A pedestrian walk and skyway at the end of Third Street paralleled the Missouri River. Whenever she jogged on it for exercise during her lunch hour, big river tugs accompanied her, pushing long barges heavily loaded with everything from coal to bunker oil, from bulk grains to scrap metal. At the height of the ash fall, the fluid economic artery of the Plains drained completely of shipping commerce.
The pedestrian skyway deposited the Missourian near the head of Broadway Bridge, a steel arch span first opened to traffic in 1959. Winnie crossed to the in-bound lane side and jogged out over the Missouri River. There she slowed once again. Unearthly sounds brought her to a halt.
At the Kansas City Metropolitan Zoo, she had once stood as a young teen before a black panther at feeding time. It snarled at visitors continuously, a voice so menacing she prayed aloud the steel bars of pen would forever contain the creature. The air over Kansas City rumbled with just such noises.
Ahead to the north, private aircraft tied down at Downtown Airport flipped into the air. Structures crumpled and fell. Big rail freight cars rocked and moved, rafting toward the bridge. The train cars slammed into the concrete piers below Winnie’s feet and piled together in a massive metal heap. To the west, at the tight bend in the Missouri River, a creeping tsunami wave of mud and debris overturned a diesel river tug and swept the barges into its maw. Several barges were overtaken and crushed, but one rafted free and spun east, drifting downriver where it slammed into the railcars pinned under the bridge.
Fire erupted. Oily black smoke climbed into the bridge superstructure and flames followed a purple kerosene slick upriver. Winnie turned to run from the bridge when a bomb-like concussion knocked her down on the bridge roadway. Dazed for a second, she managed to clear her senses. Broiling heat engulfed her, spawned by the fire curling around and below the bridge deck. Scrambling to her feet, she sprinted north off the span and down the access ramp toward the airport and rail yards surrounding old Route 169. Her way was blocked. Missouri River water, denied its customary channel by the swelling dam of debris upriver, swept across the highway. Behind her, flames crackled ever higher among the steel arches of the bridge.
Winnie could go neither north nor south. On an island of asphalt, she stood her ground watching the Missouri River calve a new lake, dammed behind the massive jam. The freeform debris dam expanded rapidly before her eyes as the river, acting as a conveyor, continuously delivered massive piles of fresh material to the blockage. Water backed up into the industrial complexes across the river in Kansas, invading the industrial baking plants arrayed there: Continental, Nabisco, Keebler, and others.
Witness to the spectacle of landscape in motion, Winnie fought off an overwhelming sense of the surreal. The waterway was ablaze, structures and rail cars afloat within the flames. Windows in the buildings on the downtown hills were missing, blown out by the blast concussion. The river gnawed away virgin ground, cutting arroyos across the airport and twisting rail lines into pretzels.
A tearing sound rent the air, as if miles of spun cloth were ripped apart at once. Upriver, things began to come apart. Gaps in the massive jam appeared and volcanic sludge cascaded through. Suddenly the whole river view to the west galloped forward, hurtling toward Broadway Bridge. The leading edge of the monstrous lahar mass collided with the flaming rail car and barge tangle, paused just a second, then surged under the bridge.
Broadway Bridge shuddered violently as the volcanic hydraulic ram overwhelmed the steel trusses, arches and piers. With a roar, the bridge heaved from its stone foundations and collapsed onto the Burlington Northern railroad span. The rail bridge twisted, resisted, but it, too, fell and was incorporated into the volcanic lahar.
Chapter Sixty
Petrified air sank over the bluff ridges at Big Stone Lake, falling in pounds per square foot. The vacuum between the eighth-inch volcanic ash flakes was polluted with talc-like micro particles of rock. Abel, peering through his prescription lens straight up into the lithic deluge, could conjure nothing more appropriate than Chicken Little’s storybook cry of despair, “The sky is falling. The sky is falling.”
On all sides, men and women toiled beneath the dust torrent, heads shielded by hoods and towels soaked through with water. All worked furiously to sweep the ash layers off the wide A-frame roofs of the dozens of large glasshouses. Bodies ran with the sweat of exertion, volcanic grime binding to skin and clothing in caked mats.
Pulling on the fifteen-foot handle of a snow rake, Abel strained to bring down ash from the highest glass panels. He labored among dozens of others, going from greenhouse to greenhouse. The whole community, except those assigned to look after the town’s children, had turned out to rescue the structures from collapse. The citizenry had been terrified by the ferocity of the alien precipitation. It took raw-boned conviction to join the struggle against the volcanic debris. But here they were by the score, working in teams outside in the geological mayhem, toiling as if slaves before the whip.
Particles grinding together on the descent filled the atmosphere with fierce static electricity. When Abel picked up the snow rake he was using, a jagged white spark arced between the metal handle and his flesh, a shock forceful enough to buckle his knees. He dragged the socks off his feet, wrapped his hands in them, and resumed raking down the rock powder. The socks, he hoped, might blunt another shock if he let down his guard and absentmindedly touched another metal object or a fellow worker.
Human senses were betrayed. The ears of the laborers filled with the chatter of billions of ash flakes colliding in midair and bombarding objects. As the citizens toiled, the menacing sound seemed to slink off to some distant hideaway as dust filled in ear canals, adhered to earwax and was trapped by fine hairs.
Ash crystals grated like tiny rasps drawn across the eyes and skin, irritating cells until the eyes watered profusely and the dermal layers chaffed again cuff and collar. In the nostrils, ash adhered to sinus tissues, prompting a copious flow of mucus and blunting smell receptors to the point of uselessness.
Hour after hour teams labored against the ash, stopping only to dodge into a greenhouse to rinse suffocating volcanic clots from the wet cloth filters. No sooner had a team reached the far end of the greenhouse cluster than they backtracked to where they had started and began the process anew. The ashen storm sealed out daylight several hours earlier than the previous day. Nightfall descended abruptly. Abel pulled everyone off the line and directed them to one of the illuminated heated greenhouses. They had done their job well, for now, he told the crews. Tomorrow, if the ash continued to fall, they’d have to be up and out a first light to repeat what they had just so laboriously completed.
Abel left the sweating, overwhelmed citizenry in the safety of the greenhouse and stepped outside, absorbing a nasty shock from the metal door latch. He closed the entryway behind him and drifted into the fury alone, walking ten paces out from the structure.
The greenhouse he left thirty feet behind was a smudge of light in the void, nothing more. In the darkness, the air crackled with static. Bony fingers of electricity glowed from the ends of tools lost in the ash fall, akin to St. Elmo’s fire playing in the rigging of sailing ships.
Where did Independency, Minnesota reside? The village was invisible. It had been consumed, the whole of it. Yesterday, had he walked down of the hill from where the greenhouse banks stood, the village green and its buildings would have been right there, due east and just below. A good hefty toss and he could have hit the CC with a baseball if he so desired. Now the community was on the other side of the moon, for all intents and purposes.