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I was more than a little surprised when "Little Mac" McAllister
identified himself on the phone. He
wasn't the type to call the local paper; heck, I wouldn't be surprised if he
didn't even read our little weekly rag. He
just wasn't the reading type. Whatever
information he'd need, he could pick up easier at the City Diner, or Fat Man's
Tavern, or from Melody, his wife.
He didn't waste any time on social niceties now.
"I wondered if you'd stop by the ranch this
afternoon. There's something out
here I think you should see."
Stopping by his ranch meant a twenty minute drive out of town.
"What's that?"
"Dunno. That's why you should look at it."
Well, put that way . . . I had to admit I was more than a little curious.
Something was certainly
up, if Mac was asking me to come take a look at it.
"I have a meeting with Joan Collins (yes, that really was her name)
at 1:00 to talk about the
school bond measure," I told him. "I
can come out afterwards--say 2:00, or 2:30."
I thought I heard a chuckle. "I'll
have coffee on."
Joan Collins apparently wasn't on his Christmas card list.
She wasn't on mine either, for that
matter, but when you run a small town weekly, you deal with the people who make
the local news.
For better or worse.
We disconnected and I went back to milking two thousand words out of last
weekend's Volunteer
Fire Department pancake feed.
The McAllister Ranch was twenty acres of mostly flat land along a small
creek. It sat among
the foothills of the Cascades a few miles east of town, off County Road 151.
It had belonged
to Little Mac's father (Big Mac) before him and was less a working ranch than a country
retreat from the construction business he ran in the city.
I had been there a couple of times
over the previous two decades and--from the point of view of someone who'd lived
in one bed
room apartments most of his life--thought the house was very nice.
It was a two-story farmhouse
with a wraparound porch and a beautiful oak shading the front yard.
I drove up the newly paved driveway toward the house shortly after two,
my mind still numbed
from the hour I'd spent listening to Mrs. Collins, and parked my aging Honda
beside Little
Mac's new Ford pickup and his wife's Explorer.
Neither had a scratch or a speck of dust on
them.
Little Mac met me on the front porch with a grinding handshake.
"Thanks for coming out."
I checked my hand for broken bones and admitted I was curious.
Little Mac nodded. "It's
the damndest thing."
"Well, let's go see it."
"Hi, Tom." Melody
McAllister appeared in the doorway behind her husband.
"Mac seems
to have forgotten his manners. Would
you like to come in for some coffee?"
"Oh," Little Mac looked chagrined, like he'd been caught with
the cookie jar. "I was going
to take a look at the pasture first."
Ever the peacemaker, I suggested we take a look at whatever he had in his
pasture, then discuss
it over coffee.
Five minutes later we stood in the pasture a hundred yards behind the
house looking down
at a crack in ground. It was two
inches wide at its widest and about four feet long.
Thick clouds
of foul-smelling steam drifted out of the opening and the air itself seemed
tainted with the
stench of rotten eggs.
"Well?" Little Mac
asked. "What do you think?"
"When did this start?"
"A week ago. Something
like that."
I could only stare. It was
the most incredible thing I'd seen in these parts.
"What is it?"
"I'm no expert," I told him.
"But I'd say you've got a new volcanic vent here."
He nodded gravely. "That's
what Melody thinks too."
For a few seconds we both stared at the smoking crack in the ground.
We were standing almost
five feet away and I could feel the heat on my face. The meadow grass around the edges of
the crack was blackened and withered brown.
Little Mac looked at me. "So
what do I do about it?"
I looked up at him. What do
you do about it? What do you do
about tornados, hurricanes,
tsunamis, or any other force of nature? You
get out of the way. But the look in
his eyes
told me he wasn't jerking me around, nor was he taking this development lightly.
"I don't know," I told him.
"But I have a friend at the University who might have an answer
for you."
He nodded.
It might have been my imagination, but right then the ground beneath me
seemed to quiver
just a bit.
The next afternoon, Little Mac and I watched as Henry Jenkins, a
professor of geology at the
University--who looked like Kurt Cobain after a rough night--scrambled around
the edges of the
crack taking readings on some kind of handheld device.
I had been shocked at the changes in
just a day. The crack was now
almost six inches wide and nearly ten feet long.
And if I wasn't
mistaken the area around it had risen several inches during the night, as if
something was pushing
up from below the meadow. I'm no
expert, but I personally took that as a bad sign.
The fact that it was a beautiful spring day, just made the anomaly in
Little Mac's pasture seem
all the more weird.
Finally, Henry returned to us, his eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas
morning. "It's incredible.
And right in our back yard. This
will make Mt. St. Helens look like yesterday's news."
He consulted his device. It
looked like a Blackberry. "It's
emitting sulfur dioxide at the rate
of ten cubit feet an hour and the ambient temperature at the mouth is
approaching five hundred
degrees."
"So what is it?" Little Mac asked.
"A vent. You've got a vent just starting up. Do you have any idea how rare it is to witness
something like this? I'd like to
set up a monitoring station immediately."
Little Mac just shook his head. "How
do I stop it?"
Jenkins looked like Little Mac had just asked him if he believed in the
Easter Bunny. He stopped
playing with his device long enough to look up at Little Mac.
"You can't stop it. This
is part
of a volcano."
He gestured at the Cascades lined up along the eastern horizon.
"All these mountains are volcanic.
