The Yellowstone Conundrum

by John Randall

I should have taken the helicopter ride.

  You would have never gotten on that ‘copter and left The Dog behind. No more than you would have left a fallen buddy on the battlefield.

  One good thing; WSDOT won’t have to go to the trouble to tear down highway 99.

  The Alaskan Way Viaduct had mostly collapsed, four lanes of double-deck concrete and rebar. The Wenatchee had punched a hole in the debris field, but when it retreated into Elliott Bay the void was filled with tons of building materials, automobiles, dead fish, dead people, animals, office equipment, furniture, tires, and goop from the middle of Puget Sound. Rats scurried everywhere, as did slimy, crawly things that never appeared on the menu at the Pike Place Market. The Viaduct was one of the busiest highways in America and notoriously suspect to an earthquake. In progress was the replacement, referred to as the Alaskan Way Viaduct and Waterfront Replacement Project.

  Unfortunately, the bore tunnel was now completely flooded because of the tsunami. The drizzle, the eerie lack of light; only a dim morning glow, like an 18w bulb trying to light up a carwash; and the sounds; sweet Jesus, the sounds; above unseen helicopters, police and national guard, their spotlights crisscrossing the sky, all made the experience like feel like Terminator on Drugs.

  You have to start somewhere, dude.

  Automobiles seemed to be the debris of choice. Ray put his left foot on the underside of the rear bumper of a 2011 Toyota pickup and prepared to start climbing. The debris field was fifty feet high. Hoisting himself up onto the undercarriage, Ray could feel the vehicle rock a bit, unsteady.

  Woof!

  “What do you want?” Ray turned and asked.

  Marmaduke looked up at him with his humans are so stupid look, drool coming from each side of his massive jowls.

  “Oh, you can’t climb over a mountain of rubble because you don’t have hands! Why don’t you make it hard for us?” Ray liked the company of the big animal. It was a lot better than a Wilson the soccer ball friend. But, it was going to make their journey a lot more difficult.

  Instead of going up-up-up, Ray would have to find lateral paths through the crap that Marmaduke could follow, like following switchbacks up a mountain instead going straight up and over.

  Ray found that the big dog was a lot more nimble than he expected, and it quickly became clear that he intuitively understood the problem; even communicating new routes that Ray didn’t see and was able to vary the pitch of his woof so that Ray could understand where are you from I’ve found something over here.

  The climbing became “easier” when the low rubble had been cleared, the cars with dead bodies inside and the ever-hungry munching rats. There were several long sections of Alaskan Viaduct concrete that offered views of the terrain ahead. But, it was hard work. After an hour of solid work, Ray and Marmaduke found themselves on the top layer of what used to be the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

  They looked east up Madison Street. Far uphill could be heard sirens; unclear where they were coming from or where they were going. Overhead, Ray thought he saw the KOMO helicopter. Everything was totally fucked.

  As if on cue, the Bainbridge-Yellowstone tuning fork decided to begin to rock and roll again. The rumble was more than audible, more than a quick shot to the gut; it was a heads-up-we’re-fucked sound. The earthquake aftershock rippled through Seattle, lasting a full thirty seconds and hard enough to knock Ray to his knees and Marmaduke to fall on his left side. The big dog was not used to being out of control of his body; he let go with a yelp-bark.

  Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit. How many oh shits can you say in 15 seconds?

  Ray laid spread eagled on the concrete slab that used to be one of the northbound lanes of the Alaskan Viaduct. His hands pulsed with the earthquake’s vibration. Rainwater slowly drained down the concrete beside him. It was a cold bitch.

  Get going, Sergeant Spaulding. People didn’t know how close they were to death. You can die of hypothermia in 55 degree temperatures if you’re wet. Hypothermia was a snake in the grass; you never saw it coming until it was too late. In fact, shivering was the body’s last warning to the brain. Dude, get help fast or you are toast. Ray knew the symptoms; fortunately, he didn’t have them—however, all the exercise in the cold morning mist, meant that he was losing fluids. Even if the water was yucky, he needed to replace the fluids he was perspiring away; otherwise there would come a time when the scales would irreversibly tip.

  The quake stopped. Ray stood up, Marmaduke at his waist.

