I went back to Teide, and the Canary Islands for that matter, because it gave me something I knew I could not find in Rome, Berlin, or Vienna. I am not sure what that was and I might not ever know but at 12,918 feet above sea level, freezing in a high-altitude wind, wearing too few clothes, watching the sun rise slowly above ocean and clouds and islands, I managed to find something.
It was around five in the morning with sleep in my eyes and the darkest dark I had ever seen that I turned on a small black flashlight and began the last hour of hiking to the crater of Teide. There were a few people in front and many behind, but they grew farther behind as I went farther ahead. It was ominous, scary almost, hiking dried lava blindly with nothing but your light and the stars and a sliver of the moon. Sometimes a star fell, as part of the almost finished meteor shower and sometimes I shut off the light and just stood to catch my breath. Other times the movement of shadows behind lunar rocks startled me. It was a great place to embrace a feeling of vulnerability, knowing there is little you could do to prevent just about anything from happening, and then remembering that nothing will except the next step forward on a well marked trail.
Huddled together for warmth at the top, around fifteen of us sat under the stars until the first light crept up over the horizon and one by one the stars melted away. They were German, French, and Spanish, and not a single person spoke English well. We were silent anyways, listening to the wind and the sound of our own shivering. The common bond atop a dormant volcanic crater, watching a sunrise from another world, all went well beyond language. We all knew what everyone was thinking.
Thirty minutes below, at the first habitable point beneath the crater, there is a cable car station. Everyday at 9:08am sharp, the first round of people are brought up from 1800 meters below. I didn't stay long enough to watch this happen, and I don't think I could bear seeing five hours of sweat covered by eight minutes of technology. Things happen faster now but the fifteen of us who climbed the peak in the dark and climbed hours before to get there, we saw much more and it was not because we were in the right place at the right time but because we were in many places at many times.
I left the station promptly for a four hour trek down the other side of the mountain, through a landscape that could have been Mordor or Mars. I let nothing cheapen it and enjoyed the pain in my legs and the sun even more as it got warmer and my hands thawed. I enjoyed the small lizards who ran across the sand and under a dry bush, scared of by the sound of my footsteps. I enjoyed the rocks people stacked, outlining difficult parts of the trail for as far back as the trail existed. I enjoyed looking up at the peak and being amazed by how far we can go in a short time. I enjoyed all these quiet things a lot.
The lava fields of Siete Cañadas ended two weeks in Tenerife. By the time I arrived at the base, nine hours had been hiked, one hour had been slept, and four hours had been spent on buses. I thought about a lot of things during that time, but I often thought of nothing at all; it was good to get that break from myself. Sometimes I get caught up in the fact that if one thing does not happen, ten things never will, and every little decision will change everything, but it's silly to think like that. I met a stunning Argentine girl after our flight together, and five days later we fell asleep on the side of a volcanic cliff falling 200 feet to the ocean. A meteor shower lit up the sky above us and when we woke up tucked away in that small protected cave, hugging each other, the sun was coming up over the Atlantic. Some things are so perfect, divine really, and fit for a film, that you could not question them if you wanted to. Since those kinds of things are happening all around me it would be silly to think about anything at all.
And it would be silly to miss them. She got on a ferry and is gone, the road trips and beach time all behind us, and I hiked down the different colored rock, watching one prehistoric explosion overlap another, the boulders turn to rock and sand, until it all fell dramatically into the sea.
Sitting at the base of the mountain and looking up, a Spanish man from Tenerife sat with a coffee. His wife and mother sat with him in no hurry, watching the tourists pass. I asked him as we sat looking up at Teide, when it will go off again. He said he didn't know, but one of two things will happen. The island will grow very quickly, or it will go away completely, and it will all be very bad for you and I. Shortly after, I got on a bus and looked out the window at different parts of the volcano, at different angles, from further and further away.
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