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Excerpts

1

The road sign read: 'BEWARE INVISIBLE COWS'. But I didn't really need it to see that I was in an unusual kind of place.

I was listening to David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' playing on the car radio. 'Here am I floating in a tin can, far above the world'. And something about: 'the stars look very different today'. I felt just like Major Tom. On this day the stars really did look very different. I was finally taking off and leaving Earth behind.

It was like driving from the Garden of Eden to the surface of the moon. As I snaked up from Hilo on the east coast towards the centre of the Big Island, I passed palms swaying in the breeze, giant ferns, banana trees with leaves the size of hammocks, and hibiscus flowers, in yellow and purple, the size of trumpets, sticking their long stamens out at me. A red bird - a brilliant red, all over - flashed by, like something on fire. I drove straight by the Kaumana Caves and the Rainbow Falls. The palatial houses down by the sea and up in the hills shrank down to mere shacks and sheds and finally petered out altogether around mile marker 10. It was raining and everything was a dripping, glistening, glowing green, like it was radioactive. And still I drove relentlessly upwards, up the Saddle Road, into the clouds that hung over the misty mountain. Soon the scenery consisted mostly of infinite variations on the theme of rock. The palm trees had all gone, even the grass had gone. I drove through fields of stone, forests of stone populated by lumbering stone creatures, tribes of stone. I saw flaky rocks, great flat slabs, spiky rocks, frilly ones, fat blobby ones, ones that stuck out at odd angles, rocky cones and cylinders and dodecahedrons, rocks like granola and rocks like chocolate, I saw rocks in the shape of pyramids, and rocks that reminded me of Notre Dame cathedral, and not a few that recalled the hunchback and all the gargoyles. And a few more that looked like plain old boulders, old-fashioned uncomplicated rocks, the size of buildings, in colour somewhere between dark grey and black, tossed down from on high by a careless giant. Here and there huge earth-moving machines were scattered about, boasting massive caterpillar tracks and capacious shovels and giant maws and ten-ton crushers, but they were stationary and lifeless, as if already defeated, feeble and pathetic up against the sheer unremitting, inflexible, and invincible hardness of the terrain.

I am a surfer. Or I used to be. I was in Hawaii, the Himalayas of big waves, but for once I wasn't going surfing. I had been surfing correspondent for a couple of newspapers in England and I had written a book about the feud between a couple of big-wave Hawaiian surfers. Now I was surfed out and written out and I had put away my board and my 'sex wax' and I was getting as far from the beach as it was possible to get. I had spent long enough looking for the elusive perfect wave. I had (as surfers say) paid my dues. I was setting off in search of the truth instead: the original truth, the ultimate truth, the everlasting truth. The mother of all truth. I was here to see God.

Mauna Kea is 14,000 feet high (give or take a few feet), which is roughly half the size of Everest. If you measure it from its real base, on the bed of the Pacific Ocean, it is the tallest mountain in the world by far. Mauna Kea is in fact an extremely large volcano which - fortunately for the inhabitants - ceased erupting a few centuries ago. That's all Hawaii is: a bunch of volcanoes poking up through the Pacific like periscopes. The 'Islands' are nothing but an accumulation of lava flowing forth from a geological wound, the Earth turning itself inside out. The distinctive thing about the Big Island is that it is not only the biggest of the lot but actually getting bigger and possibly higher. And it is high enough, on Mauna Kea, for you to have to stop halfway up in order to acclimatize.

I parked the rental car in the car park of the Visitor Information Station, threw on a coat, and walked out on a lunar landscape. It was a lot colder than at sea level and the air was thinner. What appeared to be large meteorites pitted the lava fields. Maybe I should have been wearing something other than flip-flops and cut-offs. What caught my eye though were all the warning notices pinned up on the wall. This was far enough, they all seemed to say: this far and no further. Please turn back and go down to safer heights. You really don't want to be up here, what with invisible cows and all. Another listed all the 'Winter Hazards' as you approached the summit: wind-chill factors of 40 degrees below zero; snow, ice and impassable roads; violent storms that can last for over a week; people trapped in life-threatening situations. I had already heard about the couple of Japanese visitors who had died on the mountain just a week or two before. I had to stick around at this level for half an hour or more, so I read on.

