The Yellowstone Conundrum

by John Randall

  She stepped outside.

  It was an Apocalypse scene. Gothic buildings rose behind her on two sides; across in front was the massive parking deck which looked like the battlefield of the Terminators. A gasp grabbed Karen’s throat. Not more than twenty minutes ago she was in the parking deck, happily spinning three floors under because it wasn’t in the rain. In the mist ahead of her the parking desk looked to be destroyed.

  Her universe asunder, Karen began to cry—God-given tears to relieve the I-don’t-have-the-slightest-idea-what-to-do-or-how-to-react to this shit. Half expecting the War of the World monsters to start arising from the remains of the parking deck with their woo-opp—woo-opp shrieks, Karen turned and rushed back inside the crumbled Johnson Hall, came to the elevator shaft and clenched her fists, huffing and puffing a bit, knowing no response was adequate.

  “I’m hurt…please don’t leave me…” the male voice pleaded.

  Karen was eight years old; a little tall for eight, but otherwise right on target—dorky as they came. There was nothing cute about an eight-year old girl; boys, yes. They were shorter, more agile, and didn’t glumph around like eight-year old girls, who were just plain clumsy. Eight-year old girls wanted desperately to be ten-year old girls because ten-year old girls knew about sex, or if they didn’t, they could pretend. At the age of ten little girls entered electronic puberty; it was the time when parents gave up trying to hold their little girls back and allowed them to experience the vast arrays of multi-sensual influences. Their music and clothing were driven by sexually-active 14-year olds; jailbait for adults yet role models for their children.

  It was a typical spring evening, dark and dreary; the family—Dad, Mom, Karen and three-year old Stacey—were returning from one of their favorite restaurants, the North Bend Bar and Grill, a family restaurant with yellow wooden chairs and tables, heavily-laminated for easy cleanup, situated so you weren’t eating right next to your neighbor. When the sun was out, the restaurant had a nice view of the forest and Mt. Si area. It was easy to get to and the price was right for good food; a combination that made the restaurant a popular place seven days a week.

  Karen loved her Mom and Dad; not so much Stacey, but her parents were off the charts. As a rising fourth-grader at Sunset Elementary, she only had one more year before her class was at the top of the food chain; which would be followed by a short summer’s vacation and the beginning of three years’ interment at Issaquah Middle School.

  Driving within the speed limit, windshield wipers slapping back and forth, Karen could see lights in the distance. An accident; and by the looks of it, it was something serious.

  “It’s a fire!“ Dad said. As they approached they saw that it was on the other side of the road, eastbound I-90 heading back up toward North Bend and into the Cascades. Only two more exits and they’d be off the road and into their neighborhood. “Look at that!”

  “Don’t slow down!” Mom urged.

  On the opposite side of the road an 18-wheeler was flush up against the concrete median divider. The cab was on fire and the driver was struggling to get out. There was nobody there to help. Cars inched by on the right side but no one stopped.

  Dad pulled over into the westbound parking lane and got out.

  “Don’t go!” Mom shouted. “It’s dangerous!”

  Karen screamed.

  “I have to. Here,” he handed his cell phone to her. “Call 9-1-1”

  Dad waited for a break in the traffic and started to run across the highway through the rain and gloom. There was an explosion and a scream from what Dad presumed was the driver. The center divider had the remnants of years of construction, three-foot high concrete. Twenty feet—fifteen feet—Dad could see the driver desperately trying to get out of the driver’s side of the 18-wheeler.

  As the distance closed Dad’s brain calculated the hop, skip and jump to time his leap over the barrier and into what he hoped would be the driver’s front seat. Hand now on the barrier, weight shifted—up and over.

  From forty feet away Karen and Mom saw Dad simply disappear. The truck driver stumbled out of his cab, looked in their direction then turned and ran away from the fire.

