Claire drives. She is eager to show Jim the new volcano this morning. The Karelian bear dogs obediently and silently cram into their cage. They, too, are eager to get to work.
Jim plugs his cell phone charger into the dashboard. His knees scissor up, but he leaves the passenger seat alone. He does not notice that it is forward. His mind is now on Claire, unceasingly. He feels as if he has been rescued—an odd thought, considering that the ground beneath them, and all of the ground from ridge to ridge, might soon blow twelve miles high. Somehow, the irony of it has made him lighthearted.
Claire carefully negotiates the mile to the road, and then eases the tires over the berm and heads east. There is no traffic as far as the eye can see. Jim thinks to comment that they have closed the park, but no. No talking. How perfectly delightful this is.
He looks about them, but not as a geologist. The world has never seemed as lovely. Yellowstone is fragile. The ground is brittle. Man endures. He feels a surge of new confidence. Human life proves resilient. By being suited to no single environment, we adapt to them all.
He studies Claire for a moment. She feels him looking. “Do you feel it too, Claire?”
She nods peacefully, and smiles. No talking for her either. Two people in one mood trace the outline of a private world.
Jim casually glances through the rear window to the bear dogs. While he and Claire have skipped breakfast, the dogs have received an extra ration. Content, they ride peacefully with their cage door open. All is well, except that Teton County, Wyoming is burning.
They are getting close now. They see new highway cones blocking the road. To the right, through the trees, there is smoke.
The genes of lost generations switch on. Excited energies course through their limbs. The Dogs have risen and are standing tightly, yet still within their cage.
“Stay, “he commands them. “We should be careful too, my dear. Our boots are not rated for a thousand degrees.”
Claire is eager to show him the lava field. She jumps the guardrail. Jim grins, appreciatively.
The Yellowstone forest is open. Rainfall here is twenty-five inches per year. Roots must have room to spread, and so trees distance themselves, giving the appearance of rugged parkland, rather than the tangled thicket of wetter, eastern woodlands.
Charred Lodgepole pines stand newly dead in the center of the field of shiny, cooling stone. The rock is turning reddish brown. It will become extrusive porphyry, an exquisitely rich rock jealously quarried in the Roman and Byzantine world of ancient times. Polished purple Imperial Porphyry was used to build the Porphyra, the delivery room of pregnant empresses in the Great Palace of Constantinople. And here, in the Park, it has risen to the surface of the old west in the new world.
The pines are bare of needles except at their tall, green crowns, which will soon darken. There is no sap rising to these tops. The bark and cambium has died. Their trunks are slowly scorching higher.
The lava flow has become a lava flood. Yesterday’s acre has become five. The lava melts larger the volcanic neck through which it rises. Around it is a ring of slowly burning grass. The trees nearby are darkening on their hotter sides. A ring of smoke rises in the still air to hang in curtains.
Magma hiccups, building a new, circular prominence in the center of this field of new stone. From the vent, lethal sheets of melted rock snap higher. Now among the trees, the vent is the distance from them of a football field. Jim removes a small pair of binoculars and hands them to Claire.
She is grateful. She notices that he has not looked first. “Thanks, Jim.” They feel the drive from that single word.
When the lava flow is slow, Claire watches the outline of new rock extrude from a center that now she can no longer see.
They both finch. Lava has belched three feet into the air. Then again, once more. This time to five feet. Claire is smiling.
Bennington narrates. “Gas bubbles. Higher viscosity. It’s becoming explosive.” They can only laugh. Other feelings compete to mute the irony of this.
He puts he arm around her. She cranes her head toward him, parting her lips. They kiss in a long and twisting embrace, amid the ruin of Yellowstone’s burning meadow.
Behind them on the road, a siren whoops twice. Interrupted, laughing again, they turn.
“Which is mightier? Jim asks. “Man or the volcano.”
“Woman.” Claire answers, beaming. Yes, Jim thinks. He has always known.
The bear dogs have begun to bark. Claire and Jim exchange a worried glance and begin to jog. They start to see the flashing lights through the pine boughs.
