The Yellowstone Conundrum

by John Randall

  Regardless, both major US cities were hosed.

  With no power, no phone and most municipal services disconnected, the average homeowner, the average renter, the average person would do nothing. Only the priesent were activists; those who felt fear in their bones; those who felt if I don’t do something NOW I’m going to die. As it turned out, those were the people who had a shot at living.

  Denver, Colorado; photo taken by “hogs555” 29 January 2011 posted on Wikipedia

  Was this Darwin’s theory as experienced in the 21st century? The theory of Evolution, of natural selection at work? Were the ones who stayed behind the weak sisters of human evolution? Were they the slime worms that never made it to shore?

  Evolution said yes.

  Evolution says the strong conquer the weak. Do it enough times and the weak don’t evolve.

  Columbia Generating Plant

  Hanford Nuclear Reservation

  Richland, Washington

  Leon Holt was drenched in his own sweat. He waited for a very long hour in the darkness of the Power Control Room after Andy had left. At least one fire was burning in the cavernous building; irradiated water was flowing unabated in several places. The Columbia Generating Station was about to enter the first phase of meltdown. While the control rods had been automatically inserted into the core in order to stop the process of heating water, which creates steam, which is condensed and piped through large turbines, which spin rapidly (1800 rpm) and create electricity. Unfortunately, the earthquake cut off the supply of water to the reactor core, while at the same time breaking the electrical connection to Bonneville Power. No power, no water, fires inside the building, irradiated water spilling out onto the desert floor, not a good combination.

  Finally, Leon decided to leave his post. Should have gone with Andy. Woulda coulda. The reactor core needed immediate attention and was receiving none. Staggering, Leon made his way toward the same exit door Andy had used; opening the door he stepped outside and had a front row seat to God’s Revenge; a halucigenic kaleidascope of death.

  Giant puffy fingers of radioactive sludge filled the sky above him up to 1500 feet and on to the western horizon; orange, red, yellow, purple, black—all mixed together like a child’s paintbox. In the near distance a cloud was fast approaching the Columbia Generating Station. The eastern sun shone on to the cloud as it approached, giving the falling red dust a vibrant tinge. Other clouds were moving above the desert floor, depositing the heaviest of the irradiated material as they headed toward the tri-cities area.

  Now showing at a nuclear facility in your area: Nightmare on the Columbia River. The earth shook as several tanks reached critical stage, as if egged on by earlier explosions; massive explosions sent shock waves in all directions and more nuclear crap high into the air.

  Leon began to run as fast as his 42-year old legs would take him; across the expanse of the 50s-style nuclear plant. Too late, dude. It was like watching a rainstorm approach from across a valley.

  Chinka chinka chinka chinka.

  Leon could hear the irradiated particles of 50-year old sludge as it began falling to earth. He let out a cry of dispair as the first particles landed on his shoulders and in his hair; “Get off me! No!” He started to choke as the red dust became heavier, as if God was saying here, eat this. Inhaling the leading edge of the red dust, his lungs quickly filling with particles of uranium-238, uranium-239, neptunium-239, iodine-131, Cesium-137 and good old strontium-90. He never made it to his car, falling dead on the pavement, mercifully suffocating on the dust instead of enduring a very painful two-day death by radiation poisoning, where the body simply bleeds out into irradiated goo.

  As the explosions continued at the 200-West tank farms, the leading edge of the massively irradiated clouds began dropping death bombs on the Columbia Generating Station, then across the Columbia River to Franklin, Adams and Walla Walla Counties. Within two hours the clouds would reach Spokane; by six p.m. the jet stream would have taken it up to British Columbia and Alberta, then a hard southern turn along the east side of the Rocky Mountains in Montana where it would meet the rampaging effluent from the Yellowstone caldera explosion by tomorrow morning, Day 2.

