The Journal: Ash Fall

by Moore, Deborah D.

  “Do you really think this cloud will reach us and that all this we’re doing is necessary, Allex?” he asked, digging his thumbs into my tight neck muscles.

  “I’m hoping with all my heart that all this frantic work is for nothing, John, and that the ash cloud passes us by. What if it doesn’t go south of us? What if it goes even more north and puts us in the center of it? We just can’t take the risk of being caught unprepared. Our very lives may depend on what we do in the next few days.” I closed my eyes to the weary tears I felt building.

  “Let’s see if we can catch some news. Maybe it will give us a better idea of what to expect,” John suggested.

  The footage that was being shown started clear and ended with heavy static and a blurry picture. After the first quake this morning, the park was evacuated of the few visitors. The second quake prompted the staff to make a hasty exit. For some of them it was too late. They did provide enough information to explain what had happened.

  “I’m standing about a mile from Yellowstone Lake, up on the rise near Park Point,” the disembodied voice stated. A park ranger was using his phone camera to show the panorama. The multi-acre lake shimmered and sloshed just as the second quake hit and the camera jiggled when the ranger lost his footing. Once steady again, the picture cleared and the ranger resumed speaking. “Holy, shit!” he exclaimed. “The lake is… it’s disappearing! Let’s get out of here!”

  A very tired looking young woman came on the screen. Simone Johnston, a geologist specializing in seismology according to the banner on the bottom of the screen, moved a few papers on her desk before looking up.

  “From what we’ve been able to piece together, from the readings that come into our office automatically and this video you just watched from the brave but foolish park ranger, the second quake, a 9.7 on the Richter Scale, opened a massive fissure here,” she said, pointing to a chart, “and in a matter of seconds, that fissure emptied billions of gallons of water down into the molten lava, creating an explosion that went beyond our instruments. What it did, in short, was to waken this simmering subterranean volcano.” She looked right at the camera and said, “It’s no longer subterranean. We now have an active, make that a very active, thirty-mile wide volcano that continues to grow and spew lava at an alarming rate. With each belch, it builds the volcanic height, giving the smoke and ash it produces longer range.” With that, the picture cut back to the newsroom.

  John turned the TV off. “Let’s go to bed. It’s going to be a very long day tomorrow.”

  * * *

  I left John sleeping and went back to the greenhouse to plant more seedlings into the grow boxes. There were only so many pots I’d saved over the years and those needed to be reserved for the plants that would have to stay in them, like the corn! I had to remember to dig that up tomorrow.

  Several small pots held the delicate sprouts of the purple pod pole bean. At first I wasn’t sure what to do with them, we couldn’t do trellises in the shallow boxes. I decided to move them out of the containers and into one of the many hanging pots; if they couldn’t climb up then they’d have to climb down.

  Two hours later I slid into bed, completely exhausted, and fell instantly into a deep, troubled sleep.

  CHAPTER 27

  July 18

  I slipped the old VCR tape into the player and hit pause. The room was full, but it wasn’t standing room only. There just weren’t that many of us left. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad anymore.

  “I’m glad so many of you could be here this morning,” Anna stated solemnly as the room quieted down. “As I understand it, time is short right now, so I’m turning this over to Allexa Smeth.” With that she moved to the back and leaned against the wall.

  “I’m sure by now everyone has heard that there were several earthquakes in Yellowstone Park yesterday,” I began. “While that in itself isn’t unusual, the magnitude of those quakes is, and what has resulted is what has our attention today. I know everyone has heard about the caldera that is below Yellowstone: heated rock and lava. It has been that way for millions of years and we’ve been told that it could stay just like that for a million more.” I looked at the crowd; my friends, my family, they were all watching me with grave faces. I was inwardly pleased to see Pastor Carolyn and Dr. Mark. They would both be needed in the coming days and weeks and they need to be fully informed.

  “Late yesterday, one of the stronger quakes ripped open the bottom of the Yellowstone Lake, the largest lake in the park,” I looked down at my notes, “in the southeast corner of the park that had a depth ranging from one hundred forty feet to almost four hundred feet. That’s a lot of water and that rip dumped billions and billions of gallons of icy forty-one degree water into the smoldering lava, which created an explosion of steam that sent a hundred million tons of pumice, rock and ash a hundred thousand feet straight up. In turn, that opened the caldera even wider. It was an explosion equal to one thousand Hiroshima bombs.

  “The report I got this morning states that there is now a mega-volcano that is at least thirty miles wide, continuously spewing lava and ash and it’s still growing. The caldera is estimated to be thirty-seven miles long, eighteen miles wide and seven miles deep. That’s just an estimate. It took only twenty minutes, and there is now nothing left within a one hundred mile radius of the initial site, and that keeps expanding as more and more pockets erupt.”

  “Just twenty minutes? How?” Lenny asked.

  “It’s called a pyroclastic cloud, Lenny,” I answered. “Super-heated gas moving at almost five hundred miles per hour sucked out all the oxygen and replaced it with ungodly heat and gases miles in front of the actual cloud. Everything living died instantly: plants, animals, and people, all gone.

