The (Possible) Paranoias of Lehi Smith
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
They said the immediate kill zone would spread radially for 200 miles. From northwestern Wyoming, to northern Utah, southwestern Montana, and the eastern side of Idaho. Molten lava would kill anyone in the direct vicinity as it spread through channels in the earth like a flash flood. Thick viscous rapids of dark-red, black, and bright-orange lava would cascade, serpentine-like, through the forest, fields, and valleys. Pyroclastic flows of up to 430 miles per hours would flatten everything as people’s lungs filled with poisonous gas and ash. The exploding caldera might even flash-heat people to death as Pompeian fossils for future generations to discover. And those were the easy deaths—instant.
The tephra—a mixture of ash and volcanic rock—was the bigger problem. It would cover crops like a heavy snowfall and catch in the engines of airplanes like a billion little birds—effectively shutting down air travel and agricultural production for months, maybe years. Water sources across North America would be poisoned. All ground water and wells polluted for years to come. The grid itself might go down. Lahars of mud and scalding hot water would course through river valleys cutting off roads and infecting rivers with debris and volcanic material.
As the ash spread into the atmosphere it would soon eclipse the sun, setting off a volcanic winter, a global ice age, altering the cycle of the earth’s seasons. Salt Lake City itself would be covered in ten to thirty centimeters of ash. For underneath Yellowstone National Park lay a large caldera, a magma chamber, a subterranean Supervolcano, poised to erupt. And if it did, day would turn into night. There would be no electricity, no internet. No water. No sun.
For many years this caldera, this huge caldera, stretching thirty by forty-five miles and containing enough molten lava to fill the Grand Canyon ten times over, had heated orange and blue acid pools and shimmering hot springs. It boiled water from deep beneath the earth and sent it blasting through small holes in the earth’s crust like the popping of a champagne bottle.
And now this morning, the color code for this very same Yellowstone Supervolcano had been upgraded from Green, or “Normal,” to Yellow, or “Advisory.” Code Yellow meant that the volcano was “exhibiting signs of elevated unrest above known background level.” (Green was the lowest code color, followed by yellow, orange, and then red). A small chain of earthquakes had roiled the region.
Lehi Smith read this news alert on his phone next to the sink in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil so he could make coffee. What Lee should have been thinking about was the wildfire evacuation they were currently in the midst of, but Lee couldn’t help himself. Lee had evacuated from wildfires before; they were nothing (and this one was still a few miles away). But a volcano, now that was something!
VOLCANO OBSERVATORY WEEKLY UPDATE
U.S. Geological Survey
Saturday 12:44 PM PDT (Sunday 19:44 UTC)
Yellowstone
Current Volcano Alert Level: ADVISORY
Current Aviation Color Code: YELLOW
Activity Update: Low-level unrest at the Yellowstone Caldera has continued over the past week. Satellite and web camera observations of the volcano have been obscured by clouds for portions of the week, but clear views showed a small steam plume from the summit on three days this week and minor elevated surface temperatures were observed. The level of seismic activity remains above known background level, with nearly continuous weak-tremor and occasional low-frequency earthquakes occurring over the past week. No evidence of eruptive activity has been observed this week.
Although the current level of unrest at the volcano remains low, it is possible for activity to escalate at any time with little warning. Thus, ash emission, lava effusion, and the possibility of lahars in the drainages extending from the volcano remain plausible outcomes of escalating unrest.
The U.S. Geological Survey and Yellowstone Volcano Observatory continue to monitor this closely and will issue additional updates and changes in alert level as warranted.
Lee had both a Google alert and a USGS or VNS alert set on his phone for any news involving the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Mostly it was a lot of non- or misinformation. Noninformation from the USGS and misinformation from Google and conspiracy theorists. But today, today! he was finally met by something exciting, straight from the U.S. Geological Societies Volcano Notification System!
While Lee waited for the water, he took a bite of Crown burger from the night before and dunked a handful of cold fries into a small white bowl of fry sauce. As he lifted the cold, soggy fries to his mouth, a small dab of sauce splashed onto the otherwise pristine screen of his smartphone.
“Shit,” he muttered.
He got up to grab a paper towel to clean his phone, then proceeded to finish packing some items from the kitchen (cast-iron skillet, Dutch oven, spatula, water bottles) pausing for a few brief but hurried seconds at a time to take a bite of his “breakfast,” and then finally make a Chemex once the water was heated. His wife Becca and his newborn daughter, Analise, were in their bedroom packing, nearly ready to go.
Lee ground the beans, wet the filter, and began pouring, his mind cranking in full force. Lee felt a pulse of excitement and adrenaline as they prepared to leave. He was, he guessed you could say, something of a prepper. His whole life he’d been preparing for something like the Yellowstone Supervolcano to explode. He wasn’t, like, crazy, or anything. At least, he didn’t think so. He just liked to be prepared.
A crazy person was a crazy person. A prepper was prepared.
Becca was nervous, he could tell, but that was more because of the baby than anything. This wildfire evacuation would be like a mini-test for them.
Lee finished brewing the coffee, poured it into a thermos, and pulled out his phone one last time to check the weather. In truth, Lee wanted the Yellowstone Supervolcano to explode. He wanted it to explode because he thought in the long run it would be good for humanity and the earth. In the short term it would be bad, yes, really bad, of course, but in the long run carbon emissions would be lowered, animals would return, and lives, yes, actual human lives would be saved! Just look at what happened with the last global pandemic—carbon emissions down, deer running through Michigan suburbs—because it was humans and corporations and how they treated the earth that was the true virus on the planet.
Lee was an anarcho-primitivist, he guessed, if you had to put labels on it. One who thought that society was mean to live in tribes and not a mass-produced technological society of suburbs and strip malls and alienation, where polarization caused by social media algorithms led to upending democracy and increasing isolation. Lee thought something as big as a Supervolcano might return society to a more tribal structure.
