‘I think I’ll stick to edelweiss, thanks,’ Frances says, tucking the little flower into a buttonhole in her shirt. ‘I don’t think I could even say the other name, let alone spell it.’
As they zigzag higher, the ridge narrows. Visibility is perfect and it’s the first time Frances has seen the spread of volcanoes from this angle. As they stop for a rest, Theo points out the vapour curling out of Ngauruhoe, directly in front of them. A beautifully symmetrical black cone, it rises starkly out of the lower slopes of Tongariro.
‘Not many people realise that Ngauruhoe is in fact one of several vents of Tongariro. They’re actually the same mountain,’ Theo says. ‘There used to be other vents too but they’ve been obliterated in other eruptions.’
‘When did it last blow?’
‘About eleven years ago, wasn’t it, Theo?’ Sam asks.
‘Yeah, but the last big one was back in ‘75. There were blocks of lava as big as cars flung out of the vent—an amazing sight. You could see the ash and smoke for miles around. People were pretty worried but even though it looks threatening, it doesn’t worry us too much as it’s very isolated. It’s as much as ten thousand years older than Ruapehu but Ruapehu is still the troublemaker.’
‘Has it always been active?’ Frances asks.
‘There was a big gap last century. The first settlers who farmed this area thought Ruapehu was dormant. Most of them came from England and Scotland and they tried to turn the place into a home away from home. They grazed flocks of sheep all around the mountains. It wasn’t until the big 1945 eruptions that they had their comeuppance. It must have frightened the life out of them when the mountain first blew.’
‘What happened? Why has it become active again?’
‘Well, the mountain was partly formed by eight glaciers and when a huge amount of magma rose up in the crater and met the remnants of the glaciers, bingo, a whole series of eruptions.’
As they climb higher, the ridge divides in three directions.
‘Watch your step along here,’ Sam calls back to Frances over his shoulder. ‘It gets slippery with all the loose rock and it’s a long way down. Even trickier when we’re surrounded by cloud.’
Frances feels exhausted by the time they reach the Dome Shelter, the emergency and monitoring hut near the summit. Her shoulder hurting from the backpack rubbing against her, she drops the equipment with relief.
‘Glad to see you’ve worked up a sweat too,’ Theo says. ‘We’re at the highest point of the North Island now.’
Frances breathes deeply and looks around. She can see across to the horizon above Taupo, that magical divide between water and sky where the sun sets and rises, breathtakingly beautiful yet out of human reach.
‘Leave the gear here for a bit and come and see the lake,’ Theo calls to her. ‘Sam, can you get the testing equipment ready while I show Frances around?’
Sam nods and ambles towards the pile of backpacks.
Few places on earth move Frances as much as walking into a crater. No matter how many times she does it, the feeling is always the same: the sense of danger, the feeling of landing on another planet, the niggling fear that you might never escape alive.
Steep-sided rock runs down to meet the still expanse of grey water before her. First putting on her hard hat, she negotiates the walk down carefully, not wanting to fall into the steaming acidic hot pool.
‘It has its own kind of beauty,’ she says, ‘but you can see why everyone’s freaking. Look how high the water level is. How worried are you really, Theo?’
‘It was like this in the build-up to Tangiwai. And if I was a betting man I’d have to say the next one will be twice as big. But I can’t be sure. We’ve got records of more than a dozen lahars flowing out of here both before and after Tangiwai. Lost some of the ski lifts and buildings in recent years. We found some diary accounts by one of the early settlers in the 1860s. He wrote about being near the banks of the river in the middle of summer when a wave of freezing water spilled over the area. There were blocks of ice, logs and a whole lot of canoes. Heaven knows what happened to the people in those. Then there were a couple of hot lahars caused by eruptions, floods of hot water and mud. But they were nowhere near as big as the next one’s likely to be. Yeah, of course I’m worried.’
As Frances listens to him, she understands how thirty years of scaling, watching and listening to this mountain have shaped Theo’s passion for Ruapehu.
