“I’ll bet we haven’t seen the last of our trouble out there, Wes.”
“No, I think not.”
“Have you talked with Fred Womack at CVO?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What does he have to say?
“We’re all on the same page, Ms. Embree. We should pull the plug on Yellowstone.”
“Then do it, Wes.”
Wesley nodded. “Thank you for your opinion.”
“You’re welcome. Good luck, Wes.”
Liz left the office, leaving Wesley slumped at his desk, framed by stacks of data printouts. Ah, technology, he thought, grumbling, He shoved the data pile aside. Papers spilled on the floor. What remarkable tools to work with. What a blizzard of information to sort through and interpret. Maybe there was too much data, too much of every damned thing. No seat-of-the-pants flying anymore.
Wesley picked up the phone and dialed Parks. Throngs of tourists had to be kept away for the summer season. No families with young children were going to perish because the geology community failed to act. Yellowstone would not be another Mount St. Helens. Not on his watch. No, sir! He rang the emergency management offices in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho and called ranking U.S. Geological Survey officials, the CVO and FEMA as well. He recommended the Park Service and state emergency management officials place employees on standby. Only those with official business should be permitted to move through Yellowstone. Park officials were to prepare to clear Yellowstone of workers and contractors should things escalate to a full evacuation order—a volcano alert.
It would not take long, Wesley calculated, for the phone to ring off the desk, once word made the rounds of state and federal emergency management agencies. He did not expect to receive Montana Governor Randall Seifert on the line within minutes, particularly late on a Friday afternoon. Seifert always worked a long full day on Fridays, not one to waste a single penny of the taxpayers’ money. The retired Army major tuned politician wasn’t happy at this hour.
“What the hell is going on down there?” roared the governor through teeth as large as those in the mouth of a horse. His raging words crashed from the speaker on Wesley’s desk system and ricocheted about the room. “And what gives you the right to screw with our parklands, huh?”
Wesley stiffened and responded succinctly, but the governor would not back off.
“You know what you just did, mister?” the governor fulminated. “You just yanked the happy tooth out of every tourist’s head. We need every one of those yahoos in that park. They bring in money, you understand, from Frisco to Philadelphia. You put the dagger of doubt in everyone’s back.”
“Governor,” Wesley retaliated, distraught over being assaulted over the phone, “it’s my responsibility to protect the public. Your citizens, mind you. I’m doing just that. As for tourists, an advisory will push your tourist business through the roof. Everyone will want to come to the Yellowstone country this summer to see what the commotion is about. You remember Mount St. Helens?”
“What about it?”
“An advisory turned southern Washington into a Woodstock rock concert, so many people wanted to get to that volcano to have a look at it. That mountain killed people, remember, lots of people.”
Seifert’s voice did not trail away. He kept up the verbal fusillade. “Where the hell is the big volcano in Yellowstone National Park, will you tell me that? There’s no god-forsaken volcano east of Mount Hood, for chrissake.”
“That is not true, governor.”
“Yeah, tell me how I’m wrong.”
“The entire park is a volcanic structure, governor—the whole thing. All of it! You know that.”
“Bullshit. I’m not buying this. I’ll be back with the big boys from Wyoming and Idaho, and we’ll get this thing turned around. We’ll take your volcano advisory, whatever you call it, and cram it and your federal paycheck down your throat.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Liz left Mammoth Hot Springs, leaving Wesley to struggle with the volcano advisory fallout. She contemplated spending her last weekend in the park in solitude at the Park Point research cabin on the eastern margin of the lake. There she could tidy up her research, collect her things and examine the vast new fumarole clusters where biologist Jamie Hebert had met his death. If there was time, she was determined to make the trek into the heart of Brimstone Basin to see the expanding steam fields for herself.
As she engaged the ignition of her Subaru, moderate tremors wriggled though the terrain. The woman shrugged off the rumbling and ran the car out of the lot. In the rearview mirror, long extinct Liberty Cap cone, poised on the grand mineral terraces that gave Mammoth Hot Springs its name, gagged, coughed and disgorged a boiling flood of calcium carbonate-laced water.
The geophysicist avoided Route 89. It would take another week for contractor crews to clear the rockslide and open the road beyond Obsidian Cliff, so she detoured eastward to Tower Junction and turned south for Canyon Village and Fishing Bridge. At the junction of the upper loop roads at Canyon Village, she drove to the north rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. On a whim, she deserted the car and descended the short path to Lookout Point.
The scientist reached a railing at the lip of a twenty-mile chasm near the very heart of the vast park. The canyon was a gothic cathedral in reverse. Instead of vaulting overhead, it soared below, more than 1,200 feet beneath the soles of Liz’s boots. At the far reaches of the divide, a silver wave of Yellowstone River water cascaded 300 feet from the heights and plunged into the yellowing depths, filling the recesses with spray and vapor. In the 1800s, artist Thomas Moran stunned patrons in the cities of the East when he unveiled his wall-size oil on canvas of the majestic canyon and falls, an image so fantastic that critics dismissed it as a dream fantasy hatched in the painter’s mind.
In her hands, the protective railing holding back her body from plunging into the chasm shimmied. Gripping the rail tightly, feeling the seismic pulse of the land, she promised herself that she would return to this dynamic landscape soon. But next pilgrimage, she would bring Pelee with her. The trip would be atonement for having neglected her daughter for so many months. She and the child could share in the mystery and marvels of the vast plateau.
More road miles south, the Subaru approached the Mud Volcano territory. Inside the car’s cab, thudding acoustic poundings gained access. On the windshield, brownish gray spatters slapped, a few thick, ugly drops at a time.
“I’ll be darned,” Liz muttered to herself as she geared down the car and brought it to a stop in the road.
Cautiously, she emerged from the vehicle and scanned the forest margin as booming reports rolled across the road. The highway surface rippled with heat and smelled of heated sealing tar. Tall evergreens to the west bobbed, their branches peppered with a vile-colored substance coursing through the canopy.
Liz had heard tall tales of Mud Volcano. Not a soul since the first Yellowstone explorers had witnessed the thermal monster flinging surges of pulverized rock mud into the surrounding woodlands. The massive mud pot was now doing just that, bubbling furiously, vomiting a heavy slick and pumping loud steam volleys into the atmosphere.
The drizzle of hot mud intensified, drops enlarging to the dimension of dimes and quarters. Liz ducked into the car and gave the accelerator a kick. The car lurched south, speeding through a hail of earthly excrement. When the rig emerged into the clear, it dripped with a steamy slime of filth, the windshield smeared to near opacity.
Running in four-wheel drive down the narrow access trail to Park Point, Liz reached the newly appointed research cabin. Rather than mount the stairs and go inside, she walked west instead, downhill to the shores of the lake.