Austin Aslan - The Islands at the End of the World

“Father, forgive me, for I’m about to sin,” Dad mutters. He searches briefly for keys. Nothing. He sticks his Civic key in the ignition, and I’m shocked that it turns. “Just like my old Ford,” he says. “Three decades of sea-salt damage. I bet a quarter of the cars in Hilo will start with any key.” The ignition won’t turn over, though. He presses the clutch to the floor and we begin to roll. When he pops the clutch, the vehicle springs to life and the needle shows that it’s three-quarters full. “Bet you a million bucks we’re not the first people to steal this piece of junk.”

The van backfires loudly. “Don’t be so sure,” I say. “There may be a good reason why this rust bucket was dumped here.” Out of habit I try the radio as we slowly advance into Hilo. The old thing works, but we get only static.

As we turn up Waianuenue Avenue, we pause. I feel light-headed and shaky as I see the destruction. The Hilo that I knew is gone. The old downtown is burnt to the ground, a rotten cavity along the bay front. The highway and parks in the low-lying areas are buried beneath debris. Hilo Bay is a giant stew of rubbish. The water laps against the shore like a heaving, swollen landfill.

“So many lives,” Dad says. “So many. If we hadn’t been away, that could have been us.”

The chilling thought sends waves along my back. “What if Mom and Kai were here, Dad?”

“They weren’t. We already know they’ve been around home, as recently as a few days ago.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

As soon as we can talk to the Emerald Orchid and find Mom and Kai and Grandpa, I know what I need to do next: find Tami and her mom. Their house is on the corner of a street across town that is marked with a LEAVING TSUNAMI EVACUATION AREA sign. Around here it doesn’t look like the damage has reached as far as the warning signs, but it’s impossible to tell for sure.

We continue up the mountain. Above the tsunami zone, Hilo breathes—but just barely. Cars seem deliberately parked, rather than discarded, but the rubbish heaps are everywhere. Many lawns seem tidy, but roadsides are overgrown with grasses and weeds. Pedestrians are skittish. Lots of cyclists. An open market bustles in the ball field near Rainbow Falls. It’s probably the farmer’s market that used to happen on the bay. It’s a relief to see people carrying on some of our old ways.

The upper edge of town provides our first serious challenge. There are abandoned cars all over, and we have to break through several tight squeezes between vehicles. Our van is definitely on its last journey. We listen with dread as it struggles up the steep saddle between the world’s biggest mountain—Mauna Loa—and the world’s tallest when measured from the sea floor—Mauna Kea. We might find ourselves stranded twenty miles away from anything. The Saddle Road is a ghost highway.

It takes us well over ninety minutes to reach the top of the road, a trip that used to take about half an hour. But we’ve made it this far. Dad’s sigh of relief is barely audible over the groaning of the motor. “Well, we’ll make it one direction, at least. Feel anything yet?”

I shake my head. No .

What are we doing?

From here it’s another ten minutes to the observatories’ visitors’ center, perched at ten thousand feet. We turn onto the summit road and slog forward. Just before the visitors’ center, we pass a large sign, often shrouded in mist but real. Like the falling-mango warning, another artifact of a strange age.

BEWARE OF INVISIBLE COWS

It means that roadside cattle are hard to see in the fog. “Try not to hit one, okay?” I say.

Our old joke. Dad glances around. “I don’t see any. Do you?”

The visitors’ center is a necessary stop: you have to acclimate to the high elevation before scaling the final four thousand feet to the summit. Dad turns the van around and faces it downhill so that we can easily pop the clutch again. There’s only one other car in the lot. I’m used to seeing herds of tourists here, filing into and out of buses. This place feels very lonely—which is somehow fitting.

As I jump out of the van, soaking up the silence and the stunning view, for the first time I feel that something has been corrected by the disasters. These high slopes were always overrun with tourists, but they should be lonesome. I stare across the silent expanse toward the distant bulge of Mauna Loa. The largest shield volcano in the world (and the third largest in the solar system ), Mauna Loa is nearly as tall as Mauna Kea, but its slopes fade into the sea, as if it prefers to be mistaken for a pitcher’s mound. Mauna Loa presses in on the ocean floor sixteen thousand feet deep, like a thumb indenting the surface of a balloon.

These are sacred places. Who could ascend these slopes and absorb their stillness—broken only by the volcanoes’ occasional trembling—and not feel that they are trespassing upon the home of a power far greater than any human? My heart stills, as if it has finally achieved its true homecoming.

If ever there were a place to speak to the gods … to the creatures of the stars … this would be it .

Dad and I stand beside each other at the overlook, staring at the distant sea. “Thank you for doing this,” I say.

“I’m glad we came.”

“Me too. Dad, what if this doesn’t work? What if it’s already too far away, or it doesn’t come back?”

“Lei. This isn’t your burden. It never was. This was … never going to work.”

We sit on the stone ledge overlooking the world for about twenty minutes. No traffic interrupts the silence. Nobody comes or goes, searching for the exit. It seems that we have all of creation to ourselves.

“Are you ready?” I finally ask Dad.

He lifts a can of diet cola. Full of aspartame; it should trigger a seizure. “I guess so.”

“Don’t shake it, lōlō .”

“Oh, yeah.”

As we walk toward the van, I’m surprised to see the front door of the visitors’ center standing open.

Uncle Akoni’s voice echoes across the windswept stillness:

“Go up on the mountain. Stand at the mouth of the cave. And when you hear the whisper, see if you can’t answer back.”

I enter.

The interior is dimly lit by skylights. Inside, flashy curiosities of science are on display, trinkets for sale. There is a small movie theater with thirty or so chairs facing a blank canvas. Framed posters on the walls. Large telescopes on rolling tripods crowd the foyer.

At the counter stands an older man with a bushy but trimmed brown beard. He’s wearing a plaid-flannel long-sleeved shirt with red suspenders. He grins at me over the cash register as I step inside, as if he’s been expecting me. “Oh, hi,” I say.

“Good morning.”

“Are you … are you open ?”

He smiles gently and motions toward the open doors to say, I believe so .

“Why?” I approach the counter.

He shrugs. “People still show up. Not so much in the mornings, though. There’s not much else for me to do during the day, to tell the truth.”

“Who are you?”

The man waves to Dad, who enters behind me. “I go by Buzz. I’m an astronomer.”

“Like Buzz Aldrin?” I ask.

“No. Comes from Buzz Lightyear, I’m afraid. And a bad haircut a few years back.” As he talks, he spins a gyroscope on his pointer finger. “I was in charge of a very big telescope. Now … I’m back to looking through actual lenses. But there’s still a lot to learn—if you know how to look.”

“If you know how to listen.”

He nods. He leans across the counter and transfers the gyroscope from the tip of his own finger to mine. Childish delight dances in his eyes. “And why are you here? Who are you ?”