Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre(19)
I offer to help but she waves me away. “No, no, specialization. You do your job, we’ll do ours.” She must think I’m still writing down a list of food. Not that she bothers to check. She’s like a machine. So is Dan. A little slower, a little dazed. Once or twice we exchange wide-eyed looks. She catches one of those looks and probably thinks we were still questioning her decision to keep me from helping. “Division of labor!” She barks that over her shoulder. “That’s how it works.”
How what works?
I’m hiding my journal now under the yellow legal pad.
Does this wackadoo actually think we’re going to be stuck here all winter? And why are we letting her do this? Why doesn’t Dan just stand up to her and say, “Enough!”
Why don’t I?
Okay, yes, I know what you’d say. Two betas, shared passivity, the whole reason our marriage got to where it got to in the first place. Nobody wants to take the lead and, as you say, take “responsibility” for leadership. I get all that, but…
But…
What if she’s right?
I shouldn’t even be thinking that now. I don’t know what to think. Tony has to be right. I know he is. This is crazy. So why don’t I say anything? I’m so tired. It’s almost dawn.
I’ve got to get back to work. I need time to shower and dress and head over to Yvette’s meditation class like everything’s okay. Mostar’s making me go.
Silver Skis Chalet, Crystal Mountain Resort, Washington State
The resort is abuzz with activity, the staff rushing to prepare for reopening. Their vim and vigor could not contrast more with the hollow-eyed, shuffling exhaustion of the departing government personnel. Most of the men and women here have been deployed since the early days of the eruption. No one seems to question my presence. No one asks for my I.D. Likewise, I try not to get in their way, searching the sea of army, National Guard, state police, and FEMA uniforms for the gray and olive colors of the United States National Park Service. Fortunately, the first one I spot is Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.
Her “field office,” a converted room on the second floor, smells like cigarette smoke, coffee, and feet. Josephine plops behind her cluttered desk, rubbing her eyes, yawning.
To me, Greenloop was the Titanic, right down to the design flaws and the lack of lifeboats. They were extremely isolated, miles from the one public road which was miles from the nearest town. And, of course, that was the idea. With modern logistics and telecommunications, the world must have still felt very small. But then Rainier cut those connections, and the world suddenly got very big.
Most people don’t realize how truly vast this country is. If you live on the East Coast, or in the Heartland, or just in and around a big western city, it’s hard to grasp how much uninhabited land is out there. And the nature of that land, the type of terrain we’re talking about…
Ever seen that satellite map of the United States at night? Those big, dark patches between the prairie and the Pacific Coast? A lot of that darkness is hostile, unforgiving ground. Beautiful from a car window or the edge of a designated path, but see how long you last straying too far from that path. Greenloop was in one of those dark patches, a mountainous, primeval rain forest as treacherous as anywhere in North America. Steep, nearly vertical slopes. Sudden cliffs lined with slippery moss. Whole fields of loose sharp stones. Throw in hypothermia, fog, foliage so thick it’s like hitting a brick wall. That’s what would have been waiting for anyone trying to go for help.
She gestures behind us to the emergency equipment and personnel.
And as far as help coming to them? Sure, Mrs. Durant had a point about their loved ones calling in. The problem was, so did everyone else’s. We’re talking millions of people from all around the world, jamming the phone lines, night and day, trying to check up on someone they knew. Even if they did manage to get through, their queries would have been logged along with every other grain of sand on the beach.
It was a total clusterfuck and Ms. Mostar knew it. I can imagine how her personal history predicted everything going to hell. But even if it hadn’t, if the USGS had been properly staffed, funded, and heard, if the local services hadn’t been gutted by the last recession, if FEMA hadn’t been folded into the Department of Homeland Security, if the Defense Logistics Agency hadn’t had to buy most of their supplies from the private sector, if the ash hadn’t closed the airports and that damn drone hadn’t hit the Guard helo, if most of the Guard and the army hadn’t been deployed to Venezuela, if the president was competent and the media was responsible, if the I-90 sniper had been on his meds…if everything hadn’t conspired to combine the greatest national unrest since Rodney King with the greatest natural calamity since Katrina, if everything had gone exactly according to plan, we still wouldn’t have found Greenloop for one simple reason. We weren’t looking for them.
Josephine gestures to the wall-sized map behind her, specifically to the three grease-pencil perimeter lines around Rainier.
This one here.
She refers to a yellow line stretching from Rainier to Puget Sound.
That’s the limit of the natural disaster effect. And this big one…
She moves her hand across the wavy red line that extends all the way up past Seattle.
That’s the extent of the civil disturbance. I know, right? And here…