by Hughey, J.
I stalled for time, pretending to write some final notes in my binder. Most students used laptops or electronic tablets, but last year I figured out writing my notes by hand transferred the info to my amnesiac cranium.
A few studious souls asked Boone questions. He answered what he could quickly and reminded them he held study sessions on Monday and Wednesday afternoons. Those sessions happened to overlap with football practice—coincidence?—and I wondered what he did on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.
I folded the desktop down along the side of the seat and shoved my stuff in my green and purple paisley messenger bag. Boone came over to sit in the chair next to me. He rotated a little, so that, above my bag, his knee touched mine. He leaned forward on his thighs again.
“You’re starting to freak me out,” I said. He looked like he was going to tell me someone had died, but he didn’t know anyone in my family, and surely the Dean of Students would not give him the responsibility of passing on bad news after three weeks of talking.
“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t decide if I’m freaked out or not.” He took a deep breath. “Yellowstone is erupting.”
I stared at him, not a flicker of comprehension illuminating my dim-bulb mind. Nothing. “Yellowstone? The place with the, umm, geysers?” Obviously I’d heard of Yellowstone, never been there, not sure I could place it on a map in the murky part of the U.S. between where I lived and Hollywood.
“Yeah. Yellowstone sits over a hotspot that’s been around for millions of years.”
“Instead of steaming it’s now erupting? As in lava erupting?” We’d covered igneous rocks in a very general way already so I knew hot liquefied rock below the ground was called magma and, when it erupted, became lava.
“Dr. Potter says nobody knows what it’s doing. It blew this morning. I mean explosively blew. All the local sensors went offline. Satellite pictures show a big brown cloud of dust. Like two hundred miles across.”
Boone’s voice shook a fraction. I put my hand on his forearm. He sat back so he could hold it in his.
I asked, “Do you have friends out there, or family?”
“Not close. Dr. Potter knows I’m from Nebraska. He asked me where—made me point to it on a map. He said my family might want to stockpile supplies, or better yet, leave.” He paused, prompting me to scoot to the edge of my seat. “My house is nine hundred miles away from Yellowstone, Violet.”
“Are you serious?”
“He says if it does anything close to what it’s done in the past, thirty percent of the U.S. is pretty well screwed.”
I rifled through my bag to find my tablet. “Show me,” I said. “I need to see a map or something.”
“C’mon,” he said. He took me to Dr. Potter’s office. The professor ignored us. He jabbed his finger at his cell phone to enter a text message. The screen of his laptop glowed with a cascade of open program windows, and his iPad bonged with an incoming email tone. His finger did not pause when Boone led me to an ancient roller-shade map of the US.
“Yellowstone is here. Dr. Potter drew this red circle this morning.”
That’s not coming off any time soon, I thought as I studied the thick line of scarlet Sharpie.
“The last eruption basically obliterated everything within this oval.”
“When?”
“Six hundred thirty thousand years ago,” Dr. Potter muttered. His trendy rectangular glasses sat askew on his nose. He swept his hand toward his laptop’s screen in a disgusted now-look-what-you’ve done gesture. I circled around his desk to see images more current than the one offered by the cartographic fossil on the wall.
A dark mess of chocolate pudding plopped in the midst of the whipped topping clouds of a satellite loop. The mass burgeoned over the northwestern U.S., dry pudding mix edges caught and swept east by the prevailing winds.
Anyone with a grandpa who blares Weather Watcher on the TV all day knows weather moves east.
Apparently, crap shot into the air by Yellowstone moves east, too.
I studied the image until I found the familiar outline of Indiana. Almost due east, but far, far away from the pudding. This couldn’t possibly impact home.
“Where’s your family?” I asked Boone. On the old map he pointed to the southeast corner of a rectangle with an undulating eastern edge and a western corner chewed off by Colorado.
