While visiting an amusement park this weekend in the American heartland, one of life’s stark and interesting contrasts struck me solidly like a fast moving basket ball sized block of hot lava. This particular contrast concerned the pursuit of leisure, and how different folks seek it. Perhaps it was my recent visit to Costa Rica in the rainy season, rivers flowing, monkeys swinging, where my wife and I took the opportunity to go white water rafting on the Pacuare (pronounced pak-wah-ree), rated by National Geographic as in the top 10 most something rivers in the world for rafting. Last week, on a bumpy Costa Rican road on way to the put-in, brimming with excitement and anticipation of the river, I passed this fact onto a fellow rafter. “According to National Geographic this river is in the worlds top ten,” fellow rafter raises his eyes “top ten for what?” I shrug and guess “I don’t know, I think for being photogenic.” I could have been right because the river was beautiful.
More likely though, it was not the rafting that brought on my mid-west culture shock, but two days later when in a different part of the country I hired a local guide “Heiner” to hike onto Volcan Arenal, Costa Ricas most active volcano. For $100 the guide promised to safely deliver me to a point on the slopes of the volcano where I could examine freshly erupted lava. My wife opted not to join me on this hike. Safety is a relative term, and my definition differs from my wife. To begin with, the hike was illegal, tourists and eruptions on Arenal are plentiful, and access to the volcano is technically restricted to lookouts far from the action. I had arranged the clandestine hike after an official hike upon which my wife and I, and ten other hopeful backpackers, failed to see anything owing to a low cloud base, which obscured the volcanic cone. The guide, sensing my frustration, took me aside from the group “for $100 I show lava, but tell no-one, big problem if police discover.”
On a clear night, the cone reputedly glows incandescent with fresh lava, but I would pay to see the lava in the morning. Not at the crater rim, but below the cloud base where hot rocks, freshly ejected from the crater, tumble down and come to rest on the slopes below. “For $100 you can light cigarette on rock,” it admitted to myself it sounded great, but one reservation did come to mind “but I don’t smoke.” No problem, we would pour water on the block and see it hiss. The next morning came, and with it my guide. Not Harry, as promised, but his uncle “Donald”, a bleary eyed local in his late 30’s who looked cranky, nervous, and perhaps a little hung-over to be on his way up an erupting volcano at 7 am. Uncle Don and I walked the main street of La Fortuna, a nearby town, looking for a bank to so I could pay him and close the deal. I pondered the wisdom of “paying the ferryman” before reaching other side, but I paid anyway, and we jumped in a taxi headed for the volcano. For much of our trip, backpacking in Costa Rica, my wife and I had explored within the limits of sane, Lonely Planet style travel. Moments of danger over the last month had been confined to surfing the Pacific and Carribean coasts, and eating in local restaurants. But this was different, I was sitting in the back seat of a taxi with a man who spoke little English and was prepared to break the rules to walk me into an area of active volcanic hazard.
The interior of the beaten up early 90’s Japanese sedan was sucking in carbon monoxide from the exhaust, a smell I could recognize from my youth, having had the misfortune of owning several fuming vehicles. The smell is something you become physically sensitized to once you have lived with a vehicle that fumes. Carbon monoxide is poisonous, bonding to red blood cells dangerously in the place of oxygen. It makes you sleepy, a little nauseous, and can be used to commit suicide if you run an extension pipe from the exhaust to the car’s interior. A sense of mild foreboding crept over me as we made our way out of La Fortuna, anticlockwise around the base of the volcano past thermal resorts and hotels. About 5 miles from town the taxi pulled over and we disembarked to the roadside. With a quick payment to the taxi driver, uncle Don gestured for me to follow, then crossed the road and made his way across the front lawn of a small white bungalow with a billboard out front. Two small dogs barked from the front porch as we passed by the side of the house and hopped over a fence to a farm track that lead back into the jungle and onto the lower slopes of the volcano.
