Phantom Volcano

We’re up to Day 6 of my trip to Indonesia. Sorry it’s taking me so long to get to everything. It was quite the packed vacation.

This morning we were supposed to go on a hike around the sloped of Mount Merapi. Supposedly we could see this volcano from our hotel in Yogjakarta. I’m sure normally it would be visible while we were on it. At the time two or three volcanoes in Indonesia were putting out tons of ash. The only time I saw Mount Merapi at all was from an airplane. It looked like an island in a sea of ash.

On the bus on the way to Kaliadem, a town on the volcano, our tour guide passed around some prints of what the area looked like right after it’s eruption in 2010. For some better ones, click the picture.

The prints reminded me a great deal of what Mount St. Hellens looked like right after it blew it’s top a few decades ago.

On the right our tour guide pointed the way to the volcano. Yeah, I don’t see it either. Apparently it’s just right there.

In order to convince the people who lived there to move, the government promised that they would retain their property rights. Now many people come to the mountain to continue to farm it.

There are a number of women who go to collect the long grass and bring it back to their cattle. They make huge bundles of it that can weigh as much as they do, and carry this out on their backs. We were warned to get off the path and give them the right away if we encountered. The woman in the picture is one of the grass women, but she also served as our location guide.

Likewise, some men collect bamboo poles from the mountain and carry it out on their shoulders.

In 2010 there was a man named Mah Ri Jah who was said to be the volcano’s spiritual keeper. Hikers who wanted to go to the crater would ask his permission to avoid problems with ghosts. He was given a special office by the sultan of Yogjakarta. For his stipend he was commanded to never leave the volcano, but to warn the people who lived on and around it when an eruption was eminent. He served his office all his life.

For most of the man’s life there was a rock wall at the lip of the volcano that diverted the rivers of ash to either side of Kaliadem – which is only three miles from the crater. A little while before the 2010 eruption the rock wall fell in a small eruption.

He did warn everyone that an eruption was coming, and that it was a bad one, but he refused to leave because the sultan to whom he owed his allegiance was the only one who could give him permission to go, and that sultan had already died. The word of the new sultan meant nothing to him.

Because he didn’t leave, and because the ash had always gone around the town in the past, most of the 32 people who lived there refused to leave. They were wiped out.

After the eruption some of the people returned, even though they weren’t supposed to. This woman is 74. She felt uncomfortable in the government housing and could not find anything to do there. She’s well aware that the volcano could erupt again at any minute, and that when it does she will most likely die. She doesn’t care. This is her home and she will go down with the ship.

The likelihood is fairly high. Merapi is Indonesia’s most active volcano, and Indonesia is in the middle of the Ring of Fire. Talk about a hot spot! But she isn’t the only one to be found on the slopes. The grass women, the pole men, a lot of hikers/tourists, and her grandkids can be found there.

Her grandkids just happened to be visiting her when we came to talk. They were quite willing to answer our questions about things like how often they came, what schools they went to, and what they thought of their crazy grandmother. In exchange, they had a question of their own for us.

They wanted to know why we wanted to visit such a place. Here we were, sitting in the humble abode of a woman who lived on a live volcano. When was the last time you sat around on a live volcano?

To these kids, this was normal life. We turned the question around. If they could go anywhere in the world, where would it be? The cities of Thailand, Korea, and Europe. Didn’t we want to go there?

Most of us travelers shrugged. Some of us had already been. Most of us considered their list just places our planes would stop off for a connecting flight. We weren’t impressed.

So what was the difference? They had never been, and considered it all so different. All of us, travelers and grandchildren alike, wanted to go someplace we’d never been before.

The exception? The old woman living on the volcano. She had no desire to go anywhere else in the world.

Besides a kitchen garden that includes banana trees, and a few farm animals – some of which walked in and out of her home freely – she makes her living by making charcoal. She does this by filling her hole in the ground with bamboo that she gets from the men in the neighborhood, covering the hole with dirt, then lighting it on fire. She must tend this fire carefully. Too hot and the bamboo turns to ash instead. To cold and it will go out before finishing the job. She’s been doing it all her life, and turned it into an art form. She’s so well known for it that she doesn’t have to take it to market. People who want charcoal come to her. She is the Charcoal Queen.

After leaving the Charcoal Queen, we headed for one of the stores along the main road up the slope. Along the way we passed a number of ramshackle structures.

Apparently the government is trying to take possession of the volcano in as gentle a manner as possible. To that effect, they automatically condemn any parcel that is not walked on by the owner in the course of any given period.

In other words, if you want to keep your property rights, you have to go work your land at least part of the time. The government does NOT want people to return to the volcano because it isn’t safe, so spending the night is against the rules.

So people walk a tightrope. They want enough of a building to be able to claim their rights of ownership, but not so much that it will cost them dearly the next time a wall of ash rolls through. You end up with stuff like this.

The store where we stopped off for tea and breadfruit is one of the more solid establishments, if not one of the more elegant. It’s a combination trinket shop, snack shack, and museum. The museum consisted of concrete floors and poles holding a roof over items that were dug up after the eruption. Like this car. There wasn’t a lot to it.

Probably the greater claim to fame was the owner; the wife of Mah Ri Jah, the man who would not leave the volcano for lack of the sultan’s approval.