Soon after Meda and I got married and returned to Hawaii for graduate school at UH, my mother took us on an interisland trip which included a couple of days in a friend’s family cabin up at the volcano on the Big Island.

If I’m not mistaken, this area had been part of the Kilauea Iki eruption in 1959, which I had witnessed. By now, a decade later, it was part of the “Devastation Trail” at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, which lets visitors get up close to a prior eruption.

It’s possible that in 1959, the cinder cone to the left was fountaining lava, and we watched from a spot on the rim across the crater on the right hand side. One of these days I’ll find