  Half-way across Washington county road number 24, headed from disaster to nowhere, then on to Yakima, Andy Everett pulled off the side of the road, stopped and got out of his car. The wind blew steadily from the west. The Cascades rose sharply in the distance to the west, but covered in clouds. Behind him the sky was lit up like a weird 4th of July; instead of popping and disappearing, the sky lingered in multiple colors. Now a grown man of 29, Andy began to cry and he didn’t understand why. His base of reference had been thrown off its axis. That which was comfortable was now death. There was no life left at Hanford, or the Tri-Cities. Richland and his apartment would be uninhabitable. Andy knew what was in the clouds. Washington State would be changed forever in his lifetime, probably for several hundred years.

  No more moo-cows, no more milk, no more corn, no more wheat. The irradiation from the Hanford disaster would primarily fall onto a swath of land several hundred miles in width, across Idaho, into Montana and from there; well, who knew where?

  You can’t go home again. Try that one on for size. You go to work in the morning and by God’s grace you escape disaster—and you can’t go home again. The laws of nature have changed.

  OK, Andy boy, where are you going? Instinctively he reached for his cell phone and tried to make a connection. No network available. Yeah, well. OK. No network available. Who would I call?

  I should have stayed. It was your job to stay. They all stayed.

  And they’re all dead by now.

  A story from his dad popped into his brain. It was one of those going-to-be-a-man stories that dads tell to their sons.

  I was living in Los Angeles in 1968, fresh out of college. The draft had been on for four years now and they were getting down to the nitty-gritty. They’d pretty much drafted everyone they could, now they were getting to the dregs. I’d been bailed out by flat feet and migraine headaches; Jesus, I had those headaches. Nothing worked but eight hours of darkness and throwing up. It wasn’t possible that I could go carry a rifle and waddle my way through a rice paddy, all the while having a migraine. I was a bit overweight when I was younger, not like now. For the first couple of years after I graduated from college on the exemption I made it through; flat feet and migraines. My number was 121, at some point in time I was going to be toast. At some point in time the US government was going to take first- and second-year college graduates who were working in their first post-college job, haul them off and make soldiers out of them because they ran out of warm bodies. The fine, the fit, the athletic, they’d all been picked for boot camp. They’d all been hauled off to Dick Tron or Won Fuck Won, or some place in between.

  And by God, they did. The Army came after every young male it could find. We all had registered. Our exemptions were gone. Hell no I won’t go, well, that wasn’t my mantra. Shit, I didn’t have a mantra, or knew what one was. Later they’d make a movie about me, Dead Cow Walking. I was the fat kid who was going to be in the next coffin returning to the United States; I smoked, I drank too much, I was overweight and clueless.

  After graduation in Pennsylvania I moved to Los Angeles and got a job with a technology company who was hiring warm bodies off the street. Breathing? Come on in. $650/month. In 1965 that was a good paycheck for a 21-year old.

  But the government, God bless the government, and it’s efficiency, slow but relentlessly grinding away, like a steamroller over tarred gravel, gonna mow you down.

  Even though I had moved across country to California, they found me. The letter from the Selective Service System arrived. Welcome! Please report for your physical examination on February 3rd. Report to bla-bla-bla. Oh, man. I’m so fucked. I remember, I wore a coat and tie! This was 1968 after all and I’d been out of college for 18 months, married for 20 months. The office was downtown LA, a foreign country for someone from Pla
ya Del Rey, a rich beach community where we were renting our third apartment; a standard 24-unit two floor apartment building, now since torn down.

  So I show up in coat and tie, only not at the front door. I can’t find a fucking parking place on the street, so I circle the block and park behind the SS building, then wander/waddle in through the back door, down the hallway, then into the light of the front part of the building where I stand in line with hundreds of other mostly white guys, wait for a scary military guy to search through various folders. Where you from? New Jersey, I replied. By miracle he went to another set of manila folders, quickly thumbed through them and came up with my folder. Why couldn’t I have said Mars? Or North Dakota.

  My whole life was in the folder. Everything. Including the time I thought my wife and I were pregnant in college. Jeeze I wish we were. All the doctor’s notes from college; my grades for Christ’s sake, and the conclusion was: I was Army meat.

