Branches

“So you’re the matriarch,” the bartender says as I join my daughter and granddaughter at the bar for a sunset drink.

“Amazing . . .”

Was he talking about our resemblance, or—hopefully—how youthful I look?

“. . . that you travel together.”

Don’t most families travel in three generations?

“What’s a matriarch?”

Fifteen-year-old Carly sips her virgin piña colada.

“The female head of the family,” I reply.

She rolls her eyes and shakes her head. To her, I’m only a remnant of a long-ago time before Twitter and Instagram. I know nothing of the music she listens to or what’s hot on YouTube. Even my language is archaic. She mimics every “wow” or “geez” that comes out of my mouth.

I’m thinking of this matriarch title as six of us spill out of the minivan on an overcast Hawaiian morning. Technically, it’s true. Without me, none of them would be here now, about to venture onto a marginal trail. But the title conjures images of a silver-haired sage, fearless leader of her tribe, or a wealthy dowager, beloved benefactor of the arts. Neither of these remotely applies to me.

My daughter, Elisha, stares into the feathery leafed but ruthless kiawe trees, a non-native species that has taken over the islands, sprouted from a single shrub planted by a missionary in 1827. “Where’s the trail?”

“Right here,” says my husband Jim as he slips through a barely visible opening between the thorny branches, with Carly and her seventeen-year-old brother, Cason, close behind. They’ll follow Jim anywhere there’s a whiff of danger.

Elisha and her husband, Chad, ease behind their children onto the narrow path, keeping arms and legs close to their bodies to avoid ripping their clothes and slashing their skin. The matriarch brings up the rear, favoring an ankle twisted on a previous hike. Slowly, she threads among the thorns and over the lava rocks, which alternate between smooth and ropy, dagger-sharp and jumbled.

For thirty years, the matriarch and her husband have enjoyed a winter respite on this island, the Big Island of Hawaii, joined most years by the rest of the clan. Here, her grandchildren learned to snorkel, boogie board, bury each other in sand, and witness the grand spectacle of an erupting volcano. The family’s time together over the years has been both exquisite and excruciating. Six people in a two-bedroom condo, with all the stress of sharing meals and bathrooms and long drives in a minivan.

Increasingly, the matriarch has trouble snagging the kids’ attention or sparking that sense of wonder that was once triggered by tide pools and turtles. Cason, who leaves for college in a few months, is too aloof to snorkel with the rest of us or to boogie board in the waves. Instead, he sits on the beach in his folding chair, obscure behind sunglasses and ball cap, plugged into music, inhabiting his own world. Carly broadcasts minute-to-minute details of her existence by snapping selfies, sending them to her friends, and scrolling through their parallel lives. The matriarch is perhaps unrealistic in hoping for moments of connection with the kids before they launch into the world.  

As most are deterred by the overgrown appearance and the trudge through thorns, few people frequent this old trail, likely part of the Ala Kahakai, the ancient path connecting settlements and sacred sites around the coast. The rough, raw stretch of island it traverses requires reverence and vigilance: cliffs, blowholes, arches. This is no place to run wild or meander while texting. It has all the terrible beauty that I love about Hawaii.

Harsh white light streams through an opening in the kiawes. I stoop through, stumbling over roots, and rejoin my family atop a cliff black with lava poured into the sea centuries ago. Across the crashing waves, a peninsula, the tip of the sacred Hawaiian site of Pu‛uhonua O Honaunau, the place of refuge. Before the collapse of the ancient Hawaiian social and spiritual structure, Puʽuhonua O Honaunau kept safe the bones of generations of chiefs, their mana, or spiritual power, protecting aliʽi, or Hawaiian royalty, and commoners alike. Those accused of breaking one of the many ancient kapus, or laws of conduct, ranging from murder to gazing at a member of the royal family, could be saved from mandatory execution if they could swim across the bay below and reach the sacred grounds. A grueling and dangerous penance. You would need to be a good swimmer.

Jim starts toward the cliff’s edge, the kids close behind.

“Watch where you step,” the matriarch warns, “or you’ll slip through a hole in the rocks and be swept into the ocean and lost forever.”

Nods.

The grandchildren follow their grandfather to the edge, faces full into the wind as they climb up onto an arch where the ocean has worn away the lava rock underneath, the sea below and beside them. The matriarch has seen the roiling abyss beneath them. Her hands sweat. Her heart pounds. They could die here on this sacred coast, and then where would she be? There must be some biological survival mechanism in the lurch of the stomach, in the instinct to snatch loved ones from danger, in the anger that wells up and compels you to yell to them to get away before they’re killed.  

The matriarch looks away and hopes for the best.

