For the final episode of our Human Nature series, we, appropriately, go back to our roots.
Part 1: After a dangerous incident, Kalā Holiday begins to question his work as a tour guide in his ancestral land of Hawai’i.
Kalā Holiday is a lineal descendant of the original native inhabitants and caretakers of Pu'uhonua o Honaunau, a temple that was (and still is) a place of refuge. He actively participates in ceremonies and rituals involving the ancient religious sites of his ancestors in hopes of maintaining and preserving the practice for future generations. As a guide, Kalā has shared his home and heritage with hundreds of visitors from around the world using tourism as a platform to demonstrate to outsiders that his home is far more than just pineapples, Elvis Presley, and coconut bras.
Part 2: Jeremy Richardson must reconcile his roots in coal country with his identity as a climate scientist.
Hailing from a third-generation coal mining family in West Virginia, and with more than ten years of experience in climate and energy issues, Jeremy Richardson focuses on federal climate and energy policy development, specializing in the economics of energy—particularly coal and nuclear power—and writes and speaks passionately about the need for a just transition for the coalfields.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Kalā Holiday
It's April third 2018 and I'm guiding a twilight volcano tour as I have done countless times over the last several years. Representing my home and culture, I'm proudly sharing with my visitors stories of our people's past and the legends of our gods whilst traveling through black and barren lava fields of Kilauea.
The weather is wet and cold and I can tell it's weighing on the experience of my visitors, but I'm determined to make the most of the day for them and show them as much as I possibly can.
Kalā Holiday in front of the Leilani Estates Eruption of 2018
I notice as we begin climbing an elevation towards the volcano summit the clouds begin to lift and the rain stops just as we are approaching Pauahi Crater. I pull into the parking lot to find barely any other vehicles and a beautiful view all the way down. Despite this, most of my visitors in the van were showing signs of disinterest aside from the youngest in our group, Patricia.
She sees my conch shell and asks if I can blow it for her and I cheerfully agree to do so. Patricia and her father exit the van and follow me down the trail, and once we reach the lookout I raise the conch shell to my lips. The next thing I remember is a blindingly bright flash where all I can see is white and all I can hear is ringing. I feel like I'm falling from a great height and I hit the ground hard. I can feel all the muscles in my body twisting and contracting to the point that I can hear the vertebrae in my spine popping and feel like my arms and legs are going to snap in half.
My entire body refuses to obey me as I shake and writhe on the ground. The ringing in my ears fades to the crescendo of Patricia's screams behind me as I struggle to regain control of my body, completely unable to do anything to help her.
As I slowly begin to feel my fingers and hands again, I lift myself up to find all of us on the ground. I look over and Patricia's father scoops his daughter up into his arms and exclaims, “We just got hit by lightning.”
I look around us and saw other tourists in the area just staring at us with shocked expressions and I noticed my conch is gone.
I stumble onto my feet and rush Patricia and her father back to our tour van and begin trying to call for emergency assistance, but no reception. “I need to make sure they're okay,” I keep thinking to myself. I can't wait around here for help.
I choose to drive us back to the park entrance and call an ambulance. And after doing, so I text my boss to let him know we were struck by lightning and to inform the restaurant that our group will be late to dinner.
A first responder arrives and immediately begins asking for my information. He asked me what happened and I attempt to explain. He abruptly cuts me off and condescendingly states, “Hey, calm down. Aren't you a tour guide? You should have known better then. You're responsible for this family's safety.”
His words fill me with rage, but I bite my tongue.
The ambulance arrives and the medics begin checking our hearts and bandaging our wounds. We're all surprised to see that Patricia barely had a scratch on her, whereas her father and I were both bleeding from our elbows and knees from where we had been shaking against the ground.
The medics don't notice any obvious concerning issues but still recommend we go to the hospital for more thorough testing. Patricia's father assures me that he and his daughter are fine and don't wish to go to the hospital, and I refuse the offer as well and we just continue on with our tour as if it was just a minor setback.
After returning them back to their hotel, it's then that I am hit with the heavy realization of what happened to us that day and how close we came to dying. The words of our first responder echoing in my mind over and over, I begin to blame myself for what happened.
I get back to the office to clock out and my boss is waiting there.
“I got your message. Is the van okay?”
I'm confused and angry at his response and tried to patiently explain that it wasn't the van that was hit by lightning. I tell him, “I'm going to the hospital and that I need the day off for tomorrow.”
“That's unfortunate, but we don't have anyone available to cover you,” he says.
I then scream at the top of my lungs, “I was struck by lightning. do you know what it feels like to be electrocuted?”
Frustrated, I leave and check into the hospital at midnight. Several tests and three IVs later, I leave the hospital at around 5:00 a.m. and head straight back to the office to clock in for the next tour.