‘And there are many other stories from long before I was even born about how different and clearer the crater used to be in the past,’ he continues. ‘The first person we know of who proved that this was the source of the Whangaehu River was an English bloke called Roy Sheffield—a bit of an adventurer who made quite a name for himself as a cricketer. He used to go tramping up here and then in the thirties he became a guide at the Chateau. Well, the story goes that he dived into the Crater Lake one day and swam down on the end of a rope. Down and down, he went, obviously with a strong set of lungs, until he found an underground passage beneath the ice cliffs. He reached a waterfall and this was the overflow down the valley into the river. Fancy a swim yourself, Frances?’
‘You must be kidding!’ she laughs.
‘It’s hard to believe I used to swim in this.’ He points to the lake.
‘Sure is. You wouldn’t get me in there! It’s pretty much an acid bath now. That would burn through all your orifices,’ Frances says.
‘Ah, that might be the case now, but in my courtship days it was the way to a woman’s heart. Well, the woman I wanted anyway!’
‘I didn’t pick you for a romantic, Theo,’ Frances replies, enjoying his familiarity. ‘Who was the lucky one?’
‘I used to come up here with my mates from university on field trips. One weekend I invited along a young lady who was studying social work. I have to confess I’d had my eye on her for a while. On this particular day, in spring, there was some early snow and the lake was at a very pleasant temperature. So after some strenuous climbing I persuaded her to join in when we all stripped off our clothing and went skinny-dipping.’
Frances bursts out laughing. ‘You sly dog, she probably didn’t know what to do.’
‘Oh, I think she knew exactly what to do. To cut a long story short, our relationship heated up immediately and I ended up marrying her.’
‘Damn, so I’m too late.’
‘’Fraid so. Mind you, if things go bad with Sue I might be back on the market.’
Frances throws him a grin. ‘Is that likely?’
‘No, I don’t suppose it is. Seriously, I’m lucky I guess. We’ve had a couple of kids. They’ve grown up and left now. I think Sue’s fed up with living here and wants to move to Auckland where the rest of the family is, so I might have a bit of a problem there. But we still love each other and in this day and age that seems to be a pretty rare thing.’
Theo watches Frances as she smiles back at him and says nothing.
‘What about you? No man on the scene?’ he asks her gently.
‘Not now.’ She pauses, surprised by a lump in her throat. Her smile fades. ‘Well, there was for a long time…but not now.’
Theo puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘Tell you what, if this bloody lake ever drops down in temperature, I’ll take you skinny-dipping.’ They both laugh, comfortable in each other’s company.
‘I can tell you what brought the skinny-dipping to an abrupt end. There was a serious eruption in ‘69. In the middle of the night, a lahar swept down here right into the Whakapapa skifield. It demolished everything in its wake. But amazingly no one died. All the skiers were asleep in lodges across the gully there. When they woke up they saw the extraordinary sight of a mountain divided down the middle, half black, half white like some exotic ice-cream cake.
‘As for the lake, the acid levels went through the roof.’
Sam joins them with some thermometers and bottles to take water samples back to the lab. ‘It’s still over fifty-five degrees,’ he calls, taking the
first reading.
While Theo returns to the shelter, Frances turns away from the lake and climbs back up to the ridge. As she edges around for a better view to the west, down into the valley towards Tangiwai, her eyes follow the path that many lahars have taken on their destructive journeys. The pain of what happened that night stabs at her as strongly as the bitterly cold wind. Quickly putting her parka back on, she is startled when Sam suddenly appears at her side and grabs her elbow. ‘Admiring the view? Everything OK?’
‘Sure, just thinking about that terrible train accident. Long before I was born but I knew people who were on it.’
Sam raises his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Well, you might want to try and help me talk some sense into Theo. I think he’s taking too hard a line on the dam issue. Let me show you what I think we could do.’
She is relieved when he releases her arm and moves away.
