I am what you could call microwave illiterate—I don’t understand its particular language and have never felt inclined to learn its unique grammar.  As a source of heat, a microwave is much too abstract for me.  It is cerebral, insubstantial, its hard surfaces cold, a disturbing quality in something designed to cook. I can taste the difference.

I want evidence. I want my heat to have color. I want a flame. I like to see the material itself as it burns. Thus, I have always been fond of wood fires, though I cook, most of the time, with gas. It beats electric heat, which is nearly as abstract as that generated by a microwave, and gas is admittedly less messy and easier to control than wood. This excuse, I realize, runs straight into microwave territory if pursued to its logical conclusion, but you have to draw the line. My boundary lies somewhere between the gas burner and the electric heating coil.

Yet I actually owned a microwave a dozen or so years ago.  I had entirely forgotten about it until recently.

Thanksgiving walk to Pu’u O’o

On Thanksgiving afternoon, I, along with a handful of others, rode in the back of a four-wheel drive pick-up over miles of brittle black lava in the fields south of Pu’u O’o, a breakout vent on the flank of Kilauea. It was a treacherous journey and when we could drive no further, we left the truck behind and hiked for a couple of miles, heading for what looked like a cloud billowing up from the horizon.

Shiny black lava crunched and crackled beneath our feet and steam rose from small vents as we walked over the earth’s newest skin, some of it formed just weeks or even days earlier. The twilight sky darkened. The billowing cloud glowed bright orange and proved to be not a cloud at all, but rather a husky plume of steam, rising from molten lava plunging and exploding into the Pacific Ocean. As we neared the sea, we could feel the heat of the lava flow beneath the thin tissue of crust on which we stood. We reached a fissure, a deep rift in the dried lava torn by one of the earthquakes that occur here daily. Our young  guide—a beautiful 17-year-old Hawaiian boy—kneeled down, peered in, and beckoned us with his hand to do the same. I moved closer, my cheeks flushed from the heat and then I saw the red glow in the crag beneath me, the shimmering source of fire itself.

And as I gazed down into this fresh wound, feeling a radiating warmth so pure, so dazzling as to be intoxicating, so dangerous, the image of the phantom microwave suddenly appeared. I shivered and turned towards the sea where a bubbling cauldron of lava had formed while my back was turned.

The Phantom Microwave

A dozen years ago there was a knock on the door of the small apartment where I lived.  An unfamiliar man held a large box.

When I confirmed my identity, he leaned in and set the box on the floor next to me.

“Sign here, please,” he said, handing me a clipboard.  I signed and he left.

I moved the box out of the doorway, setting it in the middle of the living room. Although the lettering on the box identified the contents as a microwave oven, it did not occur to me that  was actually what was inside. I pried open the cardboard and when I saw the white plastic with its glass door, control panel, and power cord, I didn’t know what to do.

I hadn’t a clue who sent the microwave and I was admittedly afraid of it. I had made a conscious decision not to have a microwave and one had found me anyway. It seemed less of an appliance and more like evil spawn, like a seed pod containing my clone.  Would I wake up in the morning somehow . . . different? Instead of stirring onions over my gas stove’s blue flame would I find myself  . . . well, I’m not sure what I would be doing because I’ve never really known exactly what one does with a microwave.  A path I had  conscientiously not taken had suddenly crossed back onto the alternate road I was traveling. How did this happen?  More than anything, I felt stalked. I thought of the Christmas a few years earlier when my half-sister had given me a game of pong, in spite of the fact that my lack of a television had been the subject of family controversy for years. I know it’s the thought that counts, but what idea can be behind the gift of a television game to someone who refuses to own a television?

After a week, during which the microwave sat in its box in the center of my living room, I returned it. The store manager insisted on giving me a cash refund but refused to tell me who had made the purchase.

As I walked towards the door, he cocked his head, gave me a smarmy and slightly scolding look, and said in a voice I’ve never forgotten, “It was an elderly woman, and she loves you very much.”

My mother, whom I had not seen or spoken to in over a decade. The less said about her the better but I probably should have known.  I was wise to have returned it and should have done so sooner, for I believe that microwave did in fact contain the seeds of my demise.  Evil spawn indeed.

A breakout lava flow, May 29, 2007, west of Kalapana, Hawaii Island

I shuddered at the thought of my narrow escape. I stood on the edge of the lava as close to the flow as the guide would let me until the last of our group had turned and headed back towards the truck, an hour’s hike away. I didn’t want to turn my back on the lava, I didn’t want to leave its molten beauty behind me.  I wanted to feel the lava flow through my fingers. I wanted to bath in it. I wanted it to engulf me.

The tether that keeps me earthbound felt severed.

With my first steps away from the edge of the sea, I stumbled. My friend John took my hand and for the rest of the hike I clung to his hand as if it were a lifeline, as if I would vanish without it. Flesh against flesh. I let human contact draw me back, not just towards the truck but to the world itself.  I was surrounded by friends: by John’s wife who walked a little ways ahead of us; by his young son, who ran back and forth between his mother and father;  by his teenage daughter who kept apace with our handsome guide.  Never have I felt more insubstantial, more alone. It was as if the tether that keeps me earthbound had been severed.  It was not an unpleasant feeling, merely an impractical one, and I held tight to my friend, if only to make it back to myself.

The blood of the planet

I made it back alright, but I found a different world waiting. Everything has changed. The horizon is indescribably altered now that I know what is possible, now that I know what can happen, now that I’ve watched it explode skyward in a burst of liquid fire.  My wood stove, the door left cracked to reveal hot embers within, is no longer a simple source of heat but instead a powerful reminder of the earth’s glowing interior. I have seen lava flow. I have seen it float on waves as it cooled, have seen steam escape from small cracks in the earth’s  most fragile skin. I have seen the very blood of the planet and caught a glimpse of the motion beneath the hard surface we take for granted. I have beheld an indescribable beauty. It burned itself upon my heart and yet all of its power could not and did not erase the image of that strange and ominous beacon, the phantom microwave.

My first piece of gourd art, inspired by the breakout lava flows west of Kalapana on Hawaii Island.

©1998 michele anna jordan