The park ranger stays in his car. The bear dogs patrol around it. A second siren complains in the distance, moving this way from the direction of Old Faithful.
“Amy, Betty, Carol, Doris...in the cage. Back in the cage,” Jim commands, yet without sharpness in his voice. The dogs trot back to the tailgate, jump up, and re-enter their cage, their work done for the moment. They recline in a row of four black and white bodies, resting their heads upon their paws.
Jim waves hello to the ranger, as he and Claire step over the guardrail. At the sound of his door opening, Jim begins to make peace. “Karelian’s. They’re working dogs. For Bears.”
The ranger is angry. He barks out one question after another. He has drawn his revolver. Bennington sees that it is a heavy gun, a .44 magnum perhaps, a grizzly stopper with a brain shot. Karelians are so fast, Jim wonders if the ranger would miss.
The approaching patrol car is sounding louder. Jim has raised his hands, showing his palms to the ranger. Jim’s smiling is making the ranger angrier. Claire seems lighthearted. The ranger thinks that there is something not normal in this. Claire suddenly thinks of the Rhodochrosite behind the passenger seat. Oh-shit, she exclaims soundlessly. Oh-well, Jim will talk their way out of this.
Jim is trying to ask to be allowed to show their permit. It is in his jacket pocket, but he does not wish to reach for it. The ranger’s gun remains out, although he is not pointing it, nor sighting down its barrel. The second patrol car has now pulled up from the first. The second ranger gets out while drawing his gun. The dogs are quiet. The second ranger says nothing and does not approach. The first ranger is still angry. Claire thinks that he is more explosive than the volcano he is standing on.
Jim notices that now the dogs are standing again. Oh-shit, he thinks. They remain in their cage, not yet barking, but watching intently. Will the ranger allow him to fasten the cage door? If not, will the dogs jump down from the truck? Will the ranger shoot? Will the other ranger shoot? Why do the dogs stand? Has the first ranger moved closer? How near will the dogs allow him to get? Why do the dogs stand?
Jim receives his answer as a helicopter flashes over the mountaintop. The dogs have heard it. It hovers a short distance away, perhaps one hundred feet high. It does not descend.
“BENNINGTON?” This voice explodes from a loud speaker. “IS THIS PROFESSOR BENNINGTON OF PURDUE?” The voice sounds insistent.
Jim nods vigorously. The rangers holster their guns. The dogs are watching the helicopter. Claire is beaming.
“IT’S ALRIGHT, OFFICERS. WE WILL TAKE OVER.” The voice booms from the helicopter as it lands on the road. It is an army Blackhawk. Men step out, bent beneath the spinning blades. Jim lowers his hands and walks to Claire, where they wait at the truck.
These are four men. The one in the lead is dressed in army-green camouflage fatigues. One, wearing a leather jacket and cowboy hat, detaches from his group to walk to the rangers. The others, once past the rotors, straighten and walk briskly to Claire and Jim, who are the only ones smiling.
“Miss Cheviot?” Claire nods. “I am Colonel Jeter, United States Army Corps of Engineers.” Turning, he asks, “Dr. Bennington, I presume?”
Jim cannot suppress a laugh. This sounds like Stanley finding Livingston. He extends his hand, saying only, “It’s Jim, Colonel.”
“Thank you, Jim. This is Dr. Byron Cody from the Earth Mechanics Institute and Hank Bracken from the Governor’s office in Cheyenne. That’s Blevins over there with the park rangers. He’s a U.S. Marshal. We need to talk. If I may, I’ll ride with you. We’re going into Grant Village.”
“Then I’d better lock the dogs in.”
“Karelian’s, aren’t they? The Colonel speaks admiringly, and walks to the tailgate where he drapes his arms. “A wonderful dog, if they know you.” The others gather around the truck bed. Marshall Blevins finishes with the Rangers, who are moving the highway cones. Blevins is a huge man. A pistol grip extends from within a shoulder holster just behind the zipper of his leather flight jacket. A badge stands out, pinned to his shirt.
