Volcano Watch

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

We halted at the mouth of Gold Dust and Lindsay lifted her chin. “Where?”

Perhaps it was the surprise at this hidden gouge in the mountain, but there was surprise in her voice.

I said, “Then you’ve never been here?”

“Should I have?”

I kicked off. “This way.” For the first time in the field with Lindsay, I took the lead. It was midday and Walter’s and my earlier tracks had softened in the sun. Walter had bowed out of a second trip to Gold Dust in one day. Truth was, he was giving it to Lindsay and me, the volcanologist and her pupil.

The rockfall was again seamless in the flat light. I led Lindsay to the door.

She whistled. “You have young eyes.”

I told her about the dipper.

She bent to examine the Dutch door. She looked cold, the flush of exertion draining from her Dresden skin.

Urgency welled in me. I took off my skis and went first through the cavity and she passed me her knapsack and I shoved it around the corner. She followed me on her belly and when she reached the grotto she grunted in amazement. I did not give her time to read deeper into the geological record. I snatched up her pack and moved out through the granite leaves into the little pocket. The dipper had not returned.

She followed, and blanched.

I had not prepared her. I had told her only, there’s activity. I had wanted her to come to it raw.

“Oh honey,” she said, and her face just opened like a flower. I handed her the knapsack and got out of the way.

She went alone to the fissure’s rim.

With Lindsay in the field, I’ve always hung back upon first examination of an object. I would wait for her to take it in, and when she’d processed it, to draw me close and explain. Even when I knew as well as she what the object signified, I would wait for her to speak. On a primitive level, no fumarole or stratum of ash was real to me until Lindsay said it was. If we had gazed into the face of Mount Pelee herself in eruption, I would have waited for confirmation from Lindsay. If Lindsay had said honey it’s a mirage, I would doubtless have stood there admiring the volcanic hallucination until the hot cloud incinerated us both.

I joined her, finally. Heat from the fissure had returned the flush to her face, and steam had wetted her skin like dew on the flower.

She said again, “Oh honey.” Now her face tightened.

The way I read her face, the flower opening and then closing, was that she was seeing here something every volcanologist both dreams of and dreads. She was seeing her volcano unloose its bonds.