CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/26/2024

Evidence of common human folly in 'Ah Ah'

As we head into peak tourism season, we’re taking a page from Ryan Thompson’s smile-inducing new release, Ah Ah: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Haleakala & Hawai'i Volcanoes National Parks, the follow-up to Thompson's 2014 best-seller, Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest, also published by The Ice Plant. Pictured here, a note from a tourist whose regrettable impulse at the Chain of Craters Road lava flow in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park has done enough post-holiday damage to warrant return postage to the Big Island. Perhaps the thief caught wind of the “apocryphal story of a curse wrought by Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire, on anyone who removes volcanic rocks from Hawai'i,” Thompson writes. Or perhaps it’s “simply a desire to return something that the letter writers later felt was not theirs to take.”