Chapter Twenty-Six: Life On Volcanic Earth

I may live, I may die

Apr 06, 2024

About two hundred and forty thousand years before the Rotolonga Boys High School Golf Team won their national golf titles, Rotorua blew up, leaving behind a volcanic caldera that is fourteen miles in diameter and depositing ignimbrite.

photo of lava flowing on land — Photo by Marc Szeglat on Unsplash

I am glad my surname is Allbright and not Ignimbrite — that would be almost as bad as Beaglehole.

Anyway, ignimbrite is a volcanic pyrolastic rock, and was deposited over an area of fifteen hundred square miles.

As I said, though, not to worry about the boys golfers. This eruption took place long before they travelled the area winning golf titles. Now, there are seventeen extinct caldera lakes in the region and today Kiwis and foreign visitors alike enjoy the fishing, water skiing, and swimming that all these lakes offer.

If you decide to visit Rotorua, be forewarned, however, that some Kiwis call it “Stinky Town” because of the geothermal activity, because of the steaming geysers and bubbling mud pools and thermal springs that emanate a sulfuric fog and smell to the entire area.

That being said, you may also want to know that the town was the happy recipient of “New Zealand’s Most Beautiful City Award” in 2002 and again in 2006. So it is stinky town and most beautiful. Life is full of contradictions.

Beau and I agree it also deserves the “New Zealand Most Interesting Gentleman-Scholar-Golf-Player-Haka Performing Award” of all time. With a special lifetime achievement award for Gutsy. Cheers, Gutsy!

Just south of the Rotorua area, in the center of the North Island, is Lake Taupo. Now this, New Zealand’s largest lake, also lies in an ancient volcanic caldera, created when the area erupted about twenty-six thousand years ago. The most recent explosion at Taupo, however, occurred in historic times.

In the reign of the emperor of China, Ling Ti (168-189 A.D.), it is recorded that the sky was “as red as blood” for many days. And in the Roman document of the same era, the Historia Augusta, there is a report that some time before the Deserters’ War (186 A.D.), the sky was seen to “burst into flame.”

Herodian, another historian of the time, lists odd portents, strange omens seen in the reign of the Emperor Commodus (180-192 A.D.). He writes, “Stars remained visible by day, and others became elongated, seeming to hang in mid-air.”

The only known volcanic eruption of that magnitude in those days was the eruption of the Taupo rhyolitic vent. The most powerful, the most destructive volcanic explosion anywhere on earth in the last five thousand years, many times more powerful than Krakatoa, which was quite small in comparison.

Will Lake Taupo erupt again? Yes, definitely, say the volcanologists. When? They have no idea. Maybe today.

Knowing that the ground and the waters around Rotorua still bubble and steam and send geysers skyward, Beau and I decided to postpone a visit to the heart of the Taupo volcanic zone, to put it off maybe forever.

Of course, a great deal of the country of New Zealand would blast skyward if the area decided to release its tensions again — even Auckland city lies above an active hotspot, an area of extra hot mantle. And the skies in China would once again be as red as blood, and the heavens in Italia would burst into flame.

What goes around, comes around. Do you believe in the Big Bang? As the Dalai Lama says, “Which one?”

Someday — even the sun and all the stars will die.

We decided to skip the center and to skirt around the North Island, counterclockwise, and then head back up to Auckland and on home to the Far North, to Doubtless Bay. I was left to think about volcanic eruptions as we drove mile after mile toward the wine country of Hawkes Bay.

There are volcanic-like eruptions that come suddenly into everyone’s life, sudden death, devastating news, deadly accidents, diagnoses of terminal illness. Aaron do you know you have leukemia?

Human life is always lived out on unstable earth, above active hotspots. Calamity is never a question of “if” but of “when.” Old age, sickness, death. Life is unsatisfactory, impermanent, they say the Buddha said. Indeed.

And yet, I’m for it, for Life. Wouldn’t want to miss it, given the choice.

Rolling through the North Island, once again we remembered our first trip to this area. We had originally gravitated to the South Island because we were looking for peace and quiet after California.

Although the South Island is slightly bigger in area than the North Island, as I’ve mentioned, it has only one-third the population. Three million in the North, one million in the South. Yet rolling through mile after mile of countryside here in the North made us realize how sparse the population is, even here. Miles and miles of green countryside, forests, and sheep paddocks, but almost no people.

Occasionally, we would see a farmer walking in the paddocks or driving a tractor or pickup truck, a farmer wearing one of those bright electric-blue jumpsuits they wear all over New Zealand, those bright blue overalls.

Who wears a blue suit?

Why was Ian hanging around the forest on our farm? He had planted it, with help from Maddy Jane’s brother, Gaddy John, about sixty years ago. But why was he still hanging around there? And why could some people, like Beau and his mother, Dee, why could some people see the dead?

What does it mean to be dead?

Maddy Jane, who wears a blue suit?

What do you mean, Beau? A blue suit. I don’t know. A blue suit.