  Downtown Seattle lay before them, dark, spooky, eerie. The rat’s in the cupboard, he thought. Before them was the dark canyon called Madison Street, a primary thoroughfare that cut SW-NW through downtown Seattle, from Elliott Bay to Lake Washington. Uphill from Ray’s perspective was Swedish Medical Center, east of I-5. The air was clogged with the sounds of sirens and automobile horns; every horn a frantic driver, every siren an injured person trying to get help.

  In front of him from what used to be Alaskan Way up past Western, then Post, First Avenue and nearly up to Second Avenue, all was utter destruction. The view could not have been more discouraging and demoralizing to Ray; having just spent nearly two hours climbing from the former Pier 52 up to the top of the concrete sentinels that remained of the Viaduct.

  Jesus shit.

  As any hiker knows, going downhill is much more difficult than going up. Going downhill is like anti-hiking. Going downhill over uneven terrain is slow and tedious at best; you can’t see the lateral movements ahead of you, the easy paths from one place to another; you can’t see over rocks to what’s on the downside.

  Ray and Marmaduke had two blocks of extreme downhill climbing to do, over unstable automobiles, panes of glass, ripped furniture, dead fish, oily water, jagged concrete, a landfill turned upside down.

  “Woof,” added Marmaduke.

  “Yeah, double woof to you, too.”

  I-25/Wyoming State Route 387 Interchange

  Cameron Hughes woke up in an extreme coughing fit. He was dreaming about being buried alive; a never-ending dream. He was in a coffin and someone was throwing dirt on top of it. Over and over he heard the sound of the shovel and the scratchy noise of the dirt being thrown across the cheap coffin lid. No, no—I’ve got to get out. I’m alive! Don’t bury me! I’m alive! Can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! Then the coughing as the air inside the coffin was laced with the dirt being thrown on top. Can’t breathe! Help!

  Cam rolled back and forth, fighting the suffocation. No! No!

  Wwwrrreaallllll! A screech like he’d never heard before.

  Cam’s dreamland came to an end when Tiger Kitty bit his left arm as hard as a cat could, instantly sending alert-grams to his brain.

  “What the hell!” Cam rolled over and opened his eyes, then brushed his face with his right hand. He was face-to-face with the ornery cat who did not like where he was, what was happening, getting rolled on by a big human, and who was hungry. It didn’t take much to piss a cat off; and Tiger was very unhappy.

  The woman beside him was unresponsive.

  Jesus mother Mary.

  Surreal wasn’t in Cam’s vocabulary, but there was hardly another description for what he saw. The ground, including Cam and the woman and the cat were covered in a thin layer of black volcanic ash. Above him the sky was black, the cloud impenetrable. To his right he could barely see the underpass, its raging fire now being smothered by the falling ash, even though it was no more than 30 yards away.

  Cam scrambled to his knees and started shaking the woman, who wasn’t dead, but was bad off. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here, now!” He grabbed the woman around the waist, his hand gaining traction on her small left breast; and then she was up and on her feet. She was tiny, no more than five-foot one and weighed nothing, about a sack of grain. To their left about fifty feet away was his cab. Beyond that the surreal resumed. In the distance there was bright light from the morning sky. Laid over the top of where they were in Eastern Wyoming was a thick layer of black crap. There was
actually a psychedelic rainbow where the morning sky tried to break through the black haze; full of purples and reds.

  The pair had about five minutes to live.

  “Come on, lady! Wake up!” Cam shouted.

  Cam started a three-legged race toward the truck, both of them now coughing. They were drowning in ash.

  Tiger Kitty raced off to one side, then like cats do, immediately forgot why he’d run off to the side. Cats have a short-term memory the size of an ant’s dick, which is one of the enduring and beloved habits of an animal that couldn’t care less about you. It’s why a cat will chase a ball on a string or dance after the red light from a light stick, or a finger/toe under a sheet.

  Whoa, what’s that? Never saw that before. Whoa, what’s that? Never saw that before. Shit, I’m tired. Let’s rest. Whoa, what’s that? Never saw that before.

  Reaching the semi, Cam opened the door and lifted the woman up in a single swoop, then closed the door and hurried around to the driver’s side. The engine was still running; clutch now engaged and the semi lurched forward. Sitting in the woman’s lap was Tiger Kitty, who obviously had a change of mind.

