US Route 191 approximately ten miles north of Jackson Hole
Five days after the day of
Things were close to unbearable in the Airstream.
This time of year, the daytime heat in Southwest Wyoming was always in the low to mid-nineties. Four adults, two near-adult-sized teenage girls, and a year-old baby cooped inside a twenty-five-foot aluminum tube with virtually no ventilation were almost more than was humanly tolerable. Throw a lack of water and diapers into the mix, and you soon had an environment ripe for explosive tempers.
Jeremy had anticipated this eventuality. He set aside regularly scheduled times for the adults to discuss their predicament. His intention was to remind his fellow cellmates of the need to focus on anything other than their situation.
Jeremy and Brandon opened out the Airstream’s awning to create at least a semiprotected space outside the RV. Although they positioned its roof at its steepest angle to keep the ash from accumulating, someone still had to pound the underside every few hours. Ash built up like snow underneath the steep roof of a Swiss chalet. Even though the space under the awning was only about four feet wide, it did afford them some degree of airflow, and the tasks involved in keeping it open exercised both their minds and bodies.
Using an army entrenching shovel that Jeremy kept in the truck’s toolbox, they continually cleared a path through the mounding ash between their latrine and the F-250.
Trudging through fourteen inches of the dry ash covering the ground was physically exhausting. Jeremy fashioned a pair of snowshoes from two baking sheets they kept in the Airstream’s kitchen oven and trudged down to the Snake River for fresh water. The continuously falling ash had choked the winding, slow-moving stream into a sticky, black bog. Still, after five days of living like chickens in a coop, despair was starting to set in.
Then it began to rain.
The rain turned the ash into volcanic mud. Moving became virtually impossible. However, they had no choice. They had to keep the path to the truck and their latrine area open, and so they did. Hour after agonizing hour, everyone but Hunter took turns shoveling the accumulating mud out from under the awning and out of the two paths.
The blade on the entrenching tool was less than a quarter of the size of a standard shovel, about five inches by six inches. This meant that whoever was using it could pick up little more than a double handful of the soggy ash with each scoop. The good news was that a small amount wasn’t all that heavy, so even the twins could do the necessary work without physically exhausting themselves.
At around five thirty, after four days of captivity, Judy jerked open the door of the Airstream and stepped outside. She screamed.
In an instant, Jeremy bounced off the couch and headed toward her, a mixture of fear and bewilderment masking his face. “What’s wrong, Judy? Are you all right?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong!” Judy shouted. Sweeping one hand toward the horizon and grabbing Jeremy’s arm with the other, she gleefully blurted, “It’s stopped! The ash isn’t falling anymore.”
By now, Sophie, Brandon, and the twins were all trying to squeeze out the door, making it look like a circus clown car. Everyone started laughing and hugging.
Then Judy, regaining her composure, calmly told the group, “I suspect the front that brought all this rain is pushing the volcanic cloud toward the east. You can see the sky already getting a little brighter out toward the west. Not much, but enough to notice.”
“Well, it’s enough for a celebration,” Jeremy said. “Back inside! This calls for a round of Jack Daniels.”
“Oh boy, Fiona,” Ellis cried, clapping her hands and bouncing up and down. “It’s adult-beverage time!”
“Not quite,” Jeremy interjected. “But I’ll let you two split one of the Cokes.”
Everyone slept a little better when they went to bed that night.
Shortly after he began his watch the next day, Jeremy saw the faint glow of headlights piercing the mixture of morning fog and the slowly dispersing ash. He couldn’t think of a single time in his life when he had been more excited, and as the lights inched their way closer, he felt the first waves of relief washing away all of his other thoughts.
Snapping out of his newfound state of euphoria, Jeremy started pressing, then pounding the truck’s horn.
It was Sophie’s turn at shoveling, and she was going through the perfunctory motions of scraping and tossing ash sludge, which she noticed, as the day got warmer, was starting to develop a slight crust. She dropped the entrenching tool the instant she heard the blaring horn. She would later recall it as the most melodic, sweetest sound she had ever heard.
Once again, the Airstream took on the appearance of a clown car as Brandon, Judy, and the twins, with Fiona carrying Hunter, poured out the door. They stood cheering and hugging each other as the first Wyoming National Guard double-bladed road grader, followed by a string of deuce-and-a-half cargo trucks slowly became visible through the haze.
Jeremy continued to blast away on the horn until the driver of the road grader blinked her lights, acknowledging the group’s presence.
