Lady of the Yellowstone

When one or both of the tunnels connect, the Yellowstone magma chamber will drain, releasing pressure, and giving mankind a century, or an age, or an epoch in which to prepare once more.

PBS will broadcast the two-hour special to an America that waits behind the Mississippi, or across the Canadian border, or beyond the high Sierras, facing the interior of a continent they have fled. The super volcano is awake.

A lazy summer of field work at Yellowstone is always the plum of Purdue’s PhD program. The Geology Department sends one lucky candidate out with Professor Bennington and his four Karelian Bear Dogs. Pretty Claire Cheviot is this summer’s lucky pick. West Lafayette, Indiana moves slower than erosion during the summer sessions. Even a romantic fling would seem a still life compared to drilling holes for dynamite charges.

It will be just the two of them. Separate tents seemed to end the argument about sharing a remote campsite with the professor. There are rumors in the department about Bennington, but they move slowly and have not worked their way around to Claire. The middle of May is still too early for tourists. The isolation at Craig’s Pass is complete. The wilderness of Lodgepole Pine and fantastic shapes must ever work its strange magic. Claire will return to the professor’s tent each night. Of all the many hidden things in Yellowstone, she will understand this least of all. The science at this place becomes her lover. Everything the Earth does, it does for her.

A vast construction project will set two tunnel boring machines in place four miles down inside an empty geologic feature discovered by Digger O’Dell: the Madison Valley Abyss. These will grind against the rock face of 40-foot diameter tunnels toward the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone National Park. The work will run round the clock. They will proceed a mile farther each month from subterranean stations that are much like man-made environments orbiting in the cold of space, and the workers will be suited-up much the same.

The Russian Federal Security Service sends over agent Victor Rostov to sabotage the American tunnel boring machines. A super eruption will level the playing field. With the Americans knocked out, the Russians will be free to turn their full attention to China, who has sent five million squatters into Siberia.

Bennington and Purdue gave Digger O’Dell his PhD five years ago on the strength of the discovery of the Abyss. Now Digger is off fracking wells in Pennsylvania. The army will bring him back for the big meeting that assembles after Claire finds the first of the lava starting a fire near Craig’s Pass.

Digger turns the two hand-wheels of the hatch and pushes it open. The air is full of ash. Still in his suit, still gripping his mouthpiece in his teeth, he climbs half of the steps and peers out the hatch through the rectangle of gold tinted glass in his hood. A brown cloud floats above the Industrial Village. The skeletons of I-beams stand like rows of scarecrows in a ruined field.