Stein's Story

Stein's Story

ONE STEP
By Stein Kretsinger
With Tim Elms

 

The story begins thirty-six hours earlier when I met Drew Thurston. Full of energy, wound up from a jug of coffee, the twenty-six year old gestured widely with his skinny five-foot-eleven frame. “Stein, welcome to the Big Island.” Reddish blond hair and freckles marked him as a high strung, confident, opinionated Irishman. Drew was the fix-it-all handy man of a nature healer who came on the same plane from Oahu.

Our conversations switched topics anxiously like someone was clicking a remote control changing the channels of thought: self-sustaining construction techniques, Hawaiian coffee, credit cards, nature healing, and the DEA. In-between rants the lifelong Hawaiian resident told me things I should do on the Big Island.  “The Mauna Kea Observatory would be awesome for sunset………….. You should check out the turtles in Aii’awe Beach. It’s bad ass you can sit beside them……. You have to drive down Mono Road. It’s not on the map. No tourists go there, but it’s beautiful.  You need a four-wheel drive. Oh what the hell you can do it in a regular car…………... Hey, I’m going to this a party tonight.  Give me a call.” 
This was the jackpot in the lottery of personalities you meet traveling alone. In my first hour in a new place, I’d met an interesting person who wanted to show off all the cool places tourists never see. His energy and frantic pace was contagious. I was lucky.
 I climbed to the 13,790 foot summit of Manua Kea before heading down the locally famous Mono Road.  It took four white knuckled hours to cover its forty mile length. The dirt road started out fine, but deteriorated into two feet of mud, oceans of four foot tall grass, and inclines more suitable for climbing then driving.
 The car got stuck for the fifteenth time. I was alone and it was getting dark.  I had already popped one tire and it was to steep to drive back up. Breaking free I came upon three forks in the road and chose the right one that took me to the party where Drew insured that my feat of was the talk of the evening. “He took a Dodge Neon down the Mono! Can you believe it!” That night I slept on the floor of his sister’s house.
 I awoke to, “Drew!  What are you thinking?  Don’t bring tourists into my house.” 
 “He is really cool. He took a rental car down Mono Road!”
 I spent the day helping Drew fix well pumps and power washing moss off his grandmother’s house. Over lunch in a diner he said, “Stein, we should body surf the flow.  Are you in?”
 “I’m definitely in.”
 Flow meant lava, which the Big Island is famous for.  He had already mentioned that we should go out and see the lava at night. Waterfalls, rain forests, and sunsets are nice.  I have seen them before.  Lava was something new. I definitely wanted to see the lava. That is why I came to Hawaii. Now Drew was talking about surfing the water where the lava flowed into the Pacific Ocean. What could be better?  He asked the waitress if she wanted to surf the flow.
 “You can’t surf the lava. You’ll get burned up.”
  Drew scoffed at her. “We’re not going to surf the lava. The lava heats the water so that it’s warm like a hot tub around it.  The lava comes in at 1400 degrees and then gets cooled by the 77 degree ocean, so the waves where the lava hits the ocean are warm.
   “When the lava hits the water the outside turns to pumice, which floats while the inside is still glowing red hot.   But you can hold it in your hand! You have to try it.  It is awesome.” It certainly sounded like it. 
 Our crew assembled for dinner, Drew, me and a group of six Coloradans, we had run into at the beach.  Lori had been in Hawaii for a month and was considering getting a job and staying. Her friend Amy and her boyfriend were visiting from Denver. They had come with a married couple and another guy, who looked like he had partied one too many times.  They had all worked together at Vail the previous winter and were staying in the same condo in Kona. Drew had scrounged up two four-wheel drive Suburu station wagons, the fourth and fifth car he had borrowed in the twenty-four hours I had known him!
 We traveled down the Puno Coast to the north side of the National Park to the lava flows from Kilauea.  Kilauea has been actively flowing for fifteen years, the longest continuous series of eruptions anywhere.  Glowing red streams of goo burst from the crater five miles from the coast, where it flows downhill to the sea, swallowing up anything in its way, trees, buildings, and roads. As the fiery magma cools it solidifies into black rock. 

