I have been to see the dragon’s skin … and this is what it
looks like.
Where I live, the Earth is a mellow creature. It doesn’t
move beneath my feet or spew into the sky or break open very often. Folk here
are focused more on the sky and the changeable—sometimes wicked—weather it
brings us. We never doubt the solidity of the ground we’ve built our lives upon
because it so rarely fails us.
We shouldn’t be so trusting.
The Earth is a living, breathing entity … a dragon, if you
will. And that is never more evident than where this dragon is daily making
itself new. On the island of Hawaii, the Big Island, the ground swells, it
puffs poisonous, sulfurous smoke from open red sores and hundreds of bottomless
cracks. It disgorges slow-moving lava fields that surround and torch homes,
highways, and fields. It creeps downhill to fill a once-beautiful cove with
20-30 feet of solid black rock, rippled like skin.
The Earth lives
here, and the people live with it, and nature takes hold of the rock—very quickly,
it seems, finding footholds for pollen and seedlings in seams filled with
windblown dust. Dragon skin is fertile, apparently, or the islands built by
these forces wouldn’t be so lush.
We think of dragons as mythical creatures, armor-plated and
breathing fire. I think of them as having skin like this, and sleeping—ever so
restlessly—beneath our feet.
