The Yellowstone Conundrum (4 page)

University of Washington, Seattle

6:20 AM PST

  Sixth-year grad student Karen Bagley carefully placed her piping hot Starbucks double latte on a small, but clear portion of the left side of her messy workstation, ever so carefully because two years ago she’d casually put a similar cup of on top the tail of an old-fashioned mouse, which when accidentally jerked, spilled the contents into her sleek laptop, instantly frying the circuits. Of course, like the rest of world’s population, she hadn’t backed up her data in over a year thinking;
It won’t happen to me, I’m just too smart.

 
She still hadn’t backed up her data but she had graduated to Safe Starbucks.

 
Karen herself was a messy bag of laundry, her sex features hard to determine other than the smooth, pretty lines of her face; everything else a guy would look at was covered by drab, loose-fitting comfortable clothes; now 22, her girly pimples were gone, most of her freshman 15 lost to semi-healthier eating. However, she hadn’t done her hair in four days, so her ponytail was now a bit heavy, perhaps blond, perhaps not. Her head followed the rhythm of the music from her iPod5. She couldn’t hear anything from the outside world, which in this case was the basement of the seven-story Gothic Johnson Hall, which housed the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. 

 
Outside, February was now into its third month, or so it seemed. Nothing but a cold grey mist covered everything west of the Cascades, separating Drysiders from Wetsiders.  Very few places could beat Seattle in February on the Dreary Scale. It would be four months or more before the girls with short skirts would sit on the steps surrounding Drumheller Fountain and spread just a little, pretending to study, knowing there was a cadre of horny freshmen shooting up-skirt shots from across the quad.

 
Faced with actually graduating in June, Karen knew the mornings of monitoring the seismographs and printouts, then transmitting the pages of results from UW’s monitoring station back to US Geo’s Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, were coming to an end. Some other grad student would take over. The data captured each night would be verified from different angles from the other 135 world-wide monitoring stations.

 
At 6:20 PST Karen’s double latte lurched into a two-step and did a head-first dive onto her laptop—kind of a swan song, a two-and-a-half-double-latte-backflip and instantly fried her computer. Karen shrieked, her headphones popping out of her ears. Her swivel chair with the roll coasters started to float across the hard computer lab’s raised floor. Books and papers started to jump like they had minds of their own—
free the slaves!  I’m free at last; thank God I’m free at last
and spewed in all directions across the lab.

 
To her left the bank of seismographs started to dance like she’d never seen before. Unable to get out her seat because of the shaking, Karen saw the rapid fluctuation of the measuring equipment violently fluctuate on the four monitors, then rip across the printout paper---whacka-whacka-whacka. 

 
The earthquake felt like it was right under her seat.

 
Stumbling, she fell toward the seismographs. 

 
That can’t be.
She thought.

 
Some spikes were going off the page; that is, the peak wasn’t sharp, it was broken. The apogee of the measurement was to the right of the piece of paper, the return shock coming back to be printed dutifully picked up where it could—beyond imagination. The top margin of the printout was 10.0. The earthquake being measured was beyond that.             

 
The epicenter was in Wyoming, six hundred miles away.       Thirty seconds into the endless rattle a second set of seismographs began to spaz out.

 
The second quake lasted a full 120 seconds, at odds with the first series of quakes. She looked at printer as it regurgitated the results before it spazed, jerking this way and that with the shaking before tipping over onto the floor, still printing. 

 
The epicenter of the second quake was north of Bainbridge Island, two miles east of the village of Suquamish in the center of the Puget Sound; the Cascadia fault had been triggered by the severe disruption in Wyoming. When the freight train of the quake was over she could hear other noises from above. The greater Seattle area had just experienced a 9.45 earthquake, an aftershock from hell’s imagination inside Yellowstone National Park which had witnessed an 11.2 earthquake.

 
The Seismology lab was in shambles.

 
The lights went out.

 
Karen screamed again.

 
Above her she could hear the rumbles resuming in the distance, like the thunder from an advancing storm. A nearby building was collapsing. Was it hers?

West Yellowstone Village, Montana

7:20 MST

 
“Good morning visitors!  Time to get up and rock and roll! Get up out of that warm, comfy bed for a day of play in the snow. It’s a great day! Clear skies, the sun is just coming up over the horizon. Let’s see; what does our trusty thermometer have to say? Ten below. Yes, indeed; going to get all the way up to minus 2 by late in the afternoon,” chirped morning DJ Billy “Little Deuce” Richards. “This is KWYS-AM West Yellowstone Montana, broadcasting at 920 kHz, your 24-hour station with all the news, weather, sports and Yellowstone Park comin’s and goin’s. Get ready sleepyheads!  Get up and dance your socks off!” Billy’s voice dropped to a bass. “It’s Alright by Adam Faith and the Roulettes!”

