The blood of the Inca kings is forgotten. The Rhodochrosite rides in its bundle on the floor behind Bennington in the passenger seat. Claire drives them to the Bozeman-Yellowstone Airport to rent a helicopter and a pilot. Bennington has been busy on his cell phone. The saucepan of molten rock has cooled, and rides in the back of the truck. The bear dogs wait for their return. They watch the tree line from the camp at the top of the hill.
Bennington and Claire lift off in the twilight of early evening. At the north end of the park, they will fly past the fire-watch tower atop Mt. Washburn in the last light of this first day. The bear dogs back at camp will glance skyward through the darkness, hearing the helicopter, and seeing its collision lights, but never fathoming that their master, and Claire, ride within it. The dogs do not know that man can fly. The Karelian’s are patient dogs. When your job is to attack a grizzly bear, everything else in life is merely waiting.
Red magma from Earth’s mantle extrudes to the surface as lava. It outlines the inky contours of the slopes west of Yellowstone Lake. From overhead, the luminous flow appears as a broken honeycomb. The melted rock halts as might an evil spirit in a church door. For now, the volcano is reluctant to do more than merely broach the surface. It is awake, and tells us so.
Atop the Continental Divide and along its flanks near West Thumb, these thin lines of lava have extruded from a volcanic neck connecting near the base of the great magma chamber building beneath Yellowstone’s Central Plateau, farther north. Near its base, the magma is hotter. The great chamber is connected to the furnaces of the interior of the planet by a persistent upwelling. Near the bottom of the chamber, the magma contains more iron and less silica, making it runny and unable to hold destructive pressure. It fills the neck. It is buoyant. It lifts. It seeks the surface. This is magma of molten granite, rising up from the planetary convector, the Earth’s primordial hot spot. It intrudes among older, long settled structures of basalt, re-melting their edges to enlarge its path. The liquid rock squeezes past these Plutons to find the surface.
Deep within the Earth, the decay of radioactive elements stoke the planet’s furnace. The heavy crust insulates, trapping the heat. Its weight halts the rising rock, which cools to form underground mountains, the Plutons. The planetary convector is a primordial heat pump with its on-switch stuck. It persists to broil the crust moving over it. When the plates of crust become stuck, the heat sears its way to the surface.
Bennington and Claire trace these threads of fire from the north end of Shoshone Lake up to Chickadee Lake. Mercifully, for the paws of the grizzlies, the magma stops two miles from their trout-spawning convocation at Grant Village. Not for many generations have buffalo, elk and bear felt magma underfoot. There will be injuries. The wolf packs and the coyotes will be cautious.
Yellowstone abounds with fallen timber. With such a short summer, it decays slowly. From a height, the whitened logs look like scattered matchsticks.
Now, in this night they fly through, Bennington and Claire see the thin, red lines swell into broader circles of flame wherever the flow crosses a fallen tree. At dawn, the smoke will make the announcement to one and all.
At Bozeman, Claire was surprised to see a female pilot walk into the waiting room, working a double hit of chewing gum. Her name is Cherry Brady. While still on the ground, Claire thought to herself that Cherry looked like a stripper on a camping trip.
At the Bozeman airport, introductions were limited to a nod and the pilot’s invocation that they “get rolling.” Cherry wanted to take advantage of remaining daylight for navigation.
Later, Cherry will turn friendly, but tonight Claire will silently bristle when Cherry refers to the Professor as “your father.”
The National Park Service will radio Cherry to advise that they, too, are up over Yellowstone. Both helicopters are watching for the other’s collision lights. Bennington called the Park Service last. Since Cherry was overhead first, she stays at 3,000 feet. The Park Service will take 4,000 feet. This seems to make everyone as happy as they are able, watching the Earth begin to reclaim one of its natural treasures; part of that grace God shed on thee.
Bennington turns to pull another can from the 12-pack behind them. They had stopped in West Yellowstone. Now they sit between the tent flap and the fire pit. Their sack of burgers and fries warms near the fire. Sleep is impossible. Their minds are teeming.
Nearby, the new Volcano works, glowing in the darkness. It is two and a half miles from them as the crow flies, or four miles by track and road.
At Craig’s Pass, the vent has grown to a trench fifteen feet long, but narrow. The new stone around it is thickening. New stone has pushed across the ground to entomb several acres. Elsewhere to the east, lava rises independently in other places. Jagged and irregular fingers of it glow in honeycomb outlines across the forest. Soon, Claire’s volcanic vent will enlarge so that all of the pressure flows only toward it.
Yellowstone is burning at the edges of all of this. At daybreak, curtains of smoke will hang throughout the southern half of the park where the Continental Divide scribes its line across it. Mercifully, it has been a wet spring and so the forest will resist.