You know, one of those bright suits, a bright blue suit, that you step into. I saw a man in the forest while Aaron and I were clearing underbrush. He was there, right before my eyes, and then he wasn’t.

Pippa, Maddy Jane’s daughter-in-law, speaks up, surprised.

Why, Maddy! Ian always wore a blue coverall! It was Ian, Ian that Beau saw in the forest!

Yes, he did, says Maddy Jane, yes, he did. Ian always wore blue coveralls when he was out on the farm. Yes, he did. He did. And he planted that forest. Oh. Oh, my goodness—

We arrived in Napier again, the gateway to the Hawkes Bay wine country, and decided to spend a few nights for old times’ sake. The Māori had lived here for a few hundred years when the first European sailed by in the 1770s. Captain James Cook, of course.

Then in the 1850s, the town was planned and laid out and named after Sir Charles Napier, the famous hero of the famous Battle of Meeanee. OK, maybe not so famous. The British colonial Battle of Meeanee, in the province of Sindh, in what we today call India. Only a few thousand casualties — hardly worth mentioning in the history of human warfare.

Many of the streets in Napier were named to commemorate the colonial era of the British Indian Empire.

On Tuesday, February 3, 1931, all of Hawkes Bay was rocked by an earthquake that lasted over two and a half minutes. Napier was leveled. The city was rebuilt during the Great Depression and was recreated in the Art Deco style that was popular at that time.

Napier and South Beach Miami are the two best preserved Art Deco towns in the world. Since Napier’s entire city center was rebuilt simultaneously, it almost resembles a giant movie set. Yet, it is a real town and the buildings are original.

Beau and I checked into our hotel and then went out for a stroll through the streets, kind of an architectural tour. Later, in the middle of the night, we got up to stroll the streets again. Far away, in Europe, the Rugby World Cup quarterfinals were being played and we wanted to observe the game with the local Kiwis here in Napier. Cultural experience. It seemed the entire city was awake.

A giant marquee on one building read, “Xena Warrior Princess Bar and Café.” We wanted to try it, guessing it was probably a lesbian establishment — OK, OK, people of Lesbos! So sue me! I no longer care! — but the place was so packed that we could barely squeeze ourselves in the door.

The giant TV screens inside were blasting the opening of the rugby match. France Les Bleus vs. New Zealand All Blacks. The French team was lined up on the centerline, arms over each other’s shoulders, face to face with the All Blacks just a few feet away.

Now, I should add that in the old days, Māori warriors often went into battle naked, except for a plaited flax belt around the waist. And an erect penis was a sign of courage.

It is a good thing the All Blacks did not attempt their opening haka in this more traditional style. There is no telling what might have happened at the Rugby World Cup that night. The French team most probably would have surrendered to the All Blacks straightaway, as would have half of those in the stadium.

We pushed our way in closer to the nearest big screen TV at The Xena Warrior Princess Bar.

Now begins the haka, the Ka Mate Haka.

Māori chief Te Rupiah is credited with composing it in the 1840s, this most famous haka of all, but in fact it is an ancient chant going back many centuries.

Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!

Tenei te tangata puhuruhuru

Nana nei i tiki mai whakawhiti te ra

A, upane! Ka upane!

A, upane, ka upane, whiti te ra!

I may die! I may die! I may live! I may live!

This is the hairy man who stands here

Who brought the sun and caused it to shine

A step upward, another step upward!

A step upward, another step upward! The Sun shines!

The Ka Mate Haka celebrates the triumph of Maui.

So as the sun rose one morning, Maui and his brothers threw a lasso around it and slowly, slowly captured the sun, slowed it down and made the days longer, increased the light, increased the warmth, increased the life.

Stepping up toward the sun — the journey toward life, toward enlightenment, and toward wisdom.

After the rugby match, Beau and I walked some more through the streets of Napier, the chant of the Ka Mate still in my head, and, eventually, as the sun came up, we went into a café for breakfast. The crowds in the streets and cafés were despondent. New Zealand had lost to France, 20-18.

There are no guarantees in life.

I may die, I may die, I may live, I may live—

Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!

Why was Ian hanging around the forest on our farm? Maybe he just couldn’t let it go. Some things are just too hard to let go of.

In the Buddhist mandala mudra, the entire universe is symbolically offered to the enlightened Buddha. Holding a handful of rice in the palms of my hands as I release the mudra, I relinquish all attachments. Everything I own. My home, this Vara Prasada, this Sacred Gift.

My books, my clothes, my car.

Our pets, and all my loved ones.

This beautiful earth. My beloved ones.

My most dearly beloved Beau.

And even this body.

Everything I own.

This precious body, this precious human life.

Imagining that each grain of rice in my hands is something that is most precious to me.

And then. I throw it all up into the air and it is beautiful to behold, like a wedding, and at that point I am releasing all these things, and letting go of attachment to my precious body, my precious human life, everything I own, and my hands get sweaty and some of the rice grains just won’t release.

And that’s what most people feel when they are getting ready to die.

There are some things we just can’t let go of.

END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

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Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published soon.