U.S. Poet Missing Near Japanese Volcano

An acclaimed American poet who had been working on a book about volcanoes disappeared five days ago during a scouting expedition on a tropical island in southern Japan.

Craig Arnold, 41, is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wyoming. He went missing Monday during a visit to a volcano on the island of Kuchinoerabu-jima in the northern Ryukyu Islands of southern Japan.

Japanese law only requires authorities to look for missing people for three days, but University of Wyoming officials say the search has been extended through Sunday.

Arnold went for a hike up the volcano around mid-afternoon Monday, shortly after arriving at the island by ferry and checking in at an inn, according to his brother, Chris Arnold, of Brooklyn, New York.

When Arnold hadn't returned by 8 p.m., the inn staff went looking for him. They reported him missing at 9 p.m., and a formal search began that night.

Forty people, dogs and a helicopter joined the following day's search. Police reported finding Arnold's tracks on a trail up the volcano, but they couldn't find any tracks coming down.

The island is about 7 miles long by 3 miles wide and dominated by an 1,800-foot volcano that last erupted in 1980.

Dense vegetation covers much of the island, but the area near the caldera, the volcanic crater, is bare. Japanese authorities speculate that after emerging at the top, Arnold may have had difficulty finding the trail again to get back down the volcano, Chris Arnold said.

(CBS)

"So they're really having to do it by lines of people walking across areas to make sure they're covered," she said.

Arnold has published two award-winning collections of poetry: "Shells" in 1999, and "Made Flesh," which came out last year. He's known for his searching, passionate, humorous verse, such as "Hymn to Persephone," which begins, "Help me remember this/how once the dead were locked/out of the ground/and wandered sleepless and sun-blinded."

Chris Arnold said his brother lived in Japan for four years when he was young and has since been a world traveler who has explored many volcanoes for his book.

"He has a lot of experience with visiting volcanoes, and he's very knowledgeable about taking precautions and knowing about the terrain, about the conditions, possible ways he could get into trouble and to plan for those," Chris Arnold said.

The following is one of Craig Arnold's last entries in his blog (volcanopilgrim.wordpress.com), dated April 26:

You had not expected this to be so easy. In less than an hour you have found the road that circles the base of the volcano. All that remains is to walk around to the south face where, judging by the map, another road squiggles its way up the crater. You could be to the top and back down to the port long before the boat departs for Tokyo at two-thirty, with time for lunch.

When you round the bend of the road and catch your first glimpse of the summit, you see your mistake. It is as if you have wandered into some post-apocalyptic science fiction movie. There is the husk of what must have been the visitor's center. There is a backhoe, resting on its side, yellow paint pitted with rust. Whatever road once went to the summit is now under a lot of dirt and rockfall and dark gray ash.

Stubs of dead tree-trunks

standing around a crater -

ashtray at last call

And something is beeping, loud and piercing, on the minute, a pair of beeps, short-long, dit-dah. Is it an alarm of some sort? A warning? Is it the movie soundtrack telling you that you are about to be attacked by a ragtag band of inbred knuckle-dragging mutants?

No, but the danger is real, if not quite so melodramatic. Since the eruption nine years ago, Oyama has been venting vast quantities of sulfur dioxide gas, a tall white plume that - if you had landed in daylight - you would have seen from miles away. Now it is hard to miss, indeed it is practically in your face. And, right on cue, the wind changes, bearing the column of sulfurous death straight down toward you.

This seems like an opportune moment to reconsider your plans for the morning. Luckily there is another road down, and you take it. The metal guardrails have been eaten half-away, and they twist off easily in your hand.