From the very first minutes of the eruption, the violence was sealed away from the eyes of the world. Those near enough to record the opening salvos of the eruption on still camera or video devices were buried. Within the first twenty-four hours, tens of thousands of square miles across five states disappeared beneath the pyroclastic assault. By the end of the second day, the jackboot heel print of the eruption and ash fall pressed into forty percent of the landmass of the contiguous forty-eight states.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Evening crept along the granite and rubble escarpment above Big Stone Lake. Abel anxiously anticipated the sunset to see if what Bobcat was telling him would come to pass. After dinner, he and Pelee strolled away from the heart of the Independency compound and picked their way down a meandering path cut into the glacial debris of the bluffs to the eastern shore of the thirty-mile-long finger lake to take in the celestial nightcap. He had corralled citizens all day, asking them to join him for the sunset at the water’s edge. He knew Bobcat and his wife would come, Penny Markham, too, and Findley and Sarah Litton, new arrivals to Independency and parents of Pelee’s new friend, Jennifer. There would be scores of others, most likely.
The third of May had been a frenetic day. It had dawned warm, in the high fifties, a decidedly toasty early morning temperature for the plains country. The balmy air was greeted by the Independency faithful with a flurry of activity. Acres of potato ground had been tilled with the old Ford tractor and several tons of Katahdin, Kennebec, and Russet seed potatoes had been healed into the warming soil. Danvers carrot seed followed the potatoes in several adjacent acres, as did onions, leeks and scallions. The Brassica family—broccoli, cabbages, kale, Brussels sprouts, and related oriental vegetables—had been set out as tiny starter plants in acre-long rows. Warm weather crops would have to wait until Memorial Day weekend. Abel was sullen as he left the community buildings behind. Pelee streaked ahead on the steep, well-worn path, keeping tabs on the unfolding ferns and listening to a deafening chorus of spring peepers and toads out early to greet the warm evening air. The sundown sky was partitioned as it had been the day before, with a gray flat wall to the south, clear air directly overhead and to the north.
Abel was troubled by his failure to contact Pelee’s mother. He couldn’t get through on his cell phone and landline circuits to the Rocky Mountain West were hopelessly jammed. News from the networks about conditions in the mountain states was increasingly grim. Salt Lake City, an entire urban metropolis, had not been heard from for nearly seventy-two hours. Denver and all but her southernmost suburbs were stone quiet. Those trying to raise scores of smaller high plains and mountain communities reaped only silence.
Nothing Abel did could penetrate the blanket over the West. He had Bobcat working every avenue of communication, but the pro could yield little. It was becoming clear to Abel that his ex-wife might be among the millions now missing. If entire states had been buried by the eruption and all communication had ceased in those regions, it was not much of a leap to assume Liz had died in the disaster the day she was to leave Yellowstone. He was facing the prospect of having to tell his daughter that her mother would not be coming home. He feared the burden of having to divulge the truth to Pelee. The notion made him nauseous and irritable.
At a fork in the path to the lake, Abel turned left, ambled around a backwater inlet and out to a bony limestone shelf of land on the eastern shore of Big Stone Lake, where he sat down. Blackbirds called from the cattails and reeds, each staking a claim to a stretch of lakeside turf. Insects winged just above the waters and the first whirligig beetles of the season pirouetted relentlessly on the surface in the shallows. New shoots of wild grasses waved in the sweet warm breeze.
Penny Markham, Bobcat and his wife, Josie, and several others padded along the lakeshore and came up to join Abel. Penny, the community’s master chef, sat down next to him and gave him a pat on the arm.
“Any word from Liz yet, Abel?” Penny asked.
“No, not a word. I can’t get through. Things look bad, don’t they?”
“Well, we’ll have to see. We really don’t know any more about what’s happened out west than anybody else. We just know we haven’t heard from anyone. That’s all we know.”
Abel understood instinctively the woman was being kind in the choice of her words. She was right, he reflected. He really knew nothing at all. Liz’s fate was unknown and would probably remain so for some time, at least until flights out of the mountain states resumed and communication was restored in the stricken region.
On the western horizon, the mirror-blue heavens north of the ash line blushed deep pink and the edges of high cirrus clouds picked up the rose hues. Bobcat and his wife plopped down on the grass, followed by a dozen others. Pelee came sailing into the clutch of sunset gazers, towing Jennifer by the hand. The kids were breathless and sprawled in the grasses and sedges near the water’s edge.
Bobcat had been working the communication channels all day, keeping to himself as much as possible. Community members dropped in on him throughout the day, asking him for help to see if he could find a way to communicate with Rocky Mountain towns where they had relatives or friends. He felt as if he were the wireless operator aboard the ill-fated Titanic, sending signals and getting little useful response in return. But he kept at it hour after hour, leaning heavily on the short-wave radio.
He could raise Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, and San Francisco. There was traffic with Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Colorado Springs and Oklahoma City, too, some of them cowering and barely audible under a ferocious volcanic ash barrage. He had slapped a National Geographic Society map of the United States up on the wall and circled each city. He then connected the circles with a marker line, creating a great oval arch west, south and east of most of the Rocky Mountain States’ terrain.
As the map began to take shape, he tried to tighten the noose by attempting to get through to communities closer and closer to Yellowstone National Park. He learned quickly that the noose was loose and wide. Everywhere he turned, the voice of warm humans fell away just one hundred or so miles inboard from the freehand line he had drawn. Inside that marked-in zone, audible ceased. The sound of morgue silence reigned; it spooked Bobcat. As no one else at Independency, he now had a distinct concept of the scale of the event that had taken place in the Rocky Mountain country. He had uncovered the disaster’s audible reach. It was immense.
Bobcat sat pouting, pulling pebbles from the soil and tossing them about. His wife, Josie, sensing a cold shoulder, fell into conversation with Penny. Abel settled down on an elbow and tugged on Bobcat’s old leather vest.
“What do you hear, Bobcat?”
The man went on collecting pebbles. “I don’t hear a thing, Abel. Nothing.” Bobcat flicked a glance at his friend and tossed a pebble toward the lake. “There is no such thing in short wave as not picking up chatter from half a continent. It just doesn’t happen. I’ve never heard it like this before. It’s frightening.”
Silver riffles in the black lake caught fire. Each wavelet, capturing the lengthening light, reflected the color of wood embers and danced like flame. Pinks on the horizon had heated up to cadmium orange and the ash veil to the south blushed hot rouge. The cloud wisps throbbed with lustrous reds, their linings red violet. The atmosphere above pulsated with hot blast-furnace pigments, drenching the forest and bluffs in a warm, saturated orange.