The Yellowstone Conundrum (36 page)

Morpheus and Iris (Pierre Narcisse-Guerin, 1811)

  Dreams have befuddled mankind forever and have significantly affected the development of various societies; both the Greek and Hebrew societies documented their ancestry at about the same time in history, approximately 800 BCE. The
Illiad,
the
Odyssey
and the
Bible
were all written and complied at the same time.

  Sex dreams are generally vivid, full of temptation and lust; oftentimes forbidden fruit, or taboo practices. As their deep sleep progressed, Betsy slid effortlessly into spoon formation with the much larger man; her small, shapely bottom gently nudged his rock-hard manhood, which continued to probe, as did the fingers of his right hand; her panties, just a small wad, were around her knees, then her ankle. His fingers probed from the front and his penis from behind. Still asleep, they began to rock more urgently in unison. His hand moved across her stomach, then molested her breasts. Betsy began to moan in pleasure, yes-yes-yes breaths.  Slowly, each began to awake from dreamland, each brain receiving internal e-mails about you-shouldn’t-be-doing-this; each brain in turn ignoring the messages. As if meant-to-be, Cam and Betsy hit the summit of Mt. Orgasm together.

 
Out of breath but fully pumped up with pleasure, they relaxed.

 
“Kinda warm in here,” she said with a smile.

 
“Yeah, you don’t smell as bad as I remember,” for which she poked him in the ribs with a sharp elbow.

Denver, Colorado

 
The cloud was a solid 75 miles wide with grey crap to the eastern edge; most of the way to Fort Morgan on I-76 where thousands of Denver residents were trying to get to.  Without highway patrol help, fleeing motorists decided to make all four lanes outbound toward Nebraska. Accidents, some bad, could be predicted, and did occur; further mucking up the escape route.

 
Those with a full tank and good driving skills had made it through to the other side and found themselves headed for Nebraska. Another hundred thousand Denver residents decided to try I-25 south toward Colorado Springs, obviously directionally challenged. There was no way anyone would be able to outrun the cloud heading south.

 
Denver and Seattle were approximately the same size cities. Both cities were without power. Some residents of Denver had already chosen to speed out of town to the West, across I-70, through the Eisenhower tunnel and were headed toward Salt Lake City, which no one had mentioned was in worse shape than Seattle because of the proximity to the earthquakes in Yellowstone. 

 
Regardless, both major US cities were hosed.

 
With no power, no phone and most municipal services disconnected, the average homeowner, the average renter, the average person would do nothing. Only the priesent were activists; those who felt fear in their bones; those who felt
if I don’t do something NOW I’m going to die.
As it turned out, those were the people who had a shot at living.

 
Denver, Colorado; photo taken by “hogs555” 29 January 2011 posted on Wikipedia

  Was this Darwin’s theory as experienced in the 21
st
century? The theory of Evolution, of natural selection at work? Were the ones who stayed behind the weak sisters of human evolution?  Were they the slime worms that never made it to shore?

 
Evolution said yes.

 
Evolution says the strong conquer the weak. Do it enough times and the weak don’t evolve. 

Columbia Generating Plant

Hanford Nuclear Reservation

Richland, Washington

 
Leon Holt was drenched in his own sweat. He waited for a very long hour in the darkness of the Power Control Room after Andy had left. At least one fire was burning in the cavernous building; irradiated water was flowing unabated in several places. The Columbia Generating Station was about to enter the first phase of meltdown. While the control rods had been automatically inserted into the core in order to stop the process of heating water, which creates steam, which is condensed and piped through large turbines, which spin rapidly (1800 rpm) and create electricity. Unfortunately, the earthquake cut off the supply of water to the reactor core, while at the same time breaking the electrical connection to Bonneville Power. No power, no water, fires inside the building, irradiated water spilling out onto the desert floor, not a good combination.

 
Finally, Leon decided to leave his post.
Should have gone with Andy. Woulda coulda
. The reactor core needed immediate attention and was receiving none.  Staggering, Leon made his way toward the same exit door Andy had used; opening the door he stepped outside and had a front row seat to God’s Revenge; a halucigenic kaleidascope of death. 

 
Giant puffy fingers of radioactive sludge filled the sky above him up to 1500 feet and on to the western horizon; orange, red, yellow, purple, black—all mixed together like a child’s paintbox. In the near distance a cloud was fast approaching the Columbia Generating Station. The eastern sun shone on to the cloud as it approached, giving the falling red dust a vibrant tinge. Other clouds were moving above the desert floor, depositing the heaviest of the irradiated material as they headed toward the tri-cities area.