  “Where’s Daddy?” Karen screamed. “Where’s Daddy?” she screamed again, the scream turned into a full wail. Mom unbuckled her seatbelt, fighting with it, then opened the passenger side door and stumbled into the rain. “Karen! You stay here! You stay here, you understand?” she turned back to the car and yelled, then pointed her finger right at her child. Karen’s scream turned to a whimper. Mom turned and ran across the three lanes of traffic, dodging cars which had now slowed to see the accident.

  Whereishewhereishewhereishe?

  With cars now whizzing behind her, Mom stopped. The man in the truck was able to get out and scramble back to safety. It was an optical illusion. The three-foot high concrete barrier was an optical illusion. Her husband had sprinted toward the barrier and had vaulted over thinking it was a single barrier. She slowed her pace, rain pelting her face; not caring. Up close she saw there was a 10-foot gap between the eastbound and westbound lanes of I-90. Karen’s Mom looked over the barrier. Thirty-five feet below in the center of 4th Avenue NW was the body of her husband of 12 years.

  Back in the car Karen saw her mother lurch like the Alien was coming out of her body, then fall to the ground in uncontrollable sobs.

  “Dadddddyyyyyy!!!!” Karen shouted.

  In the months, then years, afterwards, Mom had changed from the loving, supportive thirty-five year-old to a shell of her former self. Daddy’s death pulled the plug on her, turn-out-the-lights-the-party’s-over. Like most couples, Alan and Sarah Bagley thought of insurance as a waste. They’d made the decision to create a family instead of both of them working. Sarah had been lucky to land a second-shift job at Costco and put all of her energy into making sure she succeeded; she was on her own.

  Barely able to keep the payments on their little gray house on SE 43rd Avenue, she used the bus for transportation; only using the car to go to the store for groceries. TV was their entertainment. Sarah’s austerity was passed on to daughter Karen. Both Mom and daughter lost weight; by the time Karen was ready to switch from Sunset Elementary to Issaquah Middle School, Karen was five-six and one-twenty. She towered over most of the boys.

  The middle school was a cesspool of raging hormones; single-parent heads of families was the norm. Kids were unsupervised before and after school.

  “You’re either going to do right, or you’re not,” Sarah had told Karen when she turned twelve as she finished her last semester at Sunset Elementary. “I can’t be there and I can’t lose sleep over it. I have to worry about me first. If I take care of me, then I’ll be able to take care of you. You have to help me take care of Stacey. It’s not fair, but I don’t have Daddy.” She had asked Mom to find another Daddy, but the lights were still out in Sarah’s brain. Not two days later she entered puberty.

  “Well, it starts,” Sarah said, resigned; comforting her daughter.

  The following week she took Karen to the clinic and got her first prescription for birth control pills.

  “I’m going to help you for a while with these, remembering to take one every day; but, it’s not my job. It’s yours,” she had said kindly but firmly. “You can choose to be sexually active or not; your choice. I simply don’t have time to waste on trying to stop you from having unprotected sex. God, and he and I are not on the best of terms, gave us our sexual organs for our own pleasure.”

  Karen didn’t tell her that she’d already been to a blow-job party at the home of an eighth-grader over by the lake whose parents were out of town. Karen had left little Stacey at home while she stood on the fringes of a group of twenty or so adolescents; it was clearly show-and-tell-time. While Karen hadn’t undressed, several of her older friends in the neighborhood had; soon two eighth grade girls were down to panties and were gobbling the knobs of whichever boy wanted it. Karen stood in wide-eyed wonder at the naked boys; amazed at the diffe
rence in penises and at the similarity of the boys’ reactions, how intense their feelings were. And, then, of course, there was sperm, which caused shrieks of “eewww” from the girls and “yeah!” from the boys.

  “Like I said, God gave us our sexual organs for our pleasure. When men and women doodle their noodles together, the sperm and egg create babies. Twelve-year olds shouldn’t be having babies. Sixteen year-olds shouldn’t be having babies. You shouldn’t have a baby until you’re able to support yourself and the baby. Right now I’m 34 years old and I have two children to support; I’m barely able to do it.” Mom looked dead tired.