  “I have a fictionalized docudrama on what might happen in such an event. It’s only about forty-five minutes long. I first want to say, this is probably the most serious single thing that we have faced as a community. An eruption of this magnitude puts tons of steam, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride, sulfur dioxide and pulverized rock and pumice, ten to twenty miles up into the air, and then it comes down. It comes down as acid rain, dust, and those pulverized fine shards of rock falling that look like ash will be like breathing glass.”

  I hit play.

  * * *

  When the short movie ended, the room erupted into a buzz of murmuring voices.

  “What does this mean to us, Allexa?” someone asked from the back of the room.

  “The ash cloud is coming this way,” I said flatly. “This cloud is huge and it’s getting bigger all the time as more eruptions happen. It will take four days to hit New York and it will be east of the Mississippi and here in less than forty-eight hours if the winds stay as they are. The Jet Stream is being affected because of the height of the heated cloud, so it keeps moving and the forecasters are having trouble projecting the path. Too much of a shift, and those forty-eight hours could become twenty-four. That’s why time is of the essence. We just don’t know when it will arrive.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I think it best for everyone to stay together. It will be easier to secure one or two places than ten. The hotel would be ideal. There are a dozen rooms for sleeping, multiple bathrooms, and space to find some privacy, too.” I caught the pastor’s attention. “Pastor Carolyn, if the Stone Soup facilities could be moved into the hotel kitchens that would help a great deal.” She nodded.

  “All of those working on Bradley’s Backyard garden should dig up your plants and get them indoors. Put them in pots, buckets, anything to bring them out of the ash and to keep them alive. They just might live long enough to feed you.

  “Animals need to come in, too,” I made eye contact with Joshua. “If you’ve got pets, or chickens, sheep, goats, any animal will die if left outside when this cloud hits. The key will be to not breathe this ash, and for most that will mean not going outside, not even opening windows. If there is a reason to be out, wear a mask.” I reached to my left and se
t a box on the table. “There are fifty surgical masks in here. I want everyone to take one and another one for someone you know isn’t here.”

  “Is anything else going to happen?” Amanda asked, her face furrowed in a deep frown.

  “The sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere will start to reflect the sun’s radiation and at the same time it will absorb the heat radiated by the Earth, so our temperatures will start to cool. Since the temperature might drop twenty degrees or more, we might even break our own records and have snow in August.” I smiled, but few found it funny.

  “How long will we have to stay inside?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “It could be a week or two weeks or two months. I just can’t answer that, Anna. This won’t affect just us. That cloud will circle the globe, maybe for years.”

  * * *

  “How is it you have boxes of surgical masks, Allexa?” Mark asked as everyone was leaving.

  “Because I’m paranoid, Mark,” I said flippantly and with a shrug. Then I got serious. “Please be careful. We’re going to need you.”

  * * *

  “What do we need to do now, Mom?” Jason asked, pacing in my kitchen.

  “There are two boxes of heavy clear plastic in the barn, lower left shelf. Each box is eight feet wide by one hundred feet long, if I remember right. One box should be plenty to wrap the deck area. The ash isn’t like radioactive fallout. We don’t need to be as air tight, though we do need to keep the ash out of the generator’s air intake. It could be very important mentally to be able to ‘step outside’ on occasion once we’re confined and the deck would be a nice place to go,” I responded. “I think the second box should be used to wrap the porch across the street, for the same reasons.” I looked around. “By the way, where is Amanda?”

  “She took Jacob back home. I came over with Eric. She’ll be here later,” Jason replied.

  I can’t worry about her right now.

  “What do you want me to do, Allex?” John asked.

  I thought for a moment. So much was running through my brain.

  “Fish! All the fish will die once the ash starts falling. It would be good if we had a different kind of protein to eat. I know how to can fish, and it can also be smoked.”

  “I don’t think I should waste precious time fishing, Allex,” he replied with a snort.

  “Agreed, you’re the best one here to dynamite fish,” I said with a big grin. “Once the three of you wrap the deck and the porch, I think you should do mass fishing. It shouldn’t take long to bomb a section of McKenna’s Bay and net all the dead fish. I’ll do the rest.”

  “Sure, that can be done, but I need certain materials, Allex,” John reminded me.

  “I do reloading, John. I’m sure I have whatever you need,” Jason piped in. “Good call, Mom, and I know just the place we can set the charge.”

  “If you could start filling the hot tub first, John, I’d appreciate it. Even though it would have been nice to have a hot soak, I haven’t filled it yet because the power has been so erratic; however it’s a perfect place to store water. I’ll bring all of the full gas cans to the deck so we don’t have to go to the barn for a while.”

  While others were busy doing these tasks, I sat for a moment and started a list of more things for us to do. Antsy, I pushed the paper aside and got my small plastic garden wagon to move the gas cans. At forty pounds per five gallon can, they were too heavy for me to carry more than one, unless I used the wagon. Two trips and I had that done, less than ten minutes. I went back to the list.