Yet, to Lee’s disappointment, he knew most of the scientists and volcanologists cautioned that Yellowstone might not necessarily explode in such a cinematic and apocalyptic fashion. It might never explode, or not for hundreds of years. It might simply ooze lava like fresh toothpaste in a fairly harmless manner, as Kilauea did some years ago in Hawai’i.
There were over 160 active volcanoes in the world after all, forty-five of which were currently erupting, and yet, the world went on. Real life was rarely as dramatic as Hollywood movies; it was subtler and more complicated, crueler and more dangerous, and more monotonous than any fiction. Yet nature was indifferent to our politics, schemes, and plots. Still, Lee wondered, didn’t these things always mean something? What was the Earth trying to tell us?
As Lee ran downstairs to grab the camping stove and some propane, he heard a tiny scream from Analise. It was almost time for her mid-morning nap. They needed to get on the road, soon.
Downstairs Lee grabbed the camping stove and tried to decide what instant meals to bring from their emergency meal supply kit. Scrambled eggs with ham and peppers or granola with milk and blueberries? Porque no los dos? He heard the front door open and shut.
It wasn’t just Supervolcanos and wildfires, though. All over the western United States that summer, the air swelled with heat and the leaves fell to the ground and combusted. The water supply stretched thin, and people from the Southwest migrated to forests in the North as the planet grew angrier. Forest fires blazed from California to the Arctic. Dust storms blew frequently. The rich were moving to New Zealand and Canada.
But no one really wanted to stop what they were doing to combat the threat of climate change or another pandemic or ecological disaster, or at least, had the wealth or luxury to do so. There were practical concerns, after all. For businesses and banks and lenders and credit agencies. Mortgage solvency, for one. What if people abandoned their houses and second cars and mortgage payments? What if you owned a business? The economy would shutter, again. Best to go about business as usual. We didn’t want another recession.
The threat of an apocalypse might mean big money for the entertainment world, but it signaled death for the economy and even literal death for millions of others.
Why were we so fascinated with the end of the world? Did we secretly desire it?
Even though everyone else might be unsure if something that had been predicted for many years was actually here to call humanity to awe and repentance, Lee wasn’t. Despite the advice of volcanologists and men and women from the U.S. Geological Society for many years to stay calm, despite the one in 700,000 chance of such occurrence, Lee was sure this was it. Perhaps humanity deserved such a fate. Perhaps it would be a sudden mercy. Perhaps—“Lee!”
A voice from upstairs woke him from his troubled thoughts.
“Lee! We need to go, now!”
* * *
“Well, where to?” Lee asked, after they turned onto the main highway. A few moments of silence between them to collect their thoughts.
“I don’t know,” said Becca, rubbing her eyes. “I just want to go somewhere and chill.”
“We could do that,” said Lee, taking a sip from his coffee mug. “Like a beach?”
“Sure, yeah, we could go to a beach . . . in Utah,” said Becca, rolling her eyes.
“Oh, also, that reminds me, do you want to stay with my parents tonight? Or your mom or maybe your brother? I need to call one of them to let them know we’re coming.”
“I really just, this sounds bad I know, but could we just get a hotel tonight with the three of us?”
“You mean the four of us?”
“Four?”
“The dog! You always forget about the dog now.”
Becca rolled her eyes, again.
“Yeah, four, okay. I just, don’t you think a hotel would be nice?”
Lee raised his eyebrows.
“Come on. It’ll be like a Wildfire-Evacuation-Staycation,” said Becca, her eyes all wild and excited.
“Well,” said Lee, pausing, “I actually think that’s a great idea!”
“Then for once we’re in agreement.”
“For once.”
Lee nodded and smiled. They drove past the turnoff for Promontory Point—the site where the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869, creating the world’s first transcontinental railroad, built primarily, he knew, by 12,000 Chinese and Japanese immigrants. Past the turnoff for the Spiral Jetty, an art installation that curved like a spiraling hook into the salt-filled lake. Past the boxed and chained stores, headed south.
Lee, despite the evacuation, was excited. His whole life he had wanted to be whisked off on some magical adventure. To be a character in The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or maybe even just live a couple hundred years ago and be some sort of frontiersman. Live during a time when everything was more visceral and life-or-death. Modern life was not filled with great struggles of such clear-cut good and evil, and survival. Or, perhaps it was; it was just different. The same evils existed, but now it all just involved a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy and waiting in lines. You voted and lobbied and wrote to your congressman perhaps, maybe protested. Yet the monsters of the day were corrupt politicians and corporations and systemic injustices. One had to be fluent in words like “data mining” and “algorithms.” Your battles and fights were not against dark lords but with racism, mental health, pornography, drug abuse, white nationalism, and capitalism. Things you could not exactly fix by charging at them with a battle axe or tomahawk. No wonder alienated and disaffected individuals picked up guns to shoot. But volcanos were prehistoric, otherworldly.
They drove south on I-5. Becca scrolled through her phone and Analise was now asleep. The whole of Utah stretched out before them.
Growing up, Lee couldn’t wait to get married and have kids. Now he felt as if being a husband and a father was a pleasant, but stifling, burden. When he was young, he could never understand how men could leave their wives and children and start life in another part of the country. Now he could understand it all too well. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his family. It wasn’t even that he missed his freedom or nights out drinking and partying (what few he’d had after leaving the Church). It was something more primal, something within him that called him to distance himself from everyone and everything for the sake of survival and his own mental health. Something about how a wife and a child seemed to wrap and compress around Lee’s body like a boa constrictor. Or maybe this is just how one got rid of one’s own selfishness—the way snakes shed their skin.