The Yellowstone Conundrum (3 page)

 
“It’s still winter in Wyoming, isn’t it?” asked the Deputy Director.

 
“Yes, ma’am, it is.”

 
“Who would we evacuate?  Snowboarders?” Janice asked, reasonably.

 
“It depends on the size of the event,” Nancy replied.

 
“My recommendation is that you contact the Wyoming, Utah and Montana Departments of Emergency Management and tell them of your findings.  The Director is in a meeting with Congressional representatives at the moment, trying to increase funding for our research projects; several of which are in your area. I’ll notify her of your concerns when she gets out of the meeting.”

 
“Yes, but—“ the line went dead.

 
Colorado had a Office of Emergency Management. Nancy dialed it first; no answer. The Utah office of Emergency Management was located at 1110 State Office Building in Salt Lake City. Nancy dialed the listed phone 801-538-3400.

 
“You’ve reached the Utah Department of Pubic Safety, Division of Emergency Management. Our hours of operation are from eight AM to four forty-five PM. Please leave a message at the beep and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
”

 
It was 7:15 MST.

 
Nancy left a short but urgent message, knowing it wouldn’t be heard until 8:30 or so. She went to their web site, clicked on the organization chart link; up popped a full chart with tiny, tiny text that was difficult to read.  Most importantly, there were no telephone numbers.

 
Please visit our web page but we really don’t want to talk to you
.

 
The All-Hazards Incident Management Team page had MS-Outlook links to e-mail, but no telephone numbers. It also assumed that the person wanting urgent contact had MS-Outlook on their computer and had gone through the steps of setting up an Outlook mail account.

 
Who do you call in case of an emergency?
  Nancy typed.

 
You mean like now?
He responded.

 
Yes.

 
Just a sec.

 
Danny went to his own web page and clicked on Regional Information, then on Utah Department of Public Safety.

NOT FOUND.  The requested URL /homelandsecurity/ was not found on this server

 
Rut row
, as Astro would say.

 
Danny quickly googled Utah Department of Public Safety at publicsafety.utah.gov/#1, then took the link to an odd web page with moving icons that sat on top of a very scenic backdrop of the Wasatch Mountains; with buttons at the Featured Online Services subpage that connected users with drivers licensing information, fingerprinting appointments, concealed firearms; then with luck he clicked on an empty space on the page and saw a button for Emergency Contacts; only to be taken to a page with a form that needed to be filled out. There was no information on how to contact a real person.

 
Sorry. I’m working on it.

 
Meanwhile, Nancy found the after hours number for the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security and dialed 307-777-4321. She still had to get in touch with Montana’s office in Fort Harrison, about three miles SW of Helena.

 
“Homeland Security, how may I help you?” the phone had barely rung twice.

  “Good morning.
This is Nancy O’Brien. I’m the Director of the Geologic Hazards Center in Golden, Colorado. I need to talk to the Duty Officer, please.”

 
“One moment,” was the efficient reply.

 
“Good morning, this is John Temple. How may I help you?”

 
“Mr. Temple, I’m the Director of the US Geo Survey Geological Hazards Center in Golden Colorado. . .“             

             
The line went dead.

The White House, Washington DC

9:15 EST

  “You know, one of the really neat things about being President is that you get to walk around this huge home in your pajamas and can walk into the kitchen any time you want and order up some pancakes.”

 
The President laughed as he pulled up a chair in “the family room” not exactly away from the activity of the kitchen, but at least not in the way. Space was limited in the White House kitchen, but there was always room for the President and one or two others.

 
“Jimmy, I’d like a really high cholesterol breakfast if you don’t mind; four crispy slices of bacon and some of that hot Tennessee sausage; no sense trying to get me to take any of that fake syrup. It’s like drinking a diet Coke with a cheeseburger and fries.”

 
“Yes, sir, Mr. President, and I won’t tell the boss.”

 
“I knew you wouldn’t, Jimmy!” The President laughed.

  It was a free day.
The Republicans had been beaten around the head and shoulders and were running amok; no foreign wars going, nobody angry at the US, at least no more than usual, and no protesters on the front lawn. 

 
Bowling and basketball were on tap. Bowling was an unnatural act for him, one that he knew he had to work on because sure as shit he’d be in Ohio someplace shaking hands and he’d find himself whisked off to glad-hand at the Big Top Lanes and have to bowl a couple of lines while cameras took pictures of his lanky, uncomfortable style.  Practice, practice, practice; and off to the gym for some serious head-banging with his posse-for-hire on the basketball court, a place he felt much more comfortable.

 
As if conjured,
USAToday
, the Washington
Post
, the New York
Times
and the LA
Times
all appeared on the table; the President went straight for the
USAToday
sports page, turned to page 4 and started reading last night’s NBA box scores. Box scores for basketball were a lot less fun than reading a baseball box score; reading a baseball box score was almost like being at the game itself. It took a bit of practice, but a serious box-a-holic could almost replay a game pitch-by-pitch.

 
Outside the window the White House Garden was under winter protection; still providing all of the vegetables and spices for the kitchen.

