Serendipity

It was one of the most amazing, outrageous, absurd coincidences in my life.

I was walking down the Sliding Sands Trail from 10,000-foot top of Haleakala National Park, descending into the dormant crater, heading towards its center, and the Park Ranger cabin in a spot known as Paliku.

Beneath my feet were volcanic sands, in a mostly barren landscape. The trail was an evolutionary one, stretching from rock and sand through a middle ground where mists lingered and yellow-orange poppies seem to bloom and decay with each new breath among the ohelo berry bushes, and then, as if passing through a life membrane, towards the sounds of birds, flitting back and forth above the pali, the crater’s edge, and the Kaupo Gap, where the crater had been eroded by the hot rush of lava hundreds of years before, and then, a descent into deepening green, ever richer in its brightness, towards the rain forests and streambeds which could turn into raging torrents in an instant if it rained, and finally, to the sea itself, a blue horizon stretching upwards towards a lighter blue sky, until the clouds of mist would blanket me in swirls of moisture, the sunlight piercing through it to form intense rainbows, which always seemed to be waiting for me at the end of the path I was walking down.

My destination, the ranger cabin, was where my friend, Sandy, a park ranger, was on duty, and where I would be staying during my sojourn to Maui. We were friends; she had signed me in as a volunteer in the park, enabling me to wander about the crater on my own.

In those days, I never traveled with a camera, believing that it was important to remember the images I encountered without visual aids, that as a writer, it was a mental exercise for the brain to retain encounters with the natural world that could then be translated from synaptic pulses back into words, at will. Of course, I was mistaken; the memories only come late at night, or very early in the morning, like now, awakening from dreams that I will are not remember, until the next time my unconscious takes me there, once again, past the silverswords, past the outcroppings of hardened lava, towards the most intense rainbows I have ever seen.

Descending the trail, at first, there is only the sound of my hiking boots scraping against sand and the increasing sound of my own labored breaths as I struggled with the altitude, the sun’s heat, the ache of my calves which had spent too much time sitting in an office chair, punching down keys at the computer, and the sweat pouring down my face. My own sounds were enveloped in the silence around me, as if I were underwater, traveling alone on a path towards beauty, without any human, it seemed within miles. I was very aware of my own heart beating.

Each time I had descended into the Haleakala crater, I found that I was entering a revelatory realm, because as I traveled down the path, I also traveled deep within my own thoughts, wide awake, talking to myself, and to my unconscious.

Now, it was a year later, and I was lost in my own thoughts, still unfogging my brain from the stresses of my job, when the sound of voices began to filter through the mist. Up ahead were three fellow travelers, two men and a woman, shouting and carrying on as if they were drunk and on the way to an Aerosmith concert. I was annoyed, because they were disturbing my own sense of quietude, communing with nature. And, I realized, because we were alone together in the crater, we would soon be traveling side by side, as an unintended group, much like Chaucer’s pilgrims.

One of the men, very tall, was athletic and graceful in his stride. He wore a long, flowing caftan. His companions, showing the signs of fatigue and sunburn, were clearly companions who had been dragged along at his urging. I fell in with them, and listened as the tall man told his tale.

He had been a graduate student researcher at Stanford University, working on the genetic engineering code of tomatoes, in collaboration with his professor. He had uncovered important new understandings of the genes and how they worked, but his professor had taken full credit for the work, and negotiated a lucrative research contract with Monsanto. Worse, a lawsuit filed by some crazy environmentalists in Washington, D.C., had halted the work. So, he had left the university, gone to Maui, and was supporting himself by doing magic tricks for tourists at the large hotels on the island.

His companions couldn’t have cared less about his story; they were busy sharing a joint made from buds of what was affectionately known as “Maui Wowie” and asking, as impatient children do on long trips, “When will we get there?”

But I was stunned. What was the line from the movie, “Casablanca?” Of all the dormant volcanic craters in all the world… It was Environmental Action, a national environmental group, where I was one of three editors of the magazine, which had decided to join with the lawsuit brought by Jeremy Rifkin and his Foundation of Economic Trends in 1983, challenging the tall man’s work with Monsanto on genetic engineering.

The tall man went on, railing against the stupidity of such people, who didn’t know what they were talking about, who didn’t understand that there was no risk. His angry words rose up and then fell down to the crater floor, which was silent and oblivious.

Finally, after a bunch of un-huhs and reallys, I summoned the courage to tell him the truth. “It’s hard to believe,” I said, “but I’m one of the people responsible for stopping your work. My environmental group joined the lawsuit.”

The tall man was incredulous. His angry had been directed for months at some nameless, faceless group, far away, built into an incredible imagined force of darkness in his life, and now, walking down the Sliding Sands Trail, he was confronting one of the very people responsible for so much of what he perceived as his personal misery.

“Why? Why? How could you do such a thing?” he sputtered angrily

I responded: “Look around you. What do you see?”

“I see incredible beauty,” he said.

“Beyond the beauty,” I answered, “is the legacy of that beauty being attacked by foreign species of plants and animals that were introduced here, which disrupt the natural ecological balance of things. I pointed to the edge of the crater, where a fence was being built there, to try and contain feral goats that were eating all the crater’s vegetation. The fence, of course, was useless to prevent the spread of goats.

As I went through a litany of Maui’s diversity being diminished by the introduction of new foreign species, the tall man’s attitude seemed to shift. His anger dissipated, and after much discussion, he found himself agreeing with me. There were always unintended consequences when folks started to tinker with the balance of nature. Two hours later, when I left them at their destination, a small hiker’s cabin, the tall man hugged me, as if I were one of his new best friends.

I never saw him again. The lawsuit was tossed out, his former professor no doubt got rich and Monsanto Co. has pursued its genetic-engineering regiment unimpeded, with a spate of disturbing questions about the unintended consequences. A recent news story by Reuters described the growing doubts:

COLUMBIA, Missouri (Reuters) - Robert Kremer, a U.S. government microbiologist who studies Midwestern farm soil, has spent two decades analyzing the rich dirt that yields billions of bushels of food each year and helps the United States retain its title as breadbasket of the world.

Kremer's lab is housed at the University of Missouri and is literally in the shadow of Monsanto Auditorium, named after the $11.8 billion-a-year agricultural giant Monsanto Co. Based in Creve Coeur, Missouri, the company has accumulated vast wealth and power creating chemicals and genetically altered seeds for farmers worldwide.

But recent findings by Kremer and other agricultural scientists are raising fresh concerns about Monsanto's products and the Washington agencies that oversee them. The same seeds and chemicals spread across millions of acres of U.S. farmland could be creating unforeseen problems in the plants and soil, this body of research shows.

Kremer, who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), is among a group of scientists who are turning up potential problems with glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup and the most widely used weed-killer in the world.

"This could be something quite big. We might be setting up a huge problem," said Kremer, who expressed alarm that regulators were not paying enough attention to the potential risks from biotechnology on the farm, including his own research.

I haven’t been back to the Haleakala crater in more than two decades. But, sometimes, when I think about going back, I wonder, what are the chances I might perhaps meet up again with the tall man again. What would he think now about Monsanto and his former work?