'Acute mountain sickness is common,' I discovered. Symptoms (according to an 'informational health column') included:

Severe Shortness of Breath
Cough with Frothy or Blood Sputum
Loss of Coordination/Balance
Rapid Breathing at Rest
Vision Impairment
Chest Pain
Slurred Speech
Confusion/Disorientation.

Children under the age of 16, pregnant women, persons in poor physical condition or suffering from heart or respiratory conditions were being strongly advised to turn back NOW! I bought a bottle of sparkling mineral water. There wasn't anything stronger. 'DO NOT DRINK ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES ON MAUNA KEA'. This was not just a plea for abstemiousness. 'High altitude causes impaired reasoning and drowsiness. Alcohol will further diminish judgment and driving abilities.' The word 'evacuate' came up fairly often, as did 'hazardous'. People found to be suffering from acute high-altitude symptoms had to be transported down to lower altitudes immediately. 'IT MAY BE A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH'. It was not exactly 'Give up hope all ye who enter here', but it was close.

I was beginning to think I would need a Sherpa to get to the top. Fortunately, I had one. His name was Doug, he had a generous bristling beard, and he served behind the counter at the Visitor Information Station. He delivered a short sermon on the perils of hypoxia. 'Whatever the altitude, always listen to your body,' he said. 'Don't fight it.' I thought this was good advice.

'My body is telling me to keep going right now,' I said.

'That's good,' he said. He looked out of the window at the cars that were pulling out of the car park and turning back down the hill. 'Most people's bodies get a little cautious at this point.'

Doug introduced me to the wekiu bug (or Nysius wekiuicola). He was an unusual little critter who lived on or around the summit and was unique to Mauna Kea ('wekiu' means top or summit in Hawaiian). Built-in antifreeze. Survives by sucking all the juice out of other insects blown up there. 'She inserts the mouthparts into the exoskeleton,' said Doug with a degree of lip-smacking enthusiasm. 'And then sucks.'

'I guessed that's how it would be done,' I said.

It was a cunning evolutionary adaptation, given the lack of edible plants at this height. Apparently visitors were easy prey, knocked out or rendered incapable of resistance by the cold. After all, they were in Hawaii, they were used to warmer climes, they come here for a holiday and then - bam! - they end up as lunch. After a while, I wasn't sure if Doug was talking about other bugs or tourists or, quite specifically, me.

I buttoned up my coat, got back in the car, and drove out of the car park and up the hill. Soon there was nothing but a gravel track winding around the mountain. Down below, fluffy clouds formed a doughnut around the mountain and blotted out the warm Pacific and the coastline. I was looking out for invisible cows: I couldn't see any, and I couldn't hear them either, so they had to be there somewhere, whole herds of them, conceivably, galloping about. As I slid around another bend on the long approach to the summit I spotted another sign stuck in the thick red dust: 'Ice Age Natural Reserve'. It was definitely colder up here but there was a strong sense that I was floating free in time as well as in space. It was like stumbling upon The Land That Time Forgot or going back to One Million Years BC with Raquel Welch (but without Raquel Welch).

As I got closer to the top and the road thinned out and narrowed down into nothing, like a goat-track, and I shoved the gear stick desperately into 'low', I not only had the feeling that it was vertiginous, but also the very word 'vertiginous' kept reasserting itself in my brain, I could virtually see the word 'vertiginous' out there in space, dangling off the edge of the mountain, over the precipice, falling down into the abyss. It was as if the damn word was giving me vertigo. They didn't mention that symptom of high altitude in any of the notices. And there were a few other things they didn't mention either.

© Andy Martin 2009