  “If you want to doodle your noodle, do it in your bedroom, where it’s private. It’s OK. It’s legal. It’s not a sin. It feels good. But, you don’t doodle outside where people can see you. You can doodle yourself or have someone else do it for you, again in private, but it’s against the law for an adult to doodle someone under the age of eighteen. So remember that; whether or not the girl wants her noodle doodled.”

  This was a rare moment of good humor from Sarah Bagley; she had made the decision not to be bogged down with things she couldn’t control. Karen never forgot the six-minute sex education her mother gave her; and, she never got pregnant, although she got quite good at doodling.

  Karen pounded on the elevator door. “Where are you?” she shouted.

  “I’m in the fucking elevator!” returned the voice, perhaps humorously.

  Regardless of the intent, Karen started to laugh uncontrollably; starting with a chuckle, and rolling quickly to catch-her-breath, tears in her eyes laughter, which lasted twenty seconds or more.

  “I’m glad you find my predicament amusing, Miss--”

  “Bagley. Karen Bagley”

  “May I call you Karen?”

  The chuckles she’d eaten started to return.

  “Sure. Where in the elevator are you?” Karen asked.

  She heard the man muttering under his breath. “Karen, I’m on the floor of the elevator. I believe I’ve dislocated my shoulder and I have a wrenched knee, and I think I’m bleeding in several places.”

  “No; you don’t understand! Are you on the second floor, the third, or where?” she shouted.

  “I think I’m in the elevator pit. I was going up to 3 when the earthquake hit, then it fell a few seconds, braked, then fell again, braked and hit bottom pretty solid.”

  “Isn’t there a trap door in the ceiling?”

  “I’m sure there is. I’m sure if I was twenty years old instead of 52 and weighed 150 pounds instead of 190 and remembered how to protect myself in a falling elevator while minimizing injury, I might be able to pull myself through and climb up the elevator shaft to safety. But I’m NOT!” the man sounded angry, less at her than his condition.

  Karen could tell he was shouting to make himself heard, and there was angst in his voice.

  Crap. Make that crapcrapcrapcrapcrap.

  O.K., so you can’t just walk away. She thought. I’m on the first floor, the fucking building has collapsed all around; and he’s in the pit below. He can’t help himself by getting up through the ceiling. Well, gee, what else do you have on your plate right now? Well, actually, nothing. Whatever bad is outside, is, well, outside. The destroyed lobby of Johnson Hall is your temporary universe. You have a problem. Fix the problem.

  Having grown up watching cop and Terminator movies, the logical thing to do was open the elevator doors, jump down, open the elevator’s ceiling hatch, haul the old dude up eight feet and through the opening, then climb back up.

  Karen’s brain started to melt, like chocolate chips in an oven. Yeah, but what am I--the thought disappeared.

  She needed something to pry open the elevator doors. The lobby was in shambles. Go back to the lab. What in the lab would be useful? Her gut said that her little universe at the University of Washington was part of a much greater universe that was in a great deal of pain and that, sorry, call back later for help. Want help? You’re on your own, babe. Karen knew that if she was the old man in the elevator that she’d be shitting bricks of sloppy brown right about now.

  Find something, Karen!

  Karen re-traced her steps back into the lab, now able to see better because of the dim light from the lobby. She opened the door and yanked the corner of the section’s secretary’s desk as hard as she could, to the point where she could anchor the desk against the door so it wouldn’t close. The lab was illuminated with the dimmest of light. What the hell? What can I use? Sweat started to rise on her neck. She looked around and started to cry. Nothing. She turned and ran back to the lobby, past the elevator to the crunched heavy wooden door and found herself back outside.

  To her right was a foreign object, pieces from a radio tower, of course, from the measurement system she’d been using to monitor the earthquake activity in the Puget Sound area. It had fallen from the roof, along with a good portion of the gothic parapet; Johnson Hall no longer looked like a medieval visage, now more like a child’s Lego kit.

  Karen didn’t know if it would be strong enough, but it was surely the right shape. Struggling a bit to cross over the debris fallen from the roof, she latched onto a red/blue painted ten-foot section of aluminum, lifted it with some effort; it was a lot heavier than she thought it would be; then shook it with a snap—and the section of the transmission tower disconnected.

