After taking a rock from Mauna Loa, volcanologist Jess Phoenix starts to worry that her offering to the volcano goddess Pele was not enough.

Jess Phoenix is Executive Director and co-founder of environmental scientific research organization Blueprint Earth. She is a volcanologist, an extreme explorer, and former candidate for United States Congress. She has been chased by narco-traffickers in Mexico, dodged armed thieves in remote Peru, raced horses across Mongolia, worked on the world’s largest volcano in Hawaii, piloted the Jason2 submersible on an undersea volcano, and explored deep in the Australian Outback. Jess believes science should be accessible to everyone, and that creative possibility is limitless. Jess is a Fellow in The Explorers Club and the Royal Geographical Society, a featured scientist on the Discovery and Science Channels, an invited TEDx speaker, and she has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, in Wired, Fast Company, on National Public Radio, on CNN, NBC, and has written for the BBC. She is the host of the podcast Catstrophe! (catastropheshow.com) and has a book coming out in Spring 2020 with Timber Press called Miss Adventure: My Life as a Geologist, Explorer, and Professional Risk-Taker.

This story originally aired on October 25, 2019 in an episode titled “Cursed.”

Story Transcript

I leaned hard into the fence, my hand flung out, my eyes straining into the darkness trying to follow the path of the Puka-shell necklace as it floated down into the gaping abyss below.

My friends and colleagues at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory had told me that if I wanted to take a rock off the island I needed to make an offering to Pele, the volcano goddess who made her home at the bottom of Kilauea Volcano, so there I was.

It was September 2008 and my four months of conducting research on active volcanoes was coming to an end. I had mapped active lava flows. I had taken helicopters over volcanic vents. I had collected gas samples for analysis, installed a camera at the edge of a roiling lava lake. And I trekked down the side of Mauna Loa, the world's largest volcano, and I sampled flowing lava with a rock hammer. It is so hot up close that you can literally feel your eyes dehydrating. 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit will do that.

So, like many visitors to the Hawaiian Islands, I wanted a souvenir. Now, I found the perfect one. It was a cantaloupe-sized piece of basalt rock, black and less than 200 years old. This basalt had crystals of olivine, which is a green mineral that, in this case, had weathered to iridescence. That's unusual and that made it rock-collection worthy.

I displayed my would-be keepsake to my boss Frank at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Now, Frank raised his eyebrows and said, “Better make a good offering.”

Frank is part native Hawaiian and he's a brilliant scientist. I am not native Hawaiian and, at the time, I was very much an aspiring scientist. I was also a broke grad student living on $30 a week, so offerings to Pele are often alcohol. Gin or rum are her favorites, but also dances, prayers, chants, traditional food or leis are also acceptable.

I reasoned that a cheap, discarded, Puka shell necklace that some previous volunteer researcher had left in the house would be enough. As far as I know, there are no scientific records of Pele.

However, in Hawaiian she has another name. Ka wahine ‘ai honua, the woman who devours the earth.

So my land-based research had drawn to a close. I left the Big Island, went to Honolulu where I was supposed to meet up with a research vessel. I was going to spend the next month at sea assisting Mark, a geochemist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution with his research on the Lōihi Seamount, the undersea volcano off the coast of the Big Island.

Pretty much as soon as I stepped off the land and onto the ship I ran smack into a steel cabinet and gave myself a concussion.

Then we had a really expensive piece of equipment called an elevator that we drop to the bottom of the ocean and then we bring it back up with samples on it. This is not your normal elevator. This is like a special science elevator. It literally exploded, like that's bad.

And then, on the second-to-last day of the cruise, we actually had the ship's data expert have a heart attack. We were unable to resuscitate him. Everyone on board was part of the effort to clear the decks so that a medical helicopter could land, but it never came.

That night, we were really subdued. Everybody was grappling with the fact that we were just fourteen miles off the coast of Hawaii and yet what seemed like a world away.

I asked my boss Mark if it was normal for someone to die on a research vessel. He told me it was very rare.

When we returned to Honolulu, I reorganized my luggage for the trip back to LA. I eyed the rock in my bag, but then I thought if Pele was really mad at me she would have done more to me personally, more than just a concussion. So I determine the cruise was just riddled with really bad, really sad luck.