As the convoy moved forward, the grader pushed up four-foot-high walls of ash and sludge on either side of the road. This unstable mass immediately started to spill back onto the edges of the highway. But someone on the WNG disaster-planning team had anticipated this situation. A second grader, about ten meters behind the first, pushed the spillover farther off the road, allowing the trucks to move virtually unimpeded.
Thirty minutes later, the convoy commander and a Humvee bearing the red cross insignia of a military medic vehicle drew up next to the evacuees. The grader moved past the F-250, then stopped.
“Did you folks call Triple A?” called a grinning captain as he trudged through the muck toward the clearly exuberant group.
Sophie was the first to reach their rescue party’s company commander. She threw her arms around him, laid her head on his chest, and gave him a bear hug. The twins, followed by the rest of the cheering group, were right on her heels and literally mobbed the captain, barely giving him a chance to speak.
“I’m Captain Bailey, One Thirty-Third Engineer Company, Wyoming National Guard,” he said, smiling. “It appears you folks could use a little roadside assistance.”
“That and a shower.” Judy, too, hugged Captain Bailey, joining Sophie in her display of sheer exuberance.
Captain Bailey switched to a more serious demeanor. “We’re on a search-and-recovery mission. We’ve been looking for survivors, such as yourselves, but unfortunately, you’re the first that we’ve found. Alive, that is. And we are just about as far as we can go in this stuff.
“You’ve probably noticed, once the volcanic ash gets wet and the air warms, it basically turns into concrete. The volcanologists down at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, warned us that after this rain and heat, everything in roughly a seventy-mile radius from the Yellowstone Caldera would essentially become the world’s largest parking lot. So we’ve got to get you out of here. As I said, we’re on a search-and-recovery mission. The search means we’re tasked with finding people, and the recovery means we have to return them or their remains to a safe zone.
“I have been explicitly ordered not to waste time and resources trying to salvage RVs or other vehicles. That means you’ll have to abandon that Airstream. However, if we can unhitch your truck and drag it out into the cleared section of the highway, you should be able to drive it down One Ninety-One and past the area blanketed by fallout. That will free my unit up enough to get a little farther up the road before this stuff turns into asphalt. Otherwise, you will all have to load up into one of my two Humvees, and we’ll drive you to our staging area in Hoback.”
Jeremy locked eyes with Judy. She nodded, and Jeremy turned back to the captain. “We’ll dig out the back and unhitch immediately and worry about getting the Airstream later. Or not, depending on how this stuff sets. Right now, we need to get out of here.”
“It’s getting a little ripe in here,” Judy added.
“OK, let’s get these things disconnected.” Motioning to a private first class waiting by the vehicles, Captain Bailey ordered, “Private Flinn, give these folks a hand and let’s get ’em headed south.”
“Oh, FYI, Captain,” Jeremy added, “we had to leave a man and woman in a parking lot several miles north of here. I don’t think you will make it that far, and I don’t think they would still be alive even if you did and were able to find them. But I felt like I needed to warn you. How and why we came to abandon them is a long story, and I’ll be glad to fill out a report when we make it back to wherever we’re going, but now you know.”
“We’ll keep an eye out for them, but I don’t think we’ll be able to bust through the ash fallout much farther.”
As Jeremy unhitched the F-250 from the Airstream, Brandon and PFC Flinn unwound a section of steel cable from a winch mounted on the front of one of the two-and-a-half-ton trucks and connected it to tow hooks on the F-250.
Jeremy got behind the wheel of the F-250, started its engine, and put it in gear. At the same time, PFC Flinn activated the winch, which slowly pulled the truck away from the Airstream through the mounds of slushy ash and onto the recently cleared highway. Within minutes the truck was free and ready to roll. Judy shooed the twins into their assigned seats as Sophie, holding Hunter, climbed in as well.
Brandon unhooked the cable, and he and PFC Flinn dutifully rewound it onto the winch. While they were doing so, Captain Bailey retrieved a bright red, five-gallon plastic container of gas from a carrier mounted on the back of his Humvee. He placed the fuel into the bed of the F-250.
“A little gift from Uncle Sam. This should be more than enough to get you past the fallout radius. Stay on One Ninety-One until the road splits north of Hoback. Then take Eighty-Nine all the way to Ogden. Thanks to the volcano cloud pattern and the jet streams, the path will be clear as soon as you cross the gap twenty miles south of Jackson Hole.”
“Thanks for everything, Captain,” Jeremy replied.
“That’s my job, sir. By the way, the president has declared most of Wyoming, the western sections of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and northern Colorado a national disaster. The NRO hasn’t been able to use regular satellite imagery due to the cloud.”
