Weeping Waters

by Nicholson, Anne Maria

She has forgotten how incongruous the hotel looks, stuck here on the lower slopes of the mountain in the middle of nowhere. With its bright blue-tiled roof studded with white chimneys and red brick walls interrupted by tiny-paned windows, it is an oddly European landmark for such a young country. It must have had the locals scratching their heads in amazement when it appeared suddenly in the late 1920s just as New Zealand, like the rest of the world, was plunged into the Great Depression.

  As a teenager she was deeply impressed by the hotel’s luxury and surprised by her father’s unusual extravagance. ‘It’s just this once,’ he had told her. ‘Your mother needs a bit of comfort.’

  Frances felt she needed it too, even though she hadn’t wanted to come with them, hadn’t wanted to leave her friends. She was used to a no-frills existence in a plain semi-detached brick cottage in Surrey, England. Although the purpose of that trip was a little unclear to her at the time, it was the closest she’d come to a holiday abroad.

  As she pulls into the car park, she notices the telltale signs of the task that has brought her here a second time. Speakers on poles, instruction posters and aerials on some outbuildings, all are part of the early warning system that Theo Rush has told her urgently needs modernising.

  Frances had worked with the team that had developed new acoustic early warning systems in Seattle. She had helped to put them to the test herself, first successfully in the States and later in other, wilder places. But she knows it won’t be so easy here. Scientists are working in a much tighter timeframe. There could be as little as ninety seconds’ warning from the build-up of a lahar in Ruapehu before it hit the upper part of the skifield. At best there would be one or two hours to move people out of the surrounding area.

  When Frances put her hand up for this posting, she was still hesitant. Moving would be a wrench. She was frightened by the thought of it, even though it could be the emotional circuit breaker she needed. But when Theo phoned to offer her the job, her doubts dissipated and she knew instantly that this was what her life’s work had been preparing her for.

  She didn’t mention that she’d been to New Zealand, to Ruapehu, before. Theo wanted her for her specialist expertise, her ability to monitor volcanoes, and she didn’t want to give the impression that her return might be influenced by sentimentality.

  ‘Had a long journey?’ the red-haired receptionist asks, not waiting for a reply as she watches Frances dragging in her suitcase while struggling to balance her laptop and backpack. ‘Leave your luggage and I’ll have it put in your room,’ she says as she checks her booking on the computer. ‘We’re not very busy and we’ve got you a lovely room with a view of the mountain.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s great. Has the mountain been clear for long?’

  ‘Not much cloud around for the last few days. Where are you from? America? Canada?’

  ‘Seattle…and England.’

  ‘Well, enjoy. Dinner is served from six with lots of local delicacies and if you feel like a swim there’s a hot pool on the basement level.’

  Frances gratefully takes the key and lingers in the foyer. She is surprised how little the hotel has changed. Chandeliers still glisten from the ceilings and she smiles to herself when she has the same image she did as a girl, of Cinderella drifting down the elegant staircase. Thick woollen carpets lead her to the large lounge where guests with pre-dinner drinks are already settling into rows of plump sofas in front of an open fire.

  As if in a familiar dream, she wanders over towards the large picture windows, framed with heavy velvet curtains. The mountain, soaring above, lit by the remains of the day’s sunshine, seems to be telling her something. But the fatigue of her long journey is overtaking her and the thought fades as she sinks into an armchair. Her body finally relaxes and her eyes beg to close.

  She hears it first, the unmistakable chop-chopping of a helicopter, and returns to the window in time to see it rising out of the cloudy summit’s jaws like a dragonfly in search of its prey, hovering uncertainly for a few seconds, then determinedly flying off.

  The Seismologist

  I’ve been asked about the night of 24 December 1953 many times. The truth is, there was no volcanic activity or earthquake recorded on our equipment on that day or the days leading up to it. And we regularly checked it.

  Ever since the series of major eruptions of 1945 we had been under severe pressure in the observatory here at the Chateau to keep a close watch on the Crater Lake. Until then many New Zealanders believed Ruapehu was extinct, although few of us in the scientific community ever shared that view. Four big bangs within months put paid to that theory once and for all.

