by Lou Cadle
His mind turned it over and over. Was he in the way? Did they all resent him like Kane? When Francie said he helped, was she—what, patting him on the head like a puppy? He felt like a kid. Like a stupid, clumsy kid playing at being a fireman. He dropped the sponge and gripped the edge of the sink, standing there, trying to keep himself under control. He could still feel the red heat of his flushed face, but he was not going to get all emotional and bawl like a kid, too.
Many deep breaths later, he had a handle on his emotions. The heat in his face was fading. His thumbs ached from where he’d dug them into the lip of the counter. Turning on the cold water, he splashed some on his face, dried it with his sleeve, and took a deep breath. He pushed through the doors, head tucked down, and he walked past Francie without saying anything, down to the central room, and out the side door without seeing anyone else. It was 45 minutes before he was scheduled to leave, but no one would notice. Or care.
8
Timberline Lodge. Evening.
Ellen and Ty’s late lunch had turned into more coffee on the front terrace. She kept thinking she should head out, go down the mountain and find a place to stay cheaper than the lodge, where the price of a room would have her sleeping in a car for the next four days to keep to her budget, but soon night had fallen, and they had moved inside to the central room. She didn’t want to leave, not yet. They sat on a soft sofa facing the big stone fireplace, Ty ordered appetizers to nibble on, and they were still talking like old friends. She was enjoying herself, feeling none of the stress she had back in Nebraska. Their conversation had gone from astronomy to religion to national politics—which neither of them had much interest in—and back to his work as a community college teacher of physics.
“Your parents must be proud,” she said, “being astronomers.”
“They may have preferred I turned into a Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan,” he said, “but this is acceptable.”
They touched on the politics of teaching in a middle school in Nebraska versus those of a community college in a big coastal city, which sounded much easier to cope with. She told him she was jealous. But she didn’t dwell on her problems of this past year. She was supposed to be avoiding that stress, not recalling it. They were both on summer break, with three months of freedom for him, a little over two more for her. For two strangers who met accidentally on a mountainside, they shared a number of common ideas—but not so many that she didn’t find him interesting in his differences.
He had an irreverent, self-deprecating humor, he was smart, he really listened, and he didn’t brag. His interests were broader than science. Though he had looked fine to her at the beginning, he seemed more attractive the more they talked. It was the way his enthusiasms lit up his face, maybe. Or the wry smile when he poked fun at himself.
“How about dinner here at the lodge?” he said. “My treat.”
“That’s kind, but no, thank you.”
“I know of a great bistro back in Gresham, not two miles from my house.”
Ellen smiled and shook her head.
“They serve breakfast,” he said.
She laughed.
“All right, then,” he said. “What are you willing to do with me? Either I’ve lost my ability to read people altogether, or you do like me a little.”
“I do.” And more than a little. She thought about what sounded like a good first date, or second date, if this counted as the first. “How about a nice easy hike tomorrow?” she suggested.
“How about a nice easy overnight backpacking trip? I know some great trails.”
“Do I know you well enough to spend the night alone on a mountain with you?” she mused, asking herself more than him.
“I can give you references,” he offered. “My department chair—I never had a sexual harassment claim in fourteen years of teaching. My neighbor with the two teenage daughters? A cop I barely know but might be willing to say he knows me better than he does?”
She laughed. “Okay, give me your college department’s phone number.”
He looked surprised but pulled out his wallet and handed her his business card.
She looked at it. Ty B. Atkinson. She wouldn’t call his department, but she would call this number tomorrow morning and make sure his voice mail was his voice. She would also try tonight to find a picture of him on-line, maybe at the college website, to make sure he was who he said he was. She was 99.9% sure he was as disingenuous as he appeared, but with researching a person’s background possible with a click of a mouse button, why not make sure? “Maybe an overnight trip is a bit too much, this early,” she said.
“Then a day hike. Or I can call friends and try to get another couple to go along. Or we can sightsee in Portland.”
“Isn’t it pretty far?”
“No, just next door to where I live, next thing west. And the roses are in bloom. You have to see the rose garden. Oh, and Powell’s, one of the remaining healthy bookstores in America. It’s huge. You’ll love it. Street art like you’ve never seen. It’s one of the best cities in the country.”
“You’re a secret employee of the chamber of commerce, aren’t you?”
He grinned.
She agreed to a day of sightseeing in Portland, and he drew her a map to a Walmart in Gresham, where they could meet at 9:30 the next morning.
He followed her down the hill in his hybrid until she found a strip mall in the town of Sandy with a Starbucks where she could get online and grab a muffin for supper. As she pulled in, he gave her a friendly beep of his car horn. She watched his taillights speed on down the hill into the night.
She’d check him out online, email Claire with a vacation update and report on the potential romance, and get info on a place to stay tonight, some no-frills campground, maybe.
Ellen smiled to herself. What a great vacation this was turning out to be.
9
Beneath the ice. The mountain at midnight.