“Wow, bear dogs,” Blevins says, boyishly. “Beauties. Four of them. They sure are in their element around here. I’m Bill Blevins, Dr. Bennington. Good morning, Miss Cheviot.” He tips his hat. These folks are going to open their kitchen for us. How about some coffee and some breakfast?”
Jim does not wish to see Claire minimized by these men. He slips her the truck keys. Jim slides along the bench seat and slips his left arm along the top of the seat behind Claire, sitting close. The Colonel rides shotgun. The truck is cramped, but that is all right. They have found who they were looking for.
Claire leans out the truck window to watch the Blackhawk lift off. The park rangers, without expression, ignore the helicopter, and watch the truck pass.
The Colonel observes the burning meadow. “I wonder how much longer we have until the lava closes the road?”
Grizzlies spot themselves down every stream leading into West Thumb. Some stand on the bank and wait. Others sit in the water, as if they expect a waiter. Still others prowl the flow. Some stand to their full height of nine feet to watch the humans walk between the buildings. Five streams pass though Grant Village and this is the middle of the trout spawn.
Grant Village will not open until the third week in June because of the bears. Jim notices that there is unusual activity around one of the six lodge buildings as well as at the main entrance. The Blackhawk has landed. All of the men except Marshal Blevins have gone inside. The Marshal has been waiting for them. He cuts across the grass toward Jim’s truck. Jim wonders if Claire attracts him. Jim thinks that there will be more of that.
Jim lets the dogs loose. He knows they will not go far. They know that they have not been put to work. Nonetheless, the dogs stare fixedly at the bears along the streams. Jim notices two Rangers striding purposefully toward them. He points to the approaching Rangers and tells Blevins, “You can’t pen up Karelian’s for very long.”
“I know that, Professor. Let me handle this.”
One of the rangers looks to be bursting with importance. “You’ll have to leash those dogs, sir, or kennel them.”
Blevins pulls his jacket back, exposing both his badge and his shoulder holster. “May I have a word with you, officers?” The three walk off.
Claire walks closer to Jim. They stand almost touching, looking about.
Claire speaks softly. “Do they want us because you put Purdue’s name on this?”
“You did that, my dear. These men have been sent here to find a fix by people who think that Americans can fix anything.”
“We can’t fix the planet.” She shrugged, but not hopelessly.
“Well, actually, my dear, I think perhaps we can.”
Claire blinks rapidly at hearing this.
The Grant Village Inn is a campus of six buildings, each with fifty rooms. The main building has a long lobby appointed with several overstuffed parlor arrangements. The staff is lighting the kindling beneath new logs in the fireplace. There is a chill in the building and it is damp from being closed up over the winter.
Claire and Jim have taken the couch. Marshal Blevins, Colonel Jeter, Cody and Bracken have taken the armchairs. Another armchair is pulled across the carpet. It is Secretary Laruso of the Department of the Interior, just arriving.
There is a flurry of extraneous talk. No one seems to want to get to the point of the meeting and it is obvious that everyone understands what that is.
Jeter begins. “Professor Bennington, bring us up to speed, please.”
“Colonel, Yellowstone has evolved many parts since the last time the whole of it erupted some 600,000 years ago. Lava is when the Earth gets angry. And like human anger, sometimes it is only a low boil and other times it is violent and explosive.
“Right now, Yellowstone is witnessing the less angry lava. This is an extrusive flood of igneous rock along fissure lines over an 18 square mile area beginning on the west near DeLacy Creek and ending on the east two miles from West Thumb. It is bounded north to south by Chickadee and Shoshone Lakes. It also seems to be venting from a primary volcanic neck. That is the one discovered yesterday, near Craig’s pass, by my colleague Claire Cheviot.”
Laruso asks. “What kind of rock is this, Professor?
“It must finish cooling to know that, but the sample which Claire gathered yesterday looks to be a very unusual specimen known as Phonolite Porphyry. For our purposes, this is a good rock. But I fear that it is a harbinger of a coming catastrophe.