  Once in line I went from station to station, right behind the other white meat in front of me. Naked except for tighty-whities, there was no difference between any of us, except we were all the flabbies. The lean, the mean, the fighting machines, well, they’d all be selected and were already fighting the Viet Cong. My last chance was the neurologist; my chart flashed a history of migraine headaches. “You look OK to me, son,” was his sage advice. “But, sir, I’ve had migraines since I was eight years old.”

  “Well, stop drinking red wine,” he said plainly, obviously tired.

  And that was it. His assistant handed me my papers and told me to follow the other recruit, do downstairs and hand my papers to the sergeant at the desk.

  Well, I didn’t do that. Something, I don’t know what, got in the way. It was a hidden survival instinct. I didn’t trundle on down the well-worn steps down to the first floor. Instead, I tucked the folder underneath my sports jacket, stuffed it right up to my armpits, and went down the back stairway to the first floor, took an immediate left-hand turn and was out the door, into the rear parking lot behind Figerora Street. The lot was virtually empty, nobody collecting tolls. I found my car, got in and headed toward Playa Del Rey where we were renting a two-bedroom, one bath apartment on Manchester Avenue. I was shaking the whole time.

  What had I done? I’d played fuck-me with the United States government.

  I pulled into our apartment building, got out and stumbled to the rear, to where the garbage cans were stacked in lines. The folder, my folder, burned like hot coals in my hand. I riffled through the notes. I was going to be on the airplane to Viet Nam for sure.

  I pulled a Bic lighter from my pocket and instead of lighting up a Pall Mall from my other pocket, flicked my Bic and lit fire to my Selective Service records, long may they fucking burn. I held the mess in my hands until every last piece of paper was burned, including the outside folders. It was 1:30 in the aftenroon on a sunny LA day. My wife was at work. ’m not sure what I did the rest of the day. I was scared to death. I never served because I no longer existed in the system. Instead of being on a computer disk someplace, the Selective Service relied on paper files. I might have been on a computer in New Jersey but after moving to California, my records were all paper.

  It was 1969 and I would have been dead meat, Cong chow. Probably shot by my own because I was too slow, too fat and had headaches.

  But, it never happened. Instead, I saved my life. It’s too much to think of sure death and all the things not done in life. Everybody touches everybody else somehow. How many people will I affect in my lifetime; good and bad? Hundreds? Thousands?

  That was my dad, Andy thought. But, I’ve never been quite sure if it was him or someone else. The story was a good one. Go with your gut. Self preservation. Don’t depend on anyone else to save your skin. Life is all you have. Death is nothing, nada. When the nuts get crushed either you are the nut or the crush. Don’t depend on anyone else to bail you out. ou are the one in control of your life.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Andy said, wearily. He was in the middle of the desert in Yakima County, Washington on highway 24, headed toward Yakima through the wine country. He came to the crest of a hill. The Cascades ahead of him were snow-capped. Straight ahead of him was the giant, Mt. Rainier—rising above 14,000 feet, completely covered in snow.

  Where the fuck am I going to go?

  McCone County, Montana

  “Charley, the Fort Peck Dam is gone. The Missouri River is running downhill from here into North Dakota and a month from now it’s going to destroy New Orleans. I’m not sure what I can do,” from the passenger seat Robert tried to explain what had happened.

  Driving like a bat out of hell, Charley constantly gave Robert looks to the side like he had a ghost in the passenger seat. The image of three buffalo protecting his former boss, who might as well have been dropped from the planet Xenon, was jaw-dropping. His momma (the slut) might have told him he was catching flies, so great was his astonishment. At this very moment if Charley had been told that Robert O’Brien, Secretary of the Bureau of Reclamation, was Jesus Christ walking the earth again, he would have nodded and shouted praise, Jesus.

  Charley was driving north, back on highway 24 toward the dam.

  “We can’t go there,” Robert started. “We need to go east, that way,” Robert pointed to the right.