This weekend I was in Ohio visiting my wife’s grandmother. My wife and I are moving overseas a couple of months, my wife phrasing the visit indelicately as “say goodbye to grandma”. Present at this family reunion were my wife’s four cousins, three of which are 12 year old triplets, hence the amusement park idea. Actually, truth be known, I quite like roller coasters and the whole thrill seeker culture surrounding them. The contrast comes as I wait in line for the “Drop Zone”, a ride that earns a terror rating of 4 out 5 in the park’s ride guide. Patrons of this theme park were both lucky and unlucky this weekend, lucky because the weather was perfect, azure skies of deepest summer and low humidity. Unlucky because the weather was great and the weekend was the last of summer vacation, which equals theme parks crowded with kids all across the Midwest and long, long lines for rides. For me, plenty of time to think about the banality of mass market corporate engineered recreation in modern America. I wait in line for the “Drop Zone” and consider the contrast between seeking thrills on the slopes of a volcano versus riding roller coasters. I am filled with the creative urge to express the absurdity of the contrast to others, and imagine making a work of art, a painting on a canvass, something frightfully subtle. Perhaps I could use newspaper clippings snipped out, and glued anarchist-style into a collage. I don’t paint so a collage makes sense.
The “Drop Zone” is a giant steel erection which juts perpendicularly out of the ground to a height of over 300 feet. The erection has a ring around it that seats about 30 riders. After suffering the anxiety of a long, long wait in line, the rider takes a seat at street level and is harnessed into a spartan bucket seat. Silently, the ring ascends the pole with a nervously giggling and mostly teenage payload. But in my work of art, on the canvas of my imagination, the payload is not young, but very old. Thirty white haired octogenarians in the drop zone. A final thrill to end their insulated and litigation proof existence in Middle America. Before the new group can board, the lifeless bodies of thirty white haired seniors must be unloaded from the ride and into a waiting queue of Ambulances. How ironic, living your entire life obsessed with safety, only to die anyway. No different to standing in line, anxious and bored, waiting for a heart attack.
Passing through farmland on a gentle incline we follow a rough cattle track upwards. After about 500 meters we come to a fork in the road. We take the left fork, through a farm gate, across a stream, and continue upwards along the track through more farmland, then into rainforest. While walking through the rainforest Don points out a Toucan and some other wildlife and I take some comfort from this. I am on a normal guided walk. After a kilometer or so the road forks again, we stay to the right and walk down hill until the track double backs sharply on itself uphill to the left. We walk to the right where the path seems to disappear into undergrowth. An old wooden sign, broken and nearly covered with vegetation warns of volancanic hazard and against proceeding. We pass it and continue downhill for one hundred meters or so until the overgrown track exits the undergrowth next to a small lake. We walk along the lake shore in an anticlockwise direction, past an abandoned lodge. In broken spanglish I ask about the lodge, Donald gestures to the derelict buildings “landslide destroy in 2000.” We continue past the lodge along the lakeshore, following a road of crushed black basalt. After a few hundred meters the black rock road snakes uphill toward the crater, and the road becomes the lower slope of the lava field, an expanse of sharp black basalt, permeated by the occasional green shrub and reaching from the crater rim to our position on the lower slopes of the volcano. Basalt is frozen lava, but higher up we can here an almost constant clinking sound. My guide impresses upon me that the clinking is the collision between rocks. I am not sure what he means, why do the rocks collide?, but I am beginning to enjoy the sneaky feeling I am getting, passing unnoticed through gates and jungle, the abandoned lodge imbuing the morning with an end-of-the-worldly, apocalyptic atmosphere.
The ride ascends and the giggling is gradually replaced by a respectful silence as the anxiety of vertigo descends upon us all. Going up, the view is the best in the park, perhaps in the best in all of Ohio, and I am reminded of a sign in the park below that informs patrons of a seemingly random fact, that the highest point in Pennsilvania is lower that than the lowest point in Colorado. It all makes sense now, suspended above the vast flatness of the Midwest, a geographical banality. But more than that, the vastness below reminds me that my feet are dangling unsupported, the same way they do when I am sleepy and on a top bunk, about to leap onto a cold concrete floor, and my feet tingle nervously in anticipation of a painful landing. Like butterflies in my feet. When the ring reaches the top, there is a soft clunk, and then the wait. The long line allowed me plenty of time to inspect the cycle of the drop zone, and I observed a wait of between fifteen and thirty seconds, presumably depending on the state of humor of the ride operator. During the long line I conjecture that the wait is probably the most frightening part of the ride, the part most likely to result in the coronary failure of someone with a weak heart. As it turned out I was wrong, but only just.