“We are witnessing a lava flood of a type which shares characteristics of both Mafic and Felsic magmas. Mafic is the friendly, runny lava. Felsic is the thick, viscous, explosive kind. Phonolite often occurs next to Felsic Magmas in a subterranean structure of ancient, cold magmas called Plutons.
“Does this type of rock tell us anything significant?” Laruso asked.
“Yes, two things. First, what we are currently witnessing is merely a sideshow. Phonolite may have been in this crust 40 million years ago—long before the development of the present location of this latest Yellowstone Caldera. Today, it is being remelted and squeezed to the surface.”
“There have been other locations, other Yellowstones?”
“Yes, Yellowstone has been on the move for 12 million years. It is the mantle’s hot spot that is stationary.”
“Hot spot, Professor?”
“Yes, I call it a planetary convector. The earth used to have a lot of them when the mantle temperature was several times higher during the Archeon eon—when the planet was only half a billion years old. Today, there remain about six dozen of them. By far the most prominent ones are Yellowstone and Hawaii. Hawaii is the non-explosive Basaltic lava. Yellowstone and the nearby Snake River Valley have seen both kinds.
“The Earth has been making volcanoes here, where we are, for a long time, but the crust has been moving them to the southwest along a line hundreds of miles long. I theorize that a few deeper structures in this south half of the park, as well as up in the Madison Valley, have stubbornly remained in place, while a section of the planet’s crust—called the Wyoming Province of the North American Plate—and the line of Calderas has moved past these deeper structures. These stable structures in the lithosphere, or crust, we call cratons. They bound the Yellowstone caldera on the south and on the northwest.
“The fact that this is a Porphyry also gives us clues as to what lies beneath. A Porphyry must cool twice. First, it cools very slowly, producing large crystals called Phenocrysts. Later on, after remelting—usually through volcanism—it must cool very quickly in order to produce a fine crystal matrix into which the earlier Phenocrysts are scattered.
“All of this tells me the following. Magma has arisen in a volcanic neck connecting near the bottom of the Yellowstone Magma Chamber. This very hot magma has risen to remelt the native country rock, which had been a pluton—probably a lacolith—which had earlier formed from Phonolite after experiencing only its first stage of very slow cooling.
“Upon remelting and extruding to the surface this Phonolite cools to become a Rhomb Porphyry. This is a very beautiful and valuable ornamental rock. Someday, it will be quarried.
“The key to all of this is that it had to be remelted. This means that the lava we are seeing is from new magma, not part of the Yellowstone Magma Chamber, but simply remelted by it. That means this site is not the main show. The main show, I predict, is 7 miles farther north, midway between Craig’s Pass on the continental divide and the start of the Madison Valley.
“I theorize that the magma flood at Craig’s Pass is merely material that has been displaced by the latest movement of the main magma chamber. This low viscosity rock has been remelted and squeezed to the surface by hotter, more buoyant, gas filled magmas farther to the north on the Yellowstone Plateau. We have felt nearby earthquake swarms that I would guess to be in the range of 3 to 5 on the Richter Scale. Swarming can mean magma on the move.
“This means that the newer structures of Yellowstone are pushing against this older structure at the continental divide. It is our wake-up call.” Jim pauses. He can see their attention wavering, except for Byron Cody of the Earth Mechanics Institute. Cody seems very intent and is indicating his understanding by nearly a continuous nodding.
Jim looks over at Claire. She seems spellbound. He understands that she can easily assimilate what she is hearing, whereas some of these men are only now assembling the matrix by which everything that follows will be understood.
Bracken, from the Wyoming governor’s office has been squirming more than the rest of them. Finally, he gets to the point of the meeting. “Dr. Bennington, just what is the fix? I mean, what are the choices? Evacuation? A controlled detonation? A mile-high concrete dome? Just what?” The other voices rose together.
The Colonel interrupted. “There is no fix, Mr. Bracken. We can only prepare for it.”
Laruso spoke up. “We assume that the American West will be destroyed. This morning, the Canadian Prime Minister has arrived at the White House to begin discussions on a North American Union. We will have to move fifty million people. Fortunately, global warming is transforming western Canada into potential farmland. We are going to lose our ranching, our wheat, and half of our corn belt.”
