Written in Bone

Around seven o’clock each evening, music filters up the hill to my vacation rental in the Kona District from the large dance hall. I can hear the house band sing about paradise while visitors, retirees and honeymooners alike, swig down fruity rum drinks and nod to each other in sweet agreement. The song shifts to the inevitable end of the trip and the lament of having to return to the cold, hustle-bustle or humdrum existence that awaits back home, leaving only memories and a desire to return, the latter receiving it’s own verse. Then the music changes as the island’s drum and dance troupe rush onto to the stage to whip even the most cynical Poli-Sci or Anthropology professor into a desire to go back to the room and have one last go at the Missus before the plane in the morning.

Similar scenes play out on other islands in this chain, as they do in the Caribbean and other tropical isles around the world. It’s how a significant number of the locals make a living, the visitors. What is unique about the Big Island of Hawai’i is that many of the tourists leave behind a mark of their presence, something they can call their own and hope to someday see again.

North of the Kona airport the drought-tolerant trees and grasses give way to fields of dark lava. Little else is here, yet it draws vacationers and locals alike to pull off of Highway 19 with buckets, plastic bags or satchels full of dead white coral. Using the pieces and clumps as markers, they pile lines along the dark ground to spell out their messages of hope, love and commemoration. This is coral graffiti.

 The lava flows are from the volcano Hualalai, which last erupted in the 1700s. Yet, it is somewhat difficult without further research to know if some of the flow is from Mauna Loa, which is still very active and has vents extending into this region. The coral is hauled up from the beaches where it is found in abundance. It is tempting to draw contrasts of life and death with these minerals: The coral was once alive and the lava the birth of an island; the coral bleached white in death and the dark lava denying roots a hold. Yet, my purpose in such a trajectory would be to merely segue back to those who combine these elements to leave sentiments less sublime, yet all too human.

 

 

From the highway, it’s as if I’m looking at the leftovers of a party I wasn’t invited to, the remains of favors and a good time. I have never seen someone actually do this graffiti. Yet,  when I venture out onto the lava, I cannot help but feel disappointed, for taken individually, so many of the grouped pieces of coral seem pedestrian in their sentimentality: a couples’ initials surrounded by a heart, a first name, a home town, a memoriam, and if especially industrious, a date or some extra decoration in the shape of a star or flower.

 

There are a few clever or, better still, enigmatic pieces, and while I did not catalogue every marking left along the one-mile stretch of road (both sides), I am comfortable with this assessment as a rule. I am perhaps most amazed by the groupings that are the furthest from the road, as far as one hundred yards into the lava. The effort is noted and I assume the trek made to better insure their mark is not disturbed or pilfered by opportunistic souls with a lesser empathy for others. I dutifully document these even though the marks themselves are no more special, revealing or imaginative than those ten feet off the road.

Against these massive fields of lava, we humans are small things, insignificant except in helping to erode the surface with each step or in the garbage we leave behind. This is the overwhelming sense I carry with me as I sweat in the heat and my eyes begin to sting with salt. I step carefully, knowing that should I take a serious spill or an apparently solid surface give way to a precipice, I could become more like the coral in a short period. I am less aware of my humanity and more of my mortality, my piece-of-sand transience. A memory and sentiment that will both fade long before these stretches of lava show more signs of life than the occasional tuft of grass.

Such a frame of mind! It perhaps then is no wonder that I soon tire of J.K.’s undying passion to get into L.M.’s pants via a clump of dead sea creatures, and instead begin to take special note of the graffiti that has been dispersed by either vandalism or tectonic rumblings. 

Were I otherwise disposed, I suppose I would celebrate the lovers, feel compassion for the families of those remembered in this way. And perhaps I could wait until that time to write a more compassionate essay. But I find it difficult to have such hope out there with the lava and coral that only serve to reinforce what I want to claim as my own sentiment. Nevertheless, I must be touched on some level, if ever so slightly against these feelings of futility, and ultimately come to terms with my own desire to leave a mark... my mark… a fitting mark.