 When it’s really active the lava forms a river above the ground leaving a cracked, black, contorted landscape in its wake. During less active periods the lava circulates through hollow tubes thirty to forty feet below the earlier hardened flows.  Pressure eventually forces it to pop out of a surface vent.  Presently there are two vents on the coast where lava pours directly into the Ocean. This activity increases the land mass of the island as the cooled lava turns into rock. It also provides a nocturnal pyrotechnic symphony of sensual assault. It was this we wanted to see.  There are few places on Earth you can see fresh orange lava. Hawaii is the only place you can see it pour into the ocean.
 At ten o’clock we drove down the coastal road.  Drew was telling us we were going to get a better view than the tourists who take the helicopter tours. “Plus we’re going at night.  It is so much cooler.”  I had taken the tour earlier in that day. Watching the red hot lava ooze like yogurt amid yellow sulfur stains and tall plumes of white steam was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. It was difficult to fully appreciate in the brief passes the helicopter made high above the vents. I could only imagine what it looked like at night. 
  The forested eastern slopes of the Big Island gave way to barren patches of old flows.  We saw some caution signs, which marked the first flows that engulfed the road.  In 1988 the lava first rolled over part of the road and cooled. More recent flows had claimed more chunks of the highway.
 A series of worn-out ruts had smoothed down the lava as we switched into four wheel-drive and continued in the dark. “Eight years ago this wasn’t here. Isn’t that amazing.” Lava is anti-erosion!” After three hundred yards of driving on the bumpy plain, the yellow line of the road reappeared in our headlights along with trees on the side. Soon enough we were back on lava again.  “This used to be a town six years ago.  Can you imagine coming back from work and your house was gone. Bummer man. Look! There it is.”
 We all looked where Drew was pointing.  In the distance near the coast you could see the steam coming off the water.  A glowing pink plume visible a mile away. It was steam illuminated by the lava underneath.  
 ‘Wow!”
 “Awesome!”
 “Yes, that’s where we’re going.”
 We kept an eye on the sky as we approached the steam over the lifeless lava fields.   Stars were scattered up high above a moonless sky. There was only darkness except for our headlights and the glowing steam. Ten minutes later the smoothed out tracks ended.
 “Okay.  Get ready to blow your mind.”
 The eight of us gathered our flashlights. Drew had a Coleman lantern. Lori, Amy, and I had headlamps and everyone else had the mini holigan mag lites. We got out of the car.  A whole new domain awaited us unlike anything I had ever been.  This boiling cauldron of darken rock was as far removed from the green rain forests in Puno as it was from the strip malls and towering condos of Honolulu. An expanse of cracks, shifting planes, and bulges lay at our feet.  The rock had transformed into formations of abstract art.  Everywhere twisted curves of earth showed up in the beams of our flashlights.
 Walking offered a new experience as well. Each step crunched under our feet like frozen snow. Crunch.  Crunch. The bizarre landscape was composed of shapes and curves. Some places were jagged while other parts were smooth. The surface betrayed the violent forces that spawned it.  One section had air bubbles trapped in it like a giant batch of fossilized pancake batter. Other areas looked like the arms of an octopus or the wrinkled ass of an elephant.
 Drew turned on a big flashlight and put it on the dash of the car so we could find it later in the trailess black expanse of indistinguishable lava. I took one look back and lined up the car with the steam and Polaris in the sky.
 “Come on!”
 We headed toward the glowing mist a half mile in the distance.  I was bounding ahead with Drew while the others lagged behind. Evidence of volcanic power was all around us.  The lava came to the surface three miles behind us at Poo Ou vent and then carved a path down the gentle slope. Molten lava coursed through the underground tubes somewhere near us on it’s way to the ocean. 
  Crunch. Crunch.  We marched on in the darkness.  Without a trail going was slow in the twisted rock canyon. Drew told us to watch out for Pele’s hair, two inch-long microscope strands of crystallized lava. We had to be careful where we stepped because you could break the surface plate and cut yourself on the sharp rocks. We slowly got closer to the brilliant glowing cloud. Intermittently you could hear the hissing sounds of rumbling lava. Drew went ahead and put his hand on the ground.  “Can you feel that? It’s getting hotter.  We are over an active lava tube!”
 As if on cue I started to feel the heat on my ankles. “Isn’t this cool!” It was. I was mesmerized by the surroundings. With a stiff breeze at our back walking over hot rocks we headed toward the swirling tower of orange and pink vapor. Drew was bubbling with enthusiasm. We crossed over a minor tube on our way to the major vent closer to the edge. The steam was close. The explosive noises were getting louder, as was the surf. 