 
Although a hit in its own right in 1964, the song was made famous in the movie
Good Morning, Vietnam
with Robin Williams boogying around the radio studio, flipping 45 records and generally acting like Robin Williams. It didn’t matter that the song consisted of repeating “It’s alright, it’s alright” 72 times to a relentlessly driving beat.

 
Well, if you want me

 
It’s alright

 
It’s alright, it’s alright

  Well, if you want me

 
It’s alright

 
It’s alright, it’s alright

  Well, if you want me

 
It’s alright (it’s alright)

  I
t’s alright (it’s alright)

 
It’s alright (it’s alright)

  But, it wasn’t alright (it’s alright). On the 23
rd
It’s alright
(it’s alright) the strongest earthquake ever recorded since man crawled out of the ooze began to violently shake the village of West Yellowstone, Montana.

 
The second floor of KWYS-AM 920 Voice of Yellowstone National Park and West Yellowstone with all the Motels, Hotels and Places to Stay, Eat and Hootnanny fell directly onto the first floor of WKYS-AM 920, etc. killing young Billy “Little Deuce” Richards as he took the first sip from his double vanilla latte mocha from the Starbucks down the street. He never knew what hit him.

 
Further down the street the wooden exterior of the IMAX Theater “Yellowstone Bears and Beavers!” took a hit as exterior wall boards first popped in synch, then the roof fell and the IMAX went boom. Wendy’s fell into the Motel 8; the Hampton Inn exploded; and they all died; McDonalds, Holiday Inn, Ramada Inn, Comfort Inn—in fact, ALL of the Inns. All fell into rubble within twenty seconds, anyone inside was dead.

 
And if it wasn’t enough that everything was totally demolished and everyone was dead, the earth had the audacity to violently shake for another four minutes, just to make sure all of the bricks were sifted.

South of Beartooth Pass, Wyoming-Montana border

7:20 MST

  “Yes!  Jesus, yes!  Oh--oh, please, yes!  God—“ 

 
Penny Anderson felt the earth move beneath her slim, naked body. The vibration of their sex hit her at the exact moment of the best orgasm of her life. The warmth of their oversized sleeping bag and passion of their youth combined for Feast of the Yeast. 

  “Yes!
God damn it, yes!” she shouted, her pelvis moving at 120 beats a minute to his strokes. “Don’t stop!” Her long fingers had a hard buttock in each hand. 

 
Jimmy James Johnson, pile drivin’ man. Oh, the front porch was wide open. So was the back porch if he wanted it.  “Yes…yes…go…more!  Don’t stop!” Penny screamed as her partner and the earth moved as one. Jimmy James hit the runway just as her plane landed and the pair started to glide down the runway to the exit ramp.

 
The orgasm stopped moving but the earth didn’t.

 
“Wh--” sputtered her startled partner. “What the hell! “

 
Penny screamed as their REI 4-season tent started the limbo, shaking to the earthy beat.

 
A penis is a funny thing. It knows. It knows when to hold ‘em and knows when to fold ‘em. While part of Jimmy’s brain was still inside Penny, the alert portion of his brain told him something was seriously wrong and that Mandingo needed to fold camp, take a hike; petered out so to speak.

 
“What the fuck was that?” Jimmy shouted, tumbling first out of, then off of, the hottest babe he’d managed to snag in the past year. Penny Anderson, second team US volleyball and alternate to the USA 20km cross-country skiing team—a walking, talking hot babefest fucking machine. And he’d scored the best pussy ever. 

 
The Earth even moved.

 
The pair lay panting as the shock poles on the tent continued to rock and roll, the ground beneath them vibrating like a 50-cent bed in the Super 8 in Cody.

 
Penny screamed again because of the noise; a rumbling, bumbling, rolling thunder, belying the beautiful morning she saw out of the flaps of the tent; the yellow distant sun just climbing over the statuesque fir trees, the blue sky to the east. She shouted, rolled over Jimmy James and tumbled out into the hard packed snow. He wasn’t far behind her, although equally undressed.

 
The two naked twenty-two year olds looked across the wide expanse of the NE corner of Yellowstone National Park; they were alone.

  Trees swayed.
Animals cried and wolves howled, the crisp hardness of the snow crust crinkled as the ground shook. 
Surf’s up, dude
. The pair reacted to balancing themselves during the most violent earthquake since the earth’s creation.

 
Then it stopped.

 
The sound of the ground shaking stopped. 

 
Pine trees rustled their branches, then stopped, all snow falling to lumps beneath.

 
The animals stopped howling.

 
Thirty seconds later, Penny and Jimmy James, still naked and scared to death outside their now-collapsed tent.  

