Cartography can be really frustrating

What an amazing thing it is to stand in the dusk and watch land forming. The Big Island, Hawai´i, is volcanically active, and the signs of lava flows are not hard to find. Especially when the lava has run straight across the road, cutting it off. Then one can trek a short distance across the cold, jagged lava that spewed from the ground a couple of decades or so ago, and see the red glow of fresh, hot lava pouring over the coastline, and the steam plume rising as the lava hits the waters of the Pacific below.

I imagined that the human figures standing silhouetted against the steam plume had to be a team of cartographers. The younger ones happy that they were being kept in work, redrawing the government maps. The older ones sighing that their life's ambition to chart the islands accurately was being forever thwarted.