We went out at seven and the light was already going.
The boat was small and open and there were nine of us on it, which I had not expected. I think I had imagined something more solitary. It is not solitary. That is the first thing.
Round the headland the village disappears and there is nothing on that side of the island at all. No houses. No road. Just the flank going up, black and enormous and steeper than it looks from the water, and the scree running from somewhere near the top all the way down into the sea in one unbroken line.
The engine cut.
Then the waiting, which is most of it, and which nobody tells you about.
There were four other boats out by then. They came round one at a time and settled, and everyone cut their engines, and after that the only sound was water against hulls and occasionally somebody’s voice carrying much further than they meant it to.
Nobody talked much. Everybody faced the same direction.
It is an odd thing to be part of. Forty or fifty people on the black water in the dark, all quiet, all looking at a hill. The deck lights were the only light for miles and they were weak enough that you could see the whole sky. I have not seen a sky like that in a long time. It went right down to the water on every side.
We waited about twenty minutes for the first one.
There is a sound before there is anything to see. Not a bang. Something lower and further off than that, more like a door closing in another part of a very large house. And then orange, high up, going up rather than out, and holding for a second, and then coming apart into separate pieces that fall.
Somebody behind me said oh, quietly, in the way people do when they have been braced for something and it arrives anyway.
The pieces come down the scree. That is the part the photographs do not manage. They stay lit as they fall, and they bounce, and they take a long time about it, and some of them go all the way to the sea and go out with no sound that reaches you.
Then it stops, and it is black again, and you sit there.
And then twenty minutes later it does it again.
Then twenty minutes of nothing, which is the actual texture of the evening.
You look at the mountain until you stop being able to see it as a shape and it becomes just the place where the stars are not. You look at the other boats. Somebody opens a bottle and the sound of it is enormous. A woman on the next boat over was filming, holding her phone up for the whole twenty minutes between explosions, and I thought about telling her it would come to nothing, that a phone cannot do this, and did not, because it was not mine to say and because she probably knew.
I want to be accurate about the feeling, because I had assumed it would be awe and it was not, quite.
It is more like watching something breathe. There is nothing dramatic in the individual event. It is not large. It is a mountain clearing its throat every twenty minutes, and it has been doing that for two and a half thousand years, and it did it eight hours before we arrived and it will do it eight hours after we have gone to bed.
We were not witnessing anything. We had turned up during.
My father was easiest near water and I found myself thinking about him out there, which I had not planned to. He would have been interested in the boats rather than the volcano, I think. How they were sitting. Who had chosen which spot. Whether the man at our tiller was watching the mountain or the swell, which he was not, he was watching the swell.
The rail under my hands had salt on it and something finer than salt, grey, that came off on my palms and would not brush away properly.
We went in at half past ten.
The village has almost no street lighting and after two hours of nothing but deck lamps that seemed correct rather than inconvenient. People peeled off toward their own doors without saying much. There was a bar still open and I did not go in.
Coming up from the harbour you pass the houses and they are all white and all low and all shut against the heat that has gone hours ago, and there is a smell of cooking and, underneath it, something faintly mineral that I could not place on the first night and worked out on the second. It is the mountain. It is always slightly in the air here, the way salt is somewhere on the sea.
I ate very late, alone, outside, and the whole time there was a thing happening on the other side of the island that I now knew the shape of. Every twenty minutes or so. Nobody at the other tables looked up. They live here.
That is what I keep coming back to about Stromboli. Not the volcano, which is extraordinary but which behaves like weather.
The village. Nine hundred people, more or less, who have arranged an entire life on the side of a mountain that explodes on a schedule, and who have made it so ordinary that the woman clearing my plate did not glance up once.
Tomorrow, the black sand and the early boat out.
Tonight, the sound of it, every twenty minutes, from somewhere behind the house.
V.
This is a diary from Stromboli in the Aeolian Islands. The practical version, what you can climb and what the boat costs, is in Stromboli and the volcano climb, and the archipelago is in my complete guide to the Aeolian Islands.