 
Now showing at a nuclear facility in your area:
Nightmare on the Columbia River
. The earth shook as several tanks reached critical stage, as if egged on by earlier explosions; massive explosions sent shock waves in all directions and more nuclear crap high into the air.

 
Leon began to run as fast as his 42-year old legs would take him; across the expanse of the 50s-style nuclear plant.
Too late, dude
. It was like watching a rainstorm approach from across a valley.

 
Chinka chinka chinka chinka
.

 
Leon could hear the irradiated particles of 50-year old sludge as it began falling to earth. He let out a cry of dispair as the first particles landed on his shoulders and in his hair; “Get off me! No!” He started to choke as the red dust became heavier, as if God was saying
here, eat this
. Inhaling the leading edge of the red dust, his lungs quickly filling with particles of uranium-238, uranium-239, neptunium-239, iodine-131, Cesium-137 and good old strontium-90. He never made it to his car, falling dead on the pavement, mercifully suffocating on the dust instead of enduring a very painful two-day death by radiation poisoning, where the body simply bleeds out into irradiated goo.

 
As the explosions continued at the 200-West tank farms, the leading edge of the massively irradiated clouds began dropping death bombs on the Columbia Generating Station, then across the Columbia River to Franklin, Adams and Walla Walla Counties. Within two hours the clouds would reach Spokane; by six p.m. the jet stream would have taken it up to British Columbia and Alberta, then a hard southern turn along the east side of the Rocky Mountains in Montana where it would meet the rampaging effluent from the Yellowstone caldera explosion by tomorrow morning, Day 2.

Half-way across Washington county road number 24, headed from disaster to nowhere, then on to Yakima, Andy Everett pulled off the side of the road, stopped and got out of his car.  The wind blew steadily from the west. The Cascades rose sharply in the distance to the west, but covered in clouds. Behind him the sky was lit up like a weird 4
th
of July; instead of popping and disappearing, the sky lingered in multiple colors. Now a grown man of 29, Andy began to cry and he didn’t understand why. His base of reference had been thrown off its axis. That which was comfortable was now death. There was no life left at Hanford, or the Tri-Cities. Richland and his apartment would be uninhabitable.  Andy knew what was in the clouds. Washington State would be changed forever in his lifetime, probably for several hundred years.

 
No more moo-cows, no more milk, no more corn, no more wheat. The irradiation from the Hanford disaster would primarily fall onto a swath of land several hundred miles in width, across Idaho, into Montana and from there; well, who knew where?

 
You can’t go home again
. Try that one on for size. You go to work in the morning and by God’s grace you escape disaster—and you can’t go home again. The laws of nature have changed.

 
OK, Andy boy, where are you going?
Instinctively he reached for his cell phone and tried to make a connection.  No network available. Yeah, well. OK. No network available.  Who would I call?

 
I should have stayed. It was your job to stay. They all stayed.

 
And they’re all dead by now.

 
A story from his dad popped into his brain. It was one of those going-to-be-a-man stories that dads tell to their sons.  

 
I was living in Los Angeles in 1968, fresh out of college. The draft had been on for four years now and they were getting down to the nitty-gritty. They’d pretty much drafted everyone they could, now they were getting to the dregs.  I’d been bailed out by flat feet and migraine headaches; Jesus, I had those headaches. Nothing worked but eight hours of darkness and throwing up. It wasn’t possible that I could go carry a rifle and waddle my way through a rice paddy, all the while having a migraine. I was a bit overweight when I was younger, not like now. For the first couple of years after I graduated from college on the exemption I made it through; flat feet and migraines. My number was 121, at some point in time I was going to be toast. At some point in time the US government was going to take first- and second-year college graduates who were working in their first post-college job, haul them off and make soldiers out of them because they ran out of warm bodies. The fine, the fit, the athletic, they’d all been picked for boot camp. They’d all been hauled off to Dick Tron or Won Fuck Won, or some place in between.

  And by God, they did.
The Army came after every young male it could find. We all had registered. Our exemptions were gone. Hell no I won’t go, well, that wasn’t my mantra.  Shit, I didn’t have a mantra, or knew what one was. Later they’d make a movie about me, Dead Cow Walking. I was the fat kid who was going to be in the next coffin returning to the United States; I smoked, I drank too much, I was overweight and clueless.

 
After graduation in Pennsylvania I moved to Los Angeles and got a job with a technology company who was hiring warm bodies off the street. Breathing? Come on in. $650/month.  In 1965 that was a good paycheck for a 21-year old.             

