The Yellowstone Conundrum (25 page)

Red Lodge, Montana

  Penny was exhausted. Normally, highway 212 cleared Beartooth Pass on the Montana/Wyoming border at 10,900 feet, and then in a space of ten miles switch-backed its way down to the village of Red Lodge, altitude 5,555; the views back up the Rock Creek Canyon toward Thunder Mountain and Mount Rearguard were treeless and spectacular.

 
Behind her to the south the Death Cloud billowed; bright sunshine and blue sky straight ahead to the north.  Stopping to catch her breath, she took a swig from her Nalgene water bottle, and was rewarded with a small cut on her tongue from the sharp edge of ice that had formed inside the bottle. The death cloud now covered the horizon behind her in 180 degrees; up close and personal. There were no puffy cumulus clouds; no rain, just death inside them. With some hard skiing in the last two hours, she’d managed to put a little bit of distance between
It
and her, referring to the cloud as if it were a real monster.  She couldn’t shake the
chinka-chinka-chinka
sound from her head. 

 
The top of Beartooth Pass was no longer visible, lost in the black carbon shower of soot; pure white show now covered with a thin layer of black.

 
Jimmy couldn’t make it, but you can.  Get out of here
!

 
She turned and started to quickly descend from the ridge, flying down the canyon, tucked in tight; down to where US 212 cut a clear path into the mountain, albeit covered with 60 inches of packed powder. 

 
Thighs aching and lungs burning, Penny shot down Rock Creek Canyon, knowing sometimes she was skiing directly over the creek itself. The assumption the snowpack would hold was a dangerous one; she was well aware of the presumed loss of Sequoia National Park ranger Randy Morgenson when on July 21, 1996 he was reported missing; a 64-year old ranger missing? Two years later his boots and pieces of a backpack were found in a side stream west of Bench Lake in Kings Canyon. The assumption was he’d fallen through the snow, back pack on and had been trapped in the cold swift waters of the creek, unable to move. He’d simply drowned; then his body eaten by wolves.

 
Penny hoped that if the snow gave way her speed of descent would save her, at worst a tumble. It didn’t matter.
I’d rather be eaten by wolves
. She didn’t want to die from the Black Smoke Monster.

  Travel throughout the West and notice that towns don’t sit high on bluffs; only retiring Easterners with more money than brains build new homes having wide, expansive views. Western towns in the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska all are built to protect the settlers from the relentless prairie wind, and have been built that way since the land was first settled.

 
As a result, towns were built in ravines, low-lying areas between low hills. Ever notice how the temperature goes up when you step around a corner on a cold, raw, windy day?   It’s the wind chill. 

 
Red Lodge, Montana was like that, built on flat land in a wide ravine, with picturesque Rock Creek flowing down the center. The ravine was about a mile wide and protected the town from the relentless wind.

 
Was
.

 
At most seven blocks wide (EW) and twenty blocks long (NS), the town owed its primary existence to fame as being at the NE entrance to Yellowstone National Park-at least the Montana entrance; that and a modest ski area, some interesting bars that one visitor called “a hoot”.   Reality was Red Lodge was as American a town as could be found. Nestled in the 7-block wide town were three grocery stores, three schools, a couple of motels, and the small shops with honest hard-working people, businesses handed down from one generation to the next. While Big Sky might not have been invented here, it was close. Aspens lined Rock Creek, which flowed heavily in the spring runoff—but there were always the fish; tasty trout.

 
On the hill west of town was the airport, with facilities for the jet-set winter and summer folks who marveled at the sky, the expanse, how clear the air was, and how you could see forever. Politics in Red Lodge centered on farming and tourism. High School graduates tended to stay and work in the area. In other words, Red Lodge, Montana could have been rural Indiana or Texas.

 
Oh—my—God.
 

 
Penny stopped skiing a mile above town. Highway 212 had been plowed up to Perry’s RV and Campground, but afterwards it would just have to wait until the spring melt.

 
The town of Red Lodge was completely destroyed. Bring in the bulldozers and cave in the hillsides on either side.  Ninety-five percent of the homes in Red Lodge were built of either clapboard and/or wood. Why wood?
Duh, there’s this huge national forest.

 
The church with the blue roof, the seven blocks by twenty blocks of neat two- and three-bedroom, one-bath, post WWII early 50s homes, the High School (go Rams, not Redskins) and the brand new gym, the log cabin with the green roof on Park Avenue, the airport—all destroyed. Fires rose from various places across town and had created a layer of smog in the pristine valley. Red Lodge, Montana couldn’t have been destroyed any worse if the government had dropped bunker busters. The frame buildings were sticks. A tornado couldn’t have done better destruction. The old high school, now an elementary school, a smallish three-story brick building was a pile of bricks; two cast iron stairways led from the first floor to the third; now were stage props for Stairway to Heaven; the roof had collapsed as had the second and third floor; the exterior now a ten-foot wide mound of reddish-brown bricks around the circumference. 

 
By the time Penny got to town she was carrying her skis and had a double set of backpacks; oblivious to the weight.  Her legs were rubbery. Uphill and behind her the Black Death Monster hung over the mountain tops, clinging like a spider creating a web. The mountains themselves—always weather-creators—were helping to prevent the northward movement of the volcanic ash, which now spread all across the southern horizon.

 
Penny stared back up toward Beartooth Pass. The top of the mountain was shrouded in black. The upper level winds had shifted a touch; Black Death was moving northward.

