The Last Volcano

by John Dvorak

  Knowing this would be his last trip away from the Hawaiian Islands—Jaggar was now seventy-nine years old—he decided he would spend a week with each of his children. It would be the first time he had spent any extended amount of time with either of them since his divorce from Helen thirty-five years before.

  He traveled by train through Canada to Vancouver, British Columbia, then southward to Seattle, Washington. From there, he took a ferry across Puget Sound to the rural town of Poulsbo where his son lived. When he arrived, his daughter-in-law told him that his son was next door helping a neighbor bring down an old barn. When Jaggar arrived, he saw the barn was on fire and that a man was collapsed outside. It was his son, who told Jaggar that he did not know what happened. He was inside the barn when it caught fire and he barely escaped. Fire number two.

  Jaggar next goes to the San Francisco area to see his daughter. But, as she told me: “It was the darnedest thing. As soon as Dad arrived, my skin broke out in a red burning rash. It must have been something I ate. And I wasn’t able to spend any time with him.” That was fire number three.

  Jaggar now meets Isabel and they sail back to the Hawaiian Islands. On the last night at sea they are dining with the captain when he receives a cable. Mauna Loa is erupting and lava is pouring into the sea. The captain then announces that he will be diverting the ship so that everyone can see the display.

  The next evening, as Jaggar recalled the scene, the ship is four miles off the Kona coast. There are two zigzag streaks of orange coursing down the mountain, each one looking “like hot coals extending far up the mountainside under the clouds.” Occasionally, there is a bright flare where a tree has burst into flame. “Visible motion there was none,” he recorded, “as we were too far away to see detailed motion.” This was fire number four.

  As he and Isabel watched the display, he confided to her that, after forty years of living at Kilauea, fire now followed him wherever he goes. She told him that the name people in the islands have given him—Malama-o-Pele, “the torch of Pele”—is an appropriate one. He replied, “I am the weaker one.”

  Jaggar’s health began to deteriorate after his return. There was the occasional household accident or an illness that sent him to the hospital. Some required extended stays. His last hospital stay was in December 1952. His doctor released him a few days before Christmas and sent him home.

  He had written an autobiography and had shown it to publishers on his last trip to the mainland. None chose to publish it. As a last hope, he submitted it to University of Hawaii Press, sure it would publish his memoirs. It did not.

  A rejection letter from University of Hawaii Press arrived on January 16, 1953. Thomas Jaggar died early the next morning in his sleep—forty-one years to the day from when he had arrived at Kilauea to start the volcano observatory.

  Kualono, the home of Thomas and Isabel Jaggar at Kilauea, was their place of privacy. It was a place where they could get away from the crowd of visitors at the Volcano House and still see the observatory and Kilauea and Mauna Loa. It was here on the verandah that he contemplated many philosophical questions. One was: What is love? And he provided an answer.

  “Have you ever sat after a day of hard work beside someone you loved,” he wrote, “with her hand in yours thrilling, and gentle sweet night airs blowing by, fragrant with flowers and faintly musical with the leaf whirr.” And you ask her: Do you love me? And she answers, “Yes.”

  During his last years, he and Isabel talked of many things, as couples do. They even discussed their eventual deaths.

  Neither wanted to be placed in the ground with tombstones over their heads. Both said they wished to be cremated and their ashes scattered in a special place. For Isabel Jaggar, it was the small garden she had kept near Kualono. For him, it was a different place.

  It is often mistakenly said that Isabel Jaggar scattered her husband’s ashes in Halema’uma’u. That is not true. There was a place dearer to him.

  I have seen a letter she wrote to a friend in which she tells where she placed her husband’s ashes. At the beginning of the letter, Isabel wrote: “This is a private matter.” The underlining is hers.

  As the writer of this book, I cannot violate a desire to have a resting place remain private. But I can say that the mortal remains of Professor Thomas Augustus Jaggar, Jr., are somewhere at Kilauea. And that is where he rightly belongs.