  With the war, of course, those were a trying few years. At the end of ‘45, conditions on the mountain were quite unbearable with the ash fouling the water supply to such an extent that it was almost like liquid mud. In addition, anything mechanical, such as the electric generating plant, was difficult to maintain with fine ash penetrating everything.

  The war also put skiing on hold. The Health Department took over the Chateau to house patients of a psychiatric hospital near Wellington that had been damaged by an earthquake. But that didn’t last long with the unhygienic conditions on the mountain. The female patients and staff were evacuated and they left on a special train three days before Christmas to go to a place up near Auckland. That certainly took the pressure off me.

  Of course, we kept up the monitoring and we had a number of scientists coming and going. The eruptions created huge interest around the world and the photographs were spectacular so the place became something of a tourist attraction.

  We had trampers constantly arriving and wanting to climb up to the crater. They tend to be a little gung ho, mad buggers some of them, and I always worried about their safety. And with good reason, it turned out. I remember a couple of them who camped in the snow near the crater, really copped it during the July eruption. They were showered with hot rocks and badly burnt and one of them was knocked out. The mountain rescue got them down but they were very lucky to survive. The snowfields were wrecked, but mind you, after the war and with the first rope tows installed in ‘47, the skiers were back in droves.

  After the explosions stopped, the crater looked completely different. I frequently climbed to the top to inspect it and take samples. There was a boiling lake surrounded by a steep-walled vent I estimated to be about 900 feet deep. Over the next three years it gradually refilled so by the end of 1949 it was approximately the same level as before the eruptions. We regularly saw small steam eruptions but not much else.

  One day in March 1953, when I was up at the crater, I observed a lava dome had emerged from the lake and I could see occasional steaming puffs of ash coming out of it. It had clearly been formed by magma squeezing its way out of the vent in the crater and piling up in mounds. Lava had spread across the crater floor and pushed out all the water.

  From then onwards there were regular powerful ash eruptions with the ash spreading out for hundreds of miles around. In May, I noticed a second larger dome growing. Later that month there was a huge explosion and we saw flames shooting up 300 feet high above the mountain. It was an awesome and terrifying sight!

  Stories and photos of the eruption were all over the papers. We had our thunder stolen at the end of the month, though, by Mount Everest and Hillary. New Zealanders went crazy.

  It was pretty quiet at Ruapehu for the rest of the year. On that Christmas Eve, we detected nothing on our monitoring equipment to worry about.

  It was only after the disaster at Tangiwai, we were able to piece together what happened. We now know that some time after dusk, possibly as late as eight o’clock, a solid ash wall covered in ice inside the Crater Lake that had been acting as a dam barrier suddenly collapsed. This force cracked and shattered masses of ice and released a huge mass of water. It formed a cold lahar, a turbulent volcanic mudflow.

  It washed out of the crater, pushing over the rim, and flowed down into the Whangaehu River. Moving with tremendous speed, it d
ragged everything with it: boulders, ice, large quantities of loose ash from the ‘45 eruption, trees, anything in its path.

  The lahar flooded into the valley, depositing boulders and sand for miles around and it washed away six road and railway bridges. It reached Tangiwai at 10.17 p.m. Five minutes later, the train arrived at the bridge and plunged into the torrent, killing more than half the passengers.

  As I said, we had no prior warning on any of our equipment about the impending disaster.

  Geoff Andrews, 49, seismologist at Mount Ruapehu in 1953

  CHAPTER THREE

  Look at this, the water temperature’s definitely heading north.’ His bright orange overalls and red hard hat clashing with the muted colours of nature, Theo Rush scrambles up from the edge with a thermometer and the small bottles he has just filled from the shark-grey waters of the volcano’s Crater Lake. In his sixtieth year, he is still lean and tanned from a lifetime outdoors. He hands the samples up to the younger scientist crouched at the top of a heavily eroded ridge. ‘That’s the third time in a row we’ve had readings over fifty-five degrees and the crater level looks like it’s still rising. What do you make of it?’ Theo asks.

