Liz was desperate to communicate with someone, anyone. Rummaging in her pack, she failed to locate her cell phone. Try the landline in the hotel, she instructed herself. Sprinting to the hotel lobby, she found the hotel lobby in shambles, the electricity down. Glass shards littered the floors. She tried numerous phones in the lobby and experimented with the switchboard. All were silent.
Defeated, she resolved to drive Route 89 south through the Grand Tetons and run the half-day loop east and north through Riverton, Thermopolis and Cody to Cooke City and the northeast gate back into Yellowstone. Living on peanuts and water, she could at least keep hunger pangs at bay a while.
Backtracking over the continental divide toward West Thumb, the scientist kept her speed down, knowing that elk, bison and moose would be out in some numbers in the cool early morning hours, foraging near the highway at Duck Lake. As the Subaru descended the thousand vertical feet off the divide toward the small body of water, she imagined the stress the animals must be under, going about their lives on ground that would not keep still. The creatures were far more sensitive to a whole array of stimuli than humans. Could they get used to it? What being on earth could get used to constant tremors?
As the highway leveled out on the in-run toward Duck Lake, Liz rounded a wide switchback turn that opened out onto a broad panorama of Yellowstone Lake and the encompassing lake basin plateau and mountains. The view did not grab her attention; a herd of elk did. The large creatures stood at attention in the road and on either side of the asphalt. Every one of them had its head up, ears forward. They peered eastward, away from the approaching car. Liz stopped the vehicle, but still the many elk stood fast, immobile, not one acknowledging the hum of the engine.
Across the vast sweep of the lake waters rolled the deep rumble of artillery shell bursts from a far distant battlefield. Underfoot unrelenting seismic pulses shook the soils. Liz ran a hand over her face in a gesture to relieve tension when as one the entire herd of elk pivoted to the west and bolted, their speed turning them to blurs as they raced over the road away from the lake vista.
The elk’s flight behavior spooked the scientist. A student of ancient Chinese accounts depicting bizarre behavior on the part of animals that could sense the onset of violent earth movements, Liz knew the elk’s panic could be a precursor to unforeseen geological trauma. The animals were gone at once, leaving her alone. She felt abandoned. It was unsettling. She pushed in behind the wheel to find the image of her daughter’s face in the windshield.
Chapter Thirty-Six
A few steps from the water’s edge of Yellowstone Lake, Wesley pulled a water sample from a smoking seep stained uranium-salts orange by the living bodies of billions of thermophilic bacteria. As he capped a vial, he was startled by a piercing squeal of tires on pavement. A Subaru Forester charged into view, skidding to avoid his service truck parked in the highway on the edge of West Thumb Geyser Basin. Apparently the driver didn’t notice the truck until it was almost too late. The car swept by within inches of the parked rig, throwing up clouds of dust from the shoulder. The speeding vehicle shuddered to a stop.
Liz materialized on the road, legging it toward the diminutive geyser complex tight by the shores of Yellowstone Lake.
A voice reached the supervising geologist. “Wes, is that you there?”
Wesley waved.
Liz jogged up to the older gentleman. “What are you doing here, Wes?
“I was about to ask you the same thing. Ms. Embree.”
“I thought you had gone to D.C.”
“I was on my way, up to the very last minute. I cancelled the trip.”
“Why?”
“The advisory…it may not be enough. The other morning, you’d gone down the Thoroughfare; I was supposed to get to the airport. But things changed dramatically overnight. It’s remarkable what’s happening. All the data is suddenly far outside even recent parameters on everything we’re monitoring. Data or not, when you’ve worked the park as long as I have, you just know in your bones that people are at risk now. So I called the shot.”
“The advisory?”
“Yes, yes, and we went so far as to evacuate all but the most critical personnel.”
“No wonder no one is around.”
“The Park Service is in lockstep with it, the Interior Department, FEMA, everyone except Montana Governor Seifert. He’s one angry beast. But it’s done. It’s time to clear people out.”
Liz nodded her head repeatedly.
“They’ve instituted a fifty-mile buffer around the park. A few YVO veterans have stayed on. Some gung-ho graduate students in the office wanted to stay, but I sent them out; told them to get far away from this place. I was worried sick about them. About you, too.”
“How did you get here? I couldn’t get through to Mammoth.”
“I got caught below Canyon, probably the same as you. I couldn’t go north, so I came down here to Grant Village and spent the night. Didn’t sleep much. I thought I’d go out the south entrance and backtrack via the Tetons.”
“We could go together.”
“Sounds like a plan, Ms. Embree.”
The geophysicist surveyed the West Thumb inlet waters out to the white-capped Absaroka Range peaks glistening on the edge of the world, listening for the concussive sounds she had heard earlier among the elk herd. “I just came from Brimstone, Wes.”
“You did? Did you see anyone on your way out?”
“No, not a soul.”
“We wanted to get people in there yesterday but couldn’t get through. What did you see?”
“The basin is heavily deformed and cut through with fissures. It’s blowing off prodigious heat. Those air bursts, they have to originate at Brimstone.”
“The data stream, everything, it all points that way, Ms. Embree.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Vehicles running in tandem, Liz and Wesley sped for the south entrance of the park twenty miles away, crossed the southerly continental divide rise and descended toward the shores of Lewis Lake. At the south tip of Yellowstone’s third-largest body of water, at a pullout for Lewis Falls, the highway lay in ruins, just as it had been near Madison junction under the ancient caldera escarpments.
Lewis Falls tumbled down the last eroded and lava-flow-buried remnants of the south rim of the lost caldera, providing a chattering backdrop for the humans surveying geological mayhem. Great cracks hacked down through the road and zigzagged through the surrounding terrain, some twenty-feet wide, steep sided and nearly as deep. The great gashes in the earth belched white sulfurous vapor. Ten car lengths away to the south, across a half dozen fissures, stood a Park Service pickup truck sideways in the road, blocking the way through to the north. Someone was signaling, a park ranger. His voice sailed across the divide.
“What are you doing there? Where did you come from?
Wesley cupped her hands around his mouth and yelled. I’m Wesley Couch with the USGS. Ms. Embree here was at Park Point cabin, doing research.”
“Didn’t you hear?”
“What? Hear what?”
“The evacuation order.”
“Yes, well aware of it.”
“You need to leave the park.”
“Look, I was hoping to help Ms. Embree get across to you. Can you take her out? She needs to get back to Mammoth.”
“I can’t leave this post.”
“Very well, just radio to reach someone to get up here.”