High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [83]
The sun blazed ferociously. My pack was stuffed with a wool sweater, sleeping bag, and rain gear—ludicrous baggage I’d brought at the insistence of Park Service brochures. The gallon of water, on the other hand, was a brilliant idea. The trail leveled out on the valley floor and dusty cinders gave way to fields of delicate-looking ferns, which felt to the touch like plastic. Under a white-hot sky, blue-black cinder cones rose above the fern fields. From the cliffs came the gossipy chatter of petrels, rare endemic gull-like birds that hunt at sea and nest in Haleakala. I envied them their shady holes.
When we topped a small rise, a tin-roofed cabin and water tank greeted us like a mirage. The Park Service maintains a primitive cabin in each of three remote areas of the crater, where hikers, with advance permission, can avail themselves of bunks, a woodstove, and water. (There are no other water sources within Haleakala.) We had a permit for a cabin, but not this one—we would spend the night at Paliku, six miles on down the trail. The next day we would backtrack across the crater by a different path, and exit Haleakala via a formidable set of switchbacks known as the Halemau’u Trail. Even on the level the trail was hard, skulking over knife-edged rocks, requiring exhaustive attention; I could hardly imagine doing this up the side of a cliff. I decided I’d think about that tomorrow.
Meanwhile, we flopped on a grassy knoll at the Kapaloa cabin, devouring our lunchtime rations and most of our water. Steven, my ornithologist companion, observed that we were sitting on a litter of excrement whose source could only be the nēnē. He was very excited about this. I lay down on endangered goose poop and fell asleep.
I woke up groggy, weary of the sun and grateful to be more than halfway to Paliku. We marched through a transition zone of low scrub that softened the lava fields. Ahead of us hung the perpetual mystery of fog that had obscured the crater’s eastern end all day, hiding our destination.
Suddenly we walked through that curtain into another world: cool gray air, a grassy meadow where mist dappled our faces and dripped from bright berries that hung in tall briar thickets. We had passed from the mouth of hell to the gates of heaven—presuming heaven looks like the Smoky Mountains or Ireland. Awestruck, and possessed of aching feet, we sat down on the ground. Immediately we heard a quiet honking call. A little zebra-striped goose materialized out of mist and flew very low, circling over our heads. It landed a stone’s throw away, cocked its head, and watched us. “Perfect for a wilderness catalog,” it might have been thinking. In the past I have scoffed at anthropomorphic descriptions of Hawaii’s state bird, which people like to call “friendly” and “curious.” Now you can scoff at mine.
Soaked to the bone and suddenly shivering, we walked through miles of deep mist, surrounded by the honking of invisible nēnēs. The world grew quiet, white, punctuated with vermilion berries. The trail ended in Paliku meadow. Beyond the field, a wall of cliffs rose straight up like a Japanese carving of a mountainside in jade. The vertical rock faces were crisscrossed with switchback crevices where gnarled trees and giant ferns sprang out in a sidesaddle forest. On these impossible ledges dwell the last traces of native rain forest. They survive there for only one reason: pigs can’t fly.
Paliku cabin, nestled among giant ferns, was a sight for sore muscles. Its iron stove was an antique giant, slow to warm up but ultimately unstoppable. Rain roared on the tin roof of our haven. In the thickening dark we lit candles and boiled water for coffee. I hugged the sleeping bag and heavy wool sweater which, at lunchtime, I’d secretly longed to bury under a rock. It was impossible now to recall the intensity of the morning’s heat. And tomorrow I would have trouble believing I’d stood tonight fogging the windowpane with my breath, looking out on the wet tangle of a Hawaiian rain forest. Where does it go when it leaves us, the memory of beautiful,