A girl who could have been anything and probably was an L.A. mutt—a little bit of everything—raised her hand. “Question?” Kelly asked.
“Uh-huh,” the girl said. “Somebody told me you were, like, in Yellowstone when the supervolcano went off. Is that right?”
“Um, no,” Kelly answered. “If I’d been there then, I wouldn’t be here now. Trust me on that one.” The class laughed nervously. She decided she needed to say more: “I was part of a team of geologists doing research in the park while the supervolcano was ramping up. A couple of helicopters flew us out when things started looking really scary. We’d just landed in Butte, Montana, about two hundred miles away, when it blew. I was on the runway—I mean, we’d just landed. The earthquake knocked me over, and then the wind—the blast wave, if you want to think of it like that—blew out most of the windows in the terminal, blew me down the strip, and knocked my copter over on its side.”
“From two hundred miles away?” the girl said. “Wow!”
“Wow,” Kelly agreed. “Yeah, from two hundred miles away. It’s—what?—eight hundred miles from Yellowstone to L.A., and you guys heard the blast here, right?” She knew Colin had. Hell, they’d heard it across the whole country. They’d heard it in Western Europe.
“We felt the quake, too,” the girl replied. “We felt it before we heard the boom.”
Kelly nodded. “You would have. Earthquake waves travel faster than sound.”
“I thought the world ended,” the skinny black kid said. “Way things’re at right now, maybe I wasn’t so far wrong, either. Snow in L.A.? If that ain’t the end of the world, what is it? Anybody know for sure how long the cold weather’s gonna last?”
Regretfully, Kelly shook her head. “Anywhere from a few years to a few hundred years. No one can tell you any closer than that. We’ve never had a supervolcano go off before when we were equipped to study it.”
The big Samoan guy raised his hand. When Kelly pointed to him, he asked, “While you were in that helicopter just before the big eruption, were you, like, y’know, scared?”
“No shit!” Kelly blurted.
The undergrads burst into startled laughter. They didn’t expect that kind of language from a prof, even one who wasn’t all ancient and dusty. But what else could you say when somebody sent you a really silly question? Maybe they’d decide she was a human being after all. It might be too much to hope for, but maybe.
“You’ve got to remember, the hot spot under the supervolcano has been active a lot longer than it’s been under Yellowstone—under what used to be Yellowstone.” Kelly had loved the park, loved hiking in it, loved the geological formations without a match anywhere in the world. All gone now. The ecosystem would be tens—more likely hundreds—of thousands of years healing. “It started up under northeastern Oregon seventeen or eighteen million years ago. As the North American tectonic plate slid along on top of it, it erupted every so often across Idaho till it got to where it is now. The Snake River Valley follows the path of the eruptions pretty well.”
A few of the kids looked impressed. Kelly knew damn well she was. A single geological feature active across so much time . . . The hot spot that created the Hawaiian chain had been around even longer. So had the collision between India and Asia that pushed up the Himalayas. Not a whole lot of things like that.
“There are a couple of museums in Nebraska full of beautifully preserved rhinoceros bones from eleven or twelve million years ago. The animals died around a water hole and got buried by the ash from one of the blasts when the hot spot was under Idaho.” Kelly’d known about Ashfall Historical Park for a long time. You heard of it when you studied the Yellowstone supervolcano. Funny, though, that Bryce Miller’d seen bones from that excavation when he was in Lincoln. Funny also that Kelly, as Colin’s new wife, should get to be friends with his daughter’s ex-live-in. Rocks weren’t the only things that laid down strata. So did relationships.
It was ten till twelve. She let the class go, warning them they’d get another quiz Friday. They gave the predictable groans as they trooped out.
She hoped she’d find an open gas station before she got home. If she didn’t, she’d have to see how the bus lines worked before she left tomorrow. She’d have to see how long getting here by bus took, too. L.A. buses sucked—a technical term. But you did what you had to do . . . if you could do anything at all.
* * *
There’d been a boom in apartment buildings in San Atanasio—hell, in the whole South Bay—in the 1970s. Colin Ferguson, who’d lived there a long time, remembered when they were still pretty new. The two-story courtyards with the pools and the rec rooms and the underground parking garages had had an almost Jetsons kind of cool.