Free Fire (22 page)

Joe looked at Demming and she nodded.

“We’ll tag along,” Joe said.

“Good, good. You’ll see some really cool stuff,” Cutler said, turning on his heel and gesturing in a “follow me” wave.

Joe instantly liked him for his affability and enthusiasm for his job. He guessed Cutler was a pretty good manager.

“I’ve got a couple of things to wrap up in my office,” Cutler said, leading them outside on a wooden walkway that led, eventually,to some low-slung administration buildings painted Park Service brown and tucked into a stand of lodgepole pine. “We’re winding down the season, as you can see. It’s quite an operation. That means shutting down all the facilities and winterizingthem, dealing with the reassignment of employees, year-end reports, too many things to count. It would almost be easier if we just stayed open all year, but we don’t.”

“So you knew the victims pretty well?” Joe asked.

Cutler shrugged. “Pretty well. I mean, I was their boss, not their buddy. But I got along well with them. They were good guys, despite what you might have heard.” He nodded toward Demming when he said it, indicating the tiff they had had with particular rangers like Layborn. “They worked hard and they played hard. Hoening had a bit of an agenda, as you probably know, but a lot of new hires do. They come here to save the place, but the day-to-day work starts to make them forget that.”

Cutler’s office was small and nondescript, nothing on the walls or his desk of a personal nature except for a photo of him smiling with Old Faithful erupting in the background.

While Cutler fired off responses to e-mails, Joe turned to Demming.

“The Pagoda is a palace compared to this,” Joe said. “Cutler manages hundreds of people, but his office . . .”

“I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “That’s how it is. Governmentemployees are the royalty and the contractors are our serfs. Discussion over, Joe.”

“Sorry.”

She smiled to show she wasn’t angry. Then: “I talked to Ashby for an hour last night. He’s not happy. The news about Darren Rudloff is getting out, and he’s gotten some calls already.Apparently, some reporters are asking him questions about the Zone of Death, like are there a bunch of armed outlawsin it, why isn’t the Park Service patrolling the area, those kinds of things. He doesn’t like it one bit and he’s meeting with Chief Ranger Langston this morning to discuss the situation. I may get called back to Mammoth to help out.”

“How can you go back and keep an eye on me at the same time?” Joe asked slyly.

She shook her head. “I’d rather stay here. I don’t know where we’re going, but it seems like we’re headed somewhere.”

“Story of my life,” Joe said.

“If I get called back, you may be asked to leave.”

“Oh.”

“They don’t trust you,” she said, lowering her voice. “They think you’ll do something to bring the whole Clay McCann/Zone of Death thing back into the headlines. In fact, it’s already happening, isn’t it?”

“I hope so.”

Cutler tapped the keys on his keyboard with efficient violenceand fired off the last e-mail, saying, “There! Chew on that, Park Service weenies!” As he did so, he glanced at Demmingand said, “Sorry, ma’am. No offense.”

“None taken,” Demming said coolly.

Cutler leaned back. “I’m going off my shift here now and putting on a different hat. Follow me.”

Cutler launched himself out of his chair and was out the door in a shot, Joe and Demming struggling to keep up. Cutler explainedthat his primary interest in life was geology, specifically geothermal activity. It was the reason he came to Yellowstone in the first place, twenty years before. Although he was area manager,his degree and background were in science, and he’d publishedscientific papers in international journals and kept a regular and ongoing correspondence with geologists around the world, wherever there were geysers. He had personally mapped more than two thousand geothermal sites within the park, and served as the secretary for the loosely organized Geyser Gazers, the volunteers who watched and recorded eruptions and hot-spotactivities.

“So that’s what brought you out here,” Joe asked, “the geysers?”

Cutler nodded. “I originally wanted to join for the Park Service,but that didn’t work out.”

“Why not?” Demming asked, a little defensively.

Cutler stopped, smiled gently. “This is the most active, unique, and fascinating geothermal area in North America. Everything is visible here because the center of the earth is closer to the surface than anywhere else. It’s like a doctor meetingsomeone who has all his organs on the outside of his body—everything is right there to study. Do you know how many geologists are employed by the National Park Service in Yellowstone?”

Joe and Demming shook their heads.

