That Time I Pissed into a Volcano

The results were spectacular! WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE

Greetings, Elswhereians!

For those of you joining in late, I’ve been keeping a daily journal…oh, since the beginning of time (October 12, 1978).

I wrote about it here.

I’ve now made journal entries for 16,000+ straight days, and recorded about six million words of experience, noticing, worry, and exhilaration. My journal is a great resource for my backward glances, and I want to tap it here, and add the illustrations that will provide hectoring commentary on who I was back then, and what I think of mini-me right now.

Welcome to my recherche du temps perdu.

As Marcel Proust wrote: “Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.”

I have tried my best to live that advice from the madeleine-munching author of The Remembrance of Things Past, and my daily journal is the best reflection of my own devotion to—and failure to follow—Proust’s example.

Below, my journal entry about a visit to an erupting volcano, in eastern Congo, along with friends of mine who served in the Peace Corps back then.

Not sure I understood what was happening, but at least I took notes.

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Journal Entry #1,195: TUESDAY, 19 JANUARY 1982

I HAVE BEEN MEANING TO WRITE in greater detail about our guide on the Nyiragongo volcano adventure. It’s very hard to believe that I stood on top of one of the few active volcanoes in the world, but I did, and I wouldn’t have if not for our guide, whom we called J.C.

We had paid a $15 Volcano Eruption Fee, guide included, but none were available at the trailhead. Seeing our distress, a Wananda (short person, in Swahili) guide stumped up to us, looking like an escapee from Munchkinland national basketball team. For the equivalent of five dollars, he agreed to do the two-day trip with us and carry our forty-pound pack. It seemed like a good deal to all of us, if not our guide, so we engaged him.

We loaded the pack onto J.C.’s back with lots of laughter. Once we got the straps arranged, the bottom of the pack was well below his waist.

No matter. J.C. was off like a shot into the jungle.

For much of the first two hours of the hike, we had to shout ahead for him to slow down. Once, as we were struggling over a hill, J.C. yelled back at us in Swahili, and broke into a run. My friends translated: “Army ants!”

They’re called that because when you cross their path, they will not break their line. But they will climb onto your boot, up your pant leg, and into sensitive places where their bites will cause serious damage.

We all ran in a panic for fifty yards, with no ant incursions.

Eventually we broke out of the jungle onto an old lava flow, and sat down for sardine sandwiches and water. J.C. started talking with another porter in the area. The poor guy had been walking barefoot over the flow, and sharp volcanic rocks had cut his feet badly.

No problem, said J.C. He pulled out his machete and lopped off the split flesh. The porter thanked him, hoisted his load onto his head, and walked off into the jungle, cured.

Miracle number one.

After another two hours we neared the campsite under the volcano. The weather was getting rough, with the high mountains in the area generating thick, dark clouds. The sky was tinged orange and gold—something to do with the volcanic gases and particles in the air, plus reflections off of flowing lava.

The volcano campsite was filled with beautiful tents. Neatly dressed tourists— Belgians and Germans—stood in front of them, sipping cocktails and warming themselves around roaring fires. Camping is different when strong porters can be had for $2.50 a day.

We had brought only two small tarps for shelter. It would have been way too humiliating to set them up among this Camper’s World splendor, so we moved to the valley beyond. As we put on our packs down, the rain began. We pulled out the tarps, only then realizing how inadequate they would be as shelter. But they were all we had, so we got to work, stringing them between charred trees. J.C. watched with a pained, confused expression on his face—one that didn’t change for several hours.

“What are they doing out here with only those two bits of plastic?” he seem to be asking. “And why aren’t I with those well equipped Europeans up the hill?”

J.C. crawled in under a corner of the tarp when the rain got really heavy. Most of the time, however, he was out trying to light a fire. There was no shortage of firewood. Every tree in the area had been killed by the intense heat of the eruption. After we gathered a pile, J.C. walked up the hill to grab some hot coals from the cozy Europeans and their dry, happy porters.

