These words make me want to visit a volcano 🌋
Dispatches from a Volcano with Ena Sroat, archeologist in Hawaiʻi | Issue 1 of 2022
Greetings, greetings. I’m back, and what a sigh of relief that is.
As you know, I’ve been promising dispatches from a volcano. Archeologist Ena Sroat and I spoke recently, and there was so much interesting material (21 pages of transcript!) that I couldn’t possibly put it all in one place. So I’ll be releasing these as Dispatches from a Volcano with Ena Sroat.
And now, for some words that make the top of a volcano seem like the most magical place ever.
🌋
Ena Sroat: You'll take your vehicle up to the volcanoes for your work day and then come back down. I spent about six months up on the main plateau of the Big Island.
When you're up in this space, there's a quality of stillness and light. It can be very subtle or very dramatic because you're just surrounded in this bowl of volcanology.
So the sun is closer to you, the moon is closer to you, and when it's erupting, there are particles that dusted up into the atmosphere. Sunsets and sunrises are gorgeous. There's this interplay of light and silence because there's very little human noise as well, and it's just this expansive view.
We don't really get that very often. We're so contained in cars and in buildings and cities and whatnot. It’s really having that sense of space and quiet, that’s what I love about it.
It's so remote that it really puts you into the footsteps of the Hawaiians. Because you can see that it was a really hard place to traverse, and to live.
Ena standing on top of Mauna Kea (“White Mountain”) on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, looking across toward Mauna Loa (“Large Mountain”).
Fun fact: Ena tells me Mauna Loa is “actually the largest mountain in the world. And it's technically taller than Mount Everest [29,000 feet], 'cause if you measure it from the bottom of the ocean floor, it's actually about 30,000 feet tall, and then the upper portion is about 13,000 feet above the surface of the ocean.”
Below, the main plateau region where Ena camped for 6 months. It was formed by lava flows from three separate volcanos: the two in the photo above it, plus Hualālai.
Interview has been lightly edited for format.