Strong Like the Sea, стр. 62
I hate disappointing him, and it puts me on edge sharp as lava rock ’cause I know he’s hoping I’ll change my mind if he keeps asking. When Dad says it’s time to go, I get all wobbly with relief, but Uncle begs for five more minutes.
I can’t help but tease him a little. “If you keep looking at all these other turtles out here, you’re gonna make Saisei jealous!”
He presses a finger to his lips. “Shh. I won’t tell her if you won’t.”
It takes a while to get to our next stop because we have to drive the mauka roads all the way back around before we can wind down to Kalapana-Kapoho road. Travel on the Big Island can be kind of tricky when lava keeps eating up all the roads.
We drive over new lava fields where the molten flow sliced across grasses and trees and left barren, black rock. Surviving islands of green stand scorched around the edges, surrounded by rivers of stone. Instead of flowers, yellow painted lines add splashes of color to new sections of road paved over desolate black.
I try to imagine what it must have been like when the land was burning, but it’s so immense and powerful, it’s like someone trying to imagine a tsunami when all they’ve ever seen is a bathtub. “It’s so weird how there’s trees, then nothing, then trees again. Is it because the ground is tall underneath? Did it used to be a hill?”
“Sometimes, but I’ve seen places where lava took a whole neighborhood and left a single house right in the middle,” says Dad. “I’m sure there’s an explanation somewhere, maybe a slope or ridge in the landscape, but it seems like lava goes wherever it wants.”
“It’s incredibly hard to predict where lava will flow.” Uncle leans forward from the back seat. “Especially with a shield volcano like this that created so many fissures for lava to slip through—twenty-four this time. Teams of scientists at the college study it. When lava’s hottest, it can move really fast, and it slows when it cools. It also changes depending on viscosity—thin and runny or thick and chunky.”
Chunky peanut butter sounds great. Chunky ’a’a lava? Not so much.
Then jungle surrounds us again—some places so dense, the canopy arches over the whole road, a living tunnel of vines and branches.
A big truck comes from the other way and we pull to the side to let it pass on the narrow road. Beside my window, a tidy line of rocks borders a break in the undergrowth where someone cleared the brush away and planted grass. On one side, yellow and white flowers peek from between mangrove tree roots. Behind those, more coconut trees stand beside a banana tree heavy with young fruit.
It always seems weird to me that bananas grow upside down with the pale green fruit curved up toward the sky. At home, we hang banana bunches from their stems so the ends of the fingers point down, but on a live tree, the stems of bananas are on the bottom of the hands, and the bunches grow up from there.
“There’s your mom’s favorite. See it?” Auntie taps my arm, and I pull my gaze away from the purple flower trailing below the banana cluster to follow her lead.
“Where?”
“See the blue on the trunk to the side? They have a rainbow tree in their yard.”
Turning almost backwards, I spy a flash of blue and red streaking up a trunk to the far right. “What is it?”
“That’s a rainbow eucalyptus. Not so many around here, but there’s a grove of them on Kona side,” Auntie says. “Remember how it looks, because you’ll never see the same one twice. They’re always changing.”
I peer at the trunk that is brown and green and blue and red and orange—a real rainbow of colors all worn by the very same tree! Like drips from melted crayons, bright streaks speckle the length of it all the way up. It’s easy to see why it’s Mom’s favorite. If it weren’t for Castle Tree, I’d pick it for my favorite too. “How do they do that?”
The truck rumbles past and Dad speeds us back onto the road.
“The rainbows?” Uncle sways as the car rounds a bend. “It’s all about layers. As the trees grow, their thin bark curls and flakes away from dark green bark underneath. The longer it’s exposed, the more the color changes. The older the tree, the more colors they wear.”
“So, it’s like natural tree-bling that never fades, yeah?” Greens and browns blur past my window as I watch for more.
“I have a picture from last time we went to Kona.” Auntie scrolls through her phone to a picture of Uncle standing beside a tree draped in neon blue streaks as bright as glow-in-the-dark play dough. That can’t be real. It looks like taffy from the chocolate factory in Mom’s book. “How do you know it’s real—not painted or anything? Can we go back and see?”
Uncle chuckles. “They’re real.”
“Ah, the schedule’s pretty full.” Dad checks his watch. “Maybe you can have your phone ready on the way back and take a picture out the window. We still have Pohoiki Park and Uncle Robert’s to get to before our last stop.”
I bite my lip as another tree zips by too fast to get a good look. The forest could be full of rainbow trees for all I know, but we’re going too fast to see more than a glimpse of anything. What’s the point of “seeing” all this stuff if I never get to actually look at it? Can’t we have one day without a schedule?
At home, it’s easier to ignore because