Cutler raised a finger. “One. And he’s too busy to get out in the field. Not his fault, just the structure of the bureaucracy. So,” Cutler said, spinning on his heel and continuing to lead the way to a cabin compound where he lived, “without volunteers, withoutthe Geyser Gazers, there would be no ongoing study of the caldera in the park. But it’s not a chore, it’s a passion. I love what I do, both at Old Faithful and especially out here in the field.”

“Are you married?” Joe asked. “Kids?”

“Engaged, sort of,” Cutler said. “It’s hard to convince some ladies to live here, believe it or not.”

“Kids would love it,” Joe said, smiling. “Imagine being raised in this place. I wanted to live here, once.”

Cutler nodded with instant kinship. “Takes a special kind of person,” he said. “Or an outright fool.”

“Which are you?”

“I straddle the line.”

Joe said he’d met Dr. Keaton the night before.

“Doomsayer?” Cutler asked, squinting.

“Is it true what he says?”

“He never stops talking,” Cutler said, “so that’s a hard one to answer.”

“That Yellowstone could blow up in a super volcano any minute?”

“Oh sure, that part’s true,” Cutler said cheerfully, pausing outside his cabin. “Give me a minute to change and we can go.”

Joe and Demming looked at each other. Joe thought she looked pale.

“You haven’t heard this before?” he asked.

“I’ve heard it,” she said. “I just didn’t believe it.”

“Doomsayer says drink up, for tomorrow we die.”

While cutler changed clothes and gathered his equipment,Joe and Demming looked idly through five-gallon plastic buckets filled with tourist debris Cutler had fished out of geysersand hot springs. Most of the collection was of coins, tossed in, no doubt, to bring luck. There were American coins by the thousands, but also Euros, yen, pence, pesos, Canadian coins. Another bucket contained nails, hats, bullets, batteries, lug nuts, and, interestingly, a 1932 New York City Police Department badge and an engagement ring.

“I’d love to know the story behind that ring,” Demming said, holding it up.

“I want to know who walks around with lug nuts in their pocket,” Joe said.

Cutler emerged in ranger green with a radio on his belt. He loaded a long aluminum pole with a slotted spoon on the end into a pickup, along with metal boxes containing electronics.

“Thermisters,” Cutler explained when Joe looked at the boxes. “We hide them in geyser and hot springs runoff channels to track the temperature of the water. We learn a lot about which geysers are getting active and which ones are shutting down by the temps.”

“What’s with the pole and spoon?” Demming asked.

“I use that to pick the coins and crap out of the geysers to keep them clean.”

Joe and Demming climbed into the truck and Cutler roared off.

“Hoening, McCaleb, and Olig were all proud members of the Gopher State Five,” Cutler said. “Since I’m from Minnesota,we hit it off right away. They were just big old Midwesterners.They worked hard, loved their beer, loved the park. They used to come along with me sometimes to check geysers and clean out hot springs, like we’re doing now. They’d come on their days off, when they could be screwing around. When Ranger Layborn came around to ask me about them, it was as if he was describing entirely different people. He seemed to think they were big into drugs and crime, that they were some kind of gang. I never saw that side of them.”

“Were they illegal hot-potters?” Joe asked.

Cutler smiled. “I’m sure they were. We frown on it when it’s our employees, but it’s just about impossible to stop. We can’t watch everyone twenty-four/seven, even though the rangers think we should. No offense, ma’am,” he said to Demming.

“None taken,” Demming said, tight-lipped.

“Any other problems with them? What about the drug allegations?”

“Nothing I know of, and I mean that. That’s not to say all of my people are clean. It’s like any other work situation; there’s a percentage of bad apples. But no more than any workplace in the outside world and less than some. Hell, I went to school in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin. Ranger Layborn could really ply his craft there.”

“Not even marijuana?” Joe asked. “There seemed to be drug references in the e-mails he sent. ‘Flamers,’ he called them.”

Cutler shrugged. “Again, I can’t swear he wasn’t smoking, but I never saw or heard anything that would confirm it. As you know, there’s a certain attitude and culture that goes with drug use, and he didn’t seem to be a part of it. He was pretty tightly wound at times—kind of naively idealistic about environmental issues. But drugs, that would surprise me.”