The center of the mountain is a maze of tubes and tunnels, channels and chambers, and the molten rock has found two good paths to move upward. About a half mile from the old crater, the river of magma splits, part of it moving up, up, up, through a vertical shaft Norio would call the central conduit. Instead of bubbles rising from ginger ale, now it’s like a ginger ale into which someone dropped a whole package of Mentos. The gas rising from this bubbling brew forces it way through cracks and emerges as fumaroles, or geysers of steam, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and other volatile compounds, jets of gas like the ones that had knocked out the north face monitoring stations.
Another smaller river of magma moves west from the point of the split and spreads out into a vast chamber along the west flank of the mountain. Steaming magma oozes along, propelled by the gas pressure within, and it begins to fill the empty spaces of the chamber. Above this pool of almost two-thousand-degree molten rock lies the old surface of the mountain, built thousands of years ago from other magma. Above that thick crust of rock is Reid Glacier, tons and tons of thick ice. Centered at 45.37,-121.72 as the GPS measures it, and despite the plummeting night temperature, the magma starts to melt the glacier.
10
Two days before. Cascades Volcano Observatory, Vancouver Washington, 1:15 p.m.
The morning meeting had lasted hours already. Kate had shown several remote images, and various department heads had reported. The room was noisy now with conversations, small groups huddled together over computers, models and seismograms and jpegs, with some raised voices as debate grew heated, as they tried to decide if the volcano was likely to erupt.
The arrival of bags of grocery store sandwiches broke up most of the groups. People still talked over their food, but the food also had brought some lowered voices and organization, much to his relief.
Kate took advantage of that to call everyone to order. “Keep eating, but I want a two minute opinion from everyone here,” she said. “What are we looking at? What needs to be done next?”
Some people did not hold to the
two-minute limit, only one person passed, and Norio simply seconded that they needed to replace the lost north monitoring stations ASAP. Twice, Kate needed to interrupt cross talk to prevent a debate. By a little after two o’clock, everyone had his or her say and Kate was nodding.
“Okay. So we all think we may be working towards an eruption, probably lateral, maybe vertical, maybe soon. Or in a hundred years, give or take.” A ripple of amusement passed through the group at the wide range of time, but they all knew that was volcanology. With geological processes, they could only predict in geological time—with monitoring precursor events, they could pinpoint dangers more easily than those trying to predict earthquakes, but still not close enough to satisfy the public, not always. People thought in terms of minutes. The earth changed over eons.
Kate went on. “We have two helicopters and one small plane lined up for tomorrow morning at seven, to do thermal scans, test for gas, and if there’s any break in the cloud, get some eyes on this thing.” She named six names, including Norio’s, for this work. She also picked two hydrologists to send up the Sandy River by car. “You all radio in as you know more. If I’m not answering, phone and leave a detailed voice mail. Email raw data as soon as you can. A team will take up a temporary monitoring station to the north face. We need accurate deformation maps there.” She named three of the newer, younger scientists for that.
“I want the rest of us to take the data we have, and what comes in new from the field teams and satellites, and model two possible eruption directions, vertical and laterally to the west, three possible strengths, VEI 3, 4, and 5.” The VEI was the Volcanic Eruptive Index, equivalent to the Beaufort scale for hurricanes or the modified Mercalli for earthquakes, telling how serious the event, the cubic kilometers of ash expelled, the height of the plume, and the extent of the devastation. Mt. St. Helens in 1980 was VEI 5, Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 was VEI 6.
“I want those six models to be as precise as possible. I want graphics for outreach to show the media and first responders. I want archival footage, stills, and maps of St. Helens 1980 ready when they ask for it for a comparison. I think we should be at yellow alert status for now, yellow for aviation, but I want PDX and Sea-Tac informed explicitly of not only the eruption dangers but also gas dangers. I don’t want some passenger jet falling out of the sky because we neglected to mention the danger.”
Because of its geochemistry, Mt. Hood was capable of producing much more hydrochloric and hydroflourine gas than Mt. St. Helens had put out in 1980. The gasses it released could be very dangerous indeed, and Norio thought it was smart of Kate to be overly cautious about this, at least until they had hard facts on which gasses the volcano was venting right now. He itched to get out there and collect some good, solid data.
Kate went back to the map. “I further think we should close the ski areas and shut off the mountain to hiking and climbing above the timberline. We’ll recommend temporary evacuation of Parkdale, Government Camp, and Welches and any dwelling within 50 meters of the Sandy, Zig Zag, and Hood Rivers.” There were some noises of surprise at this. She said, “I know, it may seem alarmist, but the tremor is steady now, has been the whole morning, and until we can get a clear picture, better safe than sorry. Possibly in two to five days, we’ll rescind, but for now, until we understand more, those evacuations are prudent. There’s as good a chance that in two to five days, we’ll change them to mandatory.”
The meeting broke up and Norio met with the other five people going up into the air the next day. He was teamed with Roger Akroyd, one of the three gas emissions specialists at the CVO. Akroyd shook his hand. “Nice job getting the air sample up there.”
“It stayed uncontaminated?”
“Looks like.”
“Good. I really want to get some solid readings. I wish we could get up there today.”
Akroyd glanced at his watch. “Day’s shot anyway, even if there were a plane available.”