I arrived home after five months away to the marital equivalent of the Hindenburg disaster. Our fights escalated exponentially as I struggled to readjust to life as a grad student and my teaching duties at Cal State Los Angeles. Student Health Services diagnosed me with kidney stones which I was unable to afford to have removed because no health insurance.

I took the rock and I proudly put it in my office where one of the olivine crystals just winked at me. I convinced myself that it was a trick of the ‘70s fluorescent lighting.

After a really horrific fight with my now example, I went to stay with a friend of mine who was an undergrad from the Geology Department and her Cal State Los Angeles soccer teammates, the whole team. I was six to seven years older than all of them so I immediately adopted the role of responsible adult. I became designated driver.

The first time I took them out, we went to Jack in the Box after we left the club. We were jumped in the drive-through lane as part of what I later found out was a gang initiation. My friends were fine, yay booze, I, however, had a concussion, a sprained wrist, missing clumps of hair and a black eye.

I started to look at the rock in my office with a little bit of side eye. Sometimes, I found myself wondering exactly how long was the reach of the woman who devours the earth. But to get rid of those notions, I would wander out into the hallway and grab literally anyone I found to talk about anything vaguely scientific. I'm a scientist.

So January 9, 2009 I had been moved in with the soccer girls and away from my ex for nine whole days. I did go to pick him up to go to our last ditch effort at marital counseling where the counselor pulled me aside and said, “Sweetie, he has all the traits of a malignant narcissist.”

Uh-huh. And then, the same day, all of these things happened. I left my ATM card in a cash machine. I gave first aid to a bicyclist I watched get hit by a car. My car died as I raced to LA County Hospital to try to see my ex who had apparently been hit by a car while on his motorcycle. My car died, like I said, and I managed to lock my car, house and office keys inside of it while it was going away on the tow truck.

And then I did confirm the ex had been splattered across the 5 Freeway and had a broken collarbone and several areas of road rash down to the bone. I do not recommend motorcycle accidents, especially in LA.

Then I ran into my future ex in-laws. Think about that. They were visiting from out of state. I learned from them that literally everything my ex had ever told me had been a lie. And then I realized that I was going to have to move back in with him to take care of him because he had no family in-state. I felt myself sliding back into the nightmare I thought I'd just escaped. I hugged my dog and my cat and I cried.

A few months later after I finished taking care of the injured now-example, I move back in with the soccer girls, finally. When I got there they joked around that maybe I was cursed. A dim bulb brightened somewhere but my science brain rejected the idea. I did, however, put the rock in a very, very high shelf in my office where that olivine eye just couldn't see me anymore. But I still wasn't convinced.

But then I was designated driver for the soccer girls again. I had two of them in my car, drunk passengers. I stopped at a stoplight. Something made me glance up at the rearview mirror. I see headlights barreling towards us with no sign of slowing down. I braced. We hit. My friends were fine. Yay booze, again. Sensing a theme. I had severe whiplash and a completely, absolutely, utterly totaled car.

A few days later, sitting in my office staring at the rock for answers, scientist or not, I had nothing. The woman who devours the earth had just about digested me.

I called Frank. I told him I was sending the rock back.

He said, “I'll take care of it. Send it back.”

To his credit, he did not say ‘I told you so’. Good man.

So I apologized to the rock for taking it from its home. I wished it well and I visualized the cliff over the edge of Kilauea where I hoped some HBO scientists would properly reunite it with Madame Pele.

I tucked it in its little UPS box and sent it off across the ocean. A week later, and Frank confirmed that it had been hurled into Kilauea and an appropriate offering of rum had been made, I laughed because I'm a scientist. I mean, how could this work, right? Six months of people around me being hurt of violence, of accidents, of a totaled car, of imminent divorce yet, somehow, less than a week later, I found the exact truck I wanted to replace my car for half price.

Two weeks after that, two weeks later, just two weeks later, I met Carlos, the guy I've now been married to for nine years. And I still have the truck.

So since then, I've worked on six continents and with people who have vastly different customs than my own. Whenever I teach students, which is frequently, about how to do scientific research, I always pass on Pele's most important lesson. Always, always, always respect local traditions especially if they involve a goddess with a volcanic temper. Thank you.