrock and roiling vapor, the sun was about to break. Far from the world where “Aloha Oe” whines through hotel lobbies, I stood in a remote place at an impossibly silent hour.
But pandemonium had an appointment. Grunting, hissing, a dozen buses pulled up behind me and threw open their doors. Tourists swarmed like ants over the tiny visitors’ center at the crater’s edge. Loading cameras, dancing from foot to foot in the cold, they positioned for the spectacle. “Darn,” a man griped through his viewfinder. “I can’t get it all in.”
“Take two shots, then,” his wife advised.
In the throng I lost and then relocated Steven, my fellow traveler. In his hiking boots, sturdy fedora, and backpack, he apparently struck such a picturesque silhouette against the dawn he’d been cornered by a pro and enlisted as foreground. “Perfect for a wilderness catalog,” the photographer testified, while his camera whirred meaningfully.
Sunrise over Haleakala is a packaged Maui tradition: tourists in the beachfront hotels can catch a bus at 3 A.M., ride the winding road to the summit, witness the daybreak moment, and return in time for a late breakfast. As religious experiences go, this one is succinct. In fifteen minutes the crowd was gone.
I wandered a hundred yards back to the parking lot, where a second troop was assembling. For about $120, intrepid sightseers can get a one-way bus ride to the summit for a different thrill: outfitted with helmets, Day-Glo safety vests, and rental bikes, they speed back down to the coast in a huge mob, apparently risking life and limb for a thirty-eight-mile exercise in handbraking. The group leaders, who presumably knew the score, were padded from head to toe like hockey goalies. As they lined up their herds of cyclers, they delivered flat monologues about hand signals and road conditions. “Ready to go play in traffic?” demanded a guide, straddling his mount. “Okay, let’s go play in traffic.” With the hiss of a hundred thin tires on a ribbon of asphalt, this crowd vanished too.
I blinked in the quiet light, feeling passed over by a raucous visitation. Now the crater lay deserted in the howling wind, by all but one pair of picturesque stragglers. The toes of our boots turned toward the rim and found purchase on a rough cinder trail called Sliding Sands, which would lead us down into the belly of Haleakala. The price: a $6.95 waterproof trail map, and whatever else it might take to haul ourselves down and back again.
Entering the crater at dawn seemed unearthly, though Haleakala is entirely of the earth, and nothing of human artifice. The cliffs absorbed and enclosed us in a mounting horizon of bleak obsidian crags. A lake of cloud slid over the rim, wave by wave, and fell into the crater’s separate atmosphere, dispersing in vapor trails. The sharp perimeter of cliffs contains a volcanic bowl three thousand feet deep and eight miles across as the crow flies (or twice that far as the hiker hikes). The depression would hold Manhattan, though fortunately it doesn