“Now, I’ll fast forward ahead twenty-plus years, and I can tell you from experience that the hair trigger of the sixteen-year old is a thing of the past.”
“Oh, really. What does it take to get a man of your sophistication aroused?”
“An intelligent woman like you engaged in a rutty conversation like this.”
“And what about you?”
“Me?”
“Mmm, what does it take to get a woman of your persuasion aroused?”
“Oh, a clandestine rendezvous with a favorite radical. Good conversation over a drink, a little music, Courvoisier. And a dip in this hot tub. That might do it.”
“Well, we’ve got most everything behind us except getting into the tub.”
“Disrobing would probably be advisable, unless you bathe in your pants.”
“Not lately. May I help you from your encumbrances?”
“I would be receptive to that.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Burning throat tissues drove Liz out of Brimstone Basin and away from the Park Point research station. Rather than bunk over Sunday night, she hastily packed the car and motored north for the return run to Mammoth Hot Springs. At Fishing Bridge junction she wheeled north toward Canyon Village, only to discover a boiling, oozing mudflow two-feet deep across the highway in the Mud Volcano terrain. Advance was impossible. She reversed direction.
The lake drive had been bulldozed clear of debris and a rough gravel lane built up just a week earlier so traffic could bridge a twelve-mile gap in the paved highway. Thankful for a surface to underpin her car’s tires, Liz’s Subaru bounced southwest on the rough gravel strip through the remains of Lake Village. Demolition excavators had been at work on the grand but mortally wounded Yellowstone Inn, tearing it down. The drowned marina at Bridge Bay flashed by the passenger-side window as the woman pushed the Subaru at a hasty clip on to West Thumb and the intersection with the lower grand loop road.
Toward Old Faithful and Madison she steered, slowing only to see if anyone was about in West Thumb hamlet. Liz floored the Forester and winged the eight miles to the continental divide, rammed through Craig Pass and descended to the Firehole River and the great steaming geyser basins beyond. The road was empty, the parking lots and turnoffs to various features barren. Liz dismissed the geyser flats. She was hell-bent on getting through to Mammoth Hot Springs headquarters when washboard ripples in the pavement forced her to gear down within earshot of Firehole Falls.
The going got worse. Wide cracks appeared, severing the asphalt. Across the bridge over the Gibbon River, the pavement disappeared. Liz braked the car to a halt. Before her, the uninviting cliffs of the old Lava Creek caldera rim glowered 300 feet above the highway. Stopped just south of the eroded battlements, she could not move an inch more. The pavement ahead slumped and fell away, falling into fissures deep enough to thwart passage of a military tank. Massive fracture rings, Liz realized, radiated along the margins of the old caldera boundary. They had to be new, maybe a day or even hours old. The land knew no rest. The cracks could have appeared unheralded. Maybe she was the first to come upon them.
The severed highway was a trap; every avenue north was blocked. With no prospects, she turned the vehicle around and drove south. Rather than push over the continental divide once again, Liz pulled off the highway at Old Faithful compound to seek out a warm soul. Some of the facilities at Old Faithful had been slated to open in a week’s time, but the advisory had put off the opening. Perhaps some staff member or two was on hand and, like her, was trapped inside the loop road with the only remaining exit far to the south through Grand Teton National Park.
Seven stories tall, the Old Faithful Inn dominated the skyline in the Lower Geyser Basin. A monumental rustic structure, it was the largest building in the world constructed of round peeled logs. Its dramatic earthy design influenced national and state park facilities all across the country.
Liz jogged into the building, finding its doors open, the towering lobby unlit and the interior air cool. Marooned on an acre of highly polished plank floor, she revolved in place to survey the stunning enclosed space. The lobby ceiling vaulted to timbered recesses eighty-five feet above the floor. Massive cross timbers supported upper floors, an intricate lattice of roof support logs and freeform railings fashioned from peeled branches and small crooked trees. Glass domed lights nesting in the timbers were cold, doing nothing to illuminate the vast interior dimensions.
“Hello.”
The salutation from Liz echoed in the cavernous expanse, the wood failing to soak in the sound waves.
“Anyone here?”
“Anyone here?” The identical response bounced off the walls.
No human voice ventured from the halls, main desk or open floors. No soled shoes clattered on the acres of polished floor. Without the banter of guests and the flow of foot traffic, the immense scale of the American landmark was unfriendly, eerie. The sense of isolation was profound, exaggerated by the enormous emptiness.
A heavy thump sounded along the length of the floor. Low vibrations followed, skittering down the planks, running up the timber support columns and braces, and infiltrating the ceiling rafters and finish boards. The wood—perfect for augmenting acoustic waves—hummed, giving voice to the seismic prattle rising from the earth.
The vibrations increased, setting the walls in motion. The moving timbers gave voice to low-frequency moans and bellows, interspersed with pops, snaps and whistles. The air became saturated with the noise, growing louder as the tremor increased in intensity, as if suddenly a pod of humpback whales had somehow paddled into the enclosed atmosphere over the lobby.
Jabbed by a growing sense of alarm, Liz twisted on her heels and ran from the great room, burst through the great lobby doors and sprinted away from the building to open terrain in the direction away from dormant Old Faithful geyser. The shaking continued, the ground dancing a wild jig, the tempo increasing, the steps faster, faster. From the great inn came the sound of crashing and clatter as unseen objects fell, tipped over and shattered.
A sonic shriek rifled up from the earth. The volume of it punched the breath from the geophysicist’s lungs, hobbling her. Through the air, solid particles hissed by at bullet speed and were overtaken by the scream of steam. Old Faithful, on the opposite side of the great inn, roared to life, but not as the familiar hot water geyser trailing fans of fine mist. Its plumbing ruptured, the geyser had lost its water supply, and pressures had found ways to reroute fluid through the subterranean catacombs far below. The continuous shaking tremor, however, managed to clear out some lost silica-lined pipes and open new channels to ground level.
The tremor gave back to Old Faithful its thermal powers, but now only in the form of raw, visceral, super-pressurized steam. The sound of cannon shot boomed through the land as Old Faithful launched fountains of white scalding vapor hundreds of feet perfectly straight up into the reddening late day light. Rock shrapnel blitzed the log walls of the hotel and machine-gunned away the window glass. The structure shielded Liz from the blast but not from a monstrous vision rising lightning–quick, far above the grand gabled roofline. A tornado on end, it seemed to Liz, a skyscraper-high boiling fury. Awestruck by the sight and banshee scream of the thermal monster, she could only stand dumb before it.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Shivery dawn etched spidery filaments of frost on window glass. The geophysicist awoke in the safety of her car, seatback prone, sleeping bag unzipped but pulled up to the chin. Much of the night she had laid awake, tense, startled every time the new incarnation of Old Faithful roared to life—each cycle just thirty-five minutes apart. Tremors were unwelcome bedfellows throughout the long night, shaking her awake if she did nod off.