The diamond gem of all North American mountain waters lay brooding, moody. Rotten spring lake ice coated the waters and framed massive rafts of forest debris. Sky and ice were as one, the color of backwater scum, except where vast black openings in the ice unmasked plumes of boiling water upwelling from gapping fissures and steam craters on the lake floor. The spruce and pine along the shore were black scarecrows, branches brittle, roots baked.
A stone bench took Liz’s weight. Head in her hands, she studied an impoverished environment before her. It seemed she was seated at a sick bed, unable to comfort a chronically ill patient. Her first night on the lake many months earlier, under the spell of the full moon, the waters had been fresh, cool, the forests vigorous. The watery basin was just beginning to run a fever then. Now the disease was advanced.
She had been correct to admonish Wesley to close the park for good. What would tourists find once they came, besides campgrounds ruined and inns destroyed, the lake road a rough, hastily-bulldozed gravel strip, more geyser basins closed, most of the lake off limits and constant tremors that banished sleep from the weary. Why put thousands in jeopardy? For safety’s sake, it would be best to shut down the park for the whole season. An advisory was the right thing to do. She hoped Wesley had made the call.
Early the next morning, the odor of rotten eggs seeped through the Park Point cabin floors. Liz threw the door and windows open letting the chill in, but the smell would not leave. Stuffing a granola bar into her mouth, she donned her pack and ran from the cabin southward down the Thoroughfare Trail.
It took nearly an hour to reach Alluvium Creek, the liquid avenue pointing the way to Brimstone Basin. The area lay smothered with mineral film and rock mud vomited from countless fumaroles large and small. Liz cracked deposit samples from the margins of the flows, then struck off to the east, climbing uphill, hiking over tremulous ground. The sulfurous stench increased as she ascended and the forest shone of lifeless bone, bark sloughing from the tree trunks in sheets.
At once the dead forest stands fell away and a stark black and white desert loomed. Naked, steaming thermal fields expanded to the horizon, filling a broad valley and sweeping into the low foothills fronting snow-crowned peaks on the eastern park boundary.
Brimstone Basin was a forbidding ruin, Liz’s feet, nose, eyes and ears telling her so. High heat permeated the souls of her boots. Her socks soaked through with sweat. The reek of volcanic elements soiled the air and the basin rumbled from the exhaust of hundreds of steam vents. The ground was a curmudgeon, trembling as if with Parkinson’s disease.
The brow of a low sprawling dome blocked the advance into Brimstone. Liz picked her way uphill with care and crested the rise, coughing as she went. She stopped on unstable ground at the edge of a drop. The hillock fell away, leaving an appalling wound in the landscape. Dozens of fissures snaked through the slumped terrain, all shrouded in thick clouds of poisonous steam. At the base of the depression, a black smoldering dome filled the lowest terrain, a miniature version of the lava dome housed in the crater at Mount St. Helens. Little or not, it was a small cancer, being fed from below by a magma bloodstream.
The whole of it—the blistering heat and vapor, the constant rumbling noises, the ground fractures, and the smell of the place—reeked of peril. Active volcanic summits and craters Liz had studied all presented similar portraits. Brimstone Basin, she now understood, was a high hazard zone wedded to a hair trigger. Brimstone was fast becoming the most dynamic if dangerous block of real estate in all North America.
Chapter Thirty-Three
A fully restored Dodge Dart turned onto Fourth Street and motored into the heart of the historic commercial district of Sioux City, Iowa. Abel sought Buffalo Alice Restaurant, one of the Midwest’s best-kept pizza and beer joint secrets.
He parked the car and took to the street until he saw a big yellow sign emblazoned with the full-size image of a bison’s head. He ogled the sign for a moment and scanned the boulevard.
“Hello, stranger,” called a female voice from behind him. Abel turned to see a familiar face crossing the street toward him.
Winnie approached quickly, cleared the curb and went straight for Abel. “I thought we might stage some sort of grand Hollywood greeting, but how’s this for starters?” She kissed him gently on the lips, and then stroked the side of his face. He leaned in and kissed her in the same manner. He swept a strand of hair from her face and uttered a quiet greeting: “Hello, young lady.”
“Hello, young man. I thought you would never get here.”
“Just a little tardy.”
The couple entered Buffalo Alice pizzeria, filled with young professional people down from the offices in the business district surrounding Fourth Street. Winnie found them a small booth to squeeze into. In short order, they had Alice’s famous “Works” pizza before them and mugs of Rogue Dead Guy lager.
“I must say, Winnie, thank you for the invitation.”
“My pleasure.”
“You look divine, good lady.”
“And you, sir, are dashing.”
“Aren’t we something?” Abel laughed. “We have a middle-age mutual admiration society underway here.”
“I admire what you’re doing.”
“What I’m doing?”
“What you’re doing at Independency, it’s remarkable.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“At first, I thought your work was that of some New Age charlatan. When your latest books became best sellers, I thought you were cashing in on some eco-trend, like a diet fad doctor.”
“I’m amazed at the success. Somehow, I tapped a nerve among the masses. There is such enormous discontent there, bottled up with no place to go.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Don’t get me started, Winnie, I can’t turn off my mouth when I’m given free rein.”
“I’ll stop you when it’s my turn, remember?”
“When it’s your turn?”
“Yes, but it’s your turn now, Abel. You go first.”
“Okay, I remember the rules of the game.”
“So, why do you think your average Joe and Jane are so uptight?”
“Well, at the very core of it is the notion of helplessness, of being unable to control virtually any facet of one’s life.”
“I can vouch for that,” Winnie agreed.
“The average American lives in a culture of dependency. If you can’t meet your own needs yourself, you’re dependent on others to fill those needs. The only thing the vast majority of the people produce for themselves is an abstraction called money, in the form of wages. It gives them the honorary title of consumer. They’re consumers, nothing else. Two hundred years ago, it would have been just the opposite. They would have been producers of local goods first and very poor consumers, by our standards, second. They relied upon themselves and their families to supply a great many goods and services. They would have been quite independent in a sense that we no longer understand. Now, today, any and all avenues other than obtaining money to sustain life—the many skills and practices that humans took for granted for eons—have been closed off.
“My solution to this conundrum has been to try and create a whole new way of looking at how society goes about its life and work. The idea is to build a culture of independency, the exact opposite of dependency. To do that, we need to turn the culture on its head. We must turn the dependent consumer into a hybrid beast, a consumer-producer. Someone who is both. We have to create small, human-scale systems that are sustainable, productive, humane and that insure personal as well as community independence. Such systems would be quite the opposite of the emerging global mass economy where every individual is tied to and dependent upon a gargantuan, monolithic economic system and labor a world away.”