“Have you ever seen such a remarkable sunset?” called a female voice across the water.
As the colors intensified, people could not contain their glee. Most rose from their sitting positions by the waters to stand and rotate about looking to all points of the compass. The children laughed and pointed at each other, rejoicing in the saturated orange tones of reflected luminous light scattering over their skin. The heavens were ablaze, as if solar flares had come to earth by day to dance upon the lake.
Abel was swept up in the evening fireworks. The atmosphere was joyous, alive, uplifting. The colors set the children prancing, each tossing away their sneakers to tread barefoot on the flickering orange ground. Several community members spread arms wide toward the heavens as if to evoke a blessing.
“My goodness, it’s heaven on earth!” sang out Penny.
“Quite the opposite,” rumbled Bobcat.
Bobcat’s quiet retort jabbed Abel’s sensibilities like a hatpin. He spun about, grabbed Bobcat by the arm, and led him away from the group.
“Is this the atmospherics you expected, Bobcat?” asked Abel.
“Exactly. Look at it. It’s remarkable.”
“What does it tell you?”
“Like I said yesterday, Abel, if Yellowstone blew away like it has in the deep past, then sunsets should be awesome. Well, it’s awesome right now.”
“It’s all the dust in the upper atmosphere?”
“Yeah, dust and sulfur dioxide.”
“What happens tomorrow? What happens the next day?”
“More of the same, Abel. The sunsets will be spectacular for months. That’s nothing to be happy about. Dust and gas is blocking sunlight from reaching the ground. The long red wavelengths of light are getting through, as you can see, but that’s it. Makes for really great sunsets.”
Bobcat pointed to the heavens, to the now-throbbing red drape-like formation to the south and southwest. “You see that shit out there. If that moves over us, we won’t be seeing sunsets for a while.”
“You told me yesterday,” Abel pressed, “that temperatures could cool down a great deal if Yellowstone erupted like it once did.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t joking. This is big and it’s not going to go away. Things are likely to get chilly, probably a great deal. It may be nirvana right now, like Penny said. But I’m telling you, man, it just may be hell on earth tomorrow.”
The evening stretched into the night hours and still the brilliant paint palette in the sky remained. Aerosols high in the stratosphere captured and reflected light from the sun that was now a long hour over the horizon. Dusk should have fallen, but the sky was still brightly lit, and the community citizens stayed out by the pond to bask in undying color.
One of the community members had lugged an acoustic guitar down to the shoreline and was now strumming a few bars of Oh, Susanna. Up and down the lake, people joined in a sing-along:
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Shouldering the waters of immense Lake Sakakawea reservoir in central North Dakota, the long, low Garrison Dam was built well for its Promethean task, but the great impoundment could not be found in the landscape. The massive concrete and earthen structure and hundreds of miles of shoreline lay buried beneath nine feet of volcanic ash.
Human life had been snuffed out in the lonely high plains country surrounding the great manmade body of water. There were no witnesses to the arrival of a mountainous juggernaut. A battering ram of mud, volcanic slurry, whole trees and structural debris fanned out for miles across the ash-choked reservoir. The mass surged tall enough to overtop two-story roof peaks of those few buildings that had not been crushed by the ash accumulation.
It had taken nearly a week for the Yellowstone lahar to reach Garrison Dam. Born of flash-thawed snow and ice from all mountain summits within several hundred miles of Yellowstone National Park, the potent volcanic flood traced both the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers and grew to hellish proportions as it surged out of the mountains. Slowed by endless debris fields, uprooted forests and dense ash and pumice deposits, billions of cubic yards of meltwater bulldozed the volcanic mire steadily downhill into the upper Missouri River basin.
At Lake Sakakawea, the mass fanned out across the sweeping lake topography and formed a mammoth debris jam at the dam that held for thirty hours. An ocean of lahar muck mingled with the reservoir waters, raising the level of the lake so much that the polluted swill overtopped the dam and cut new drainage passages around it. As a torrent of scum chewed new erosion canyons into the prairie, immense pressures behind the debris jam blew out the dam with explosive force. Garrison Dam failed utterly and the lahar was underway again. The viscous mass of volcanic horror had doubled in volume. Its speed increased, powered by the tonnage of mud and water that had accumulated behind the great dam and by the immense volume of the reservoir itself.
After ten days of relentless advance, the Yellowstone lahar entered the broad sweeping turn in the Missouri River at Sioux City, Iowa and swung south toward Omaha, Nebraska and Kansas City. At Sioux City, the town’s lively new riverfront developments and parks, sources of much civic pride, were ground to fragments and swept up into the moving mass. The Argosy, a floating gambling casino, was splintered to matchsticks. Fourth Street, the town’s historic commercial district, drowned in thick muck that reached up to the second story windows.
At Omaha, St. Joseph and Kansas City, severely crippled emergency management authorities could do little to communicate with low-lying businesses and residences within a mile of either side of the Missouri River. Crews had been rendered powerless by the ashfall to do anything to help hundreds of thousands of citizens get out of harm’s way.
Aboard the Missouri Mallet, a heavy diesel river tug stranded with its load of four tank barges full of light-grade kerosene, river pilot Jefferson McPhee was in near panic. His vessel’s engines had failed nearly two weeks earlier during the first days of the ash fall. The channel ship and its barges had been just north of a severe dogleg turn in the river, where the Kansas River empties into the Missouri within a long toss of downtown Kansas City. The fast river current pushed the stalled ship and its barge load backwards in the Missouri and onto the Kaw Point Riverfront Park spit where the Kansas River emptied into the larger flowage. There the ship and its fleet of barges stuck fast in the mud on the river’s west shore.
The Army Corps of Engineers ordered McPhee and his crew to return to the vessel and remove lanyards that kept the barges lashed together. The big floating flat-bottom tankers were to float free, separately. McPhee protested vehemently, thinking the order was complete madness. He was near fisticuffs with an officer of the Corps, when the tug’s bridge began to fill with an ominous growling noise, so low in frequency that it could be felt in the chest.
The pilot ceased his shouting match and glanced upriver beyond the old terminal buildings of nearby K.C. Downtown Airport. One of Kansas City’s famous limestone bluffs appeared to be moving, dropping south toward them, advancing at the same rate that the river was running. A monster was loose in the river valley. It crumpled private planes like waste paper and swatted down decades-old hangers and freight terminals one after another.
Roaring into the river dogleg, millions of tons of mud and materials rose up out of the Missouri as debris jammed and compacted in the tightest turn in the lower river system. The artificial dam built higher and higher, shutting off much of the Missouri. With nowhere to go, water surged into the Kansas River, reversing its course. The Missouri Mallet capsized and the kerosene tank barges separated. Several were crushed, spewing tens of thousands of gallons of kerosene.