March 13, 2012

The 1963 Jeep Wagoneer chugged out of West Yellowstone as a warping, plasma belching sun arched upward over the awakening giant.

Kenneth had us rousted and ready to roll by 5:30 a.m. We had a large, greasy breakfast to celebrate our departure and return to the wild and wooly wastelands populated by the vile and snotty.

Always fairly knowledgable about geography and road travel, I asked Kenneth, while we loaded food and other supplies in the Jeep, which route he intended to take.

He turned away from me and stomped back into the B&B.

Already seated in the back of the Jeep, Andy chortled.

“You know he doesn’t like us, right?” He said and laughed aloud.

Kenneth returned outside with Carrie and Stacy and shut the door behind him.

That was when it hit me – we really were heading back into that frightening ‘who-knows-what-land.’

Andy was sitting beside the M60 and a sense of relief skittered through me. “Bring it on,” I thought.

Kenneth ‘humphed’ behind the wheel and fired the vehicle up and Stacy groaned into the seat beside him. Carrie slid into the centre between Andy and I.

No one spoke as we pulled away. In a few minutes we were rolling west and as we veered southwest into Idaho on Highway 20, I leaned forward and asked Kenneth, “Which way we going old man?”

He stared ahead and ignored me again. I sat back, waved a hand with disgust and stared out at the passing tans and browns and light greens.

“You know what I really, really miss?” Carrie suddenly blurted.

Andy was first to bite. “What?”

“I miss Facebook.”

I snorted. Stacy chuckled. Kenneth stared ahead at the road. He’d become so adept at tuning basic mortals out that he had developed, in the past 500 or so years, the enviable skill of turning his ears off. It was like a filter. He heard what he needed to hear but the rest of the time, don’t let the gibbering fools in.

“Seriously, I really miss that interaction – that life which flowed through it,” Carrie said.

Andy stared at her, his neck cocked awkwardly to do so.

“What’s Faceook exactly?”

I couldn’t help it. “Oh come on! Are you seriously trying to tell us you don’t know what Facebook is… was…really?”

Andy, sounding sheepish, admitted he rarely spent any time on computers. “Guess I am old fashioned,” he said.

Kenneth’s filter switched off and he snorted in disdain.

Andy ignored him and again, sounding sheepish, asked Carrie, “What really was the Facebook?”

A pregnant hush consumed the vehicle while she formed her answer.

“It was a… community, I guess. A community of friends and likes and subscribers. It was good for business if you knew how to do it right and it was great for keeping up on what your kids were doing. That’s why I got on it in the first place. And I’m not the only one here who enjoyed it. Buddy boy here was on it just much as I was.”

With a smirking grimace I admitted she spoke the truth. “Yeah – it was a grabber.”

Carrie sighed. “Yeah, it was.” Her voice trembled as she let herself slip backward into grief for a lost world. A few seconds later she laughed, “Wouldn’t it nice to post ‘In Yellowstone’?”

Speaking of Facebook…

Mark Zuckerberg was waiting outside a bathroom in the Facebook head office, fidgeting from the need to take a sudden and determined pee, and failed to notice people in nearby offices disappear when the big zip-dee-doo-dah happened. The lithe intern with whom he had being conducting a hack-a-thon slinked into the bathroom ahead of him and Mark googled her baggy jeans covered butt.

And he fidgeted… and fidgeted…. and finally, when his bladder was shrieking in alarm, Mark slapped a hand against the bathroom door, which swung open. He tilted to the right to try and see into the small bathroom and noticed baggy jeans and sneakers on the floor.

His bladder shouted, “What the hell is wrong with you?” But his brain, known to be a bit above average in the quotients that matter, told him that his eyes didn’t see the tasty young woman in the can.

Mark pushed the door open with a timid “hello?” Again, he noticed the intern’s clothing and she was nowhere to be seen. He looked up and around to see if there was another way out. He tugged lightly at the side of the mirror and with a shrug took a massive tinkle. At first he thought, with humour, that his pee stream was unbelievably loud and then he was rammed through the wall and bathroom mirror, effectively ending any chance for him to become a dark prince of mayhem in the new world.

