A Most Engaging Story on a Volcano

"Aaron!" my girlfriend Kristen yelled, "There's a cockroach in there!" Indeed, there was, a bigger one than what I've seen back home in the states, but I'm on the island of Reunion and they seem to be larger. This wasn't how I wanted this day to start. This was going to be THE DAY and starting it with a creepy crawler wasn't how I envisioned this day to begin.

It wasn't first light yet, and we had a two-hour drive ahead of us on our way to Piton de la Fournaise. This island isn't well known in most of the world, and if you have heard of it, it's either because you've heard of this most active volcano, or perhaps the most shark infested waters in the world, or this is also where the aileron from MH370 washed ashore. This island is remote, and as our drive down the N1 progressed I thought back to the third e-mail I exchanged with Kristen in which she asked me where I'd travel if I could go anywhere. I mentioned this island and she, like most, had never heard of it and I said that exact same description to her about volcanoes and sharks. Somehow though, she was seated right beside me as the sun was now up in the East.

The drive to the volcano seemed to encompass four different climates. One minute it's a tropical shore, then we were in a rainforest, and as we neared the volcano, you'd have sworn you woke up on Mars. Between the moments of awe, I knew what I wanted to do today... would she say yes?

As we pulled into the park that has the volcano, I smiled back to our fourth e-mail on Match.com when she asked, "Are you doing anything fun this weekend?" I was, perhaps, a bit smug when I said, "I think so, you can watch what I'm doing this weekend on NBC." What else could I say? It was June 2021, and I was in Detroit for the NTT INDYCAR Series race there. It was going to come up at some point in time, that and she also was wondering why I had a selfie with Milo Ventimiglia on my profile so I answered both when she asked, "NBC"? 

Surprisingly, she watched both races that weekend and that certainly caught my attention. She had said she hadn't watched motorsports in the past, but now here was someone that was returning my emails,
loved to travel, and watched two INDYCAR races in one weekend... as intrigued as she was with my selfie with Milo, I was doubly intrigued by her.

I attempted this hike seven years ago and it was ill-fated. It was foggy, rainy, and had I continued onward when I abandoned it, I'd probably have ended up dead. So, could there be a better way to ask the ultimate question than here? Maybe, but I've never done anything traditional.

The start of the hike is hell. It's 560 steps down and none of the steps are the same height. It's 700ft downward of switchbacks, loose handrails, and uneven surfaces. I couldn't erase the thought that the cockroach was somehow a harbinger of the disaster that could come later and that the cockroach could, quite possibly, be the highlight of the day with everything else going downhill.

We survived the stairs and in front of us was the Formica Leo. This was a smaller volcano that has been dormant since the 18th century. There were dozens of people climbing on it and it was here that we made the mistake and went right instead of left. We didn't know it at the time, but this wrong turn added 1.61 miles to our day and about an extra kilometer of elevation we didn't need to do. 

As we rejoined the path and discovered our error, I quickly thought that this was such a perfect metaphor for our lives. I didn't know if I'd have the nerve to pop the question at the summit, but this was churning my thoughts on how to ask and utilizing the fact that, in life, we may end up on roads that we didn't intend to be on, but eventually we will end up exactly where we need to be. 

I couldn't believe, when we were emailing back and forth back in June of 2021, that she was going to wait to meet me. After Detroit, there was a race at Road America, then I had a USAC .25 race in Toledo

(almost got hit in the flag stand... imagine that) followed up by another INDYCAR race at Mid-Ohio. It would have to be a month, but she waited and all we had were emails followed up by texts and one phone call. I don't like talking on the phone, she respected that, and I couldn't wait to get home to meet this Kristen I had been chatting with for a month.

The weather turned. It became foggy, rainy, and the term "Middle-Earth" would've applied quite easily. Walking on the side of a volcano, if you haven't, is surreal. It doesn't seem real and as the rain came pelting down, the volcanic rock maintained a high level of grip. Had there been any slick spots, I'd probably have fallen, but then, behind me, I heard some loose gravel, and I looked back and saw Kristen slide, but she made a great catch to prevent from falling. Oh cockroach, don't be the best part of the day.

