I was hoping my shoes didn't melt. Holding my daughter because hers would, warned a cheerful student geologist from Mauna Loa observatory. Meanwhile, my soles decidedly warmed. And I didn't dare watch my husband park the rented Ford Explorer, even with its much-advertised four-wheel-drive. An ocean of broken blackness surrounding me, and I could only contemplate the absence of color.

Because this black rock was not capitulating to purple. Its purpose was simply black. Miles of black. Black treacherous to walk on, especially carrying a four-year-old, and I kept seeing those rusting cars abandoned along the way. I'd had no idea three miles could be an infinite distance. And wildly hoped the return trip would also be an uninterrupted jolting against once-molten, now-jagged rocks. As a mother, I was regretting this surprisingly dangerous "sightseeing."

But life moves on. As inexorably, as beautifully, as mysteriously, and as hot as a slow Hawaiian lava flow. We were on the rainy side of Hawaii (the Big Island), at Hilo (HEE-low). Where it was inexplicably sunny, even in the afternoons. John Alexander, the owner/manager of The Dolphin Bay Hotel, shared his considerable island knowledge with us. His father, who spent years in Japan, built the hotel, and I loved our room's deep, hexagonal ofuro-type tub and John's custom of keeping a bunch of green-and-yellow bananas hanging next to the office, as well as a basket of ripe papayas, a plate of moist muffins, and pots of fresh Kona coffee from sunrise on.

One morning John looked excited as a kid. He'd been out to The Flow the night before. "You should go see it." It sounded like a picnic. Don't wait, he said. Pu'u 'O'o (POO-OO OH-OH) might stop any time. I went back to the patio with my coffee and sat down next to a kitchen whisk with a lump of black lava rock stuck incongruously around its blades.

So we drove down Highway 130. Till an imposing wooden barrier shouted, "DO NOT ENTER. RESIDENTS ONLY." Being sensible, we drove back. John laughed, "Ignore that sign. Drive around it." So the next day we returned, discovering the lava-obliterated highway John described as "a bit bumpy" meant 40 minutes of solid rattling, wife too-quietly eyeing the under-half-a-tank gas gauge, "HAVE WE GOT ENOUGH G-A-S? I THOUGHT HE SAID IT WAS ONLY TWO MILES," husband clinching teeth "YES JUST CALM DOWN," and the child in the backseat asking, "Is this a road? It sure is bumpy. Can't we go ANOTHER way?"

That's a "thoroughfare" Pele the volcano goddess has trod. Mark Twain himself rode on horseback around Hawaii the spring of '66. Seeing what I saw, he wrote:

       We came upon a long dreary desert of black, swollen, twisted,
       corrugated billows of lava--blank and dismal desolation! Stony
       hillocks heaved up, all seamed with cracked wrinkles and broken open
       from center to circumference in a dozen places, as if from an explosion
       beneath. There had been terrible commotion here once, when these dead
       waves were seething fire; but now all was motionless and silent--it was a
       petrified sea! (290)

Which we somehow crossed. Watching steam rise in the distance. Smelling lava. An odor unlike anything I've ever smelled. Fumaroles, sure, smell like sulfur; however, up close to that crimson flow, the scent is peculiar and bewitching, like an intimate sniff of God. I can't describe it, though I did think of burning cotton candy. Still, the aroma is not really what you'd call "sweet."

Standing a mere foot from molten rock, I heard it crack like glass as it moves and cools and forms a beautiful black layer of new earth. And then, after a five-minute shower, we all turned, looking back across an expanse of broken black to see a complete double rainbow. Not disappearing meeting ground but running, shimmering, across the basaltic absence-of-color towards us. And John was there shoveling a molten "oven" over his ti-leaf-wrapped, raw-and-marinated pork roast, and there were others there, no longer strangers, all raising a common praise, "AAAH...LOOK!"

Then you could almost forget you were balancing on the most unstable earth, and underneath you through a lava tube was God's own hot blood racing.

Author's Note: The Mark Twain quote came from Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii, edited by A. Grove Day, University of Hawaii Press, 1966.

For anyone who wants to read more about Hawaii, I can recommend J.D. Bisignani's Big Island of Hawaii Handbook (dedicated "to Madame Pele and all women of heart") and Andrew Doughty's and Harriett Friedman's Hawaii The Big Island Revealed. Both books are spirited, funny, revealing, and thorough accounts of this paradise. See pages 160-161 of Bisignani's book for more information about The Dolphin Bay Hotel with its wonderful tubs. I used the 3rd edition (1998).