  I could hear my three men out on the deck working quickly at installing the plastic sheeting. A peek confirmed that Eric was unrolling and unfolding the long sheet, while John held it in place and taut against the wooden supports for the new roof as best he could with his fractured wrist tightly bandaged, while Jason used his power stapler to make short work of securing it. The garden hose snaked under the sheeting and I heard it splashing into the big blue speckled tub.

  Unlike being isolated this past winter, when I could still get out to the sheds for a bucket of this or that, I wouldn’t have that easy access for a while. I needed some of that food indoors, and now.

  In the food shed, I pulled out two buckets of rice, two of mixed beans, and two more of hard winter wheat.

  “Emi, would you bring back the garden cart for me, please?” I asked. Happy to have something to do, she scampered across the road and was back in just a few minutes.

  “What are we doing now, Nahna?” Her big eyes held such concern it made my heart hurt.

  “I know you’re going to need food over there, so you and I are going to fill this cart,” I told her. I set a bucket of rice and one of beans in the cart. We got three empty canning jar boxes from the shed and went to the back pantry.

  “Let’s pick what you want to eat. How about chicken soup?” I suggested. She nodded vigorously. As I handed her jars filled with food, she placed them into the waiting old and battered brown cardboard boxes. When we were done, there was a box of soup, one of veggies and another with meat. I picked up a box of pint jars and set them in her waiting arms.

  “Is that too heavy?” I asked.

  “I’m strong, Nahna, I can carry this,” she insisted, so I set a very lightweight case of oriental noodles on top for Jacob, and picking up the other two cases, we went back to the kitchen.

  With three cases of food and two buckets of grains and beans, the cart was too heavy for her to pull. Emilee needed to be helpful, this I understood. I took the two buckets out.

  “You take these cases back to your house, Em, and just set them on the ground, then come back for the buckets.” By the time she had everything unloaded from the wagon, the guys would be moving over there to wrap the porch and they could move the heavy containers up the steps and into the house.

  * * *

  “Just so you know, Mom, when I was out at the garden getting the chicken wire for Jason, I also started draining the cistern so we could turn it over,” Eric announced.

  I closed my eyes briefly in relief. “I had forgotten about it! Once that ash starts falling it will turn any water to sludge! Thank you for remembering.”

  With both the porch and the deck wrapped in a shroud of transparent plastic, Jason was ready to start on closing in the bottoms of the grow boxes. He had already made short doors for access, which he attached first. While Eric was busy building a couple of nesting boxes, John and Jason placed and secured the chicken wire.

  The power was still on so I was staying ahead of laundry, doing as much as possible.

  Emilee had been assigned the task of catching the baby chicks and putting them in one of the cat carriers I kept. A few of the hens were amiable to being picked up, so she put them in the second carrier and took them to the greenhouse.

  Everyone was working smoothly, and we were almost finished when Amanda pulled into the driveway. She’d been gone a long time.

  “Whew!” she said, “I’m glad that’s all done.”

  “What is it you’ve been doing?” I asked cautiously.

  She looked at me in surprise. “Moving. Jacob and I packed up all his things and brought them over. I put them in his room at Eric’s. Then we packed things for me and Jason, and all the food we have and put that there too.”

  I’d been so occupied here I hadn’t noticed her across the road. I felt embarrassed.

  “I made sure everything was unplugged or turned off at our house. Jason still needs to do the rest. I don’t know if he wants to drain the pipes or not, but I’m pretty sure I remembered the rest.”

  “I’m impressed, Amanda, you’ve done a lot today.” I gave her a quick hug.

  “Well, you did say we don’t have much time. I don’t need anything else from there, so I’m going back across the road and start organizing Jacob’s room. Are we all having dinner here tonight?” she stood and stretched.

  “Of course we are. Seven o’clock.”

 
* * *

  At three o’clock, the guys set out for McKenna’s Bay. At four-thirty, they returned with two thirty-gallon tubs filled with fish! I’m going to be very, very busy canning the next couple of days.

  “Oh, Mom, you should have seen it, it was fantastic!” Jason exclaimed. “John mixed up some things, stuffed it into a coffee can, rigged up a detonator and BOOM! Water geysered up everywhere! Fish went flying through the air and then dead fish started floating up to the surface, thousands of them! It was awesome!”

  Eric chortled. “Jason was having a good time.”

  “We took the skiff out and just scooped them out of the water with the long handled net. They were so heavy, we would fill a tub and then take it back to shore.

  “I will never look at fishing the same way again! John, you’re the man!” Jason clapped John on the shoulder and walked away smiling.

  “I think you guys should get those tubs into the refrigerator in the barn,” I reminded them. “And then go take a shower!” I playfully wrinkled my nose at them.

  * * *

  While Amanda cleared the dishes from the table and set them in hot soapy water, I pulled out my list.

  “So far we’ve wrapped the two decks and moved as much into the greenhouse as will fit. Hmmm, Jason, when you wired your Uncle Don’s generator, did he have you build a shelter for it? I’ve never even noticed.”

  “You haven’t noticed because I hung lattice around the underside of the small porch where it sits. It can be heard though not seen. Why?”

  “If it’s just lattice, you will have to plastic that too, to keep the ash out of the air intake. Is it vented?”