Etna
4 September 1998
Etna
is big. I remember looking for it on my first visit to Sicily about
two months after I turned 12. I had been asleep in the back of the hippie-orange
VW camper van that morning, and woke up when we were skirting the famed
volcano. As I rubbed my eyes and poked up to the front seats, my parents
reported, "Look, we're passing Mt. Etna!"
Excited about
the prospect of beholding a bona-fide volcano as would be any 11-year-old
boy from suburban Philadelphia whose only previous experience with the
primal forces of planet Earth was surviving a miniscule earthquake that
would have made Richter laugh and refuse to rate it, I peered eagerly
out the window at the stormy-looking sky to our left.
After a few frustrated
minutes, I complained I couldn't see the volcano. "It's right there,"
my dad pointed. I peered again into the dark blue-gray horizon, trying
to pick out the mountain.
Then it hit me.
That wasn't the
horizon. That was the
volcano.
Now, an undefined
number of years later, I was ready to hit Etna again, having in the interim
become sufficiently proficient in the field of visiting volcanoes
after all, I've now bathed in the bubbling mud pits of Vulcano, haven't
I? I've watched Mt. St. Helen's billow ash on TV, haven't I? I've even
gone so far as to climb to the top of Stromboli, Europe's most active
volcano, and spent the night huddled in my parka against in the freezing
rains and whipping winds on its summit watching its explosive eruptions
periodically light up the night sky, haven't I?
So after slipping
along the Riveria dei Ciclopi for a stretch a cluster of fishing
villages prefixed "Aci" marked by a series of upright offshore rocks that
myth holds Polyphemus the Cyclops tossed after Odysseus as the hubric
Greek taunted him from his getaway ship I turned inland for the
torturous road up Mt. Etna.
As high as I
could drive, there was a cable car station, which I took up to a refuge
perched in the midst of the weird scorched lunar landscape of the mountaintop.
I spent an hour clambering and sliding around the pumice slopes (which
looked like nothing so much as an endless quarry yard's gravel piles)
picking out the two best volcanic bombs, one for me, one for my dad. Bombs
are extremely heavy, vaguely ovoid stones formed by blobs of molten magma
that once spurted out of the volcano and then cooled as they flew through
the air. Then it was time to board a sort of off-road minibus with a motley
group of travelers from all corners of Europe to go even higher.
A bit farther
up Etna, we stopped, piled of the bus, and gathered around a paunchy guide
with a sunburned face and bushy mustaches who took up as high as was considered
safe o that day. He reeled off his tour guide spiels in Italian, and I
translated into English for everyone, who then turned to their families
or little group and re-translated into French or Swedish or whatever.
At the end of the little tour, back at the guides' hut-cum-bar, the guide
treated me to an espresso and a shot of volcano-grade pepperoncino-laced
liqueur to thank me for the collaborative effort.
I feel it is
important at this juncture to point out that Etna is not, technically,
a volcano. Etna is a mountain. "Etna" is also the name of a huge eruptive
system underlying that big mountain, which was itself formed by said volcanic
activity. There happen to be four active craters around Mount Etna's summit,
but these operate independently of one another and so don't constitute
a single volcano. Their magma and gas systems are related, but not interconnected
per se. If they were, and all of Etna at once gave a fit as its
individual craters are prone to do on occasion with all the craters
and system working in synchronization,
Sicily would, basically, cease to exist.
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