  The woman came alive, her eyes wild—the O in her face—“My husband! My children! Turn around!” she grabbed for the door handle. Between gear shifts Cam reached over and with his right hand grabbed the woman’s shirt in a death grip.

  “No! They’re dead! They’re all dead! You’re going to be dead if you don’t shut up!” Cam ordered in his usual delicate style of communicating. He nearly held her up off the seat, so hard he had a grip on her shirt. Her eyes were wide, panic-filled, totally disoriented—completely understandable from anyone’s perspective. “Lady, I have to shift gears a couple of times. If you freak, I’m going to let you go. Look ahead,” Cam shouted. Chinka chinka chinka onto the windshield; ash chunks bounded off the cab’s roof like heavy rain. The semi headed east toward the sun, kicking up a fantail of ash as it cut across the barren Wyoming countryside. “Look!” he nodded his head forward. The woman, still with the wide-eyed crazed look on her face, turned to the front—eyes darting, brain beginning to comprehend; then a muscle relaxation. Cam let go and went back to his gear-shifting. In the fifteen minutes they’d been down and out after the rescue at the interchange, the massive Death Cloud had inched its way eastward, now on the opposite side of I-25. The Dark Thing, all seventy-five miles wide of it, hit the outskirts of Casper, Wyoming at about 11:30 MST, barely four hours from the meltdown of Randy and Nadene of Flagstaff, AZ in the crisp frozen morning at Old Faithful Lodge, just as The President went to the airwaves.

  chinka chinka chinka CHINKA CHINKA CHINKA went the drops of sky. I-25 bent its way into Casper, which like Red Lodge was built in a natural valley to shield itself from the wind. To the West the cloud had overtaken Thermopolis, the Wind River valley and Indian Reservation, and the beautiful desert back roads leading down to I-80. Rawlins was OK. It would be spared, along with the lucky folks at the Oak Tree Inn with Black Out (!) curtains and a tidy restaurant next door. While the Microtel might keep your deposit, it was clean.

  chinka chinka chinka

  At 12:00 CST, long after the President’s speech to (self evacuate), the Yellowstone Caldera began to fall on the Laramie-Cheyenne area; it was brutal on the livestock in the Laramie pens. Over the years Laramie had remained the town it always was. Strangers don’t show up at the Cowboy Bar and Grill unless they want the crap beat out of them; especially a pair of salesman just trying to sell shit to the government. DAMN HOMOSAXUALS. LET’S BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF THEM. The black cloud said to more than one wide-eyed driver. Of course, Wyoming was already the beat-the-crap-out-of-homosaxuals capital of the US anyway.

  The cattle pens south of town had been there since the railroad was built in the 1850s. Laramie and the big daddy to the East, Cheyenne, were cow towns; connected to Denver by the Union Pacific railroad; feed ‘em, pack ‘em, stuff ‘em, kill ‘em.

  It was hamburger on the hoof.

  The further south the cloud advanced, the more dispersed it had become, gradually widening from a compact 75-miles to a more meandering 150 miles. Like the weather map training on an advancing tornado coming to your neighborhood:

  Yellowstone 7:30

  Cody 9:00

  Thermopolis 9:30

  Lander 9:45

  Wind River 9:45

  Casper 10:30

  Rawlins 11:00

  Laramie 11:15

  Cheyenne 11:15

  Denver 12:00

  The Black Cloud was relentless. Interstate 80 in Cheyenne was closed by the Wyoming Highway Patrol at 11:30 because of visibility, as was I-25 in both directions. At 10:45 Major General Miles Harding of the Wyoming Air National Guard made the decision to evacuate the 153rd Airlift Wing from the Cheyenne Regional Airport to the regional airport in North Platte, Nebraska.

  A curtain had been drawn across Wyoming, roughly at the Nebraska border.

  Cameron raced eastward on state route 387, his windshield quickly pitted by the ash—not realizing what would happen, Cam activated his wipers, which solved one problem but quickly created another. It was as if his windshield was being cleaned by Steel Wool. Too late, he stopped the wipers and did his best to look down at the corners of his windshield under the wiper’s path. Whappa whappa whappa screech screech whappa screech.

  Then it stopped. He’d outrun the cloud.