 Drew pointed toward the steam cloud a couple hundred yards away, “Look at that.  Man it’s really active tonight!” You could see red drops of hot magma spewing forty feet in the air. We kept walking towards it.
 Finally we arrived on the edge of an ocean cliff thirty feet above the water. The unusually calm north swell was crashing into a ten foot wide rock beach beneath the cliff. We were thirty feet away from the steam, which didn’t smell much like sulfur because a tail wind swirled the colored vapor off the rocks. I caught my first glimpse of the glowing lava on the ground.
 The underground tube had come to the surface at the bottom of the cliff and was oozing orange liquid out of a hole.  The glowing goo poured out like radioactive orange toothpaste until it hit the ocean five feet below. It kept advancing in the water, but its outside surface withered and developed a black crust. Gradually you could see less and less of the orange on the inside. Waves lapped on to the glowing beach where steam billowed from the cooling lava.  This was nature at its best.
 While Drew and I waited for the others he put the lantern on the ground.  It fell and the glass globe shattered. I tried relighting it, but the wind kept blowing the flame out. We didn’t need it now, because the glowing fumes illuminated the entire cliff side.
  We were standing on layer upon layer of old lava.  New land was forming right before our very eyes.  “This is awesome. We are standing were no one had stood before because it didn’t exist before.”  These were the kind of experiences that inspire travelers to travel. Persistence, risk taking, and a lot of luck had enabled us to see things few people are privileged to ever witness. 
 I was getting a first-hand look at a phenomenon I had only seen in the movies and studied in school.  Now I didn’t have to imagine the power and the beauty, I was there. All of us were there because of Drew.  A total stranger a day before, he had transferred his psyche and goodwill to the entire group.  I was thankful I had met him and could do something most tourists could only dream about. I wished I had been content to leave it at that. Instead we got caught up in the stunning display of the forces of nature and took it too far. 
The emerging lava coagulated on the edge of the water under a thin black crust. Every ten minutes or so the backed up pressure would sent it shooting forty feet in the air.  We were looking down on an ever-changing three-dimensional Jackson Pollock painting where showers of lethal orange paint danced across the dark landscape in-between the steam. Half the gobs of lava would land in the ocean and turn into fiery chunks of pumice like floating fireflies. The other half would land on the rocky beach at the bottom and glow for a minute before fading into the night. Some would make it up the cliff side
 One of the rocks landed twenty feet away on the top shelf that we were on.  Drew was ecstatic, “Come, Quick!” I followed him over to the glowing orb. Drew pushed the bottom of a bottle into the lava blob pressing out the shape of an ashtray. Another one landed two feet away.  I jabbed my bottle into the orange playdough and held it high while it turned black. We ran back to safety with our bounty.  I couldn’t wait to tell my sixth grade science teacher that I had just held burning lava. This was one of the most amazing and memorable things I had ever witnessed.  What more did my new friend have in store for us?
 Drew kept saying, “Can you believe it?  This wasn’t here before.  No one has ever been here before it wasn’t here before. Cool!” It was and perhaps there was a reason no one should have been there as well.  In the euphoria of absorbing an amazing scene I didn’t even let myself consider this. I doubt Drew did either. For what happened next is something that will stay with me for the rest of my life.  I will always replay these events over and over again and wish that we had made different decisions.
 The beauty of the activity on the cliff side blinded us to its danger.  We were in a closed area, although warning signs have long lost their impact in our country by their overuse for slight danger. Our guide obviously hadn’t been trained and he couldn’t have been familiar with terrain he kept saying no one had been on. We kept marveling at the lava thirty feet away, desynthesized to its violence and unstable nature.
Drew wanted to see more, “Let’s explore.”  We trudged away from the others, who were sitting together on the cliff.  Drew and I walked over the hot tube to the far side of the vent to a cone we had seen illuminated in the steam. A twenty-foot cinder cone of ash had built up on the side of the cliff. From our flashlight beams we could see that the base was less steep than the cliff.  This was the most promising place to reach the ledge below and the water.
 Drew smiled crazily while throwing off his shirt and chucking down his pack.  I did the same even though I didn’t know why. I guess we were on a quest to surf the flow.  I was still caught up in how absolutely out of this world it all seemed.  Everything Drew had shown us before had worked out fine, so I followed him in anticipation of how amazing the next part of our adventure was going to be. I wanted more.  I traveled to find those unique experiences where you push yourself as far as you can go while letting adrenaline take over.  If you do it enough at some point you will go too far and you only know when it’s too late.  Now I don’t push myself so hard now and I forever wish I hadn’t then.
