His life in Chicago had been fast-paced, filled with raucous city sounds: screeches and shouts, automobile horns and gunning engines, all to be replaced by the comforting echoes of his childhood: the buzzing of mosquitoes; the loud haw of the nene geese; the wind whistling through the banyan trees; the lapping of water; and the chirping, rustling, wailing sounds of the rain forest. Only then did he realize how Hawai‵i remained an enduring spirit that had seeped into his body and flowed through his veins. “Might not be a fancy big city, yeah, but home comes from within,” his mother reminded him when he first left for the mainland. Her absence still stung, but his homecoming had also rekindled thoughts of his childhood, including his father’s distant voice that now returned to him like the constant buzz of a mosquito.

“Why is the island so noisy?” Daniel had once asked his father as they walked along the Wailuku River. He was a boy of five and had so many questions.

“The island voices are talking to us,” his father had answered.

Daniel studied the pale white zigzag caterpillar scar that ran along his father’s left side squirming toward his back, a fall onto jagged lava rocks when he was a bit older than Daniel. He wanted to reach out and touch it, make it disappear. He thought his father suddenly looked sad.

“What are they saying?”

His father shrugged. “Things you wouldn’t understand.”

Daniel grew hot with impatience. He’d wanted his father to explain it to him. Tell me. He could still taste the words on the tip of his tongue, but his father’s quiet moment of attention had vanished and he’d turned away.

The following year he was gone. If the island voices were what told his father to leave them, then they were the same voices that had called Daniel back home.

* * *

Daniel stood stunned at the railing of the steamer, heart racing as his eyes followed the billowing smoke erupting from Mauna Loa. Moments later, it was followed by the bright blood orange curtain of lava that shot upward toward the darkening sky. Daniel felt the boat rock beneath his feet as a horn blew and passengers filed onto the deck to watch the erupting volcano. This was a homecoming Daniel hadn’t expected, though eerily coincidental, since he’d been born in the early hours of another Mauna Loa eruption, in 1907. When he heard the steamer’s engine reverse, the rumbling quieted, and he hoped they wouldn’t turn around and head back to O‵ahu. He was so close to home. He thought of Uncle Koji and his Hilo Aunties, realizing that this might be exactly like all the boyhood stories Koji had told him, how the island could rise at any time and remake itself, destroying all that was man-made.