 
Walking north on South Broadway, car after car had been crushed by falling buildings; the Montana Candy Emporium sign now lay in the middle of the street, incredibly the handmade chocolates sign intact. The building had once been the town’s movie house; now the home-made Squirrel Nut Zippers, Black Jacks, Fizzies and Walnettos were buried in rubble.

 
Is everyone dead?

 
Across the street Moosely Tees shirts and souvenirs was out of business; further down the street the historic Pollard Hotel, with its old-fashioned lobby and restaurant with linen tablecloths had been refurbished, its rooms renovated; now the corner of North Broadway was a litter of bright red bricks. It was doubtful any fly fishermen or skiers were alive.

 
In the old, old part of Red Lodge ninety percent of the buildings were built of brick, none to current earthquake code. The further away from downtown the buildings were made of wood, much cheaper to build than brick.

 
There was sound of people talking to her left; she turned and followed the noise.

 
Hi, I’m Penny Anderson. I skied over Beartooth this morning and left my boyfriend to die on the other side because the nasty smoke monster wouldn’t let me haul him up to the top of the pass and so I left him to fucking die.

 
The eyes of the locals she met were vacant; their houses were destroyed, town gone. They looked at Penny like she’d just come in on the morning rocket ship from Mars. The first group she met included a worn man in his 50s, maybe 60s, looking like a re-incarnation of the Marlboro man before he died of lung cancer. Behind him stood a ragged group of elderly men and women, each with The Look on their face; it was tryout time for Night of the Living Dead.

 
“Are you it?” Penny asked.

 
“On this side of town,” said one woman.

 
“Everybody else over here is dead,” said a sad woman in her early 60s, shaking her head. “I was outside picking up the newspaper,” she started, referring to the Billings
Reporter
. “Just lucky,” then she started to cry, then blubber. “And the earthquake happened, destroyed everything; knocked me on my ass.”

 
Penny looked at the sad group.

 
She turned to the mountains behind her.  “See that cloud?”

 
The Living Dead looked at the menacing cloud formation, then at each other, then back at Penny.

 
“Everything is fucked,” he replied simply.

 
“It’s a death cloud. You can’t breathe. If it comes here you’re going to die,” Penny explained. “You need to get out of here!”

 
The Living Dead looked at each other.

 
“I was going to have some breakfast,” the woman added.

 
“The hotel’s down,” said another.

 
“We need to get out of here!” Penny wanted to jump and down and slap these people around, then as quickly came to a different conclusion;
to hell with them
. It was
déjà vu
all over again; the Jimmy Solution. She changed pronouns;
I need to get out of here
. “Does anybody have a car I can use?” This was met with empty stares. “Where is everybody?” she asked, with urgency in her voice.

 
“High School,” the tall, skinny dude pointed to the opposite side of town, six blocks away. In rural America everything revolved around the High School. It made sense in an emergency that it would be the point where people would rally.

  “Good luck.” Then she tried one more time.
“That cloud is filled with poisonous gas from the center of the Earth.  The top of the mountains are black with volcanic ash. If it comes here, you all are going to die.”

 
A pause, then one of the vacant-eyed 60-year old woman, dressed in her night shirt and covered with a parka, replied “When do you think the lights will come back on?”

 
It was two minutes to
Wapner.

 
Penny turned and headed back toward the middle of town.  Three blocks—and now in the middle of town—she turned and could see the group of citizens talking to themselves, no animation. They really didn’t have an idea of what to do.  The earthquake had removed all of their axis points.

 
Still schlepping her skis, with a lightweight backpack over each shoulder, Penny became increasingly aware of how tired she was. She looked back to her left up toward the pass. The Black Cloud had over-rolled the top of the mountain range. Penny knew there was nothing but
chinka-chinka-chinka
underneath.

 
Penny walked back toward Broadway, US 212, and turned north—downhill. The snow was too ratty to ski. She needed a vehicle. She stopped dead in her tracks. People in this part of the country were used to leaving their cars unlocked and the key in the ignition; there was virtually zero crime; what crime there was came from drunken tourists. 

 
Penny stopped at every car that possibly could start up without having to dig it out from fallen rubble.

 
She heard noise; yelling, actually; a surprise noise considering the circumstances, loud enough to be heard across the town, like a go-team-go during a football game, or a community surge when a wrestler, beaten for two periods starts a classic comeback against a superior but gassed opponent. The clock is relentlessly ticking and the home town boy is on the bottom, being ridden hard, needs an escape to tie to send it to OT. The fans were going crazy.

 
Except this was Red Lodge, Montana on February 20
th
after an end-of-the-world earthquake and the smoke monster was spilling over the side of Beartooth Pass.

 
Sweet Jesus, what the hell?

 
High-pitched female voices carried the day; shrieks and yells were heard across the valley. Guys didn’t yell, they said
oh shit
, and then ran.

 
It wasn’t a large group, no more than twenty, mostly female, a mixture of ages; school teachers who were ready for first period at 8:00, an administrator, the assistant principal (detention), a couple of cheerleaders, several 50s and 60s year-old women who didn’t belong in school, alongside several old men who didn’t belong in the group as well. 

 
It was like the final scene from the 50’s B-movie
The Blob
, Steve McQueen’s first; when everyone ran out from the movie theater as the horrible flesh-eating thing that looked like a giant wad of Bazooka bubble gum ravaged the town, then sat on the diner and waited for the writers to figure out the ending.

 
The people were running straight at Penny.