K Nilsen - The Yellowstone Traps

Nose pressed against a plate glass window, the logo Ester’s Cafe stenciled across it, Winnie discovered a lone figure in the interior seated at a counter. The foodstuffs unloaded and stored in the brewery, she and Abel sought to find the farmer and other Sweetly residents. They followed a single line of fresh boot-heel prints in the ash into town and up to a storefront.

The sound of muffled footsteps at the threshold of the restaurant roused the slender character at the counter. Harland freed his skull from his hands, wiped his eyes with a sleeve of his jacket, but stared ahead, his emaciated reflection returning to him by way of the backboard mirror behind the coffee percolators and frappe glasses.

“Karen works here,” the farmer whispered to his newfound audience, relieved that that he had been discovered and there was someone to actually talk to. “She makes lousy coffee, always did, but I didn’t care. Did you ever have a cup of her coffee?

“No, Mr. Sven,” said Winnie.

“Known Karen all my life. I wish she was behind the counter. I’d order my two eggs over easy, a side of ham—real slab of ham off the bone, not that pressed-pig cardboard—three slices of wheat toast, dark, butter heavy. That’s what I’d have. And she’d know. If I said, ‘Karen, I want the big spread this morning,’ she’d know exactly what I meant. She never screwed it up, never.

“Before this Yellowstone thing hit, she told me she’d won big on a scratch ticket. She’d been buying those damn things every week for as long as they’ve been printing them, and she finally hits it, a hundred bucks. Probably cost her fifty times that over the years just to make that little wad.”

Abruptly, Harland rotated on the stool, sweeping dust off the counter with his trailing arms. “I want things back that way.” He dribbled the words out. “We had a town here, a good place, a damn good one. Where’d everybody go, eh? You see anybody?”

“We haven’t, no, Harland,” Abel admitted as he joined Winnie.

“Well, ain’t that ironic as hell. You come to my town, you move my corn out of the silos, and now, Christ, there’s no one here to eat it.”

The farmer topped off his lungs with air and blew a cough across the counter, sending a wave of fine dust toward the mirror, enough to blot out his own image.

“My people been here seven generations. You? You’ve been here just a few years. Why is your godforsaken place getting on fine on the bluffs, eh? Why has this town of mine fallen to hell?

“I can’t answer you, Harland.”

“It don’t make no sense. It’s like God is smiling down on you people.”

Harland rotated from the counter stool, straightened his legs and strode for the door. Abel held up a hand in front of the man to slow his exit. “Harland, you’re welcome to come back to the bluffs.”

Harland shook his head. “I’m staying put right here.”

Abel let the farmer pass to the street. “We’ll be back for more loads of grain over the next few days. We need to move what we can before the lake freezes tight. See if you can rally some of your people so we can be of some help to them. We packed the food in the brewery, okay, like we said we would. You need to get townspeople in there. Get them something to eat. Will you do that? Will you?”

The man licked dust from his lips. “I’ll get them what they need.”

“That’s good, Harland.”

The farmer left Ester’s, pacing eastward toward LaPerle’s supermarket, hollow and shuttered against the cold.

From a helicopter pilot’s perspective, Liz appeared as a miniscule animated dot balanced on the rim of the underworld. The geophysicist frowned as the tiny blue and white USGS aircraft approached from the south; she did not want it to touch down. Liz and others in the research party would have to board the thing and be whisked away. She didn’t want to leave the rim of the new Yellowstone crater yet, the caldera stretching so far away to the dark smoking east that she could not see the horizon.

All day the professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology geology research laboratory had prowled the northwestern edge of the caldera, burying several seismometers in the warm pumice grit and collecting rock, ash and air samples. Finally, after so many months, it had been deemed safe to approach the caldera, but a wave of bad weather, poor visibility and difficult fueling logistics had delayed Cascades Volcano Observatory helicopter flights throughout the month of October. When the craft finally touched down and dropped her off, Liz wanted nothing more than to stay put at the crater’s edge, despite a galloping wind and scudding clouds threatening snow.

Liz’s vantage point was one no human being had ever encountered. Before her yawned a fathomless canyon she estimated to forty or more miles across to the south rim. A few yards beyond her boots, the earth plunged vertically 800 feet to a hideously steep slope of ruination that pitched down at a dizzying angle for another 1,000 feet. The walls and slopes below smoked, pumping out hundreds of wispy tendrils that played tag with one another and dodged the wind.

A mile to the east, a river of mountain water reached the edge of the new lost world and leapt out into nothing, falling in a gossamer strand to lose itself in the mists below. Regularly, light-colored caked layers of pumice, dark volcanic glass shards, ash and rock fragments broke loose from the unstable plateau or the walls of the caldera and plunged in dusty avalanche falls into the depths. With snow clouds scudding overhead, steam from the fissures rising, the falls and rock slides descending, it appeared to the scientist that the entire expanse before her was a living organism, as if she were microscopic and could witness busy biological processes at the cellular level.

The scientist imagined she could spade up the Grand Canyon in Arizona and heave it into the Yellowstone void. That national marvel, its candy cane-stripe beauty intact, would fall away and vanish into the ugly, tortured hellhole below. Once thrown down, the sandstone reds and mudstone yellows of the countless buttes of the canyon, would, over millennia, be smothered with upwelling magma and drowned in temporary great lakes until sometime, far into the future, the abyss would fill in with new basalt and rhyolite rock and the cycle would prime itself once again for another catastrophe hundreds of millennia hence.

Already the earth building had commenced, as much of the great magma ocean was still intact far below. On the eastern horizon, the unseen caldera floor glowed with crimson heat. Viscous magma was oozing up quietly somewhere on the edge of sight, building up small swelling lava domes deep within the sunken ruins of the landscape. The researcher reflected a bit on the processes already underway before her and the time scale necessary to complete a new caldera cycle. Human beings, she thought, if they were still parading about the planet, would be three times older as a distinct species the next time Yellowstone vanished in clouds of ash and hell fire.

Scanning the country, synthetic fabric flapping lustily in the breeze, Liz was grateful for the easterly coursing wind. The caldera was still outgassing a toxic gas stew from thousands of small fissures and would do so, presumably, for generations to come. Conducting studies on the inner flanks of volcanic craters the world over, scientists had learned to work around upwelling poisonous gases, but no one in the scientific community had a minute of experience working inside a newborn volcanic environment spanning 2,000 square miles and that was, in a some places, nearly a mile deep. The volume of gas seeping from the earth’s bowels was impossible to know, but Liz sensed that the atmosphere wafting over the eastern rim, fouled by prodigious outpouring of gases, must be perfectly lethal.