‘You can see how the build-up of the tephra is blocking the natural outlet of the lake. If that dam collapses, everything as far as you can see in that direction,’ he gestures in a sweep from the west to the east, ‘will be wiped out: roads, electricity pylons, bridges, houses, not to mention all the people who are out there. The warning system might give them a chance but I think we should be tunnelling into the dam to release the pressure and stop it happening.’
Frances can see the crusty wall of the earth’s entrails spewed out by the volcano. It stretches right along one side of the crater and disappears into the murky depths.
‘It looks pretty solid, doesn’t it?’ Sam says. ‘But we’ve been probing it and it could just go. I think we should preempt that and tunnel through it to relieve the pressure. We could bring earthmoving machinery up here, either fly in small bulldozers or drive a large one up. Not easy but it’s possible. We wouldn’t need to drain the lake, just make a drainage channel so the water would stop building up. You’d have to say it’s better than the alternative.’
‘There would be a huge pile of excavated material. What would you do with that?’
‘Push it into the lake—that would be the easiest thing.’
‘I’m not sure,’ Frances demurs. ‘They’ve tried doing that in other craters. In Columbia they did all sorts of engineering works in the crater at Ruiz Volcano but in the mid-1980s it was all ruined by an eruption and there were several lahars and thousands of people were killed because they didn’t know they were coming. So it was pointless. But at Pinatubo when we installed the early warning system, it didn’t stop the eruption but everyone got out of the way. So I’m not convinced you can stand in the way of nature.’
Sam looks exasperated. ‘Look, I could give you other examples where it does work. What about at Kelud where they’ve tunnelled inside the crater lake and Kawah Ijen in Java where they built the concrete weir inside the crater? There’s an active crater lake there and it seems to have worked. I get sick of this attitude that just because we’re in a national park and the Maoris are sensitive we should always back off.’
Frances turns and starts walking back towards the shelter. ‘I’ll give it some thought, Sam, but I want to focus on getting these geophones positioned first. That’s what I came here to do.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
At first she can’t see Theo. Then she hears him call out to her from inside the shelter. He is down in a tiny concrete basement checking the sensitive seismic monitoring equipment.
‘We keep this down here for protection. It’s survived one big eruption and lots of little ones,’ he says as he climbs out through the trap door. ‘Everything’s working OK. We should start working on the geophones.’ Handing her a bottle of water, he steps closer. ‘I see Sam was having a word to you up there about the lake. Did he persuade you that we should bring bulldozers up here?’
‘Not quite,’ Frances says, grinning, ‘but I guess he’ll keep trying.’
Theo shakes his head. ‘I’m absolutely opposed to any of that nonsense. If you start playing around with things like that here in the national park you’ll create a dreadful precedent right around the country. There are too many people out there who have simply forgotten or don’t stop to think about how foolish it is to try and put a cork in a volcano. It’s just not possible. I’ve been around them too long to know you’ve really just got to get out of their way.’
Frances is about to tell him that there could be a compromise, that maybe Sam has some valid points, but thinks better of it. Instead she turns her attention to the geophones. Choosing the right place will be crucial.
For around twenty minutes she walks all over the rugged terrain surrounding the shelter and the lake. The temperature is falling and she can see how hostile the summit could be if the weather turned. By the time she finishes Theo and Sam are waiting for her, their measuring completed for another day.
‘We’re going to have to be very careful with any geophone up here because it’s so exposed,’ she tells them. ‘We can’t afford to get them wet so they can’t be out in the snow. The one up here will have to go into the basement and be linked from there. We need to back it up with another one further down the slopes and another one again at the base of the mountain.’
Sam takes one of the geophones from her and looks at it closely. ‘So they did the trick for you before?’
‘Yeah, but because there are no lakes in the craters at Mount St Helens and Pinatubo, the volcanoes are much more exposed to the atmosphere and the magma much closer to the surface. It’s different at Ruapehu with that huge volume of water in the lake, but I’m confident they’ll still pick up the subaudible frequencies underneath. It’s another complication but we’ve experimented with this in the lab and it should work well.’
