Aetna erupting every 12 days now is sending me flashbacks of nearly falling in on a solo hike, my head full of Hans Grusel then Goebbels and Pregger. Here' s the tale, with favorite passages from Virgil's Aenied...
"Came close to dying today, wound up only wounded but it was great. My advice: Do whatever you have to but almost die, it's the best, even better if your ears are laid across a sommerplatz of hansgrusel right when it goes down. I been reading the Aeneid of Virgil cause Im in Sicily seeing where that poem goes on. When I got close to the volcano where Aeneas found the entrance to hell I wasnt not gonna go look, Etna is an active volcano ten thousand ft up right from sea level, it hasnt blown up in about ten years I'm driving steep switchbacks up through orchards the locals cant help but plant because once lava cools and breaks down it makes perfect black loam. Higher up near the snow line its just dense pine forest, suddenly the bends in the road start leading to barricades with detours to newly paved roads that emerge onto a massive lava slide a quarter mile across that cut a swath through the pines and the villages below, you can see it continue clear down into the ocean. I left the car and hiked up the lava flow, its all cool and crumbly now, towards a dome at the summit that spews a constant jet of smoke. After a couple of hours I was hiking on glaciers between ridges of lava rock. All the way up gas and smoke are swirling up from the rocks into a stiff wind that makes the wisps disappear in jolts. Its a spooky place, inside out earth. The lava rock is like those chocolite bars, all craggy and piled high but full of airholes and really brittle so Im walking on the glaciers mostly.
I hike up to a huge crater where an eruption must've blown out, its easily sixty feet across and twice that deep and swirling with white stinky smoke. But the smaller heat vents are more amazing coming right out of the glaciers and melting out deep curvy ice caves. I'm nearly to the summit where that dome is pumping out smoke and Im thinking I gotta get up there and look down into it, but its a farther than it looks and the wind gets mean about it, I havent felt my fingertips for awhile plus Im starving, so I crouch below a pile of rock and shove my fingerbones into a couple bloodoranges that I picked on the way up but that gets my fingers wet and maybe frozen, fuck, so a bit of oj in your crotch is actually ok, no problem but meanwhile the long ledge of ice curving out over the smoke vent makes me wonder why I think I'm on solid ground. I start thinking its a pretty good idea to start down preferring to step on lava rock rather than glacier ice, but the lava is basically piles of pumice stone that shift and break under weight oh yeah and it's three dimensionally serrated so pumice slices you a hundred times if you grab on.
Wherever the lava cooled in big ribbons I walk on the lava and wherever its rubble I walk on ice. Coming down a steep section I step onto the glacier and three steps later drop straight through the crust with my left leg clear to my hip, my right leg stayed on top but is wrenched a little behind me. I grabbed an edge of the rock and pulled myself up but fell right back through chewing up my wrist on the lava. My leg was cut too but I didnt notice on account of a sharp pain that made be pretty sure I'd just had my anus serrated by lavarock. Not at all a good feeling. But buttholes are deceiving. I climbed out ok, took a step, sharp pain, another step, I'm picturing a razor sharp meteor sunk in my bloody ass meat, cant feel a tear in my pants though, rim ok so... another step, another, ok... so... I think I'd tried to shit myself and couldnt, y'know automatic response when a predator like say the Earth's crust tries to swallow you whole and you real quick add your own gravy just to spoil the meal?
I hike up to a huge crater where an eruption must've blown out, its easily sixty feet across and twice that deep and swirling with white stinky smoke. But the smaller heat vents are more amazing coming right out of the glaciers and melting out deep curvy ice caves. I'm nearly to the summit where that dome is pumping out smoke and Im thinking I gotta get up there and look down into it, but its a farther than it looks and the wind gets mean about it, I havent felt my fingertips for awhile plus Im starving, so I crouch below a pile of rock and shove my fingerbones into a couple bloodoranges that I picked on the way up but that gets my fingers wet and maybe frozen, fuck, so a bit of oj in your crotch is actually ok, no problem but meanwhile the long ledge of ice curving out over the smoke vent makes me wonder why I think I'm on solid ground. I start thinking its a pretty good idea to start down preferring to step on lava rock rather than glacier ice, but the lava is basically piles of pumice stone that shift and break under weight oh yeah and it's three dimensionally serrated so pumice slices you a hundred times if you grab on.
Wherever the lava cooled in big ribbons I walk on the lava and wherever its rubble I walk on ice. Coming down a steep section I step onto the glacier and three steps later drop straight through the crust with my left leg clear to my hip, my right leg stayed on top but is wrenched a little behind me. I grabbed an edge of the rock and pulled myself up but fell right back through chewing up my wrist on the lava. My leg was cut too but I didnt notice on account of a sharp pain that made be pretty sure I'd just had my anus serrated by lavarock. Not at all a good feeling. But buttholes are deceiving. I climbed out ok, took a step, sharp pain, another step, I'm picturing a razor sharp meteor sunk in my bloody ass meat, cant feel a tear in my pants though, rim ok so... another step, another, ok... so... I think I'd tried to shit myself and couldnt, y'know automatic response when a predator like say the Earth's crust tries to swallow you whole and you real quick add your own gravy just to spoil the meal?
Traveling constipates which I guess is better than a two mile hike back down in shitty keks and better than if Aetna had loosened up on me. The andrenaline gusher under the crust was truly amazing, addiction to russian roulette must be about this, but this time no time for fun 'cause the suns getting low and now I have to step slow motion for the next half hour in case Im walking an egg shell, at one point Im forced to go between two fissures that splay above smoldering fumaroles. It wasnt til I was back on mud that I realized the blood in my ears included hansgrusel and the ice in my sock included blood, shredded one leg pretty good, tweaked the other knee a bit. Hans ended before I got off the volcano, halfway down I put on a gift from goerbelspregger that starts with tv golf commentary perfect for laughing my mind off over nervous high fake stakes about landing in the rough something about "hail erwin" "thats forever" then noooise bloody brown warm bass and disastrous scrapes that were just what I needed.
Virgil, by the way, wrote some of the best violence ever around 30B.C., skip to book IX for best gore, or read it all for psycho legacy of libya vs europe, juno vs venus, justice vs lust.
Heres a couple of passages, "fainting limbs"
"Rumor whose life is speed, whose going gives her force. Timid and small at first, she soon lifts up her body in the air. She stalks the ground, her head is hidden in the clouds." [book IV ll.230-4]
"molten electrum" [book VIII, l.529]
"He hacks their drooping necks and then lops off/ their master's head. He leaves the trunk to gurgle/ as it spouts blood; the earth, the rugs are steeped/ in warm black gore." [book IX ll.442-5]
"So Rhoetus vomits out his purple life/ and, crying, throws up wine with mingled blood./ Euryalus is hot for secret slaughter,/ [...] berserk with lust for carnage" [book IX ll.464-6]
"flies through the thin air; it drives into his belly/ and then twists upward into his deep chest; the wound's dark mouth pours out a wave of foam,/ the steel tip warms itself in his pierced lungs."
[book IX ll.934-7]
"the steel/ slices the brow of Pandarus between the temples, severing his beardless cheeks/ with one enormous wound. A thud: earth quakes/beneath his great weight. Dying, on the ground, his fainting limbs are sprawled, his armor splashed/ with brains: his head is dangling in equal halves/ from either shoulder, to this side and that." [book IX ll.1000-6]
Posts
