SA 10 - Eden Burning - Elizabeth Lowell by Elizabeth Lowell

Author:Elizabeth Lowell
Language: bg
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-05-13T18:17:56+00:00

19

For the first few miles Nicole drove, she spent as much time looking in the mirrors as she did at the road ahead. Not until she reached the first of the sugarcane fields that had been transformed into cattle pastures did she begin to relax.

She was over the first, and worst, hurdle. Now all she had to do was hang on long enough to find the tiny kipuka she thought of as her personal sanctuary. Once she was there, she would be free to do whatever she wanted—cry or scream or curse—and most of all to ask why until either answers or the fragile peace of emotional exhaustion came to her.

She took an unmarked, rough spur road that went about two thousand feet up Kilauea’s fertile, lava-scarred flank. The road ended in a thick lava flow. It was just one of the many black-stone rivers twisting down toward the sea and just one of many roads that ended beneath a cooled lava flow. The flows came from fissures that gushed liquid stone from the volcano’s flanks whenever magma bubbled and seethed upward in response to shifts in the immense pressures beneath the earth.

Each frozen river marked a time of desolation and renewal, of plant life destroyed while more land was created. Death and rebirth, the paradox of the burning mountain.

Both the desolation and the creation called to Nicole. In a way that she couldn’t describe, the ravaged land spoke to her, giving silent testimony to the stubborn endurance and ultimate beauty of life. For each savage moment of new land boiling up from the earth’s molten interior, for each violent river of fire scorching through green vegetation, there was also a long time of tranquillity and renewal.

No matter how bad it looked after an eruption, the destruction was never total.

Within the lava flows themselves, kipukas survived. These tiny islands of life were landlocked arks that nourished plants and animals until it was safe to leave again. Then, once more, life grew and changed, meeting the new conditions of the newly born land, life creating something both soft and vital from the fertile ashes of destruction.

That was what Nicole needed as she stumbled over a track that only she and Benny ever walked. She needed to sit in the midst of life that had survived incredible devastation. She needed to look beyond the safety of the kipuka and see the tiny signs of life venturing out once more, colonizing land that was as hard and sharp as the moment it had cooled years and years ago.

What tiny, fragile flowers could do, she could do.

Survive.

But first she had to find her own inner islands where emotions had survived the morning’s devastation.

If nothing had survived, she had to know that, too.

Without kipukas it took longer for life to enrich the landscape of volcanic creation, but life did win out. Even islands that had been first covered with and then surrounded by half a planet’s worth of water finally managed to rise above the waves and clothe themselves in ferns and flowers and sweetly singing birds.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.