Sam hands back the geophone. ‘Hard to see how it will make that much difference,’ he says dismissively.
Resisting the urge to tell Sam to take a hike, Frances climbs into the cramped basement and works side by side with Theo to install the first geophone. They place it alongside the seismometer that measures volcanic tremors.
‘OK, let’s switch it on and see if it’s working.’
Frances turns on the tiny switch, initially fumbling with it until she hears it click. ‘Seems to be working. Let’s phone the lab to see if they’re transmitting properly.’
Theo takes out his mobile phone and hits the office number.
‘Yeah, it’s working fine,’ he says, after talking to the technician. ‘Good on you, Frances. Let’s hope we get the system as near as perfect before the ski season.’
Closing and locking the trap door, they start to pack all their equipment for the descent. When Sam joins them outside they take refuge from the biting cold behind the shelter and share packs of sandwiches and bottles of orange juice.
‘We’re going to have to make sure the system is maintained extremely well,’ Frances says. ‘When the microphones work, they do give you extra time to spread the alert but that depends on the personnel around to do that. What plans did you have for that?’
‘All of us have pagers and so do all the rangers and lift operators on the mountain,’ Theo replies. ‘We’ll link it in with our loudspeakers I showed you earlier around the mountain. It doesn’t give a lot of time, just a few minutes to warn skiers, snowboarders and everybody else on the slopes get out of the path of the mudflow and head for higher ground. Then we have to worry about all the other people who might be in the path—trampers, army people, farmers, tourists.’
‘It’s ambitious because of the different features up here. At all the other volcanoes I’ve seen, including Pinatubo, there was a longer lead time to get the hell out of the way,’ Frances says.
‘Yeah, it can all happen very quickly here as we’ve found out the hard way. But every minute counts. We can only do the best we can and then worry about what the volcano will do next. We should get going.’
‘I’ll scout around for a place for the other geophone on the way down,’ Frances says.
They finish packing their gear and load their backpacks onto their shoulde
rs.
As Theo leads them down the summit, wafts of cloud encircle them. Unfamiliar with the track, Frances stays close to the other two, knowing one wrong step could be fatal. It is a sharp descent and her thigh and calf muscles start to ache as the pace quickens. She knows her joints will give her hell the next day.
‘We can’t install the other geophone in this,’ Frances tells Theo. ‘Can’t see a thing.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he answers, ‘we’ll come back when the weather clears.’
Driving back to Taupo, Theo breaks the silence brought on by the exertion of the day’s climbing. ‘By the way, while you’re both here I wanted to ask you to come to a public meeting next week to explain all the things we’re doing up here.’
‘Oh great, more of the Christians-into-the-lions’-den stuff!’ Sam complains.
Theo shrugs. ‘Just part of the service,’ he says grimly. ‘Anyway, please do your homework because we might all have to answer questions.’
‘What do you want me to talk about, Theo?’ Frances asks.
‘If you can concentrate on the monitoring system, that would be great. Sorry to drop you in this so soon.’
Sitting in the front seat she feels Sam’s hands on her shoulders and his breath is warm against the nape of her neck as he leans towards her from the back seat. ‘You’d be happy to fight a few lions, wouldn’t you?’ Frances shakes her head and decides not to reply, pushing his hands away. She closes her eyes and tries to sleep, unsettled by her ambivalent feelings towards him.
Something about Sam reminds her of Damon: he has the same dangerous attractiveness. As she has so many times before, she tries to retrace the events that led to her sudden realisation that Damon was two-timing her. She had pressed Olivia for more information after the split. At first, her friend was not forthcoming. Only later did she suggest that this wasn’t the first time he had been caught playing around. Olivia told her he had been seen with several other women in bars during the previous year. The news had shocked Frances to the core. She had started going back over the weeks, trying to work out how many times he had fooled her.
Weeping Waters Page 6