 
It was going to be a good day, the President thought; a good night’s sleep and no fixed agenda; a rare day, indeed.

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

7:20 AM MST

 
Randy Crowe trudged forward one slow step at a time, his new LL Bean BearStomper boots making a scrunching sound on the hard-packed snow; a cross between fingernails on a blackboard and the high-pitched squeal of a rat scurrying into a hidey-hole.

 
His breath shot forward in an elliptical arc followed in sync with an esophageal wheeze from Randy’s 68-year old lungs. In a cartoon world his breath would have frozen and fallen into a crinkly pile, which he’d have to repeatedly climb over as he walked across the flat expanse between the warmth of the old winter lodge and the iconic geothermal event. 

 
In reality, his humid vapor, heated to a toasty 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, evaporated instantly in the minus twelve morning air—all except for the vapor close to his head, which clung to the artificial fur on his $400 parka, the white ring making Randy’s head look like he was peeking out from a dirty toilet bowl. The weatherman from KWYS in West Yellowstone said it would warm up to six degrees by the end of the day! Woo-hoo! Old Faithful Village was living up to its distinction of being the coldest place in America.

  Underneath his feet he could feel the earth trembling; as advertised by the internet company’s web site.
Feel the earth move under your feet
as Carole King belted out in her 1971 hit single and lead song on
Tapestry
. Randy smiled to the remembrance.

 
“Hurry, up!  We’re going to miss it if you don’t move your wrinkled old butt!” shouted Randy’s wife Nadine who was a good fifteen paces ahead of him.

 
“Whose idea was this, anyway?” Randy grumbled. 

 
“The kids said we had to see this at sunrise,” she replied, turning her back to him and resuming her own trundle across the empty parking lot of the Yellowstone Inn—only open during the summer months—toward the Old Faithful geyser. Randy, Nadine and six other old folks had taken a snow coach from the end of the paved road in West Yellowstone at the western entrance to the park; $57 one-way per person; a ride all of them agreed was spectacular.  They’d spent the night at Old Faithful Snow Lodge, run by the concessionaire Xanterra who purchased the Fred Harvey Company in 1968 and slowly became a big player in servicing popular National Parks; Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, Zion, Rocky Mountain, Mount Rushmore and others.

 
“Besides, the snow coach is headed over to the falls in an hour,” Nadine added. The tour included Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone vista point where the frozen Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River could be seen roaring a mile up the canyon.  

 
The roof of the iconic lodge was covered with more than two feet of snow; icicles, some as long as twelve feet and sharp as razors, hung all long the southern exposure; the icicles forming as the snow began to melt in the afternoon, then freeze and re-freeze until maintenance had to dislodge them by force.

 
They passed the
Do Not Feed the Bears
and
Feed the Bears and Get Arrested
signs, before finally reaching the wide expanse of the geysers’ spill area; a No-Man’s land of whitish-pinkish viscous geyser wash, marked by a low fence and more warning signs like;
Stay on the Path
, and the ever-popular
No Access Beyond This Point
.

 
Still, every year more than a handful of idiot tourists, not all of them teenagers, managed to obtain third-degree burns from the super-heated boiling water flushed out of cracks in the Earth’s surface on a regular basis; one such crack being the Old Faithful Geyser. The water, heated by close association to magma, the core material of our planet, the heating unit that sustains all life on Earth, the material that provides the water vapor which creates our atmosphere; and is so hot that if it wasn’t water it would be fire.

 
By the time Nadine reached the sign proclaiming
Next Eruption in 5 minutes
,
steam was choo-chooing out of the geyser’s blow-hole, nature’s way of saying
Its Showtime!

 
“Do you have your camera?” she asked, knowing the odds were highly in favor of the camera being in the cabin. If pressed why she didn’t ask him about the stupid camera before leaving the cabin, Nadine would have replied “Because that would spoil my fun.” Then she wouldn’t have anything to rag him over. But, Randy was in luck. Panting, out of breath because of his entrance into Old Age a few years back, along with the 8,000-foot elevation of the village, Randy pulled out a point-and-click Nikon.

 
The problem with technology was that every generation of virtually anything was smaller than the previous generation. Cell phones were smaller than a pack of cigarettes, even a credit card. Randy had been OK with technology until the mid 00s when telephones became smarter than his trusty computer; smarter being relative, of course. Now his fingers couldn’t mash the right button, and he never got the hang of texting. It was simply too frustrating. Besides, watching movies and playing games should be done in the living room, not on the road.

  Ten minutes passed.
Randy stomped around on the frozen ground, trying to get his legs warm. His legs and feet were freezing.

 
In the near distance on the other side of the geyser’s wash, over toward the huge asphalted, yellow-striped parking lot—now covered in four feet of snow, a massive flock of black birds took off from the forest, seemingly in a choreographed movement. There were thousands of the birds. In what would be a meadow of lush green grass and endless flowers in eight weeks, now covered with snow, a herd of buffalo, startled by something, began to run for dear life away from the stream they were drinking, running toward the forest—only to be joined in the strange dance by a hundred elk.

 
“That’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” muttered Randy. “What do you make of that?” He asked Nadine, turning to her.

