As a university-sponsored event, dinner was officially dry—no wine, beer or liquor.
Going for ice, Kathie and I could not resist dropping into the KMC bar and restaurant—formerly the officer’s club and mess hall. The service was indifferent, but the prices were very friendly. More people had arrived, and more introductions were made. The fare ranged from char-grilled meats to makizushi. As the kitchen was cleared and the food put away the group gathered in the living room where I asked everyone to introduce themselves one by one. Moses was leading tonight’s foray and gave the group pointers about how to achieve in their paintings and drawings certain effects they would witness in the field. I chimed in with a few suggestions, advising them to look for narratives in whatever they beheld, and to approach the process not with the goal of producing an image, but improving their knowledge of the terrain and the condition in which they find it. Seeing is visual cognition. If you can see it, I told them, you know it. If you know it you can draw it.
As we prepared to embark on the adventure, the mercury dropped to the fifties. I changed into a cotton sweater, cargo vest and lightweight waxed cotton Barbour raincoat. Through the evening there had been light precipitation. We returned to the Jaggar around 11:00. The parking lot was empty, the riot of tourists having progressed to feeding and sleeping.
Moses and his posse peeled away beyond the barrier, setting up their easels just east of the museum, closer to the rim. Mike Marshall and I accompanied one of the adult students—a sweet, older Hawaiian woman named Ululuwei along the lighted path. The younger students seemed to regard her in a maternal light. She shook her head and said that if the park service put up a barrier, they did it for a reason. The barrier at this point consisted of a series of vertical rods that suspended a colored rope that offered no impediment to anyone wishing to pass it. About two hundred yards beyond the museum this cordon veered off toward the rim. I followed it to a peculiar monument that consisted of a two-sided stone box with a concrete cap, transfixed by a vertical steel pipe perhaps four inches in diameter. About ten feet from the ground the pipe was festooned with four immobile right-angle blades, reminiscent of the tail fins of aerial bombs. Each bore a series of circular perforations comparable to the diameter of the pipe. A button-shaped bronze U.S. Geodetic Survey marker confirmed the site was the summit of Mt. Kilaeua.
The cap of the monument’s base stood roughly forty inches, which made it the perfect height for working while standing. A massive glowing plume rose from the pit of Halema’uma’u below, a mile to the southwest. The rain had tapered off and breaks in the clouds revealed a full moon that cast sufficient light to see the pages of my sketchbook. Off to my right Moses and his band were already busy. One of them, a Hawaiian man named Kamuela saw me and came over to investigate.
I had unpacked the contents of my small shoulder bag and begun mapping out a composition across a two-page spread with an orange Micron pen. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Kamuela work in graphite on an 18 x 24 inch drawing pad on a series of vignettes.
The problems facing me were interesting. Standing at the summit of an active volcano at night, in the dark on the edge of a precipice, my visibility relied on available moonlight that came and went like a strobe light on a very slow setting. Ten seconds here, thirty seconds there.

The fiery pit emitted occasional cracking sounds as rocks from its wall fell into the lava pit within. My sense of color depended more on having memorized the location of various pigments in the Schmeinke enameled steel twelve-pan watercolor box mit flasche I was using.
The additive-subtractive process resulted in soaking the page, wetting, picking up color and applying more. This went on for perhaps two hours.
Moses came up behind me.
I can’t believe I’m painting in the dark, I uttered. He laughed.
I can’t believe I’m painting in the dark, I repeated.
Placing a paper towel between the pages I clipped the wet pages shut and went to work on the next page spread, using a fountain pen and a grisaille wash. It was easier to judge the results under the intermittent moonlight.

I took a break, drank half a bottle of spring water and found Mike Marshall. It was around 1:30 in the morning. He told me that Rosella—a student from Germany—and a few other students had headed up the trail back toward KMC, looking for other vantage points from which to draw. Moses was back at his easel, silhouetted against the glowing vapor plume. One of the other instructors sat on a bench in the parking area, suffering a headache and complaining about the vog.
We agreed to head back to KMC at 2am, catch a few winks and then return to the motif before dawn. I went back to the first painting and made a few final adjustments based on my exercise en grisaille. As we drove back to the hotel, our esprit de l’escalier moment was realizing that in all the excitement, we had completely forgotten about our headlamps.