  ‘It looks very dicey,’ his companion replies. ‘But then for the last six months it’s been up and down, hasn’t it, so I’m not sure. We’ll have to weigh it up when we get the other measurements.’

  The lake is the very pulse of the volcano. It is streaked with yellowish slicks of sulphur. Small clouds of steam and sulphur gas forced out from the hot magma deep within the volcano waft around the two men as they gaze at the thermometer.

  A look of concern creases Theo’s face. The colour of the lake tells him the mood of Ruapehu, from emerald green when cool, to sapphire blue when it is warming up. When the mountain dispenses with its jewel-like palette altogether and turns an even muddier grey than now, he knows the temperature will be dangerously high, above 60 degrees.

  Far below them lies the valley where, for hundreds of years, dozens of gigantic lahars have swept down, wreaking havoc on the wild landscape. Ten thousand years earlier, rivers of molten lava spewed out of the core of the volcano. It was one of a circle of cones stretching from New Zealand across the Philippines, Japan, Russia, onward to the Aleutian Islands and the west coasts of both North and South America, all formed by the collision of the plates of the Pacific and the Indian-Australia oceans. Since the Asian tsunami, Theo and his colleagues have felt the pressure on them to be prophets and seers. It hasn’t helped an already tense situation.

  Sam Hawks packs the bottles into his backpack, placing them in special plastic bags already marked with the date. Hauling the pack easily onto his muscular shoulders, he begins to walk gingerly around the rim. For a tall man, he moves nimbly in his well-worn hiking boots, careful not to slip on the loosely spread scree.

  ‘I’ll take some gas readings. Then we’d better check the tephra dam,’ he calls back to his boss.

  At the end of an unusually dry summer and autumn, the snow has completely disappeared from the summit. Without its white cover, the craggy brownness looks unearthly, like the hostile surface of the moon. Only the lake stretching in front of them for some 500 metres interrupts the brittle, pocked surface.

  Whenever it isn’t freezing and they fly in by chopper, Sam lives in hard-wearing khaki shorts and shirt that seem to blend in with his freckled skin and corn-coloured hair. As a concession, he has packed a Gore-Tex parka in case the weather changes suddenly and lately he’s begun to bring a hard hat and gas mask although, like today, he usually neglects to wear them.

  He takes out the silicone tubing with attached thermometer and collection bottles to capture and measure the cocktail of gases that drift up from the very core of the earth. The rising waters of the Crater Lake have already filled most of the fumaroles, flooding the vents through which the gas leaks out of the mountain. But there are still a few on an exposed part of the crater. Sam crouches down beside the biggest vent, which is as wide as the length of his boot. Inserting a long piece of tube right inside its crusty lip, he gathers a heady mixture of water vapour, hydrogen chloride and sulphur dioxide.

  ‘Getting some bloody good samples today,’ he calls over his shoulder. As a column of steamy vapour hits him in the face, he reels back, choking. ‘Fuck, that nearly knocked me out!’ His usually steady legs tremble as he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and noisily blows his nose. Tears stream from his eyes and for a few seconds he can barely see.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Theo asks as he climbs up to reach his partner. ‘Maybe you should wear that mask rather than carrying the bloody thing. And for God’s sake, put your helmet on!’

  ‘You’re a great one to talk, TR,’ Sam grins as he mops the moisture off his face. ‘Remember what you told me about the eruption you got caught up in.’

  The older man laughs. He will never forget that day. He and the scientist he worked with in those days—it was 1995—had measured an extraordinary 15,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide on Ruapehu, the highest readings recorded from any volcano in the world. Theo had vomited violently, as sick as a teenager drunk on gin. He hadn’t been wearing his mask either but that had been just the beginning of his trouble.

  ‘Right, point taken. But we all should know better now, eh. Now let’s get that survey gear sorted,’ Theo says.

  The two men walk halfway around the perimeter of the lake to the Dome Shelter, a hardy A-shaped shed containing the main seismometer on the summit, other monitoring equipment and emergency rations, packets of dried food and bottles of water.

