Koji had just finished changing his clothes when the tremors resumed. He waited for them to pass but they only grew stronger, so he ran to his truck and headed back down the mountain to Hilo town. What he had been dreading had finally arrived. Like all the locals, he understood that living on an island created by volcanoes meant accepting both the beauty and the beast. You couldn’t have one without the other. Koji bumped along the unpaved roads, passing fields of sugarcane, descending through huge stands of koa and hala trees with their thick, monstrous aerial roots, wondering which of the island’s beasts was rearing its ugly head this time. Suddenly his truck swerved as if he had a flat tire. Koji braked and stopped in the middle of a red dirt road, only to realize that it was the ground shifting his truck from side to side. He watched the ohi’a tree branches swaying, leaves falling to the ground in defeat. Koji was helpless to do anything but wait it out. Time slowed. Was it a minute or two or three before the quaking eased and the ground stilled? He waited a moment longer before he started up the truck and kept driving.

Hilo was a good forty miles away from the foothills of Mauna Loa, but they lived under the threat of the volcano while it slept—mostly forgotten—until something deep down ignited and the fire goddess Pele rose and roared to life. It must have been the tenth time Mauna Loa had erupted since Koji first set foot in Hawai‵i. Some eruptions were barely a whimper, while others demanded attention. Given the months of tremors preceding it, this looked to be one of the big ones. If Mariko were still alive, he would have gone to the green bungalow first. While her spirit never physically returned to him, he often closed his eyes and felt her there, even heard her voice, but he never saw her. Instead, he headed directly to the fish market. Koji was running on adrenaline. Twenty minutes later, when he reached Kamehameha Avenue and turned the corner toward the market, a crowd had already collected in front. He was relieved to see that the downtown area looked almost undamaged. Koji parked and ran toward the crowd, wondering if Daniel had arrived yet. He stopped when someone yelled, “Mauna Loa! Long Mountain’s smoking like a chimney!” Koji watched with the crowd as great plumes of billowing white smoke surged into the sky.

He remembered seven-year-old Daniel once pointing up at a cluster of cumulus clouds with great excitement. “There’s Aopua’a,” he’d told Koji gleefully, “right there, you see, that’s the mama pig with all her piglets huddled around her. Uncle Samuel says it means a quiet day of good fishing with no storms.”