  *DUKW is an acronym that means: D=designed in 1942, U=utility vehicle, K=all-wheel drive, W=dual rear axles

  POSTSCRIPT

  In June 1952, after almost twenty years of quiescence, seven months before the death of Thomas Jaggar, lava again erupted from Kilauea and a lava lake formed within Halema’uma’u. The lava lake was active for 136 days.

  The next eruption came two years later and continued for three days. Afterwards, the Bosch-Omori seismograph in the Whitney Vault indicated a slow swelling of the volcano that continued until early 1955 when the summit started to subside and lava erupted east of the summit at Kapoho, the same general area where earthquakes had occurred and dramatic ground cracks had formed in 1924. The 1955 eruption lasted eighty-eight days. It was the most voluminous outpouring of lava from Kilauea in more than a century. It was this eruption that prompted the United States Geological Survey to resume employing full-time workers at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.

  Today the observatory is housed in a large building located near the highest point of the caldera rim. The staff numbers about two dozen people whose specialties range from geology to geodesy, from geochemistry to geophysics. Within the building are modern laboratories where the chemistry of volcanic gases or of lava samples can be analyzed. Computers are connected through high-speed data lines to hundreds of automatic field instruments. Any change in gas emission or seismic activity or any slight movement of the ground is instantly detected, recorded and analyzed.

  And next to the observatory is a museum dedicated to Thomas Jaggar.

  I made my first trip to the Hawaiian Islands in 1971. On my last night in the islands, I was in Hilo and heard on the radio that Kilauea was erupting. I raced to the summit. Thousands of people had already gathered. The eruption was two miles away. I could see a distant red glow. I stood there for a few hours. My view of the eruption ended late that night in a heavy rain.

  Three years later I returned to Kilauea and spent a summer hiking trails. An eruption had occurred two weeks before I arrived and another occurred soon after I left. Years later, by a fortunate set of circumstances that are too complicated to relate here, I worked as a volunteer, then as a staff member at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. That was when I was introduced to the work of Thomas Jaggar. Many eruptions have followed.

  Each one has been memorable. On one occasion, I was living in a house with a bedroom on the upper floor. A row of six windows lined one wall. One night, shortly after midnight, I felt the bed shake. I looked out the windows. Through the leftmost one, a few miles away, I could see a fountain of lava of Kilauea. Through the rightmost window, at a much greater distance, was the broad profile of Mauna Loa silhouetted by a bright apricot glow. It was the first simultaneous eruption of the two volcanoes in sixty-five years.

  By great fortune, a lava lake returned to Halema’uma’u several years ago. I made the trip to see the glow, going at night, sometimes with a friend, often alone, standing close to the place where the Jaggar house once stood or at one of the other places of solitude along the caldera rim. Even though the crater is more than a mile away, if the air is still and the clouds are low, it is often possible to hear molten lava sloshing inside the crater.

  It is at such times that I am reminded of what I have learned at Kilauea. Long after the memory of me or of the reader of this book has long been forgotten, in fact, long after the words in this book have faded beyond all recognition and the pages have turned to dust, Kilauea will still be erupting.

  Because it is the volcano that is eternal.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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sp; I met Thomas Jaggar’s daughter, Eliza Bowne “Sallie” Jaggar, three times. During our first two meetings she was polite and cordial, but not very helpful. She kept reminding me that she had been a baby when her parents separated and divorced, and so knew little about her father. Our third meeting was considerably different.

  As on the previous occasions, I telephoned the day before we were to meet to make sure I was expected. She said I was. Then, when we did meet a third time, she told me this story: After she hung up the telephone she went into her bathroom and looked in the mirror. There, over her shoulder, she saw the face of her dead brother. He told her that it was time to come with him. She answered no. She said that someone was coming to see her the next day and that she had decided to tell everything about their parents. When I did arrive the next day, Sallie did exactly that. It was like the floodgates of a dam had been opened. For almost an hour, she told me how her parents had met. She recounted their courtship and difficult marriage and how it had ended after a torrential rain when they were at the Hilo Hotel. She also revealed that, many years later, her mother had written a long memoir, never published, that was to be read only by her daughter. She then handed me several excerpts she had transcribed and said that was all she could give me. I am indebted to Sallie Jaggar for trusting me with the personal story of her parents.