  The hardest task of the day still lies ahead. They want to detect any changes in the tephra dam, a large barrier inside the lake that has formed from deposits of ash, scoria, pumice and rocks thrown up during the last big eruption. It is now so enlarged that it sticks up like a fence across one side of the lake, blocking the natural outlet for the water.

  Sam puts his helmet on and smiles when he sees Theo raise his eyebrows. He props his survey equipment on the side of the crater where the tephra rises out of the water and starts measuring the dam. He can tell immediately from the pegs they placed around the edge a month earlier that the water level has risen at least 20 centimetres.

  ‘It’s now one hundred metres long and eighty metres wide. I reckon it could be about eight metres deep,’ he calls out. ‘It’s looking pretty precarious.’

  Taking a sharp probe in his hand, he pushes it through the soft layers of tephra. It punctures them easily as if they are a packet of biscuits.

  ‘The dam’s under enormous pressure.’ Sam looks back at Theo as he twists the probe through until it strikes the bedrock beneath. ‘With these water levels, if it goes the lahar will be a monster.’

  Theo frowns. This isn’t the news he wants to hear.

  Sam is quick to pick up his expression. ‘After the uproar last time, maybe it’s best we just shut up about it for a few more days and see if continues or drops back down again.’

  ‘No, I’d better let the others know as soon as possible. They’re nervous as hell about my last report and they want to hose down all the sensationalism that’s been in the media. This won’t please the politicians one little bit but I have to keep them in the picture.’

  ‘Might be time to bring in the bulldozers after all,’ Sam says.

  ‘Pull your head in, Sam!’ Theo snaps. ‘It’s not going to happen.’

  Dr Theo Rush knows the moods of both mountains and politicians well. In fact he thinks they have a lot in common—lots of power, subject to whims of either nature or the voters and likely to erupt when you least expect it. After more than thirty-five years researching the volcanic plateau, he feels more comfortable with mountains, in spite of the fact that this one nearly stole his life.

  He had just been recovering from breathing in gas when a sudden explosion caught him by surprise. Hundreds of rocks flew into the air like an uncoordinated juggler’s load. One the size of a cricket ball smashed into his shoulder, catapulting him over a sma
ll ridge. He had crawled beneath an overhanging rock shelf where he lay for four hours, drifting in and out of consciousness, until eventually a rescue team arrived and airlifted him to hospital.

  The close shave had done nothing to dim his awe of volcanoes, just notched up his respect levels.

  ‘I’d rather die on a volcano than in a road accident,’ he had told his wife Sue, who didn’t care for either option. ‘At the end of the day I can’t really tell anyone when a volcano will erupt. No one can. When you walk on a live one, you take your life in your hands.’

  Theo saw his work as an unequal contest between the unstoppable forces of nature and the human beings who were fiddling round the edges, playing the detective after the crime was committed and trying to prevent the next one. Another huge volcanic build-up could provoke an eruption combined with a hot or cold lahar, possibly twice the size of the one that caused the Tangiwai disaster. Either way, a giant mudslide was threatening to steal many more lives and destroy many hectares of property.

  Too often these days, Theo feels he is being pulled between several irreconcilable groups, each looking to him to play God. But the volcano seduced him long ago, and he isn’t alone. It is no puzzle to him why people continue to live under volcanoes even though they know, like him, their lives can be snatched away at any time.

  From the top of the mountain, Theo breathes in the cool alpine air and surveys the expansive panorama around him. ‘Never get sick of this,’ he mutters under his breath. ‘I sure as hell don’t want to leave it.’

  ‘Well, you’re not, are you?’

  Theo hasn’t realised he was talking aloud and is troubled when he catches Sam glancing at him curiously.

  The two men have worked side by side since Sam moved here from the earthquake research centre five years earlier. A highly qualified geophysicist in mid-career, he is ambitious to make a name for himself and Theo knows he is eyeing his job. The last thing he wants to do is retire, though he knows Sue, after the best of a lifetime in a small town, is keen for them to move back to the city.