A deep depression settled in. Nothing was said. No one moved. The men all stared at the lobby floor, while Claire stared at Jim. Marshall Blevins noticed that Jim was the only person looking around. Jim has the smile of a man throwing a cocktail party.
“Professor.” Blevins began quietly. “I see hope in your face. You are thinking of something, I can tell. You do have a fix. Don’t you?”
Jim smiles thinly, raising his eyebrows. He turns to Claire and pats her knee. “Don’t worry, Claire.” She looks adoringly at him. Quickly, Jim changes the subject. “Marshal Blevins, back at the volcano you talked about breakfast. Can we get to that before it becomes lunchtime?”
They adjourned. Jim allows the suspense to build. As they walk toward the dining room, Jim gives them a teaser.
“Don’t join Canada yet, gentlemen. We do have an option.”
The dining room is large and sunlit. The men pull chairs out of the way to slide three tables together. The inn manager explains that that the hotel was not really open yet. He hopes that everyone will be satisfied with pancakes, bacon, and eggs. That meets with a robust approval from everyone except Claire who is thinking of pancakes now fourteen days in a row.
Colonel Jeter begins again. “Professor, if I need to, I can requisition one of the lodges. That gives us 60 rooms. Where are we going with this? Are we going to assemble a team? Is there a fix?”
“Colonel, when you encounter a bomb what do you do with it?”
“Detonate it.”
“And if detonation is not practical, then what?”
“You diffuse it. You render it harmless. What are you getting at, Dr. Bennington?”
“There may be a way to take the pressure off, to give us perhaps 10,000 years of breathing space, perhaps 50,000 years. I think we can diffuse Yellowstone.”
Men pose in mid-drink. Breath gasps in surprised puffs. Coffee goes down the wrong way and men cough. Claire is helpless in amazement.
Jim gets to the point. “We need to bring in a man. He is somewhere in the Pennsylvania fracking fields. His name is Digger O’Dell. He was a graduate student of mine. He received his PhD five years ago. Digger knows the area west of the park. He is one of the few. Yellowstone Park gets all the attention from geologists. Digger wrote his dissertation on a certain, very unique, and much, much older feature beneath Madison Valley, Montana. The edge of this is less than ten miles from the Yellowstone Caldera. This man knows of a place into which we can drain the Yellowstone Magma Chamber. And I know how we can do it.
“Do you mean Brandon O’Dell, Professor?” Byron Cody asked.
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“Only from his dissertation. I remember that it read like a novel. I could see the planet working as in time-lapse photography. It was called something like “The tomb.”
“Yes, Dr. Cody. Very close. It was called ‘And the Earth shall prepare a tomb for man’. My committee thought that this was way too dramatic for a PhD dissertation, but the science inside was first rate. So I gave him his PhD.”
“His dissertation was ignored because it was overshadowed by Yellowstone, was it not?”
“Yes, especially since O’Dell’s area is right next door. Ironically, it is this feature that now becomes paramount.
“Over time, geology has created an Abyss, a spherical chamber beneath the Madison Valley that is maybe ten miles on the long axis by maybe 8 miles high and wide. If I remember my formula for the volume of an oblate spheroid, it is a hollow of 335 cubic miles.”
“How do we get the lava from Yellowstone into the Madison Valley Abyss?”
“Magma, Colonel. It is only lava if it erupts. We bore a tunnel. There are machines at work around the globe boring tunnels this same diameter and over longer distances, just not at this depth.”
“And the depth means…?”
“Heat, Colonel, but not enough heat to stop determined engineers. The Planetary Convector will refill the Yellowstone Magma Chamber, but after we are done here, we will have thousands of years to prepare for the next time.”
Claire and Jim return to the campsite. Colonel Jeter proceeds with his requisition of one of the six buildings of the lodge. He requests that all 60 rooms be readied for the coming Sunday night.
Deputy Secretary Laruso flies back to Washington, intending to return. The others unpack in their rooms. Colonel Jeter flies to Pennsylvania.