My co-worker and friend greets me as he normally does. “Hey, Kala, how's it going?” And I immediately break down and become completely hysterical.
“I could have died yesterday. A little girl almost died yesterday because of me. I was struck by lightning in the house of Pelehonuamea, the Goddess of Fire. What did I do? Why were we punished? Pele took my pū. She took my conch shell.”
My friend sees I'm in no condition to be driving a tour group and offers to cover it for me. He then sends me home to sleep, but I can't. I start calling up all the people that I love just to let them know how much I care about them and how much they mean to me.
For the next few days, I try to tell other people and can't find anyone to help relate to my trauma. Many are dismissive telling me that I'm lucky and others don't seem to believe me at all.
Most likely due to the culture that links us together, it was my Hawaiian friends that were the most empathetic towards my experience. I have always considered myself a man of science and reason, priding myself in the quality of information I would research and share with my visitors. But when it came to folklore and legend, even I dismiss it as nothing more than just stories and old superstitions.
But I couldn't help but feel that this experience and where it happened had greater significance to it. Many Hawaiian cultural practitioners practice interpreting Ho’ailona omens from our surroundings. I felt unqualified to interpret this for myself and why I sought the counsel of a man I have great respect for Akoni.
For years, he has been teaching me and others the chants and ceremonies of our ancestors in order to help keep these traditions alive, and his response to me was, “Aloha e Kalā. If you were being punished, you would have transitioned. The fact you walked away is a sign this is a message you were meant to share. The conch shell is used to awaken and summon everyone to action.
If we look at this message as a universal one and not a personal one, mankind is hesitant on moving forward in assuming or acknowledging things. We keep pushing things aside. A threshold is in front of you and you need to prepare to go through it before the pū summons you to it.
Fire from the sky means new beginnings and you flew your conch shell because the time has passed. Your divinity has crossed with an epiphany awaiting for you to react. Remember. Thunder first then lightning then rain, and if it's night there is stillness. If it's daytime a rainbow indicating the gods ensure that the natural cycles continue.
Nothing to be afraid or startled by. The elements spoke clearly and your message applies to all of us.”
I honestly have no idea what any of what he said really meant. All I know is that it helped me calm down and feel a bit better.
A sign of great change. A message that applies to us all.
Kalā Holiday in front of the Haleama’uma’u Lava Lake in 2020
By the end of April, the vent on Pu’u ‘O’o on Kilauea which had been erupting non-stop since 1983 completely drops its lava lake and ends its 35-year long eruption. The name of the crater we were struck by is Pauahi, which means ‘the ending fire’.
In the following days, changes to the volcano grew more dramatic and by May third, one lunar cycle after I was struck, new fissures open up in one of the communities on our island and fountains of lava begin flowing from roads and beneath homes. The stories I had shared with visitors throughout the years were coming to life before our eyes.
Over the next few months, our community witnessed one of the largest eruptions in recorded history and it gave me a much clearer understanding of what our legends and stories are referring to. Forces of nature personified as gods.
The eruption was altering weather all around the island. Many of us saw hail fall from the sky for the first time in our lives, tornadoes forming above the flow, ash plumes rising thousands of feet high that darken the sky, and lightning storms generated by pyrocumulus clouds. Entire forests were consumed by the red river and mountains were born and grew in a matter of weeks.
The Goddess of Fire represents both destruction and creation. And the 2018 eruption demonstrated this by destroying over 700 homes in a matter of four months, but also created more than 870 acres of new land and a new black sand beach on the island's eastern shore in the same time frame.
Though many families were displaced by the lava flow, not a single fatality occurred. Was this the great change? Even the locations of where the lava first broke out are named in many of our legends as places Pele stopped at on her way to the summit of Kilauea before making her home there.
Kalā Holiday taking part in the Pu’uhonua o Honaunau Cultural Festival in 2018
My experiences led me to a much deeper understanding of how our ancestors were able to live alongside such great forces and the methods they developed in order to survive here. Our stories may very well have been referring to actual events witnessed by our ancestors and describing them in the only way they understood how to. The practices of our people weren't as primitive and superstitious as many of us were led to believe. Through the observations of their environment and their connections to the land they lived on, ancient Hawaiians accomplished many feats that today are difficult to replicate even with the modern advancements we currently possess.
Sharing this story definitely helps me to cope with the trauma. I feel it has taught me to be more attentive to my surroundings in ways I have never noticed before.
The flashes of cameras and even the boom of fireworks still give me flashbacks, but I've begun to see them as a reminder of what I've been touched by and the realizations that this ordeal has led me to.