Akroyd and Norio went to the storage level and pulled out the big DOAS and a handheld COSPEC unit, checking them over, then carrying them outside to test them further. The big unit could record data internally; a cable and laptop could retrieve the info later. The smaller COSPEC worked more like a radar gun—point, click, and you could note the readout. Grabbing other gear from storage, they ran across the climbing team hacksawing a hole through a blue plastic tub, seating a seismometer into it, pulling it out and sawing some more, arguing together the whole while. Norio was glad he wasn’t going with that noisy bunch. Akroyd was okay, soft-spoken and careful in his work.
Next he and Akroyd went down to seismography and looked at what had been happening during the meeting. The bottom line was, magma was moving up, breaking rocks at ever-higher levels, shaking the mountain as it moved. Norio left the seismology office certain that something good was going on with his mountain. He was hopeful he’d live to see it erupt.
Akroyd told him to wait while he went to his office. When he came back, he was smiling. “Great. Needed to check with the wife first. If you don’t want to stay here or drive all the way back to your place, you can come home with me for dinner, stay in our spare bedroom if you’d like.”
Norio hesitated. He’d be more in the loop if he stayed on a cot here. But there’d be people and noise and he’d be stressed from a night of that. He’d lose too much time driving home and back. So Akroyd’s offer might work best. “Sure,” he said, “Thanks.” He hoped there weren’t a herd of kids at Akroyd’s, but he suspected it’d be rude to ask that before giving his answer. “Nice of you to offer,” he added, hoping that was enough of polite thanks. He never knew. Social conventions were a mystery to him.
That evening, he found that Akroyd did have one kid, but it was 13 and wearing an iPod all the time. Akroyd’s wife was a chatterer, so Norio excused himself early and finally relaxed behind a closed door in the too-soft guest bed. He went to sleep and dreamed of a volcano that erupted ash and kept erupting, the ash cloud growing to impossible heights, days and weeks of ash that covered the whole world in a warm gray blanket of stillness.
11
Thursday morning, June 13. In the air over Mt. Hood.
Akroyd was hunched over the handheld COSPEC while Norio stared out the helicopter window into a swirling soup of white cloud. The big instrument they had managed to bolt to the exterior of the helicopter in a way that the pilot, Corey, finally approved of, as long as Akroyd promised to stay in a specific seat for counterbalance.
They had been scanning the mountain from the air for two hours now, coordinating their passes with the other helicopter so they’d have one complete picture of at least the airborne sulfur compounds above the timberline by noon. The small plane was well above them, quartering the whole mountain.
“I’ll want to refuel soon,” said the pilot’s voice over the earphones. Norio nodded and glanced back to make sure Akroyd had heard. Akroyd looked up and made an okay sign. “Finish this track to the timberline if you can,” he shouted. They all had to use raised voices, even with the headphones on, to overcome the noise while the door was open. The pilot said “Roger,” and they finished that pass and then headed west to the airport.
When they landed to refuel, Akroyd went to take a leak and Norio phoned the CVO. He got through to Kate’s assistant and asked, “Anything new?”
“I’ll put you on hold for Kate, but there’s two other calls ahead of you.”
“Transfer me to someone in seismology, then. Anybody available.”
The voice at the end of the line wasn’t one Norio knew. New people must be coming in from the field. “Norio Grier, up in the helicopter,” he said. “What’s happening on the mountain?”
“Rate of tremors is decreasing slightly this morning.”
There was nothing else, so Norio signed off.
In twenty minutes, they were refueled and back in the air, moving toward the north side of the mountain over the spot where the monitoring stations had disappeared. Akroyd’s voice came into his
ear. “Come back here, Grier,” he said. “Look at these numbers.”
Norio cautiously left his seat for the empty one in the rear and watched the digital readout. The numbers began to drop.
“We were over something there.”
“New fumarole, I’m still betting.” Norio took out his handheld GPS and compared the reading to the map of Hood he carried in his head. They weren’t over any known fumaroles. They were close to where he had smelled sulfur on his hike two days before, but not right on top of it.
The numbers continued to drop and Norio looked out the window again. “I think I saw someone down there. Maybe our guys with the equipment.” The tiny figures were gone now, lost in a denser patch of the cloud cover.
By two-thirty, they had finished mapping the gasses on their half of the mountain and the helicopter dropped them in the CVO parking lot. After unbolting the big DOAS from the outside of the helicopter, they carried the instruments back inside and took them to Akroyd’s office where he downloaded the data. It took over two hours to produce a rough map of sulfur levels. Norio put that on a thumb drive and ran it up to Kate’s office while Akroyd added in the data from the handheld unit and worked at getting the map more accurate still.
He had to wait ten minutes in a line outside Kate’s office. She looked frazzled, her hair disarrayed, her desk a mess, piles of printouts in tottering stacks on her credenza. She popped in Norio’s thumb drive and they took a look. Four distinct concentrations of sulfur were visible. One was the Crater rock area; three were to the north side of the mountain.
“No venting there?” she said, pointing to the western slope.