Dr. Potter grunted. “My wife is in friggin’ Rapid City, South Dakota.” He aimed a pen at a spot enjoying sunny skies at the moment yet precariously close to the encroaching volcanic cloud. “She thought it was a good time to take the baby to meet her sister since I’m always so distracted at the beginning of term. I called her the minute I got the first alert from USGS. Barely seven a.m. out there, and I’m telling her to get the hell out, to drive north or south before she turned east, and I’m not sure she believed me. Now the circuits are all busy. No text, no cell, no landline.” He looked at Boone. “Did you call home yet?”
Boone nodded. “I told them what you said. I forgot my brother is on a hiking trip in Alaska. He’s off the grid. It’s just my parents. I mean, they have friends around, but they’re alone.”
“The ash will be there soon, and this isn’t some thunderstorm that’ll blow through in a few hours.” I wasn’t sure if he spoke of South Dakota or Nebraska and, when he thrust his fingers in his hair like he would pull out chunks by the roots, I decided not to ask.
Well, no wonder Boone flipped out this morning. Dr. Potter gave a wicked mind job. The sense of doom made me want to find a bomb shelter, or better, an end-of-days prepper to move in with. Sell my skinny body for a cot in an underground bunker. “Is it still erupting?” I asked.
Dr. Potter zoomed in on the center of the pudding. “The ejecta obscures the caldera, but I’d say yes.”
I understood the last four words more than the beginning part. “What about the people?” I pointed at the dark circle on the satellite.
He cringed. “Dead or dying. I hope I’m wrong,” he added quickly. “The initial blast, though, would be devastating—look at the rate of expansion in between those first two images—and you can see what that ash cloud is like.”
“Ash?”
“The initial pressure wave may have leveled a hundred miles or so, depending on topography,” he said. “That’s followed by ash, maybe still mixed with gasses, dirt and debris. Not much fun to breathe and falling like snow. It’s probably dark as night and those poor people have no idea what’s going on. If some at the edge saw it coming, they might at least know what direction to try to run. The periphery may now be survivable.” He tugged at his hair again.
I shuddered. My mom had tortured me one Saturday night by watching a documentary about Pompeii. I remembered casts of bodies trapped in the inescapable ash, mannequins forever caught in the poses of death by suffocation. “That part will stop, though, right? I mean, a volcano mostly makes lava and that can only affect the area already ruined, right?”
He shook his head as he clicked over the other windows opened in his browser, finally finding a map of North America with some oblong shapes drawn over the west. “This is what the stratigraphic history shows from previous eruptions. This dark oval is ash coverage from two million years ago, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to Iowa, Montana to Texas. This lighter gray one, from 630,000 years ago, stretched from Oregon to Iowa again, and from the Dakotas to Mexico.”
I glanced up at Boone. He had obviously seen this before and knew those long ago eruptions totally covered Nebraska.
“Now, this doesn’t mean these areas were devastated,” Dr. Potter added. “Only that there is a detectable layer of ash in the geologic record. In modern U.S. history, the only experience we have is with Mt. St. Helens. A ten-hour eruption ejected 1.3 cubic kilometers of ash and about a tenth of a cubic kilometer of pyroclastic material. So, let’s be generous and say it produced 1.5 cubic kilometers of ejecta in 1980.” A map showed a bright yellow area around the black dot of Mt. St. Helens with some small orange a
reas. The map key said the orange areas had received from five inches to a quarter-inch of ash. The yellow, less than a quarter inch. He continued reciting statistics. “The Yellowstone eruption 630,000 years ago produced an estimated 1,000 cubic kilometers of ejecta. The one 2.1 million years ago produced 2,500 cubic kilometers.”
“Wait, did you say 1.5 cubic kilometers versus 1,000 cubic kilometers?” I said. Here we go with all those zeroes again, I thought.
He nodded.
I knew a cubic-something meant in three dimensions, like a child’s block. But cubic kilometers? One thousand of them? I couldn’t wrap my head around the scale.
I searched Google on my phone, requested the route home with a shaking finger. Four hundred miles. 400 miles equals…. Then I selected the autofill for 400 miles equals how many kilometers. 643.7376. So, the seven-hour drive from Sycamore Springs, Indiana, to Case, Pennsylvania didn’t equal one side of the block of crap potentially spewing into the air. “And that will be all ash, shooting up in the atmosphere?” I asked, feeling a little faint.