Cutler turned the pickup off the highway at the Upper Geyser Basin and parked it in the empty lot. Joe trailed him while Demming remained in the pickup to report to the Pagoda on the truck radio. The smell of hot sulfur and water was overwhelming.Cutler explained that the pools on either side of the boardwalk were 190 degrees, and the water temperature could be gauged by the color of the bacteria in the runoff—white beinghottest, green and blue cooler but still too hot to touch. Usingthe slotted spoon, he carefully picked up coins that had been tossed into the thermals and handed them back to Joe, who juggled them from hand to hand until they cooled off enough to inspect. Three pennies and a dime. The pennies were already gray with a buildup of manganese and zinc from the water, Cutlersaid, but the dime, being silver, was unblemished.

Cutler swung over the side of the railing and landed with a thump on the white-crust surface. He urged Joe to follow him.

“What about the ‘Stay on the Boardwalk’ signs?” Joe asked, knowing the ground was unstable near geysers and the crust was brittle. Horror stories abounded of pets and visitors who wandered off the pathway.

“And if I break through?” Joe asked.

“Third-degree burns at the minimum,” Cutler said, businesslike.“Excruciating pain and skin grafts for the rest of your life. If you live, I mean. Worse, you’ll deface the thermal. But it would be nothing like if you actually fell into a hot springs or geyser.”

“What would happen?”

“You’d die instantly, of course; then your body would be boiled. I’ve seen elk and buffalo fall in over the years. Within a couple of hours, their hair comes off in clumps and the flesh separates from the bone. The skeleton sinks and the meat and fat cooks and it smells like beef stew. Sometimes, an animal body affects the stability of the thermal and it erupts and spits all that meat back out. Not pretty.”

“Maybe I should stay up here,” Joe said.

“Just step where I step,” Cutler said. “Not an inch either way and you’ll be fine. I’ve done this for years and I know where to walk and where not to walk.”

Joe felt a thrill being allowed to go where millions of tourists couldn’t go, and stepped over the railing. He wished Demming—or Marybeth—could see him now.

For the next hour, Cutler carefully removed coins and debris from the geysers and hot pools. Joe followed in his footsteps and gathered them and noted what was found in Cutler’s journal. Cutler explained how the underground plumbing system worked, how mysterious it was, how a geyser could simply stop erupting in one corner of the park and a new geyser could shoot up forty miles away as the result of a mild tremor or indiscerniblegeological tic. How the water that came from the geysershad been carbon-tested to reveal it was thousands of years old, that it had been
whooshing
through the underground works before Columbus landed in America and was just now being blasted into the air.

Cutler took a quick turn off the road and pulled over to the side. Ahead of them was a hugely wide but squat white cone emitting breaths of steam. Joe was unimpressed at first glance.

“What you’re looking at is Steamboat Geyser,” Cutler said. “It’s by far the biggest geyser in the world. When this baby goes—and we never know when or why—it can be seen from miles away. It reaches heights of four hundred feet, three times Old Faithful, and drenches everything around here for a quarter of a mile. The volume of boiling water that comes out of it is scary. Nearly as scary as its unpredictability. We’ve waited years for an eruption, and almost declared it dormant when it proved otherwise.”

“When’s the last time it blew?” Joe asked.

“A year ago, in the winter. Three times. No one was there when it went, but the evidence of the eruption was a herd of parboiledbison found a hundred yards away. It seems to be getting more active. The eruptions used to be up to fifty years apart, but last winter they were four
days
apart.”

Cutler whistled. “I’d give my left nut to see it erupt.”

The firehole river was on their left as they departed the geyser basin and drove north on the highway. Bison grazed along the banks and steamy water poured from Black Sand Geyser Basin into the river.

Geyser Gazers, according to Cutler, numbered nearly seven hundred strong, although the hard-core, full-time contingent amounted to only about forty. They were all volunteers, and includedscientists, lawyers, and university professors as well as retired railroad workers, laborers, and the habitually unemployed.The thing that brought them together was their love, knowledge, and appreciation for Yellowstone and the thermal activity within the Yellowstone caldera. Most showed up on weekends or took their vacations to help. Only a few stayed in or near the park on a full-time basis, like Doomsayer and George Pickett.