When the disappearance occurred, Cam and Tyler Winklevoss were aboard their friend’s private jet, the Aeneid 712, heading to Carmel for lunch. Deprived of a pilot, who had begun a descent nearing Palo Alto and was in full control, the Learjet 23 simply continued to descend. It took a couple of bumps and jerks before the twin brothers started to grow concerned. Tyler stumbled to the cockpit and opened the door, expecting to see his friend, the pilot.

His scream brought Cameron running forward. Together they stared at their demise – the rapidly approaching Facebook head office building – fortunately vacated of its human cargo all save one.

 

After 20 minutes of driving it became apparent that Kenneth planned on keeping to as many backroads as he could. We had turned off Highway 20 onto a number of smaller backroads, following the Wyoming border. When we hit Highway 31, Andy declared, “It’s time to get sharp.”

When Carrie asked why, he pointed out that we had had some run-ins with “fools hell-bent on getting there” and it was possible that remnants of the Morman and Wyoming forces, as well as the Idahoans and “God knows what other bands of ghouls, demons and shit disturbers.”

A few miles west on Highway 31 saw Kenneth turn south again, into the Caribou-Targhee National Forest.

“One of the best things about this country,” Kenneth stated, shocking everyone.

“What?” Carrie bit.

“All the backroads – they’re bloody marvelous. This country is like an onion when you get to know how to travel in it. There is the top layer – the Interstates; the second layer is the main roads; the third is the secondary roads; the fourth is the connectors and fifth and sixth layers are the forgotten about backroads.”

Andy said he thought that was a good analogy and added, “The thing is with the fifth and sixth layers come the hidden away wackos. Who’s up for a good terrorizing by a clan of cannibals?”

Carrie’s face flushed and she looked at me nervously.

I nudged her with my elbow. “We’re good. Wait until you get a good load of that guy at work. The cannibals would rue the day.”

Kenneth pulled the Jeep into a ranch outside Soda Springs and in a few minutes we topped up with gas and continued west, past Lava Hot Springs and after 90 or so minutes of weaving and sneaking, we approached I-84.

The Interstate system had become the battleground between the warring sides because they connected the main population centres. However, since the massive CME, battle activity had grown to stalemates on the frontiers. In some cases, armies disbanded into smaller camps and tore themselves to shreds from infighting and paranoia. Death was boss in the wastelands of a dying world.

By all accounts, we were in the frontier at this point. Kenneth stopped on a rise in the road leading toward the I-84, which angled northwest to the I-86 near Heyburn, and telescoped the horizon. Satisfied we were safe, he gunned the engine and raced up to and under the Interstate.

Two hours later, we entered the Sawtooth National Forest southeast of Twin Falls.

We hadn’t seen a hint of human activity since we left West Yellowstone and our collective mood was growing light as we passed around Magic Mountain toward Rogerson and Highway 93.

“What do you say we just turn north and head home?” I said to Carrie as we crossed over Highway 93 and headed across the sweeping baldies toward Salmon Falls Dam, and then past Cedar Creek Dam. She smiled weakly and looked deeply into my eyes. If a look could say “I wish” that was the one.

It was 11:11 a.m. when we crossed into Nevada at Jarbridge and came upon the most horrific of visions – the aftermath of a major battle between the Las Vegas Army and the Idahoans. Their supply line almost non-existent and facing an enemy with high tech toys, the Vegas army was slaughtered.

In the space of half an hour 355 sundry evil pieces of crap were ripped to shreds in a cleverly established defilade. The battle had been about six weeks prior and the stench of death coated the insides of our noses and roofs of our mouths. Carrie gagged and Kenneth shouted, “Don’t be pukin’ in here!”

A small murder of crows paid us no mind as we idled through the carnage. Crows and ravens hopped and danced over nasty looking hunks of meat. Adding to the gruesome display were Vlad the Impaler-inspired stakings of Vegas soldiers and a pile of heads that almost made me puke.