Bennington grew to understand that turning this news over to the Park Service and to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory would mean that his little Purdue team would be among the evacuees. They would wind up watching this unfold on their television sets in West Lafayette, Indiana. They would become a footnote. Bennington would call the park service last of all. He would not call the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. They were an arm of the University of Utah, with their competing academics. Bennington knew that staking his claim, Purdue’s claim, to the volcano had become job-one.
The University of Utah was the fair-haired boy of the Park Service. Purdue was back east. The Park Service and Utah were cowboys. Hard rock geologists lived out west. Purdue was home to dudes. Purdue was farmers. Bennington knew that if he did not manage this correctly, they would sit this one out—and there would never be another one for him.
Instead, Bennington called the Earth Mechanics Institute. Bennington called his literary agent. Bennington urged him to hastily arrange a telephone interview with NPR. National Public Radio had called. The telephone interview had been broadcast around the time they drove to the Bozeman airport, toward the end of “All Things Considered,” the evening news program. It was breaking news. It was a scoop. Now they owed Bennington.
Bennington telephoned the New York Times. He spoke to the reporter who had been following the University of Utah work. His news story the previous October had been half a page. The Times had reported that Utah discovered that the Yellowstone Magma Chamber was twice the size previously thought. Now the Times had a bigger scoop.
Bennington called the Chicago Tribune and the Lafayette Courier-Journal. He called his department head and asked him to call the university president, a former governor of the state with national connections, and always eager to move-up Purdue’s place at the table.
Bennington reaches down to feel the sack of fast food that they had brought back to camp from thirty miles away, from West Yellowstone, Montana. The paper feels toasty warm. The dogs discretely approach, tilting their noses upward and working them like miniature bellows.
“Stay,” Bennington quietly commands. The bear dogs return to lie in a row along the hilltop, but their noses no longer point to Old Faithful. Tonight, the dogs point to east, toward West Thumb.
Claire smiles as she accepts a burger. “This is the first day I haven’t been hungry.”
“The animal knows what it needs, C.C.” Bennington sounds peaceful and remote.
They sit cross-legged on the ground between the tent flap and the campfire. The little circle of flames seems to draw out their dreams like a poultice. They are quiet, for now.
He and Claire had spent four hours in the Applebee’s in Bozeman, stretching from the day shift into the night shift. Only once was his call unable to get through. It was to someone named Digger O’Dell. Bennington spent an hour tracing Digger from one small town to another. Bennington said that no one else knew the geology along the western edge of Yellowstone better than the Digger.
This was the Madison Valley at the west-central edge of the park and across the state line into Montana. It ran through a break in the Madison Range to broaden into a north flowing river valley between the Gravelly Range and the Madison Range, past Bozeman and up to Helena, Montana. Eventually the Madison River will flow to meet the Gallatin and the Jefferson rivers to form the Missouri River at a place discovered by Louis and Clark. You have to wonder if they had heard stories from the Indians about the geyser basins 183 meandering miles to the south. And then you have to wonder if they believed what they heard.
Claire had wondered why country to the west of Yellowstone mattered to Bennington, when the eruption was in the south half of the park. Bennington wanted Digger on-board. Bennington wanted as large a Purdue presence as he could manage and what Digger knew was central to his plan.
Finally, at the end, Bennington called the Park Service from the Bozeman-Yellowstone Airport. Now they could not say that Bennington had not called them. But by then, Bennington’s interview on NPR was racing around the nation. By the time he and Claire boarded the helicopter, in America’s eyes this has become Bennington’s volcano. He had stolen a march on the Park Service and on Utah.
The general estimate of Yellowstone’s power had, itself, built like a volcano. The figure commentators used was an eruption 2,500 times that of Mt. St. Helens, since the Yellowstone magma chamber was that much larger than St. Helens’. Such an estimate meant 90 cubic miles of ejecta, although some estimates grew to twice that. Sometimes numbers seem flat and lifeless. Ninety miles is often the distance to the city nearest yours. But ninety miles is also the same distance up into low Earth orbit. The sky and the crust both look endless, but they are thin and fragile. They are the breads between which is slathered the green and fleshy spread of life.
Bennington had told NPR that the heavy ash-fall would wipe out agriculture and ranching as far east as the Mississippi. The blast and heat alone would destroy Bozeman, Idaho falls, and Jackson Hole. Pocatello, Missoula, and Billings would stand, but would be rendered uninhabitable. The federal government quickly put a stop to talk like that in public, but the word was already out. It was like closing the barn door after the horse had left.
Bennington reaches into a second sack for two more cans of beer. It is farther from the fire. This beer has been their first since they arrived two weeks ago. The park does not allow alcohol. Bennington thinks that he should bury the beer cans somewhere down below at first light.
Bennington thinks this is odd—the world may be ending and here I am sneaking around with a twelve-pack of beer as if I was sixteen again.