This is where the Pacific and North American tectonic plates come
together. Channels
of molten rock criss-cross the entire region, just under the crust, looking for
a weak spot.
You might have a new mountain growing right here.
It's probably just venting some heat and
gas, but if it decides to go into a real eruption, it will erupt.
There's nothing you, I, or anyone
else can do about it."
Little Mac's eyes narrowed to slits as he gazed at the crack.
"We'll see about that."
Two days later, I slipped into the City Center Diner to get a hamburger
for lunch. The days
since Pr. Jenkins had officially identified Little Mac's pasture as the site of
the world's newest
volcanic vent had been insane. Every
TV station in Eugene had sent out a media van and reporter
to film the front of Little Mac's house--he wouldn't allow them on his
property--and interview
anyone who would talk to them. Several
of the local town fathers were mulling over how
best to financially take advantage of the town's new celebrity.
Jason Billings over at the drug
store already had a series of volcano
tee shirts displayed in the window.
The one person absent from all the hoopla was John "Little Mac"
McAllister. The problem
was that Little Mac was not a good interview subject and had no interest in
becoming one.
He'd always been a man of few words.
In school, he'd been the jock who never said a word
in the back of the class, but always passed.
He was a man who preferred to let his actions do
the talking and probably his greatest statement was his construction company.
In the twenty years
since high school, he'd taken the small carpentry shop founded by his dad--Big
Mac--and forged
it into one of the state's biggest and most successful heavy construction
companies.
But that was history. All I
wanted now was a quiet lunch and an hour with no one asking me
what I thought about it all. I slid
onto a stool at the counter and accepted a cup of coffee from
Donna, who had been waiting tables there since the last ice age.
"Gonna have your regular burger?" she asked.
I nodded. "Please."
"Pretty exciting what's going on in our little town."
I nodded. "I think we've had about all the excitement we can
stand."
She laughed and hung my ticket on the cook's wheel.
"Hey Tommy," George Sanders slipped onto another stool
immediately to my right. "You
hear what Little Mac did today?"
I shook my head. George ran
the local gas station/garage and was, by all accounts, one of the
worst mechanics around. He was
pretty good at pumping gas though.
"I heard he kicked all the college types off his land and brought in
two trucks of concrete.
I think he's going to try and plug up that crack."
You're kidding. I just looked at him. "Where'd
you hear that?"
He nodded thanks as Donna handed him a cup of coffee.
"From Mary Hanks."
Mary was the dispatcher at the concrete plant.
I tossed a couple of bucks on the counter and told Donna to cancel my
order.
#
A couple of days later, Melody invited me to dinner and I accepted, less
out of friendship and
the allure of home cooking than a deep interest in seeing whether Little Mac's
plug would actually
continue to work. It was one of the
most interesting dinners I've ever experienced. We sat
around the dining room table--Little Mac, Melody, myself, and the McAllister
children, ten‑ year‑old
Jason and seven year old Bethany--and discussed school and movies and current
events. Melody
had cooked a beef roast, mashed potatoes, and sweet corn and it all tasted
wonderful.
About every twenty minutes throughout the meal, the ground would begin to
shake. Plates
would rattle in the cabinets and everyone would grab their water glasses to keep
them from
tipping over. But other than that,
and a brief pause in the conversation, it was all taken as perfectly
normal. There was no panic, no
fear.
"Cool!" Jason would say, when it was over.
"That was a good one."
It was like a weird form of dinner theater.
In between the quakes, I could hear a deep, primeval rumbling, similar to
what your stomach
makes when you eat something that doesn't agree with you.
Geological indigestion.
But we continued with dinner as though it was all perfectly normal.
When we were finished, Melody and the children began clearing the dishes,
while Little Mac
and I retired to the living room with coffee.
"Have you considered--" I was interrupted by a particularly
strong quake. For just a few seconds,
it felt like sitting on the deck of a ship in rough weather, rather than the
living room of a
farmhouse. My chair moved several
inches to the right across the floor and a framed painting of
a seascape fell off the wall. Out
in the kitchen, Jason cheered.
"Has it occurred to you that it might not be safe here?"
It certainly had occurred to me.
Little Mac got up, brushed at the stain where coffee had spilled on his
pants and rehung the
painting on the wall. "This is
my home."
"And your kids?"
He returned to his chair. "It's
their home too."
That pretty much put an end to that line of conversation.
Five minutes later, the shaking began again.
This time, I thought I could actually see the walls
swaying. Nick knacks fell off
shelves, shattering on the floor. My
coffee jumped out of its cup
and onto my shirt, but wasn't hot enough to burn. I doubt I would have noticed if it had. I was
listening to the deep rumbling that seemed to grow in intensity as the quake
progressed.
In the kitchen, little Bethany was screaming.
I tried to get up, but couldn't keep my balance.
Little Mac just sat there.
The night was shattered by a flash of light and a tremendous explosion.
Everybody screamed then and I found myself on the floor.
Just as quickly, the quake ended.
"Mac!" Melody called from the kitchen.
Within seconds, we were both in the kitchen, where Melody crouched in the
middle of the
floor, clutching her children. Fragments
of broken dishes were scattered across the floor around
them.
"Everyone okay?" I asked.
Little Mac rushed over to physically check his family.
"We're okay." Melody nodded, though she didn't sound terribly
sure of that statement. She
nodded to the window. "But I
think you pissed it off."
Out in the pasture, a fountain of orange flames leapt into the sky.
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