It was about then I had my first bit of doubt on this grand idea. Who proposes on top of a volcano? Who attempts such a hike when neither of us truly were prepared for just how daunting of a hike this was with these awful conditions? From the first time I mentioned it on Match, to meeting in person, Kristen has fully accepted me as me and has never once questioned any quirky behavior the autism spectrum plays out in myself. Never. Not once. I thought that maybe proposing on a volcano would add to the uniqueness and besides, we had just been in Paris and that's just way to cliche for me. A volcano would make a much cooler story. However, this hike was getting dangerous and all of a sudden it got real.

Kristen's foot got hung up as she tried to make a step down. Even ground simply doesn't exist on the latter half of the hike, or rather the whole hike, but this hang up caused her to fall. She did great preventing a faceplant into rocks, but instead she got her hands and shin. Her palms were scraped, and her shin started to bleed. At about the same moment the rain picked up and visibility dropped, and it felt like my ill-fated 2016 expedition which, I was sure I was going to die because it was at least two-hours back to the stairs we had descended and if it is hell going down, what would you call the same except going up after such a strenuous hike? The level of concern grew. 

When people fall in my presence, I don't usually know what to do. The other person can be hurt and yet they're the one comforting me... awful, I know, but in this instance, I asked for tissue to apply pressure to stop the bleeding. It wasn't bad, and after a minute the bleeding stopped, and now it was decision time. 

"Should we head back?" I asked. Just then another group passed us headed back and Kristen asked, "Are we close?" and the wife turned to the husband, speaking French, and the husband looked at us with a bit of disgust (maybe he thought we were ill-prepared? If he had, he would be correct) and he said, "for you two? At least an hour!" It was now 1PM, and we had been hiking since 7:55AM. We had already heard other people give us wrong times so if this hour turned into three hours, we might not make it back to the car in daylight. This was serious, it was dangerous, and again I asked, "should we go back?"

In one of our earlier emails, I talked about my regret on not seeing the summit. I felt as if I had come up short on a goal I had and I don't set many goals. She knew this, and despite bloody wrists, and an awful looking shin, she said we would continue onward. She didn't respond in question form. It was factual, with confidence, and with unwavering resolve. It was a no-brainer now. This day was exactly a metaphor for our lives. Her confidence in life, and in me, has been about as foreign of an experience as being 10,000 miles away from home.  

There was a signpost up ahead, it said summit in 20 minutes. It lied. The whole hike seemed to be false hope after false hope. "That's gotta be it!" was mentioned by both of us at least a dozen times. The times on the posts lied as well. However, we kept getting baited by thinking the next crest would be the destination, but we'd be met with another valley and more white dots.

On the ground every meter or so are painted white dots. They mark the path, or suggested path, as the fog and rain can get so bad that a meter is all you can see. For us, the visibility got down to maybe 50 feet, but we kept going, and we finally saw a new sign, this one mentioning that there's burning and unstable cracks below the path so we'd be best advised to stay on the path. Surely that meant we were close, right?

The clouds started to part as we made another climb and then, up ahead there was a new sign and then... nothing! The summit. I stopped as Kristen was 20 feet behind. I didn't want to see the glory of the crater by myself. This journey since the first emails we exchanged had been us, together, and I was going to make sure we made the final push together.

It was unbelievable! The silence at the top is unexplainable unless
you've been somewhere so vast and marked by nature's savage fury and heard the silence. It was still. The clouds were above, behind, left, and right of us but the view of the crater, which caved in in 2007, was unobstructed, and it was hard to process what was being seen. Also, the ring box in my pocket felt like a five-ton anvil. It needed to see the light of day, and I had been thinking about what I was going to do, so as Kristen ventured to the left to look, I told her I wanted to do a video blog and she should stand in front of me looking off to the horizon. The rest, I think, is best to let my real voice and her expression do the talking, and thank goodness that cockroach wasn't an omen and we somehow made it back with no water left and just an ounce of daylight left.