“Even if most of it’s lava,” the professor said, “there’ll be an ash component, and any percentage of a thousand cubic kilometers is a shedload. All the volcanologists who know Yellowstone are saying the same thing—if this eruption continues, it isn’t going to sit there and simmer. The way it erupted, almost without warning, how every single sensor in the entire region went offline at the same instant indicates this thing has popped its cork with an almost unfathomable amount of energy behind it.”
“Are we all gonna die?” I asked, feeling like the useless, helpless, clueless peon who perished first in every natural disaster flick I’d ever seen.
His head swiveled, and he looked at me, stricken as he realized he was like a fireman yelling “Fire!” in a burning elementary school. “Where’s home?”
“Indiana.” I figured on the global scale of things—on the scale of 1,000 cubic kilometers of ejecta, for example—the name of the town probably didn’t matter.
“Your family’s safe for now. The jet stream will probably carry the worst of this north, along the Canadian border, for the next few days, at least.”
I looked at Boone’s map. The Dakotas and Dr. Potter’s family waited right on that path. Hopefully, the eruption will stop. It has to stop. The mind of the elementary student produced those words, not the knowledge of the fireman.
Boone and I held hands to give and receive comfort vibes until we stopped on the steps beneath the arched porch of the earth science building. I felt like I should stay with him, but we both still had classes. Our lives continued, oddly enough.
A little ash, if it ever drifted this far, couldn’t disturb our campus routine. The Mt. St. Helens map had shown “Trace to ¼ inch” in the farthest reaches of the ash fallout. It would be like snow flurries to us, not the instant black blizzard those poor people near the eruption experienced.
“You talked to your parents?” I said.
“Yep.”
“Maybe they’re on their way east already.”
“I doubt it,” he said, aggravated. “My dad won’t leave the cattle. Damn, I wish Drew was there.” He looked across campus for a moment then back at me. “I don’t know why I dragged you into this. Dr. Potter was so weirded out when I came in. He made it sound like this could become a major problem.”
I nodded, now familiar with the freak-out potential of Dr. Potter. “I’m glad you told me. And I know you’re really worried so if you need to talk later, or when you hear something, text me. Or stop by. Whatever.”
“Thanks, Violet,” he said with a lopsided curve of his lips that didn’t reach his eyes. He brushed a little kiss on my mouth. I smiled, glad he’d definitely not ended our three weeks of talking.
“Hey.” I touched his stubbly cheek. “I mean it. Let me know about your family, okay?”
I watched him walk away, and my thoughts staggered in the fashion of drunk fraternity brothers, each on its own erratic route. Everything about Boone elated me. Out west, the ground shook and exploded, heedless of the fragile humans in its path. I needed to do some calculus problems before my one o'clock class. I wanted to talk to my mom.
Wait. Where had that come from?
I wandered back to the dorm room. Mia’d already left for her eleven o’clock so I lugged my calculus book to the empty lounge to watch the TV coverage. After five minutes, I muted the sound and hit speed dial for The Perch. My home phone.
Caller ID worked its magic. “Morning, Violet. This is a nice surprise,” Mom chirped.
“Hi, Mom. Hey, have you checked the news today?”
“Not yet. I’ve been washing the outside of the windows. My spring cleaning never got done, and I’m not sure the fall cleaning last year got done, either,” she said with a laugh. “Now you’ve given me a welcome excuse to take a break. What’s up?” She suddenly sounded cautious. “You didn’t have one of those school shooters, did you?”
“No, nothing like that. It’s something my geology professor told me today…well, he told the TA, Boone, who then told me…Yellowstone is erupting.”
She sort of breathed the word Yellowstone in a way that made my scalp prickle. “Are you serious? Wait. I’m turning on the TV.” Through her silence I heard the sudden babble of a news channel. “Oh my God.”
I had expected Mom to reassure me. That’s what mothers did, right?
“Oh, Violet.” I could hear concern in her voice. She paused again. “Oh, no. What did your professor say?”
