Text from Craig Arnold's blog on April 26, 2009:
You had not expected this to be so easy. In less than an hour you have found the road that circles the base of the volcano. All that remains is to walk around to the south face where, judging by the map, another road squiggles its way up the crater. When you round the bend of the road and catch your first glimpse of the summit, you see your mistake. It is as if you have wandered into some post-apocalyptic science fiction movie. There is the husk of what must have been the visitor’s center. There is a backhoe, resting on its side, yellow paint pitted with rust. Whatever road once went to the summit is now under a lot of dirt and rockfall and dark gray ash.
Stubs of dead tree-trunks
standing around a crater –
ashtray at last call
And something is beeping, loud and piercing, Is it an alarm of some sort? A warning the danger is real, sulfur dioxide gas, a tall white plume – the wind changes, bearing the column of sulfurous death straight down toward you.
This seems like an opportune moment to reconsider your plans for the morning. Luckily there is another road down, and you take it. The metal guardrails have been eaten half-away, and they twist off easily in your hand.
You feel like you are seeing everything now. Nothing was happening, and now everything is happening. Why does your sight seem now so sharp and clear?
There is a rustle in the canes, and out comes a long lean tawny body, rippling squirrel-like over the sidewalk: a mongoose or a weasel.it is thinking about crossing the road, and a car is coming. You click your tongue at it, tsk-tsk, and it stops and gives you a look before ducking back into the brush. If nothing else you have saved a life today.
A life other than your own, that is. Danger has a way of cutting through melancholy, the real fear blinding you to the fear dimly imagined. If you could only always just have escaped death, you would never be sad again.
In the parking lot of the restaurant, the island’s only restaurant, a crow is perched on the hatchback of a pickup truck.Your lunch arrives. You have no idea what you ordered.
Afloat in my soup
sweetbitter leaves – a flavor
I’ve never tasted
ashitaba, angelica. It seems like a fine thing to eat in spring.
Angelica is a member of the Apiaceae, all of which have hollow stems and tiny flowers that present themselves in circular bunches or umbels. umbellifer, umbrella-bearers. Many of the umbellifers are delicious, some are contraceptive, and at least one, hemlock, is deadly poison. The plant takes its name from the angel who is supposed to have revealed its medicinal properties to a dozing monk. Or from St. Michael the Archangel, around whose feast-day, May 8, it blooms.
In Japan the plant is called ashitaba, tomorrow leaf. They say it grows so quickly that leaves picked in the evening will be replaced the next morning. Or it may bring more tomorrows.Crushed in the hands, the fresh leaves are sweet, slightly musky – not quite mint, not quite juniper. It is a clean, windswept smell, the smell of meadow, of England, of green, the smell of a road after rain. It is the smell of a world in which there is nothing rotten or putrid or sulfurous, a world in which all of those things have been rinsed away.