 
“What’s that?” Penny pointed, her small breasts, nipples taut, along with her finger, pointing to the west.   Cleanly shaven except for a small vertical tuft of pubis; she was indeed a blond.  While perky Penny could point, Jimmy James’ pointer had gone to its hidey-hole.

 
Fifty miles to the west a cloud of volcanic ash, molten rock, miniscule portions of Old Faithful Village, and maybe a piece of Nadene and Randy Crowe of Flagstaff, Arizona shot skyward into the blue-black sky, just now clearing the far horizon.

 
Dressing quickly, Penny Anderson of Eugene, Oregon and Jimmy James Johnson of Ogden, Utah scurried to break down camp, each knowing their portion of morning chores in the backcountry. Fifteen minutes later they were ready, boots on, skis attached.

 
“Where to?” Jimmy asked.

 
“Not there,” Penny nodded to the west, looking like she was ready for a Nordic pentathlon; clear skin, short blond hair cut shake-‘n-bake style. In fifteen minutes it had taken to take down camp the sky to the west was blocked by a shroud of volcanic debris now approaching twenty-five thousand feet, making the cloud look like a fierce thunderhead. 

 
Penny turned and faced north, the sun blocked by a range of E-W Mountains that ran along the border between Wyoming and Montana; the range was the western extension of the Bitterroots.

 
“Well, you know, we could check the radio,” added Jimmy.

  Penny smiled.
“I knew I had you along for a reason other than that stiff thing you bring out every morning.”

 
Jimmy smiled and fetched his GPS, a marvel of technology that included a telephone, an Emergency Band radio, and the positioning software. The device woke up and beeped cheerily.
Hello, what can I do for you?
  Jimmy switched to the Emergency Weather Band.

 
Static; then more static, then a faint voice.

 
“Daddy, are you OK?  Talk to me, please. (girl’s voice) Oh, God—please make it stop…Daddy!  (sound of destruction)

  “Why’d you stop it?” Penny asked.

 
“I didn’t.” It’s gone”, Jimmy James twiddled with the dial. “It was, I don’t know. The signal’s gone!”

 
The voice of the girl on the emergency weather station was terrifying. She wasn’t supposed to be there. Where’d the signal come from?

 
In front of them was a beautiful valley, mountains on two sides, and what they knew would be a large meadow, now buried under twelve feet of snow. It was shaking.  Everything was shaking. The whole valley was shaking, trembling just a bit. The fir trees were shaking, their snow dusting dribbling down like confectioner’s sugar.

 
Jimmy James ran his hand across his mouth, now dry.

 
To the west the sky was dark from the explosions.

 
The ground began to shake again, violently.

 
The young couple was thrown down. Around them a cluster of pines swayed back and forth, what remaining snow on the branches shaken to the ground.

 
They were surfing on the ground.

  Penny sh
rieked. “Stop it!” she shouted.

 
The two skiers bounced to the earth’s vibration.

 
Then it stopped again. 

 
Oblivious to the cold, the pair was spread-eagled, each trying to gain a measure of control over their out-of-control environment. After a full minute the dull roar of the catastrophe to the west subsided; trees stopped shaking. Penny got to her feet, followed by Jimmy.

 
“We can’t go back there,” Penny said, pointing to the west.

 
“That’s where our car is,” Jimmy James said simply.

 
“I don’t care,” Penny replied. “I’m not going—there—“she pointed to the west where the evil clouds had continued to climb into the morning sky.

 
The two of them had parked their car at the West entrance to Yellowstone. The road to Cody was open most years, although the road over Beartooth Pass closed at the first snowfall, normally late September. They then skied into the backcountry across a beautiful forest setting; laughing, swooshing, and loving where they were and what they were doing. They were happy. Two days of constant skiing had brought them northeast of the park, flat up against the Absaroka Range.

 
“We can’t go back there,” she repeated, her eyes pleading with Jimmy James, who stood there and shook his head. In the distance the black crap from hell continued to rise into the blue morning sky. To return to their car meant skiing directly back toward the ever-growing cloud of ash.

 
Penny turned to her left and began to calculate her options.

 
“Babe,” Jimmy said, knowing what Penny was thinking. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can; shit, I don’t know if I can make it. You’re a hell of better skier than me.”

 
“We can’t go back to the car,” Penny replied, scared.  The wolves resumed their howling in the distance. They were afraid as well. The ground started to vibrate again.

 
Jimmy James started to get a loosey-goosey feeling in his bowels. Penny was the first to speak.

 
“If we get over the pass, we’ll have clear sailing. We can ski downhill to Billings if we have to. It’s all downhill. If we go east we’ve got range after range, valley after valley; nothing but crap skiing!”

 
Skiing east from Yellowstone was impossible because of the terrain. Skiing north you only had to clear Beartooth Pass, at 10,947 the third highest road pass in the United States, in the dead of winter.