 
But the government, God bless the government, and it’s efficiency, slow but relentlessly grinding away, like a steamroller over tarred gravel, gonna mow you down.

 
Even though I had moved across country to California, they found me. The letter from the Selective Service System arrived. Welcome! Please report for your physical examination on February 3
rd
. Report to bla-bla-bla. Oh, man.  I’m so fucked. I remember, I wore a coat and tie! This was 1968 after all and I’d been out of college for 18 months, married for 20 months. The office was downtown LA, a foreign country for someone from Playa Del Rey, a rich beach community where we were renting our third apartment; a standard 24-unit two floor apartment building, now since torn down.

 
So I show up in coat and tie, only not at the front door.  I can’t find a fucking parking place on the street, so I circle the block and park behind the SS building, then wander/waddle in through the back door, down the hallway, then into the light of the front part of the building where I stand in line with hundreds of other mostly white guys, wait for a scary military guy to search through various folders. Where you from? New Jersey, I replied. By miracle he went to another set of manila folders, quickly thumbed through them and came up with my folder. Why couldn’t I have said Mars? Or North Dakota.

 
My whole life was in the folder. Everything. Including the time I thought my wife and I were pregnant in college.  Jeeze I wish we were. All the doctor’s notes from college; my grades for Christ’s sake, and the conclusion was: I was Army meat.

 
Once in line I went from station to station, right behind the other white meat in front of me. Naked except for tighty-whities, there was no difference between any of us, except we were all the flabbies. The lean, the mean, the fighting machines, well, they’d all be selected and were already fighting the Viet Cong. My last chance was the neurologist; my chart flashed a history of migraine headaches. “You look OK to me, son,” was his sage advice.  “But, sir, I’ve had migraines since I was eight years old.”

 
“Well, stop drinking red wine,” he said plainly, obviously tired.

  And that was it.
His assistant handed me my papers and told me to follow the other recruit, do downstairs and hand my papers to the sergeant at the desk.

  Well, I didn’t do that.
Something, I don’t know what, got in the way. It was a hidden survival instinct. I didn’t trundle on down the well-worn steps down to the first floor. Instead, I tucked the folder underneath my sports jacket, stuffed it right up to my armpits, and went down the back stairway to the first floor, took an immediate left-hand turn and was out the door, into the rear parking lot behind Figerora Street. The lot was virtually empty, nobody collecting tolls. I found my car, got in and headed toward Playa Del Rey where we were renting a two-bedroom, one bath apartment on Manchester Avenue. I was shaking the whole time.

 
What had I done?  I’d played fuck-me with the United States government.

 
I pulled into our apartment building, got out and stumbled to the rear, to where the garbage cans were stacked in lines.  The folder, my folder, burned like hot coals in my hand. I riffled through the notes. I was going to be on the airplane to Viet Nam for sure. 

 
I pulled a Bic lighter from my pocket and instead of lighting up a Pall Mall from my other pocket, flicked my Bic and lit fire to my Selective Service records, long may they fucking burn.  I held the mess in my hands until every last piece of paper was burned, including the outside folders.  It was 1:30 in the aftenroon on a sunny LA day.  My wife was at work.  ’m not sure what I did the rest of the day. I was scared to death. I never served because I no longer existed in the system. Instead of being on a computer disk someplace, the Selective Service relied on paper files.  I might have been on a computer in New Jersey but after moving to California, my records were all paper. 

 
It was 1969 and I would have been dead meat, Cong chow.  Probably shot by my own because I was too slow, too fat and had headaches.

  But, it never happened. Instead, I saved my life.
It’s too much to think of sure death and all the things not done in life. Everybody touches everybody else somehow. How many people will I affect in my lifetime; good and bad?  Hundreds? Thousands?

  That was my dad, Andy thought. But, I’ve never been quite sure if it was him or someone else.  The story was a good one. Go with your gut. Self preservation. Don’t depend on anyone else to save your skin. Life is all you have. Death is nothing, nada. When the nuts get crushed either you are the nut or the crush. Don’t depend on anyone else to bail you out.  ou are the one in control of your life.

 
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Andy said, wearily. He was in the middle of the desert in Yakima County, Washington on highway 24, headed toward Yakima through the wine country.    He came to the crest of a hill. The Cascades ahead of him were snow-capped. Straight ahead of him was the giant, Mt. Rainier—rising above 14,000 feet, completely covered in snow.

 
Where the fuck am I going to go?