‘Slow-motion torture’

For the past few days, Alfred Lee has started his morning with the same routine.

He gets out of bed, walks to the top of his “great wall,” and looks down on a mass of steaming molten rock only a few feet away.

“Anything new?” he asks himself as he surveys the narrow channel of hardening lava stretching up the hillside. “No. OK, go back in the house. That’s about all I can do.”

The front of the June 27 lava flow stalled near the base of a 15-foot-tall berm he built to protect his home, located on Pahoa Village Road, and hasn’t moved much since Wednesday.

The tip has hardened, and crackles like fresh snow under the weight of his boots, but the flow constantly reminds him that it’s anything but finished.

Methane blasts, some large enough to shake his home a few hundred feet away, routinely pop and crackle like gunfire, and small lava breakouts upslope ignite trees along its edges.

Occasionally, the flow’s black outer crust will give way, exposing a menacing, fiery-red interior.

But for now, all Alfred, 62, and his family can do is watch as the flow slowly engulfs the landscape.

“It’s like the movies or something,” he said. “Slow-motion torture.”

While Alfred doesn’t mind exploring the flow, his wife, Tanya Lee, prefers the view from atop the berm.

“You feel like you are staying on one other planet or something. (It’s like) a dream,” she said while watching the lava with a few friends and family members from under a canopy.

The Lees have had plenty of company lately as friends and family join them daily for meals and help keep a watchful eye on the lava late into the night.

“One thing good about this lava is all good friends and family come together,” Alfred said.

Helicopters also frequently hover overhead, and geologists with the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory hike in and out of his property to assess the flow’s progress.

Alfred said the geologists help keep him up to date on the lava’s activity uphill and out of sight from his home.

Small flags placed by the geologists indicate a possible path around the berm. But no one can say with any certainty what the lava will do next.

“This might go like this for a couple months, I think,” Alfred said. “We just got to wait and see; sit down and watch the flow.”

The Lees say they have heard criticism from other Pahoa-area residents who feel they are messing with Madame Pele by building the berm or putting other homes at risk.

“What would you do?” Tanya asks. “You do what you can do.”

So far, Hawaii County officials have not told Alfred to stop, and trucks carrying dirt and cinder have been allowed beyond police roadblocks.

Alfred said he’s confident he’s not putting anyone else at risk, and notes that a naturally occurring channel already directed water toward a neighbor’s house during heavy rains.

“Everybody think I make this to divert the flow,” he said. “This wall not to divert the flow. This wall is just to protect my house.”

The neighbor who lives on the other side of the berm left, but returns occasionally to check on the flow, Alfred said.

He said his neighbor told him, “Do what you got to do.”

Alfred’s biggest defender is his daughter, Shorinna Andrade, who also lives in the house with her husband and infant son.

“I support him because he is only trying his best all his life, to do what you can do for your family,” she said.

Alfred said he will continue to raise the berm, if he needs to, but acknowledges that Pele will likely win in the end.

“If it just keep coming one after another, it’s going to take over,” he said.

Asked why he continues to fight what others say is inevitable, Alfred said: “It’s hard to give up. Born and raised on this place. Very hard to give up. (Nearly) 63 years of memories.”

The stakes also remain high.

Tanya acknowledged the couple doesn’t have insurance.

If they lose their home, they will have to completely start over, she said.

Alfred is not the only one trying to protect his house.

His neighbor on the Pahoa side of the flow built a smaller berm on the lava’s edge, he said.

This also isn’t the first time the Lees tried to work around Mother Nature.

For decades, Alfred’s family lived with the fact that topography was just not in their favor as Pahoa’s frequent rainstorms formed small rivers and large pools of water on their property.

The ponds were big enough for him to swim in as a child, and they are the reason why he raised most of the land before building his new home.

But he never imagined that the biggest threat to his home would not be water, but a river of molten rock.

“Not in a million years,” Alfred said. “I mean, you know, when you think lava flow, what come to your mind? Kapoho. Opihikao. Kalapana. All that kine place, you know?

“Pahoa? Now come on, that’s the last place we get a volcano flow.”

But through it all, he tries to maintain a sense of humor.

Asked if he has thought of providing any offerings to the lava, Alfred points about half way up the berm.

“Maybe the ti leaves,” he said, which his family planted along the barrier.

“Either that or the Heineken bottle up there.

“… It’s for the lava. When it reach up there, it can have a drink.”

Email Tom Callis at tcallis@hawaiitribune-herald.com.