 With a grin Drew headed down to the cone carrying a flashlight he borrowed from one of the girls.  His beam formed a glowing stick into the steam that obscured the water. The cone tapered down at a thirty degree angle, the upper part barely visible. He started carefully down the slope. I excitedly followed.  The surface of the cone wasn’t hard and cracked like the rest of the landscape.  It was compressed ash cinder blown back in from the sea breeze and which soft and gritty under our feet like sand. 
 The face gradually became steeper as the steam became thicker.  Eddy currents fueled the changing winds.  The swirling air shifted the steam towards us then out to sea.  After about ten careful steps, I was beginning to have my doubts. “It’s too slippery.”   Drew was only two feet away but he had to shout to be heard over the hissing steam. “Kick your toes in.” So I started kicking steps like I was climbing in snow. 
 The wind fogged up my glasses.  Another blast came and cleared them and the steam. I looked.  Drew was gone.  He had been right next to my knee.  I could have touched him and now he wasn’t there. No yell. Only hissing steam and the precarious ledge.  I scrambled back up the cone and made two giant streaks in the cinder to mark the place.  It only took me two minutes to run towards the others.
 “Listen I think Drew fell in the lava.”
 “Yeah right.”
 More assertively I repeated, “Look I think he fell and he needs our help.”
 “If he fell you wouldn’t be so calm.”
 “Just come with me and see what we can do.”
 Two of them came over with me.  Amy and I went to the edge where we had been climbing ten minutes earlier. I yelled his name. Amid the steam, surf, and wind it was hard to hear.  I yelled his name again.  “Drew.  Drew. Are you all right?”  We couldn’t see him in the steam and the darkness.  Finally we heard his voice, but couldn’t make out what he saying.  We yelled for five minutes but couldn’t make out anything. 
 What minutes before was beautiful, was now only dangerous.  I felt so helpless. I imagined mountaineering accidents where your partner falls at 13,000 feet, but you have all of your gear.  We had been woefully unprepared for our adventure and now we were under-equipped for a rescue.  I wanted to do something, but we had no tools.  It was dark and we had no knowledge of the immediate area. There was no way to get down the cliff side to Drew. It was dangerous and there was no way to communicate with him.
 What could we do for him? Drew was probably injured in a hostile environment. He had fallen twenty or thirty feet fall surrounded by ocean, lava, cliffs, and toxic air. He was alive but for how long? We had no ropes or any other gear, only flashlights. Worse of all we didn’t know what he was facing below us.  We also didn’t know if he could see what he was up against.
   I decided to throw my flashlight down to the ledge, so he might at least be able to see his surroundings. Amy and Carl debated this for awhile.  They said that we needed our flashlights to get out of the lava field and we already were two short. Look he was going to need my flashlight much more than I was.   He was in immediate danger and I wasn’t.  It was worth the risk, so I threw my head amp down to him. 
 There was nothing else we could do for him here.  We had to get a helicopter.  Every second counted. It was a forty-five minute hike and then a forty-five minute drive to the nearest phone. I wondered why everyone else wasn’t in a full sprint. Lori, Amy, and Carl were ready to go.  The others wanted to wait, although they couldn’t do anything for Drew there. I wasn’t about to just sit and wait and I didn’t want to waste time arguing with people I didn’t know. I had to go. I felt that I was the only one who realized how desperate the situation was.  We had to move.
  The flashlight situation posed another problem.  The broken lantern was useless and Drew had fallen with Amy’s headlamp. I had just thrown mine, so we only had one hand lamp and four tiny flashlights and one of those was faltering.
 “Look we need to get out of here fast.  Just give us the three best flashlights and we’ll be back.”  The three Coloradans who were staying wouldn’t go for that.  They wanted one good one. The enormity of Drew’s plight weighed heavily on me.  He needed help now. “All right.  Let’s not debate it. Let’s go!”
 Amy, Carl, Lori and I left the steam and the three others behind.   The big chunks of lava were disconcerting slow to maneuver around. We headed toward Polaris over the rough terrain. Lori caught a glimpse of a light from the surface and we headed towards it.  What we thought to have been the flashlight in the car turned out to be something else. We had missed it.  Forty-five minutes and we still weren’t closer to the car!