Passing up through the field of frozen basalt the terrain grows imperceptibly steeper, and the clinking ever louder. Ahead a short distance are three coyote, they scatter as I pause and raise my camera. My guide points to the right where on of the coyote stands atop a small rise, the coyote throws its head back and howls banefully. The effect is haunting, unseen clinking from above, howling from the side and a damp breeze blowing up from the lowlands. I can see for the first time my guide smiling, eyes wide, getting into the spirit that has by now consumed me totally. The wild dog continues to howl as we continue upwards, the terrain growing steeper, and now the source of clinking reveals itself. Above us the cloud base hangs only just over our heads, a low ceiling of cotton wool that obscures the top third of the volcano, we have ascended perhaps fifteen hundred feet from the road. The lava field is nearly everywhere now, forming valleys and ridges that run up into the clouds. The lush vegetation from which we emerged one hour previously is now confined to narrow green fingers projecting upwards on the ridges only, the source of the clinking sound is preventing the vegetation from growing in the valleys.
On our ride, the wait seemed to last longer than I had estimated from below, and then, without warning, the ring loaded with teens and triplet cousins was magnetically released and snatched downwards by gravity. Had I been holding a quarter in my palm, it would have levitated before my eyes, but all I held was my breath, and that I released in terror, a breathless groan as we plummeted earthward.
Ejected from the bowels of the earth, blocks of still hot lava are spat from the crater high above, the blocks, on average the size of basketballs rise high into the air, then come crashing down the slopes of the volcano under the tug of gravity. The flying basalt cools quickly on contact with the atmosphere, forming solid rock that is somewhat brittle, like glass. The brittle rock ricochets on down the slopes, leaving a white puff of ash behind each collision, producing the distinctive clinking sound that can be heard from miles away, the sound of breaking glass. We stop to observe the spectacle from what I gauge to be a safe distance.
Every now and then a larger block, perhaps the size of a washing machine, comes tearing down the slope, spinning rapidly on its axis as it fly’s high into the air with each bounce, producing a whirring sound like a firework that rotates rapidly around a nail on a fence. These larger blocks are electrifying, sometimes breaking up on impact, producing smaller fragments that come to rest closer than usual “Whirr- clink, Whirr-clink.” On such fragment lands only eighty meters above our position. I am now in a kind of fascinated trance, I feel like I am being shelled, but with no enemy, no hard feelings. I lock my gaze on the featureless expanse of rocks where I gauge the recent fragment stopped and point “We go find the hot rock?” The deal was $100 to light a cigarette on the hot lava, and despite the unnerving fact that we must wander into the zone which is within range of incoming blocks, and I have no smokes, Donald smiles accommodatingly, nods and stands up.
I gauged that the hot fragment came to rest just next to large flat block about eighty meters above us. Scrambling nervously upwards toward the large block we catch sight of the basketball sized fragment just where I expected it, distinctive for its coating of white ash. We are now crouched next to the white hot block, I am staring in fascination, Don keeping a wary eye on the cloud base, now only just above us. Any blocks that come spinning out of the clouds now will give us little time to react before they are upon us. Don pulls a water bottle from his bag and empties half it's contents onto the rock, the rock hisses and steams, we face each other and stare silly grins at each other. Mission accomplished. I pull out my camera and shoot some video just as a whirring sound alerts us to an incoming block, invisible in the clouds, but approaching and growing louder. I drop my camera without reattaching the lens cap, and it bounces from side to side on the neck strap as we both break into a sprint downhill, hopping over a steep, sharp field of loose rocks, away from the danger zone. The rock hisses past, perhaps just fourty meters away, into a gully on the left hand side.