  I am also indebted to Thomas Jaggar himself. He left an enormous amount of written material, much of it in the form of field notes and scientific writings, but also several sermons, a collection of private letters and a set of small notebooks in which he jotted down daily happenings. In the top margin of one of the pages he has reminded himself: “Write 3000 words a day.” It is a goal he tried to keep throughout his life, even during the last days of his life.

  Though I first encountered the work of Thomas Jaggar in 1976, I did not begin this book in earnest until twenty years later. And then it was almost another twenty years to see it to an end. Through the second twenty years, only one person showed unwavering support for the book and was always optimistic that it would be published. Tom Peek has guided me through the many pitfalls of learning to tell stories. He also patiently read through a tortuous early draft of this book. His comments have improved it greatly. He continues to be an inspiration to me and to many others, encouraging us to write personal stories because that is how we understand who we are.

  Crucial to the contents of this book were the interviews conducted with people who either knew Thomas Jaggar or who were at Kilauea volcano during the early years of the volcano observatory. Northup Castle served as a surrogate son to Jaggar. He told me of riding with Jaggar in a Model-T to the lava lake. Barbara Fitzgibbons remembered how relieved she was when Thomas and Isabel Jaggar drove up to her family’s house in 1929 after a series of earthquakes shook the Kona side of the island. She said she felt better as soon as Professor Jaggar arrived. Akira Yamamoto’s father was the headwaiter at the Volcano House restaurant and his mother worked in the laundry and, sometimes, in the kitchen. Akira remembered sitting in the back of the dining room and watching Jaggar give lectures to dining patrons. Afterwards, as Akira recalled, the former Harvard professor circulated among the diners and performed magic tricks. Jaggar chose Alfred Tai On Au from a shop class of high school boys to work at the observatory. Alfred was one of the people who built and modified the two amphibious vehicles.

  A special mention must be made of Shizuka Yasunaka who worked as the Jaggars’ housekeeper for more than twenty years and whose story is much more poignant than I could include in the main text. She was born in 1897 in a plantation town north of Hilo. She married at age fourteen and, after giving birth to a son, she and her husband and newborn son moved to Japan where they lived in Hiroshima for two years. When they returned, she began working for the Jaggars. She gave birth to a second son. A few years later, her husband went insane and a paternal uncle took custody of the two boys. She then married Hideichi Yasunaka and, years later in order to preserve their marriage, she went with him to internment camps in Utah and in California where they spent more than three years behind barbed wire. Through it all, she never lost faith in humankind. Meeting her was one of the high points of researching this book.

  Taeko Jane Takahashi served for many years as the librarian at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. I relied on Jane repeatedly to direct me to written accounts of early visitors to Kilauea. Ben Gaddis has taken on the task of gathering and annotating and making accessible the thousands of photographs taken of Hawaiian volcanoes and of the people who have worked here. Ben selected several of the photographs used in this book. He is also the person who relocated the Jaggar daybooks.

  James Cartwright helped me navigate the archives at the University of Hawaii. Cynthia Murphy at the Connecticut Valley History Museum sent me a stack of newspaper and magazine clippings about Frank Perret. John Fournelle unselfishly provided information about Ruy Finch and documents from the national archives about Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Katharine Cashman provided a map of the historical lava flows on the island of Hawaii.

