|
My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Pele vs. Pele
>> 8,000 feet
Until Cruz MacKenzie saw Mauna Loa, he'd never paid much attention to the myth of Pele. That's Pele the volcano goddess of Hawaii, not Pele the soccer god of Brazil. During his Bay area sports writer incarnation, Cruz covered Pele a couple of times when he played with the Cosmos and definitely believed in his power and magic. After taking the job at the Star-Bulletin, he learned about the goddess whom locals reverently call Madame Pele. Covering the destruction of the village of Kalapana, he heard Hawaiians refer to her simply as The Lady.
But Cruz was a rational literalist. And while he respected the Hawaiian traditions, at first he couldn't imagine a fiery tempered lady in red birthing up millions of years of lava to create the Hawaiian archipelago. It was just a myth. And he certainly couldn't believe there was any connection between people taking Pele's lava rocks from Hawaii and then being struck by terrible misfortune, not even after the boxes of rocks started arriving in his office. The first one was a taped-up, beat-up Nike box that rattled.
After that Arizona reporter opened a box and it exploded, Cruz was wary of boxes from people and addresses he didn't know. But bombs didn't rattle around, so he opened this box and found three lava rocks about the size of baseballs wrapped in tissue paper. The writer, from Houston, said that "nothing but misery" had followed her and her family since she took the rocks from the Big Island.
Her husband lost his job and then suffered a heart attack, their daughter was crippled in an accident with a drunken driver, her daughter-in-law left her son and ran away with a Muslim imam and the writer herself had recently been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. And because when she and her husband were on vacation she'd read Cruz's column, she was sure that he would know what to do with the rocks and how to remove Pele's curse.
It was the first of many such boxes he would receive, and if the woman's tale had not been so tragic, he would have laughed. But he turned the rocks and the letter into a column. It was a good story, no question, and there's nothing Cruz liked better than a good story. But he believed only in what he could see. He was a rational literalist. That was his faith.
But then he made his first trip to the Big Island to deliver the rocks to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. That day was the first time he saw Mauna Loa. The mountain gives Pele's myth form. And a lovely, feminine form it is. Cruz was not a man given to divine entreaties, but he prayed in passioned silence that Pele was real and that he of all men might know her.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com