Standing at the Edge of Creation on the Big Island

The lava field stretched to the horizon — black and broken and absolutely still, like a frozen sea. And then, at the far edge, a thin orange line where the earth was still being made. We stood at the viewing platform in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park at dusk and watched the planet do what it has been doing for four billion years.

We had come to the Big Island specifically for the volcanoes. Priya is a geologist; I am a person who married a geologist and has learned to love rocks. Kilauea had been erupting intermittently for months and the park rangers confirmed active surface flows were visible from the overlook.

The scale of the Kīlauea caldera is genuinely difficult to process. The crater is nearly three miles across and hundreds of feet deep. Standing at the rim, the steam vents below look small until you realize each one is the size of a house.

We hiked the Devastation Trail the next morning — a boardwalk through a cinder field where a 1959 eruption buried an entire forest. The skeletal trunks still stand, preserved in the ash. New ferns are growing between them. Life insisting on itself.

On our last night we drove to the coast to watch lava meet the ocean. The steam plume was visible from miles away. Up close, the sound was extraordinary — a constant hiss and crack as two-thousand-degree rock hit the sea. Priya held my hand and said, quietly, 'This is why I became a geologist.' I believed her completely.