At 2.11pm yesterday, as the Whakaari eruption was happening, I was out mowing my lawns. From my home at Te Kaha, a tiny settlement on the North Island’s east coast, you can make out the volcano’s sunken crater. The 300-metre dust cliffs frame the northern and southern edges, and in the centre is an east-facing pit where ancient birders and old sulphur miners once did their work.

On Monday the only workers and visitors on island were tour operators and tourists, several whom never made it back from yesterday’s destruction.

At 2.15pm I went to empty the catcher, and I stood at the garden edge watching the ash cloud climb. I didn’t think too much of it. When I was growing up volcanic activity on Whakaari was more or less continuous. Every year or so the crater would spew out mud and rock. Steam was a daily occurrence, painting the horizon white.

According to GeoNet the island was in a continuous eruption from 1975 to 2000. Disaster, or at least the ever-rising threat of it, was background music in our lives. Whakaari? There she goes again.

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But yesterday was different. At 2.20pm I went to the cliff’s edge for closer inspection. The ash cloud was still climbing. Six-thousand feet. Nine-thousand feet. Twelve-thousand feet. I finally knew something was wrong.

Steam eventually dissipates. But ash lingers. It obscures. It hugs everything it can hold. You could no longer make out the island’s northern or southern edges. The pit was a nothing; all grey powder. I thought I could smell sulphur, the rotten gas creeping up my nostrils and slithering down my throat. It wasn’t. But the body knows what a volcanic disaster smells like.

If you dig deep enough anywhere on the North Island’s volcanic plateau you’re likely to uncover tephra layers (rock fragments and particles). The earth’s history book where catastrophe is recorded and preserved in the ground we walk on, build on, is a well for water and geothermal steam. The soil acts as a colour chart – whites, brown, a sulphuric yellow – indicating when and how our local volcanoes blew their tops. In the new subdivision across from my family home in Kawerau the builders turn into archaeologists as they remove monstrous greywacke boulders, serpentine rocks, and crystal-flecked stones to make way for a wastewater system.

In some ways examining the layers can seem deceiving. Unlike glaciers, the ice mountains that do their violent work over thousands of years, carving valleys and gorges out of the land, tephra can fall gently. It cloaks the landscape in warmth and dust, following the contours of the hills and terraces and valleys. When the rivers eat away at their banks you could mistake the tephra layers for mosaics. All colour and stone. The mosaics reveal the earth’s own double helix, giving us insight into the things that were happening long before we were around.

It’s easy to forget volcanoes are always dangerous. And we are unimaginably vulnerable when they go. I wish we weren’t. And I wish the people who lost their lives on Whakaari were never there. Or not at that terrifying time, in that horrifying place. Many of them were thousands and thousands of kilometres from the safety and security of their own homes and their own familiar places. The comfort of their islands; the relief of their hills. The places they knew.

European philosophies and theologies have plenty to say both for and against anthropocentrism and human supremacy. The folly that when we turn the earth to our purposes the mastery over fate is ours. Māori philosophies argue that mastery is impossible and only connection with the environment and ecosystems is possible. You act sustainably.

It only took Whakaari a moment to remind us that this is so. We are not her master. We are, tragically, at her whim.

Morgan Godfery is a writer and broadcaster. He covers politics and Indigenous issues and lives and works in the North Island town of Kawerau.