With a puzzled look, Jeremy asked, “NRO?”
“Yeah, sorry, that’s the National Reconnaissance Office, which is part of NSA, the National Security Administration, or as we call it, ‘No Say Anything.’ Anyway, they had to revert to some of their spooky tricks, like the NROL-50 reconnaissance satellite. That stuff is so ultraclassified that they wouldn’t even release the images to the convoy commander. They will get real-time, turn-by-turn directions as they make their way toward Yellowstone. That’s all you folks need to know.
“Now, you best get on your way. My guys and I have a mission to complete, and as we say in the military, the mission isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Captain Bailey slapped the rear window, giving the northwestern US signal to get moving.
Thanks to the pair of double-bladed army snow plows and what was at least a lull in the ashfall, Jeremy was able to drive almost twenty miles an hour on the straight sections of US 191. In less than an hour, the group entered what had once been a tourist mecca, Jackson Hole. Now the area was comprised of dark two-story lumps—buildings caving in from the weight of a five-foot blanket of gray-black volcanic sputum.
Roughly fifteen miles out of Jackson Hole, they passed through a gap in the mountains that had allowed centuries of passage from the plains of Southwest Wyoming through the Tetons and into the Snake River valley.
Just south of that gap, the fallen ash vanished. Just like that. The road in front of the little group was as clear as if nothing had happened. But only a few hundred yards behind them, mounds of pumice were pushed to either side of the road.
“Captain Bailey wasn’t exaggerating when he told us about the jet-stream effect on the volcano cloud,” Brandon mused, looking out the window. “It looks like we will be in for clear sailing, at least for a while.”
Just north of Hoback, the road split into US 191, which veered southeast, and US 89, which headed southwest following the Snake River and its load of ash. Jeremy stayed on 89 as it meandered through Logan and Ogden before ending in Salt Lake City. Along the way, they joined the swelling ranks of tourists and residents fleeing the fury of the formally dormant Yellowstone supervolcano.
Refugees were easy to spot. Their cars and trucks were still covered in crusty blankets of gray and black.
“The scene reminds me of The Grapes of Wrath,” Judy said. “The John Steinbeck novel about the Joad family who fled their repossessed farm in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. They headed for the ‘promised land,’ California.”
Jeremy nodded. He knew the story. The movie starring Henry Fonda was one of Judy’s all-time favorites and always made her cry.
After seeing scores of No Vacancy signs on the small-town hotels along US 89, Judy pulled out her recharged iPhone and found a Holiday Inn Express on the outskirts of Farmington, just north of Salt Lake City.
After everyone had what may well have been record-breaking showers, the group drove to the Costa Vida Mexican restaurant. Brandon, Sophie, and Hunter would be flying out the next day, and a celebratory dinner was in order. As everyone stuffed themselves on sizzling fajitas and homemade tacos, Sophie broached what was clearly an elephant in the room.
“If you two don’t mind my doing so, I’m going to put on my lawyer slash prosecutor hat and give you some unsolicited, pro bono legal advice. I wouldn’t say a word—nada—about the incident that happened when we were running from the eruption. First of all, it was purely self-defense. That animal was getting ready to crack open Judy’s head. Secondly, your pistol was loaded with shotshells, not technically lethal rounds of ammo. In fact, they are downright humane compared to hollow points.
“Lastly, and most importantly, you only wounded the guy. I could go on and on, but trust me, there’s not a DA in the country that would waste time trying to prosecute that case, even if the guy died, and they somehow found his sorry ass, which according to Captain Bradley, they most likely won’t.”
“She’s right,” Brandon added. “You probably saved Judy’s life, and God only knows what he was planning to do with Sophie and the twins once he had the three of us out of the way. This is a perfect example of when it’s wise to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“I appreciate your advice,” Jeremy replied. “That’s pretty much the course of action I had planned to follow. Or I suppose ‘nonaction’ would be a better term. But it’s always good to have your decision legitimized. Especially by a pair of law enforcement experts.”
After dinner, everyone lingered, reminiscing about the events of the last several days and discussing plans for the future. The next morning, Sophie, Brandon, and Hunter would take a hotel shuttle to the airport and fly back to Duluth. Judy, Jeremy, and the twins would run the F-250 through a car wash and begin their trek to Nashville. Everyone hugged one another, sent and accepted Facebook friend requests, and vowed to get together again on a more relaxing vacation.
Four years later, almost to the day, in one of those tragic twists of irony, Jeremy learned that Brandon had been killed when a drug bust got out of control.