  Five miles east of the I-25 intersection was the small prairie town of Midwest, population 408. Go Oilers. It had been twenty-five years since the town had been big enough to have a football team, but the memory lingered. It was a good thing there were no lights on state 387 because the red lights were going to be run. In the back of Cam’s mind he wondered what the people of Midwest were going to do. The Black Death was minutes away. He and the woman (and the cat) had escaped by minutes. Anyone in the cloud’s path was going to die. Stay and bed and die in bed.

  State 387 curved around the eastern side of Midwest and came to a junction near the Midwest School, a general all-grades school, part of the Natrona County School District out of Casper; an equivalent rarely found in America except on the plains and in the rural South. State 387 then turned eastward away from Midwest, the residual road being state 259 which continued south toward I-80.

  Cam didn’t care where the fuck the road went, as long as it wasn’t west.

  “Caution, highway 387 turns left in one-quarter mile,” the GPS lady advised.

  With the small town disappearing in the rear view mirror, Cam turned to his passenger. “Hang on.” He took the left turn at 45mph, tires squealing. There was no need to slow down as Cam sped through nearby Edgerton, a village of 168 souls, a town so small it had an East Street but no North, South or West Streets; a Second Street but no First or Third; macadam roads streaked with patches where the surface had frozen, thawed, and frozen again; pre-fab houses set on cinderblocks on properties oddly outlined with chain link fences; either everybody had a dog or the chain link fence salesman was a slick Willie.

  Even though he’d only been up a few hours, Cam would have loved to have stopped at the Teapot Motor Lodge, but Edgerton, Wyoming was gone in the blink of an eye as he motored by.

  Past Edgerton there was nothing but jackrabbits and scrubby sage as the road approached the famous Teapot Dome area, where in 1921 President Harding transferred control of the Teapot Dome Oil Field and other fields in California from the US Navy to the Department of the Interior at the direction of Interior Secretary Albert Fall. Oil drilling leases were then issued without competitive bidding; bribes paid, money laundered (follow the money), lavish gifts and no-interest loans were made. Fall’s lifestyle change was his eventual downfall and he went to prison. Also involved, was Harry Sinclair (Sinclair Oil).

  Past Edgerton state 387 began to head due north. Out his left window Cam could see that his rig was inching away from the massive ash cloud as he distanced himself from the wind currents along the eastern slope of the Rockies. That was the good thing. The ba
d thing was he was in the middle of absolutely nowhere and his gas tank was approaching three-eighths. He hadn’t fueled up after spending all night with Mr. Beam, figuring on his usual stop at Love’s Diamond Shamrock, south of Cheyenne.

  “Mister,” the woman turned to him. “I gotta go. I gotta go, real bad.” Cam nodded. There was no need to pull over to the side of the road. Nobody was on the highway this morning. She struggled a bit with the door handle, got it open, and being as short as she was, had to jump the last two plus feet to the macadam. A cold wind whipped through the open door.

  “Shit,” she muttered, which brought a smile to Cam’s face.

  He could see her in the side view window as she squatted. A woman peeing has some residual sex appeal. A woman pooping has none. Cam decided to avert eyes.

  With a soft sigh he punched his GPS unit. Thank God he didn’t have to go through voice recognition to ask where he was.

  “You are in Natrona County, Wyoming on state highway 387, eight miles northeast of Edgerton. The county is named for the natural compound natron, which is sodium carbonate, a form of baking soda.”

  Where am I headed?

  “Recalculating.” That was GPS-ese for something between not exactly sure and Middle of Fucking Nowhere. Or, ain’t got no clue. “You are ten miles NE of Midwest, Wyoming, population four hundred six, eighteen miles NE of Interstate 25, sixty-two miles NE of Casper, Wyoming.”

  Stop. Where am I headed?

  “Recalculating.”

  The GPS lady was taking a pee alongside the poor woman in the cold wind. Behind him, Tiger cat gave Cam a wary evil eye from the bunk bed, tightly ensconced in a blanket.

  Finished, the woman knocked on the door repeatedly before Cam realized she was too short to haul up inside the cab. Cam scrambled out and circled the rig. She was slender tiny. Scorch marks on her pants which were burned through in multiple places revealed blood that was congealing. It was difficult to tell if she was blond or brunet because she was covered in volcanic ash, like a Halloween costume. The first step up on the rig was well beyond her ability; she wasn’t able to reach the side handlebar.