  Darcy Bevens’ transcription of the Volcano House Register was an important aid in understanding the history of Kilauea volcano and of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. How she managed such a mammoth undertaking was nothing short of a miracle. Peter Charlot’s A Scientific Missionary, a one-man play about Thomas Jaggar, gave me a unique perspective into the life of this remarkable and unusual man. Over the years Peter and I have had many discussions about Thomas Jaggar.

  A special thank you is owed to Ardis Morrow who had the foresight to save Jaggar family documents and photographs. Bruce Blevins has published Jaggar’s diaries and photographs for the 1893 and 1897 expeditions to the Absaroka Mountains.

  I thank Liek Pardyanto, Johannes Matahelumual, Harun Said and Deddy Mulyadi for guiding me through the challenges at Galunggung volcano. In Italy, it was friendships with Roberto Scandone, Roberta Scarpa and Paolo Gasparini that helped me navigate the confusing world of Italian science.

  Robert Tilling first opened the doors of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory to me. Robert Decker saw and fostered more possibilities in me than I thought existed. Both have served as Scientist-in-Charge at the observatory. Numerous discussions with Frank Trusdell helped me hone my understanding of Kilauea and Mauna Loa. My general understanding of volcanoes has also benefitted from years of friendships with Daniel Dzurisin and Thomas Casadevall. Thomas English provided personal insights into the recent history of Kilauea and to living on the island of Hawaii. Kathy English of the Hawaii Natural History Association allowed me access to the Association’s archives, which included a tape-recorded interview made by Thomas and Isabel Jaggar.

  As this book was being researched and written, many people listened to me as I struggled to assemble the story of Thomas Jaggar. James Kauahikaua, Susan Dieterich and James Dieterich are among those who I relied on most—and who showed the most patience. Keola Awong helped me understanding the meaning of Hawaiian place names. Mary Siders and Wilfred Tanigawa commented on an early version of the manuscript.

  Unless otherwise noted, photographs are from the Jaggar family collection. Additional photographs were published with permission provided by Tracy Laqua of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Barbara Dunn of the Hawaiian Historical Society and Tia Reber of Bishop Museum, and, by the University of Hawaii, archives and papers of T.A. Jaggar.

  A special thanks is owed to my agent Laura Wood who, early on, realized the importance of telling the story of Thomas Jaggar. She improved an early draft of this book. I am grateful to my editor Jessica Case for her patience when I missed deadlines and for having the foresight to publish this book. Her numerous comments on an early draft greatly improved this book.

  The story of the four fires told at the end of the book is written as told to me by Sallie Jaggar.

  I close with one final story about Thomas Jaggar. The first time I met his daughter I asked her: What is the earliest memory that you have of your father? This is what she said.
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  It was 1915 and she was four years old. Her mother had called a taxi and the three of them—her mother, Sallie and her brother, Kline, who was then ten years old—were driven to the Cliff House, which, in those days, was a stately hotel that stood along the Pacific Coast south of the Golden Gate near San Francisco. When they arrived at the hotel, her mother told her children that their father was inside waiting for them. (Helen Jaggar refused to go in.)

  As Sallie remembered it, once she was inside the hotel, they were greeted by a man who said he was her father. He took them to the hotel dining room where they had lunch. Sallie could not recall anything of the meal, but she did remember that, before they were served, her father went around the room and gathered all the toothpicks from the tables. He then assembled them into a tight ball. He lit a match and burned through one of the toothpicks. That set off a minor burst as toothpicks were sent flying around the room.

  After lunch, the three went for a walk along the boardwalk. A man was offering to cut full-body silhouettes from black paper. Thomas Jaggar had a silhouette made of himself and of each of his children.

  Years pass. In 1987 the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory had a celebration to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary. Sallie Jaggar attended. As part of the celebration, some of Jaggar’s personal items are on display. These include the three silhouettes. Sallie, who is now seventy-six years old and seldom saw her father, saw the silhouettes and thought: “All these years I have been lied to. I was told that my father didn’t like little children and that he didn’t like me. But now I know that he must have loved me because he kept those silhouettes all those years.”