  “I can do that,” and soon as he said it, he turned right onto highway 528 which appeared out of nowhere. The junction of highway 528 and state 24 was dead smack in the middle of nowhere.

  Charley turned right, hard going too fast but quickly settled in. His passenger, Jesus Christ Himself, nodded and pointed straight ahead. In all directions there was nothing but flat; no trees, no hills to define, a huge sky; in the distance were buffalo, just out of eyesight; nodding their huge heads up and down in an OK dude formation.

  Charley put the petal to the medal and raced across eastern Montana toward the advancing darkness, window down, the cold morning air whipping through the Blazer as if it really didn’t matter. Robert O’Brien found the air to be exhilerating. A half hour ago I was dead. Two hours ago Slim Jim was dead. Why aren’t I dead?

  Sweet Nancy. I’m still here.

  The town of Wolf Point, Montana, where city counsel meetings are held the third Monday of every month, was an early established “fort” for the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803. Wild as a wooley bear and as eye-catching a place in the northwest US as there could be, Wolf Point, Montana on the morning of February 20th was about to be a Federal disaster center.

  “Wolf Point got its name from the fact that one winter the wolfers killed such a large number of wolves that they froze before the skins could be removed. The frozen carcasses were piled near the river to wait the coming of spring and the pile was so high, it became a landmark for all the country around.”

  Wolf Point, Montana was the first community to experience the rolling destruction of the Missouri River as it started its three-month tour to rip the heart out of the United States of America, to split the country in two.

  Across and south of the river Charley Lame Deer was driving like a mad man out of hell long along highway 528; it was Toad’s Mad Ride with Charley as Toad and Robert O’Brien as poor Ratty. The hardscrabble road slithered along and across a treeless expanse of empty prairie, over rises, up and down gullies, only to straighten out for fifty yards or so, then dive down into another gully; it was empty only in the sense that there were no trees, nothing but rolling grass; Kevin Cosner would be just over the next hill, a sneer on his lips; behind him would be Robert Duval, ready to kick ass if anyone got in the way of him bringing his cattle to graze north.

  Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit Robert’s brain shouted.

  Where the hell am I going?

  The Missouri River was headed downstream at 4 miles per hour, just as fast as a Roger Bannister ran the first 4-minute mile; except the Missouri River was doing the second mile just as fast; and the third; and the fourth. The river began to wander, the water began to slosh up against the snake-
like oxbow undulations of the opposing buttes, as it descended through McCone County, back and forth, back and forth; tiny tsunamis dashing across the river reverberating, the water getting angrier as nature’s high lands dictated the flow of the river, falling 300 feet from 2200 elevation at Fort Peck Dam.

  Then, just west of Wolf Point the land began to level off. The Missouri had a chance to breathe.

  Wolf Point MT Permission granted from Dave Arndt from web page www.d48.net/wp/

  Charlie Lame Deer barely slowed down as he reached the intersection with state route 13, 112-mile connection between Circle, Montana and the Canadian Border. Turning left Charlie raced toward the Wolf Point Bridge (also called the Lewis and Clark Bridge), an old-fashioned truss bridge that looked like it had been built by adults using Tinker Toys, fashionable for the 30’s; two lanes with a center support on the southern bank of the Missouri River that stretched another two hundred yards across a flood plain. The bridge, now 84 years old was one of the 80,000 pieces of Old Stuff the National Register of Historical Places (NRHP, an actual Federal government agency) kept track of; or an Hysterical Monument his dad used to say; a brief smile crossed Robert’s lips.

  Now more carefully, Charley Lame Deer crossed the narrow two-lane bridge and without being told to, stopped in the middle of the bridge. There was no traffic in either direction. It was a cold February morning; the trees along the Missouri’s banks were devoid of leaves, with not even a hint of buds trying to burst in the 10 degree afternoon heat wave. Charley and Robert got out of the Blazer and stood on the western side. Below them the Missouri lazily made its way downstream; the water a chilly 33 degrees. Along both banks of the mighty river ice had formed in the still waters, crusting the river with a five-day beard.