Thirty years, Bennington thinks. I have worked all my adult life to be right here, right now. I could have missed this by fifty miles. I could have missed this by a month. Yet here it is. Everything has come down to this.
He has always known that his destiny would find him. He meditates on this.
The back wall of Claire’s mind is a flickering cinema of images, complete with a sound track and dialogue. She thinks—five years ago I was living in the Pi Omega Tau house, pinned to a Sig-Ep, waiting to become a middle school science teacher, ready to disappear back into the mass of humanity.
All those grad school rejections, she thinks. A 3.6 G.P.A. with honors and no one would take a chance on her. Then came Purdue. Professor Bennington wrote her, agreeing to take her on. They even gave her an office—shabby old Recitation Hall, full of teaching assistants from the liberal arts, and sharing the small room with two men from the history department.
Thank god for Purdue, she thinks. Trying to live on thirteen thousand net per year and working summer’s for the grounds department, trying to turn down money from Dad, trying to get published in the science journals of regional quarterlies. And now, here at Yellowstone, she discovers that North America is going to blow up.
She was the one to bring the news back, like Phidipides, bringing back the news of the battle of Marathon to the city of Athens: “Rejoice, we conquer.” Except now, we will all loose.
Claire wonders if she and Jim will get away in time. She wonders why surviving it seems unimportant. She wonders if Purdue will erect a statue to them, like the one they did for Neil Armstrong. She wonders what the ash fall on Purdue will look like. The summer gardens there are so beautiful. Will they become covered by a falling blanket of choking ash? How fast will this new volcanism develop?
Of course, she silently adds, it might be next summer, or the one after that, or tonight. Would she and Jim stay here all year and into the next? Where would they stay at the end of summer? Would Purdue allow this? Would Jim send her back?
America refused to just lay there and take it. Something must be done. They would find the answer. Arrangements were being made all across America. Private jets, Military transports, commercial airlines would all be bringing people the next morning. Connecting flights were figured. Rental cars were reserved. Suitcases were packed. Some would drive all night. Some of them were unsure exactly where they were headed. They knew only that they must find Bennington.
Before midnight, the president discretely orders an embargo on all food exports. The Canadian Prime Minister will fly into Washington tomorrow.
Bennington broke the silence. “You know, don’t you, C.C., that Yellowstone Park is no longer safe?”
“Don’t send me away, Jim.”
Hearing her call him by his first name sent a current through him. He temporized. “They may send us both away.” He laughed.
“Yes, but you’ve been working all afternoon to prevent that, haven’t you?”
Bennington was surprised. “You don’t miss much.”
“You’ve made sure that this event has your name all over it.”
“You discovered this, C.C. I shall never try to hide that fact. But you know, my dear, that you could not have gotten on NPR, and that has likely been our ticket to stay. We will know more tomorrow, I imagine.”
“Our ticket?”
“Yes, if you wish, our ticket.”
“Thank you.”
“I will need your help, C.C.”
“Will you, Jim? Really?”
There it was again. “Yes, Claire. Are you afraid?”
“No. You’ll find a way to keep us safe.”
They did not realize they had been moving closer with increments of shifts or leaning. They became like unwatched kettles, steaming faster. They spoke little and the other’s shadowy face filled their field of vision, flashed across by quick tongues of firelight. Small scuffs of boots and the rustle of clothing emerged, as their wordless instinct compelled them closer. At last, and in unison, they tilted their faces, and kissed. It was an act made pure by heat. Love can be fearless when it seeks itself, yet nothing for itself.
During the night, the first earthquake swarm arrives. These tremors are small, but the natural frequency of the hill amplifies them. The canvas about them snaps between taut and slack. There are ten, each about a minute apart. Halfway through, Claire rolls on top of Jim. “I want to be able to say that I felt the Earth move.”
Morning is sounded by a single hungry yelp. A Karelian Bear Dog knows that her schedule has been missed.
Claire and Jim have slept wrapped each in the other’s arms with no discomfort or wish to move or annoyance with hot breath or hair. Flawless instinct has been their guide. They allow the feelings to overwhelm them. They understand that any voice is wrong in the presence of something so much larger. The world all around them has grown so big that they have become invisible to it. They have become so small that disaster must pass over. When they did resume speaking, it was rationed, word-by-word.
They awoke together, one long second after that single hungry yelp. There was no turning away to hide eyes. There were no beginnings of worry. There were only long kisses with short intervals between. Then she rolled on top of him. She negotiated her hips, finding him, and finding him ready. He fondled her lunging, buoyant breasts while she worked, lifted by her own straight arms, and throwing about her mane of hair as if to punctuate the spaces where words should not intrude.
As the sun peeks above the hilltops to the east, Claire and Jim step from the tent. Rising feelings displace all of the fear and impatience that glazes over our days like hoarfrost, yet goes unnoticed. Scrubbed clean of life’s corrosion, they emerge to greet the day with relief, as though finding something.