 
“Take a picture,” she replied, her nose beet red, bundled round as a mound, looking like to be the curmudgeon she was, or perhaps the mother of Santa’s elves.

 
Randy raised his camera to point and click. It had taken him so long to figure out that you no longer had to put your eye into the viewfinder to see the shot, instead all you had to do was hold the camera like you were, well, pointing to the object. A good portion of Randy’s shots, however, had a clear shot of his left pinkie finger in the upper left portion of the picture, again a victim of the shrinkage of technology.

 
In this case, one second Randy was standing and in the next he and Nadine were dancing out of control, as if in slow motion, arms pin-wheeling, not exactly Air Guitar, more like
Whoa Jesus We’re Doin’ the Backstroke
. Down to earth they fell in unison in a double lump. Meanwhile, in the distance the buffalo and elk continued to run, the black birds overhead refused to find refuge.

 
Then the sound of a freight train; no, make that several trains; no, a hundred angry trains; like the sound a tornado makes when it drops from the sky and is headed your way. Flat on his back Randy could feel the vibration of the Earth like a tuning fork,
wwwhhaaaaaannng
! His eyes couldn’t focus but he could see a portion of the unoccupied Old Faithful Inn’s roof, the nearest building, begin to break apart, a jagged line now drawn across the steepest portion the roof’s pitch, immediately followed by the sound of the roof detaching itself along with six gables on the geyser side of the building, sliding in slow motion to the ground in a single swoosh. Then glass breaking like someone was plunking windows with an automatic rifle.

 
Saucer-eyed, Randy saw a crack forming in the snow-covered parking lot, and then two snowmobiles disappeared into a new crevasse, swallowed in an instant. The crack in the parking lot got bigger; its jagged opening advancing quickly toward the geyser’s viewing area toward them!

 
“Shit!” he shouted.

 
They were two stumblebums in a tumble, unable to think about standing. The split in the earth headed straight for them, eating a small gathering of 50-year old pines, before splitting in two. The smaller crack continued for twenty feet and then stopped no more than a car-length away while the larger crack zig-zagged toward Old Faithful.

 
When the split in the earth hit the geyser, the sound was like the largest walnut ever had been cracked, a snap-crack of a bat hitting a fastball in the sweet spot. A large burst of steam spit into the sky; the split in the earth continuing toward the forest beyond.

  Then it stopped.
Silence except for the steam rising from Old Faithful and Randy and Nadine breathing heavily.

 
“You OK?” he asked.

 
Before she could say yes, a fearful noise from Old Faithful; a terrible groan, then the earth gave way at the blow-hole, forming a nearly-perfect round opening fifty feet in diameter. Seconds later another series of terrible groans and the hole was filled with red liquid. A crust quickly formed over part of it. A quick glance and you’d swear it was a red eye peeking out from underneath the earth, like in a Stephen King novel.

 
Wha’z up?  Anyone home?

 
Just as quickly the scummy crust disappeared, but it sure looked like a wink to Randy.

 
What the fuck?

  Old Faithful exploded.
Normally, Old Faithful blows its top not on the hourly schedule so well advertised, but every 35-to-90 minutes based on the length of the previous eruption; scalding hot water shoots ninety to sometimes over one hundred twenty feet into the air in three or four movements, the third explosion being the money shot. But, this wasn’t scalding water. It was lava. Molten rock from the center of the Earth shot high a hundred feet into the air-before being overcome by gravity, returning to Earth in goopy clumps of upchuck rock; a cum shot from ol’ Vulcan himself.

 
“Run, Randy, run!” shouted Nadine.

 
Knees popping, muscles sore from the fall, Randy and Nadine scrambled to their feet and started to waddle as fast as they could, first toward the Old Faithful Inn—closed for the season, then to the Snow Lodge beyond.

 
Randy took a last look behind him and wished he hadn’t; to his left and behind, the crack in the Earth stretched back across the large parking lot; to his right, to the geyser and beyond to the woods. In the distance across the parking lot he could see lava spurting, shooting up from Vulcan’s domain, squeezed out into a single line of gushers, each a hundred feet high. In an instant the line of gushers reached the viewing area, and continued back to Mother Faithful, now a chorus line of molten rock.

 
Seconds later the woods on the far side of the geyser were on fire. Randy almost made it to the demolished Old Faithful Inn before falling flat on his face; then to his knees and scrambling.

 
From behind him he heard the devil himself belch up fire and brimstone as the entire fault line turned from a red fountain of death, split wider, and then sank forty feet into the Earth’s mantle, all in the space of seconds. The parking lot, snowmobiles, skiers, Old Faithful herself and a good portion of the dense forest beyond, folding in on itself like God was making a crepe of fire and rock.

 
Seconds passed and God exhaled, this time shooting rock and lava and earth and steam and molten ash not a hundred feet into the sky, but thousands of feet. 

 
Randy and Nadine Crowe from Flagstaff, Arizona never made it to their cabin. The portions of Old Faithful Village that weren’t destroyed from the force of the blast—from a jagged hole in the Earth’s surface initially over two miles in length—were consumed by fire and burned to ashes as the molten material fell to Earth.