All through the kilometre-long battle site, Andy whistled Camptown Races.

Once the last torn body and burned shell of a vehicle was behind us, Andy leaned over and said, “I knew Stephen Foster, you know?”

I told him I knew someone named Foster Stephenson.

“No, I mean the fellow who wrote Camptown Races,” he said, as surprised by my ignorance of the song writer as I was by his lack of awareness of Facebook.

“What did ye do to him?” Kenneth stabbed.

Andy laughed and winked at me.

It was 2:22 p.m. when we came to the junction of Highway 290 and No. 95. The strange dim light allowed in the Great Basin made Bloody Run Peak to the west glow alabaster.

There had been a checkpoint of some kind at the junction – a forward post to a likely fort at Winnemucca, 31 miles south. We turned north and then west onto Highway 140.

It was 4:44 p.m. when we scrounged gas from an old garage at Denio, near the Oregon border and darkness was just descending when we took refuge in what would have once been a luxurious getaway for some rich prick, on the western edge of the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, near Massacre Lake.

A series of light tremors welcomed us as we lugged supplies into the cold, dark cabin.

A few minutes of Kenneth-orchestrated work resulted in a warming, enticing fire roaring, sleeping quarters arranged and a defensive strategy devised.

The bulk of that strategy centred on Andy, who disappeared when the lifting work was to be done. Why waste an angel of death on lugging groceries and bedding when he can be patroling the perimetre and searching for any signs of threat and danger.

Two hours after we arrived, and about eight or 10 more surface tremors later and were digesting a lovely supper tossed together in team fashion, Andy walked in to announce that “something’s happened.”

 

Almost 500 miles to the east, the Yellowstone Caldera was on the verge of being blown to smithereens.

Serena, Madeline and Ridley huddled together inside their tent as the world shook so violently, and for so long, that they were starting to suffer from concussion. The fillings in their teeth ached and they were deafened by an assortment of geomorphic catastrophes, from entire mountsides collapsing nearby, steam vents ripping open with hissing whistles and forests being covered by earth and rock.

It was 7:17 p.m. when Madeline’s and Ridley’s souls slipped into a gentle, silent vacuum. Serena’s eyes opened and she held Madeline’s tattered sweater and Ridley’s slicker. She pulled Madeline’s sweater to her face and with tears welling in her ancient, grey eyes, one of mankind’s great angels smiled.

Yellowstone exploded.

 

A rhyolite eruption 1,000 times greater than Mount St. Helens staggered the heart of the world.

We filed outside and witnessed an intense glow grow to the northeast, like seeing a city from a mountaintop that is being shelled by a 100,000 artillery pieces. All along the Snake River Plain, canyon walls and steep hillsides collapsed as a series of 9.0 plus earthquakes eminated from the firehole that Yellowstone had become. A steady trembling kept us holding door jams or one another by the arm.

The Earth’s atmosphere immediately began to change as the ash cloud from Yellowstone filled the sky and became ensnared in the jetstream. Luckily for us, a strong west wind had been blowing forcing the initial blast and stream of material from the supervolcano into an eastnortheast roll.

Within minutes, the entire eastern horizon was glowing at the bottom and darker than Satan’s heart reaching up to space.

That glow on the horizon came from a 100-mile radius stemming from just northwest of what was once Canyon Village, that was now the terminal centre of the world.

“We have time for a quick sleep and then we’ve got to get moving,” Kenneth said, knocking us all from our disaster-locked trances.

Even Andy was awe-struck. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like that. Can you old man?”

Kenneth shook his head. “Nay – no.”

I stared for hours at the horizon.

I thought of a sign I saw once on a Buffalo, Wyoming travel agent’s storefront: ‘Visit Yellowstone before it blows up again.”

Carrie pushed into me and I wrapped my arms tightly around her. She didn’t have to say she was terrified.

“Me too,” I said.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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