“He said it’s bad. He called it a mega caldera. He said all his volcano dude friends are saying it has a lot of energy. Every sensor in the area is gone.”
“Geez, Louise, this thing is huge,” Mom said.
“Yeah.”
“Did you see the satellite?”
“Yeah.”
I could hear her fingers clicking on her keyboard now. She’d gone into science mode, and she didn’t need me on the other end of the phone for that.
“Okay, Mom, I thought you should know.”
The clicking stopped. “Hey, Violet?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for calling. Thanks for making sure we knew. This is important. Like altering-things-on-a-global-scale important. I’m gonna go get some extra supplies for here. You and Mia make sure you have enough food and water for a few days in your room. And batteries. Oh, I wish you were closer to home, sweetie.”
“Mom, I’m farther from this thing than you are.”
“True. Okay. Good. I know you’re a smart girl. You’ll be fine. Is everything still good there?”
“Yeah, everything’s great. Most of the kids haven’t heard yet.”
“Figures. Okay, be smart. People act weird during a crisis.”
Yeah, like you. “Say hi to Daddy and Sara for me.”
“Will do. I love you. Thanks again for calling me. Let’s keep each other posted, okay?”
“Okay. Bye.” I didn’t like to say I love you. Not to anybody, really. I did love people, of course, as a little secret I held deep inside, not something to blurt out to the universe. My feelings were not volcanic ejecta forced out of me by unfathomable energy.
Daddy texted me fifteen minutes later.
Text from Dad:
Dad worked as a sales rep for a dental supplies company. It sounds lame, like he sells little spools of dental floss or something. But he also sells expensive, complicated equipment like x-ray machines, and with everything going digital, he’d had to learn a ton of stuff since I started high school. The worst part is travel. He covers parts of Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois, since we live in the southwest corner of Indiana where those states come together. He’s gone most days, and spends at least one night a week away from home, sometimes more.
Ever-present Mom always took care of us, but I liked my house better when easygoing Dad lightened the mood.
Text from Dad:
I managed to buckle down on homework after hanging up with Mom. It paid off. I actually understo
od most of what the calculus prof said after he got us to stop talking about the volcano. I went straight to the library to work the next set of problems. No way would the knowledge stick until Monday if I didn’t practice.
Long after dinner, Mia and I sat in the dorm lounge, forgoing our planned late-night trip to an off-campus party, drawn to the news like teenagers to a Hunger Games flick. Even on a Friday night, we weren’t the only ones. Nobody yelled at the TV, although all the major programming had been cancelled so the anchor people could demonstrate how little anyone knew about the eruption.
Male anchor: Based on the magnitude of prior eruptions of the Yellowstone super volcano, estimates of immediate casualties are about 80,000 people. It is believed the cities of Bozeman, Montana, and Cody, Wyoming, were the largest in the immediate blast area. We do not have any reliable information on Billings, Montana, which alone would more than double that casualty number. Damaging earthquakes are also affecting much of the region.
A girl on a couch behind me sniffled. “This is terrible,” she said, with a quivering voice. “Can you imagine getting leveled, with no warning?”
“Or having family there and not knowing…” Mia said.
“Like Dr. Potter.” I rubbed my hands over my arms as I wondered where he was and what he may or may not have found.
The feed changed to a blurred and wobbling video obviously taken through a car windshield. Female anchor: As the nation mourns, we can’t forget there are people still fighting for their lives. What you’re seeing now is video from a storm chaser on the ground in southern Wyoming. This was shot earlier today, and we apologize for the quality of the video. At his location, about two hundred miles from Yellowstone, the ash is falling, not moving in a big wall like you might imagine. You can hear the pebbles—called pumice, I’m told—hitting the roof of his vehicle. We have no information…we’re not sure where this videographer is now but we’d welcome a call or a text from him.
I’d left a note on the dry-erase board on our door, just in case, and my heart skipped a beat when Boone’s frame filled the doorway of the lounge. Mia scooted over on the vinyl sectional couch so he could slide between us. He looped his arm around my shoulders. “Trust the guys at Cramer’s to turn a national disaster into a drinking game. We were watching the same channel.”