Natural Disasters

We were vacationing on the island of Aiwa Kuku; an island big enough to support tourism but small enough to have no place for the automobile. “Where the automobile has not conquered.” This was what the natives tag the island, and that drew in enough tourist so that bicycle and scooter rental shops could feed the young natives. While their parents were busy cooking native dishes that were discovered soon after tourism, or playing culturally enlightening music that had no recorded history. There was plenty of alcohol always within hands reach so that a discerning mind might realize how fruitful it was to forget definitions.

The island was centered by a volcano, lush green tropical trees swelling from its base and fading to expose its rock belching mouth; majestically rising to more importance than the island; regal growling and rumblings added to its dominance, it was not dead, the island was aware of this, hot feet, hardened lava rock, volcano was the island, when you left the volcano you had abandoned the island. Rumbling, letting you know that from within the earth, there were things that wanted to get out.

My family and I took vacation there to get away from civilization and there we met up with other civilized peoples that were equally trying to get away from civilization and that was enough in common for us to bond where we could sit and chat about how strange the natives.

We were all sitting around watching this silly dances that, were it not for the itchy grass swaying from the native waists would have no merit; watching the dance, getting drunk, eating cooked fruit mixed meat soups, a fire unleashing unnecessary warmth, it was humid and hot enough where blankets would feel rejected, but the fire provided some additional native effect, it wasn’t electric, it wasn’t in the fireplace; the native men had made it by just piling rock and bush and spark, and it added the nice shadowing effect that mesmerizes cold hearts, and lets the dreams that rise from hardened ground fly their intimacy if only in the shadows.

Grumbling temblors would disrupt our aimless conversations, but the natives seemed unworried by their shrugging island, so we quietly adapted wanting not to seem so foreign. But this was a mistake for the volcano queen had not gone up in bed thrown into the mouth to appease the grumbling volcano god; the natives had never adopted this rather important volcano appeasing ritual, and without the life affirming death of a virgin princess calendar wedding herself to boiling rock, all god volcano had to eat was the occasional nasty criminal that fell in disgrace of the incestuous community. When caught, a murderer would be thrown down that long orifice of spiraling voluptuousness; and there met his essence in the boiling.

And you have to say that nourishing a volcano criminals, volcano will itself become criminal, and so it was that the sweetness of our adventure was broken into more parts than optimal, as all those melted criminals, rumble from within the core of molted earth, and liquid rock spitting became a game for them to prove that they could continue murdering from the grave, where spat out flame and darkness, and failed crusted earth to contain the advances, caps of sulfur spat out flames, and taming lava blanketed the rivers dry and the lush green tropics red, where wild boars cooked without being eaten, and birds new not where from the next island , and manic children swamp the sea, and we all run behind them, where it was cold but not for long, island paradise.

RC