Part 2: Jeremy Richardson
I remember once my dad asking me what I want to be when I grow up. I can't remember how old I was, maybe 10, but I know exactly where I was sitting, on the floor by the ottoman in front of his chair where my younger brother and I often played games with him. Game times were happy moments when my dad wasn't working and he was in a good mood.
“I don't know,” I said confidently, “but I know that I want to be happy when I go to work.”
You see, my dad was a coalminer. And even at that young age I knew that his work took a toll on him. Long hours and the constantly rotating shift work were a way of life. I remember I learned how to shave at 1:00 a.m. because he had just returned home from afternoon shift and woke me up to give me a lesson.
His job was to fix the machines when they broke down, so I can only imagine the stress. And it's dangerous. I still have a vivid memory of his van coming up the driveway at the wrong time of day and he was in the passenger seat with a patch over his eye. He recovered just like he did the time a boulder fell on him and pinned him to the ground fracturing his foot.
My grandfather on my mom's side was a coalminer too. Paw-paw was the first of his family to be born in the United States of Italian immigrants and the mines were his ticket to building a better life for his family, for my family. The first house he and my grandmother lived in after they got married in 1933 didn't even have running water and, decades later, my grandmother would remember carrying well water up a steep hill to their house.
According to family legend, he told her, “Stick with me. You'll wear diamonds,” and she did.
Paw-paw died of black lung in 1988. I was 13 and I still remember him as quiet and kind.
None of this of course was remotely unusual where I grew up in West Virginia. Everyone has a family member who works in the mines or used to or knows someone who does. And black lung has changed countless families.
My brother proudly followed in my dad's footsteps but I never even considered the possibility and I can't even explain why. I just remember cold nights staring through my telescope at the night sky, a failed attempt at starting a paper recycling program at my high school, a science project to determine whether biodegradable plastic bags really were, orange fingernails from an afternoon in a swimming hole contaminated with acid mine drainage.
Eventually, I decided to work on climate change, but it didn't take me very long to realize that my background was quite unusual for someone working in the largely white, upper middle class, liberal coastal elites represented by the mainstream environmental movement. A colleague a few years ago called me a rainbow unicorn.
Although I'm not quite sure what they make of my life choices, I know that my parents are proud of me. My dad is a man of few words but he and my mom have always been there at the key moments of my journey over the years. Like that time that dad and I drove an hour from Charleston up to Kayford Mountain to see an active mountaintop removal site.
We learned about the community that used to exist up there before the blasting started and eventually drove everyone else away. We walked up to the edge of the ravine where a mountain once stood and looked at the mine site below, dozens of perfectly spaced circles where more dynamite would be buried and coal rolling away in dump trucks.
My dad simply said, “That ain't even good coal.”
The thing about working on policy, which I naively didn't appreciate, is that it's actually pretty hard to make an impact. I've spent years telling my story, pounding the table, making the case for robust and sustained and comprehensive policies to help the workers and communities facing the energy transition. And until fairly recently, it just seemed to fall on deaf ears.
What's worse, sometimes I think I've simply been tokenized. Like that time I was so excited to be asked to go back to West Virginia to testify at an EPA hearing to speak against the rollback of the rule restricting greenhouse gases from power plants. Dad was there, even though I'm pretty sure that he agreed with the rollback.
My organization cared about greenhouse gases, but did they really care about the workers and communities that I lifted up in my remarks? My family? My home? It's like I'm caught in this strange no man's land, a part of two different worlds but not quite at home in either one.
Anyway, back in DC after the EPA hearing, in a meeting I was asked, “Hey, how'd it go?”
And I quipped, “Well, at least I'm not out of the will yet,” and I was genuinely surprised that no one laughed at my joke.
And when I later relayed this to my mom, she shot back, “What's funny is that you think there's going to be anything left.” And so humor helps because as comfortable as I am talking about coal to environmentalists, it's still really hard to talk about climate change to coalminers, especially my brother.
We've always been there for each other but he isn't much of a talker. I've never asked him but I often wonder what climate change means to him. What he hears when we talk about the very real impacts that are happening now and will get worse if we don't move away from fossil fuels.
The reality that when we get serious about tackling climate change, which we must, we probably won't be burning much coal and power plants in just ten years. I imagine it must feel like a personal attack. But the thing is, it doesn't have to be, not if we really listen to people like him and make sure that we get the policies right.
My friend and my partner in crime in getting it right once pointed out that even if we're successful, the people we're trying to help will never thank us for it. It's kind of messed up and yet I get it, because change is hard.
I have to believe there is a place for this rainbow unicorn in finding a solution to these competing existential crises. For how else will it be possible to build bridges without people who are part of both worlds? My only hope is that my brother knows that I've always been on his side.