poles with eight feet of line tied to them, slipshot weights you set with your teeth, bare bronze hooks, and live crickets for bait. Great-Grandmother had never used anything but a cane pole, and she never would, either.
Razor-edged sun beams sliced through the tree tops and dappled three-foot lily pads that we parted like some Antarctic ice-breaker. Hiding from the sun in floppy straw hats, we tied to a partially submerged tree. The analog depth finder blipped 10 feet of water. Fishing with bobbers for bluegills requires a very different level of patience than casting for largemouths. Either everyone in the boat starts hauling in the feisty panfish within a few minutes or it’s time to find some different lily pads. It’s about as easy and fun as any kind of fishing there is and it’s perfect for kids and 80-year-old women who refuse to give in to time. Great-Grandmother needed a walker to get to the boat and two people to help her in, but once the fishing was on she was the quickest cane pole artist in east Texas.
She had three fish in the boat before our wake settled into the lily pads, unhooking them and re-baiting in the same motion while nudging me to open the live well. I swear she had X-ray vision and could see the fish through the stained water. She would pick a tiny spot between the edges of the lime-green disks, arch the long pole above her coolly, and drop the cricket, hook, and weight right through it, easing on the descent just as the line grew taught so the bobber would settle on the surface without scaring the fish. I never saw her loose one. Only rarely would they even momentarily tangle her, once hooked, amidst the intertwined limbs, weeds and lily pad stalks. I was admiring my first catch, dripping slimy and groping for water, when she nudged me for the fifth time.
We moved with the fish around the island all afternoon, exchanging crickets for bluegills. Some were tiny, but others were over a pound, adult males with pouting foreheads and broad, black sides that bent the limber cane poles. Grandfather told us to throw the little ones back because he didn’t feel like cleaning them and there wasn’t enough meat on them to mess with. Great-Grandmother kept them all, winking devilishly as she tossed a four-inch one into the live well.
As a child, fishing those lakes with my family was simply my favorite thing to do. But in those endless, sweltering Texas days, the seductive movement of water infected me in a way I couldn’t possibly have identified. There was something comforting about seeing a coming wave and feeling it roll the boat, about smelling the infectious bliss of life on the water, about witnessing the wonder of a sunrise or sunset on a fluid horizon. It became the most intimate insight into my own place and mortality on this water planet. The magic of water and the joy of fishing would also, in time, become an indelible link to the coming generation as well.
It was time to troll back around to the boat dock and prepare for the sunset bass trip, but Great-Grandmother and I didn’t want the bluegill fishing to end. Together we stalled Grandfather until the crickets ran out and the live well was dark with over a hundred bluegills, sixty of them hers. As they lifted her out of the boat, I dropped them one-by-one into a mesh basket tied to the dock.
My parents smiled as I told all the details of the swampy island and the big ones that got away. Great-Grandmother, hunched and long since gray, squeezed my arm gently. Four generations stood together as the sun dipped in the west and the bass stirred in the old creek bed.
Surf
Slate gray mirror wavering; beneath it a surging, steady heartbeat, its rhythm, lullingly tranquil, belies awesome power. I slosh this sixty-degree edge of universal water, however cold, still warmer than most of its body. Bracing chill releases its grip with each passing surge. Lifted from the sand with each cycle, my body finds comfort in dense support. Gravity, pressure, time, senses all bend in this most ancient embrace. Each particle cycles in space rather than advancing with each wave and I another speck bobbing like a twig in the vast sea.
Waves roll in sets, peaks towering, lifting skyward, my outstretched nose barely eclipsing the crest. Sinking down the backside, fast and smooth, soothing cradle-rocks the ocean. Rumbling shoulders arch and collapse on weathered stone and sand. Gray mixes with white foam and the occasional sunbeam blends in a hint of blue. From each climax to dipping trough, time passes in divine synchrony.
Drift too far out and the waves mingle to near-continuous – too far in and it’s more fight than ride. Each has their attraction, particularly the exhilaration of mingling the crashing shoulders, but I nestle pleasantly between them, mindless of all but what I am feeling.
Lifting, sinking, waiting, drifting weightless; I have found this pleasure at numerous edges of water, some cold and gray, others bright blue and bath-warm. I identify with the rhythm, primeval lifeblood, and vastness of water. I live the cacophony of surf, the immensity of tides, the blistering flurry of life in a microscopic view of one drop, and the graceful artistry of a flashing school of fish. All of these and much more hover in that perfect zone just outside the arching shoulders. At least that’s where they found me.
Hawai’i
The night was as black as the fresh lava rock. The stars were pinpoints in a flat curtain, their luminance faded by ocean spray and acrid smoke lingering in humid midnight. The heavens slumbered as the moon cowered behind towering Mauna Loa, but the island burst with new life as Madame Pele boiled the sea. The rest of the tropical coast was tranquil, but this southeast rim of Hawai’i was violently active – growing in the night.
We had driven as far out as the road from Pāhoa reached. Near Royal Gardens, the ‘88 flow along Kilauea’s East Rift Zone covered the two-lane highway like a massive serpent, seemingly molded from the asphalt itself. New flows were spilling down the same stretch of Puna coastline three years later, expanding the Big Island. Hawai’i, already double the size of all the other islands combined, continued its birth.
We made a U-turn, dwarfed by the geological dead end, and parked in a long line of vehicles along an overgrown sugarcane field. Our shiny rental car blended with others and stood out from dusty island trucks. Tourists and locals alike had come to see the fire of creation. The paint was melted off one side of an abandoned barn but a tangle of vegetation skirted the cooled outer fingers of lava’s recent reach, charred but dotted with new life. Those arriving before us had chosen to park facing back down the open road.
Volcanic eruptions in the middle of Earth’s tectonic plates, like those creating the Hawaiian Islands, tend to be more gradual and predictable than those on the fringes. Rangers managed the volume of people that come through the reasonably dangerous national park remarkably well without more getting hurt. Still, everyone there that night seemed to realize we were voluntarily entering an active lava field and decided to face their vehicles in the only direction out, just in case.
From the fiery mantle, up through a “hotspot” burning the moving sea floor, lava builds upon layers of past flows. Seventy million years ago, magma first singed frigid water above this spot in the Pacific Ocean thousands of miles from any other land mass, forming islands that incrementally erode back to the sea. As the plate slides to the northwest, lava from the hotspot forms one island at a time, like thick honey squeezed through a frosting spreader onto a staggeringly slow but steady conveyor belt. Each island is built from the deep sea floor until it crests above the waves and begins immediately to be pulled back. From the abyssal foundation, the largest yet of all the Hawaiian Islands began the sustained 18,000 foot climb to the mirrored ceiling and has advanced some 14,000 more feet above sea level. Hawai’i is the largest mountain on the face of the planet, easily taller from the base than Everest and more massive than California’s entire Sierra Nevada range. Twenty miles to the southeast, Lo’ihi percolates below the waves, next in line.
I was fresh in my ocean journeys, and in my own awakening. Life was carefree – the possibilities infinite as dark sands crumbling from the living island. Just twenty, I found myself in the middle of the Pacific rather by accident. I had come to witness an active