  Oh, yeah. We’re bad.

  Lugging it back into Johnson Hall was different, but the adrenalin must have been working in the right direction.

  “I didn’t bring this back in here to screw up,” she was panting at the exertion. She placed one end of the length of aluminum at the center of the two door, where the rubber nubs meet, then leaned her 130-pound body into the effort from the other side of the eight-foot section of frame. The doors resisted initially but gave way. With a grunt Karen drove the frame straight through to the interior side of the elevator shaft. Out of breath and perspiring heavily, she stopped for a rest.

  Now comes the easy part.

  With the shaft all the way through the elevator doors, Karen started to put leverage on her side of the door. The doors responded easier than she expected, perhaps because they knew they’d been beaten. There was no electricity in the building, so the doors only needed to be opened as wide as she needed to get inside.

  Peering into the elevator shaft, remarkably the roof of the elevator itself was only four feet lower than her lobby level. Shit, piece of fucking cake. She clambered down; not realizing she’d never actually clambered before.

  “Is that you, Karen?” he shouted.

  “Oh, yeah; it’s me.”

  Finger-feeling the roof of the elevator, she found the escape hatch; then figured which way to open it.

  “Jesus, it’s dark in here. You OK?” she asked as the door flapped open.

  Then Karen felt a hand on her extended arm and an exclamation of pain.

  “Thank God,” he said.

  “Yeah, well--OK.”

  It took them another hour to get up and out of the elevator, primarily due to Karen’s lack of upper body strength and his injuries. By 8:30 A.M PST the pair lay in the lobby of Johnson Hall, fully extended and exhausted by the effort, oblivious to the chaos around them.

  Wheezing from the effort, he extended his right hand to her in greeting; his left arm was limp. “Denny Cain; pleased to meet you. I’m the new editor of the Quaternary Research Journal.” Denny’s smile was punctuated by a thin red beard and matching crop of unruly bushy hair. He went through grade school being called Freckles and was known as The Last Guy Chosen in Softball. Blood oozed from two spots on his forehead and there was a brownish wet stain on the left side of his left knee that was staining his khaki slacks. “It’s my first day on the job.”

  The QRJ was a quality research journal that published previously-unpublished research articles dealing with geology, geophysics, archaeology, paleontology and oceanography. The Quaternary geological period covers the last 2.5 million years of the Earth’s hist
ory.

  “Room 377A,” Karen looked upward. “You’re replacing Dr. Andy,” Karen referred to the departed Dr. Andrew Wyatt, who had left the University of Washington on a two-year sabbatical to conduct his own first-person research projects in South America and Antarctica. “I work in the lab,” Karen nodded toward the dark hallway leading to the Seismology Lab. “Rather, I worked in the lab.”

  “Almost made it to my office; good thing I didn’t,” he added.

  “Looks like your office decided to make a field trip and come to you,” she smiled, wiping perspiration off her forehead. “You’re injured and need a doctor, doctor,” Karen smiled at her little joke.

  The White House

  “Are you telling me the Weather Channel can get me live pictures of this thing and the combined efforts of the United States government can’t?” The President asked. Rising from what used to be Old Faithful Village, an ever-increasing plume of smoke and volcanic ash slowly rose straight up into the morning sky.

  “They don’t have low-bid contractors, sir,” replied Leonard. “If they want a helicopter they go out and buy a fucking helicopter. They don’t have to issue an RFP and go through the Federal Procurement Process like we government agencies do, including the White House.”

  Broad-shouldered Charley Spann, Charley Spann the Weather Man, the nation’s trusted weatherman was on the lead story from CNN’s HQ in Atlanta.

  “As you can see, the debris from the explosions is rising basically straight up. When it reaches thirty-five thousand feet, give or take a thousand feet, it will hit the jet stream and start to move eastward,” Spann continued, his trademark red double suspenders looking perfectly in place over a white long-sleeved shirt.