Meanwhile, we unprepared Americans huddled miserably under the tarps. J.C. sat out in the rain, adding sticks to the hissing fire. When a steady downpour came and put out the last of the flames, he sighed, and climbed under the tarp with us.

By this time, the four of us were feeling such tender regard for our porter that we awarded him the role of Jesus in the Holy Trinity—J.C. for short, and he was short after all.

We also resolved to put all of his kids through Oxford University, if we survived our time with him.

A frighteningly close thunder storm hammered us for ninety minutes. The sun set. There is no darker place than a lava field in a burned forest on a moonless night. During a brief lull in the storm, J.C. left our shelter again.

He stayed away so long that we began to suspect desertion—a wicked thought! When the storm was winding down again, we saw a flashlight moving toward us. In front of it there appeared to be a short African carrying smoking embers. We said: “No! It can’t be JC! We didn’t give him a flashlight!”

Of course, it was JC. Miracle number two.

He had somehow borrowed a few coals that had made it through the downpour, and coerced a sympathetic German to accompany him down to our campsite. With a flashlight.

It took a while get a fire going with wet wood, but with all of us blowing on to the coals, the flames finally leapt up. We heated meager soup rations; I offered some of my cup to J.C., which he accepted with a bow. That’s when I reached over to touch JC‘s overcoat: It was cold and heavy with rainwater

By 9:30 PM, we were all eager to lie down for the day. As we settled in to sleep, J.C. remained outside, in a light rain. He passed the night alternately warming his bare feet by the fire, and leaning back with his hat over his eyes. Several times he woke us up with his singing, in call-and-response with other porters up on the hill.

In the morning, the fire was still burning and J.C. was in good spirits. We packed up our gear and asked our guide if our stuff would be safe from thieves while we walked to the volcano. J.C. said, without hesitation, that it would all be stolen if we left it there. We would be able to find the volcano without his help. He gestured toward the smoking cone.

So, maybe he wasn’t keen on walking uphill into sulfurous fumes and lava?

We walked off across the black cinder floor of the dead forest. Soon we were next to the wandering lava flow. At one point, I excused myself from my friends, and pissed on hot cinder next to glowing red streams. My urine was immediately absorbed into the porous ground, there was a pause, and then a fragrant puff of steam rose in front of me.

The piss of a lifetime.

Our footsteps sounded hollow on the week-old volcanic rock, which crackled like thin ice. Through cracks in the rock, we could see glowing lava barely three feet below the surface. A Belgian hiker pointed out the route to the volcano cone, and we headed off through a leafless black forest.

Eventually, we emerged to the black dunes of volcanic ash that led the way to Nyirogongo. It was a stark landscape, but elegant in its simple black lines. The cinder was firmer than beach sand, and it crunched like breakfast cereal on each footfall.

We gained height above the landscape, which looked like a miniature Bryce Canyon in black and orange. On the ridge of the new mountain, where we were able to see the main lava flow. The new rock looked like a petrified flood, with chutes, waterfalls, waves, pools, and channels frozen in the instant of their highest flow. Above all this rose a smooth, curving hill of lava and cinder, venting white gas all along its ridge, where we walked. Often the gas would rise up and envelope us, choking us with its vapors.

This volcano was a force greater than all human effort.

Back at the campsite, we found J.C. by the fire. We packed up, everybody went off to relieve themselves (no steam clouds, this far from the cone), and then we fell into step behind our guide for an even faster walk out.

At the end of the trail—the road between Goma and Rutshuru—we paid J.C. the equivalent of $7.30, for which he was very grateful. Then he lit his pipe, and went off shouting to his fellow porters about how hard it had rained the night before.

Postscript: A decade after this volcano hike, the Hutu people of Rwanda killed 800,000 Tutsis. It was yet another genocide that the world refused to see—until it was too late. J.C. probably died in the carnage, along with those children we failed to send to Oxford.

Nyirogongo is still erupting.

“People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.” —George Santayana

Or …

Or

…