We continue on, zigging and zagging along the deserted coast, beyond view of the brightly colored dots of snorkelers at the head of the bay, where the coral reef grows bright and healthy and the fish thrive in the clear waters. Periodically, craters appear in the rocks beneath our feet and waves whoosh up, spraying salt water onto our legs and far onto the rocks. Though I’ve hiked this coast maybe five times by now, I never remember where the hazards are, and I never get used to arriving at the brink of doom so easily.

Cason climbs toward the top of another precarious arch, a lava tube widened and eroded over centuries by the constant pounding of the ocean, little more than an eyebrow curved over an angry green eye. Wild curls barely restrained in a ponytail, Carly wobbles behind him, less sure-footed than her hockey-playing brother. All her life, she has been fiercely determined to have her way, rejecting any hint of help. As soon as she could walk, she followed her big brother like a puppy, refusing to acknowledge that just because she was nineteen months younger than him she might be any less coordinated, less able, or less qualified.

One day when I was babysitting them, I became frustrated with their constant squabbling. I gathered our bikes from the garage and we pedaled to the local elementary school. As soon as we arrived, Cason raced his bike up a steep, gravelly hill pocked with holes carved the previous winter by too many kids sledding on not enough snow. Having reached the top, he turned downslope, flying with no brakes to the bottom.

Unstoppable, Carly pumped up the hill to repeat the stunt. As I watched helplessly, she paused briefly at the top, then bolted down the hill. Her front wheel hit a hole and she launched into the air like a cannonball, hurtling over the handlebars and crashing to the ground with a thud. In those few seconds of silence before she caught her breath, I was sure she’d been killed. When I reached her side, she at last inhaled and began to wail, then slapped me away as I tried to help her up. Covered with dust, she stood, choked out a few more sobs, and limped down the hill with her bike.

Now she again follows Cason, yellow water bottle dangling in one hand as she grasps with the other at rock edges for balance. I suppress the warning I want to yell. The edge. The gaping void. 

She reaches the top, poses shoulder-to-shoulder with her brother, nearly reaching his six feet in height, smiling as I snap a picture.

This is the stuff of matriarchs.

We’re past the halfway point in our trek. It’s shorter to take the loop trail back—if we can find it—than to go back the way we came. The kiawes do not easily release their secrets as we poke around their edges, looking for the trail that leads away from the cliffs and, ultimately, back to our car. Overhanging branches force us closer to the cliff’s edge, where we must scale steep, broken chunks of lava. The matriarch is tired, cranky, and longing for the lunch she left in the car.

Following the cliffs, we check for openings in the trees, peer down into a sheltered cove.

Carly points. “Look!”

Below, a fin breaks the surface. Descends. Slices the water again.

“A shark,” says Jim.

“It’s just like TV!” Carly says.

“A shark!” Her brother repeats.

We six draw together, staring silently at the animal circling the smooth water. We snatch cell phones from pockets, but the shark disappears before anyone can record it.

 “I can’t believe we saw a shark,” says Carly.

The first shark for our grandchildren, a thing of wonder. To Hawaiians, sharks are rulers of the ocean and must be treated with respect. When caught, all parts of their bodies were used: teeth, eyes, meat, skin, everything. Some Hawaiians believe that certain species of sharks are their aumakua, ancestors reincarnated and sent to protect the family. Whatever or whoever this shark may be, it is a gift, inspiring a brief, shared moment of awe.

We carry on, weary, wondering if we’ve missed the trail. A faint tunnel through the trees has potential, but it requires squeezing through a gauntlet of little daggers. I check my cell phone to get our location, but it shows only blue water, green land, and a blue dot indicating we are here. Elisha does the same, with no better luck. Carly pulls out her phone and locates a faint squiggly line snaking away from the coast. It joins a thicker squiggly line ahead of us.

Bending over and under branches, weaving, scraping arms and faces, we follow Carly’s lead until a bright red pickup truck comes into view, giant wheels perched on the rocks. The old overgrown road. The way out.

We turn inland, away from the wind, from the shark, from the waves carving away at the rock beneath our feet. We’re mostly silent, returning. Jim, the kids, the parents—all intact—and finally, the matriarch, still limping.

-Susan Pope

Susan Pope’s work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, The Southeast Review Online, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Under the Gum Tree, Burrow Press Review, BioStories, Writers’ Workshop Review, Alaska Magazine, and Burningwood Literary Review, among others. Her writing reflects intimate connections to home and family in Alaska as well as a restless exploration of faraway places. Her essay entitled “Canyon,” which appeared in Bluestem, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012. She writes from her home in Anchorage, Alaska.