Ashfall

We gathered up all the kale we had: two five-gallon buckets of frozen leaves and four bags of good stuff. I got our three biggest backpacks, and Max, Darla, and I squeezed into the Studebaker for the ride back to town.

Dr. McCarthy drove us to a huge metal building north of town. The sign over the door read: WARREN MEAT PACKING. A wiry guy sat on a metal folding chair in front of a small fire just outside the main door. A shotgun rested on his knees.

“Hey, Stu,” Dr. McCarthy called as we walked up. “Need to trade some pork for medical supplies. I’ll go down to the mayor’s office and get you the paperwork as soon as we’re done.”

“Aw, Jim, you know you’re supposed to bring the paperwork first.” The guard shrugged and handed Dr. McCarthy a key. “But you may as well go ahead. He always approves your trades, anyway.”

“Thanks, Stu.” Dr. McCarthy unlocked the door and ushered us inside.

Pork gleamed pink in the light filtering in through the open door. The plant was packed with hundreds, maybe thousands, of frozen hog carcasses hanging from the ceiling. Shelves lined the walls, filled to overflowing with pink hams, white loins, and huge slabs of uncut bacon.

“Take as much as you can carry,” Dr. McCarthy said. “I’ll weigh it for the paperwork, and you can pay in kale later.”

My mouth hung open, watering as I imagined that bacon sizzling in a pan. The slaughterhouse held enough pork to feed the small town of Warren for years—enough to feed our family forever. And Dr. McCarthy hadn’t hesitated when Darla proposed trading one pound of kale for ten of pork. All our work building and tending the greenhouses had paid off. Our kale, loaded with vitamin C, was more valuable than gold. Food represented wealth in the post-eruption world, as surely as a bank vault stuffed with one-hundred-dollar bills had represented wealth in the old world.

Darla must have been thinking something similar. She turned and hugged me, her face lit by a smile of the sort I’d rarely seen since we left Worthington—since her mother had died.

Thinking about Mrs. Edmunds turned my happiness bittersweet. I stretched to kiss Darla’s forehead, then disentangled myself and stepped outside to clear my head.

The western sky glowed with a dim, yellow-gray light. I stared at the horizon as if I could see back to the start of my journey in Cedar Falls, 140 miles to the west. I thought about all the people I’d met who were worse off than we were, struggling just to survive: the refugees at Cedar Falls High, the people of Worthington, Katie’s mom and her kids, the inmates at the FEMA camp. And wandering somewhere among them, my mom and dad.

Maybe one day my parents would trudge up the driveway to my uncle’s farm. But if they didn’t, Darla and I would go find them. With Uncle Paul injured, we couldn’t leave anytime soon, because even more of the farm work would fall to us. But I’d made a promise to myself before I‘d left Cedar Falls: not just to get to Warren, but to find my family. A promise I pla

Darla stepped beside me and wrapped an arm around my waist. Despite my worries about Mom and Dad, I felt strangely hopeful. Even in the icy wind, the warmth of Darla’s body against mine felt like spring.

Author’s Note

There is a colossal volcano under Yellowstone National Park. The volcano’s caldera, or crater, is visible in some places as a ring of cliffs and measures roughly 34 by 45 miles. It has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million years, events so powerful they are usually classified as supervolcanoes. The largest of these eruptions released about 2,500 times as much magma as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

It’s often said that the Yellowstone volcano is “due” for another eruption, since the last three were 640,000, 1.3 million, and 2.1 million years ago, respectively. Actually, it’s extremely unlikely that the volcano will explode in our lifetime. The eruption preceding the last three was 4.2 million years ago, so the regularity of the most recent events is deceptive.

The problem with writing a book set in the aftermath of a volcanic supereruption is that no supervolcano has exploded in recorded human history. So in describing it, I’ve had to make do with scientific speculation and accounts of survivors of normal, or Plinian, eruptions such as Mount St. Helens in Washington State and Krakatoa in Indonesia.

For example, early in this book, Alex’s house is hit with a piece of rock thrown 900 miles by the volcano at supersonic speed. Plinian volcanoes don’t do this; all the heavy material they eject falls near the volcano’s vent, and only the much lighter ash travels farther. Some scientists believe supervolcanoes behave differently, blasting chunks of rock on ballistic trajectories from deep pipes in the lithosphere (the solid part of the earth consisting of the crust and outer mantle), but this view is controversial.

The loudest sound in recorded history was probably Krakatoa’s eruption on August 27, 1883 in Indonesia. That eruption was audible almost 3,000 miles away on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. There, it sounded like the roar of heavy artillery for several hours. Yet the Yellowstone supereruption 2.1 million years ago was about 120 times more forceful than Krakatoa’s blast.

The ashfall I’ve depicted in the book is similar to what Yellowstone released 2.1 million years ago. This amount of ash would have darkened the skies for months, possibly years, and caused a global volcanic winter lasting a minimum of three years. Ash particles are tiny and electrically charged, so they are often associated with lightning storms. They can also cause odd weather effects, usually abnormally heavy precipitation in the short term, followed by years of drought.

No one knows exactly how much warning we’d get before an eruption at Yellowstone. It’s possible it could happen suddenly, but more likely there would be years of earthquakes and topographical changes to warn us. Whether we’d prepare adequately, even if given enough warning, is another question, of course.

If you’d like to read more about the science behind Ashfall, the following books are a good start:

Supervolcano: The Ticking Time Bomb Beneath Yellowstone National Park by Greg Breining. MBI Publishing, 2007. Provides an excellent overview of the history and geology of Yellowstone. Includes an account of major volcanic events that have impacted humans and speculates about the possible consequences of a Yellowstone supereruption.

Supervolcano: The Catastrophic Event that Changed the Course of Human History by John Savino, Ph.D. and Marie D. Jones. Career Press, 2007. Contains information on supervolcanoes around the world, including Yellowstone (Wyoming), Long Valley (California), and Toba (Indonesia). Chapter 10 is an interesting fictional account of a future supereruption at the Long Valley volcano.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester. HarperCollins, 2003. An exhaustive and beautifully written account of the biggest modern Plinian eruption.

Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World by David Keys. Ballantine, 1999. Describes how a volcanic event in 535 A.C.E. changed civilizations across the globe. Very useful for considering the possible political, social, and epidemiological consequences of a supervolcano.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, my thanks go to my mother and father, Shirley and Stan Mullin. Without their unwavering support, Ashfall would not exist. I’m also grateful to Helen-Louise Boling for her feedback on Ashfall and for being the good kind of mother-in-law.