The lanai my bare feet are currently resting on is ringed by red hibiscus bushes. When I jumped out of bed this morning around 5 a.m. they were closed tightly in natural slumber. But, as the morning has worn on, and the hot Kona sun radiates from above, they have blossomed splendidly. Unlike me, they’re not jet-lagged, no, they’re right on time to add cherry-colored highlights to my view of Pele’s home, Mauna Kea, whose base starts about 15 miles from where I currently sit, and stretches into the sky, past the clouds about 14,000 feet.

Who’s Pele? Well she’s the ancient Hawaiian volcano goddess. Hunter Thompson in his book, The Cure of Lono describes Pele like this:

“The missionaries may have taught the natives to love Jesus, but deep in their pagan hearts they don’t really like him: Jesus is too stiff for these people. He had no sense of humor. The ranking gods and goddesses of the old Hawaiian culture are mainly distinguished by their power, not their purity, and they are honored for their vices as well as their awesome array of virtues. They are not intrinsically different from the people themselves—just bigger and bolder and better in every way.

The two favorites are Lono and Pele, the randy Volcano goddess. When Pele had a party, everybody came; she was a lusty long-haired beauty who danced naked on molten lava with a gourd of gin in each hand, and anybody who didn’t like it was instantly killed. Pele had her problems—usually with wrong-headed lovers, and occasionally with whole armies—but in the end she always prevailed. And she still lives, they say, in her cave underneath the volcano and occasionally comes out to wander around the island in any form she chooses— sometimes as a beautiful young girl on magic surfboard, sometimes a jaded harlot sitting alone at the bar of the Volcano House; but usually—for some reason the legends have never made clear—in the form of a wizened old woman who hitchhikes around the island with a pint of gin in her kitbag.”

Pele is a babe, no doubt about that. She’s usually depicted as a half nude vixen, with fiery red lava exploding all around her. You can find her on everything from post cards to refrigerator magnets here on the Big Island; she’s their Patron Saint, to put it in the terms of my Catholic-schooling youth. And like any proper pagan god, she has a curse associated her. The story goes that if you remove any lava rock (which are strewn all over the island) and take them back home to the mainland, the curse of Pele will follow you — brining bad times to your life. Now of course, you can buy “purified” lava rocks at any gift shop which are curse free for about 10 bucks a stone. This is obviously a racket, but I applaud the Hawaiians for their free market instincts. We didn’t just give them monotheistic religion, we showed them the power of supply and demand. And they’ve proved themselves quick learners.