 There was no way we were going to find the car wandering aimlessly on the lava flows not knowing which direction to go.  I suggested we go back to the steam again where the direction of the car would be obvious.  Amy and Carl didn’t want to go back over the lava and then come back again.  The flashlights were waning. One flickered and died.
 It was frustrating feeling that I knew the right course of action, but was unable convince my companions to follow it.  The group dynamics were far from ideal.  No one had clear authority. I was an aggressive stranger who had tried to take charge of a stressful situation. I was attempting to direct the actions of three people who had known each other for years in order to save someone they didn’t know.  I had known Drew for a day-and-a-half, and I sure as hell wanted to do everything possible to save him. 
 We kept walking.  Circumstances kept conspiring against me. Another flashlight died. We pressed on in the hopeless darkness. Suddenly we came to the edge of the flow and followed it up to a road. It wasn’t the same road we came in on. Amy and Carl wanted to walk out on the road to civilization, they were sick of the lava fields.  We didn’t know how far a phone would be on the road or even if there would be one.  It might not have any access at all if another lava flow had swallowed it up again later on.  We just didn’t know.  We were exhausted and lost. Our remaining light was a faint yellow beam a foot in front of us and we had no idea which way to go. It had already been three hours since Drew fell. Going down a road not knowing if it was a three hour walk to a phone would not be helpful. 
 The others were determined to go down the road, which was definitely in the opposite direction of the car. It would be light in an hour. In order to keep the group from separating or going in a more time consuming way, I suggested we wait out the sun and find the car.  At first light I climbed a volcanic knoll and spotted the cars.   We raced over the rough surface and got there in ten minutes.  I ran up and started the station wagon while Carl, Amy, and Lori were discussing what we should do.
 “It’s already been four hours let’s not fuck around!”
 We sped back to Amy’s friend’s place in a half hour.  I kept thinking I hope it’s not too late.  I called 911. “My friend just fell in the lava send a helicopter to the steam vents.”
 “This is the fire department. I’ll relay that to a dispatcher.”  That was it before she hung up.  The operator hadn’t mentioned that she was going to send a helicopter or not.  I called again, “Let me talk to the dispatcher. Look there is a man trapped in a life threatening situation. He needs immediate emergency evacuation.  You can’t miss it.  It’s the place where the steam is coming off the coast. Hurry.”
 We got back in the car and sped back to the lava. In the light the bleak volcanic landscape seemed spookier and more devoid of life.  As we drove we saw a helicopter in the air.  They were hovering around the steam when we parked the car.  In daylight it only took twenty minutes to bound over the uneven rock.  Two rescue workers were on the cliff shouting into walkie talkies.  A helicopter hovered overhead with a man on the end of a rope.  A boat was farther back in the ocean.
 From my vantage point far back on the cliff I could see more clearly in the light when the steam was blown out to sea. Drew would have landed on a ten foot ledge dangerously close to the lava.  The ledge was only thirty feet long and didn’t afford much room to maneuver away from the lava at the far end. No one could have survived long down there. I was thinking that Drew must have known that he couldn’t get back up and the longer he stayed there breathing the noxious fumes the worst off he would be. Maybe he made a break for the water and surfed the flow to escape the danger.
 I looked across to the cinder cone. You could see two sets of footprints coming down the face.  The far ones lead down and reached an abrupt overhang recessed into the cliff.  The other tracks stopped one step above the drop off.  One step. That was it. One step was all that separated him from me.
 The reports came back over the radio.   No body.  Only one flashlight had been found.  This was puzzling because the workers had all expected to find a body, but there was no trace. The helicopters combed the water and the rescue workers told us the operations center would be moved back. 
 I surveyed the cone and the ledge again.  I looked at the lava one last time.  The lava didn’t seem so spectacular any more. Neither did the memories of all the wild experiences we had the night before.  I had truly experienced something most tourists never had, a first-hand look at death. For Drew, his family, and his friends, I wish I never had.
 Three weeks later we still have no clues. The best guess is that he swam out in the ocean and drowned.  I still get angry at myself for what happened.  Why couldn’t I have seen the obvious?   Sadness competes with anger.  I think about Draw’s family and his friends and share their grief. I think about how fragile life can be and how fast it can end. I think about what various experiences are worth.  I think about rules, danger, and common sense.  I think about the pursuit of adventure and I try to make sense of it all.