Rock Fall Revisited
Copyright© 2021 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 5: Rock Fall
For a few minutes, the anchor talked about how a camera isn’t the human eye and how it had trouble changing apertures, and this could result in damage to the sensors. Considering how fast the onset of the flash was, I was pretty sure that if you’d seen the flash with your naked eye, you’d be blind too.
And of course, the first thing the announcer said showed how wrong I was.
“We’re getting reports now from locations around the South Pacific reporting a bright flash. Ah, here’s something.”
“Something” was a picture from a webcam, pointed, we were told, slightly west of south from Easter Island. There was a visible glow in that direction, a glow that slowly brightened.
Then you could clearly see that the glow was above the horizon and still ascending. Abruptly, the camera jerked and shook and tipped slightly. The rising fireball went out of the frame, and that reduced the amount of light to the point where you could see ten million trillion sparks rising up in a fountain, far faster than the fireball had gone up.
You could watch some of them descending, quite a few seemingly headed right for the camera.
“Can the camera survive?” Sarah asked.
Amy was curt. “It will take the camera’s survival, the broadcast van’s survival, the antenna’s survival, and the satellite’s survival. Some of them may survive, but not all of them — the picture won’t.”
You could see debris start to impact in the background of the picture, and it moved like a carpet being unrolled. The picture survived for another few seconds, and it was clear that there was a lot of crud coming down. Then the picture went.
The studio anchor said, “We still don’t have any photographs of the impact. The camera that was watching from the satellite has been damaged, and they are shifting to another camera.”
There was a brief flicker, and another picture was up. You could indeed see a column of glowing debris rising up from the impact location, with some debris already arcing down, obscuring the surface. There was also a misty white interface that I wasn’t sure what it was ... until the anchor described it as the shock wave passing through the air.
There was almost no warning, only if you’d been paying attention to the fact that some of the debris was well past the camera when the satellite picture went out.
The anchor intoned, “The consensus is that there will be no functioning satellites after this event. NASA and NOAA have been rushing to get a satellite ready to launch, but they feel they will need to launch it a week to ten days after Rock Fall, as right now there is too much junk in space for a satellite to last more than a few minutes in orbit. The ISS is a certain casualty, but its crew came home a week ago.”
A few minutes later, the anchor was back with another report. “A weather station in a sheltered location on Easter Island survived almost ten minutes. Then it recorded a sudden increase in air pressure and a sharp burst of wind. Air pressure may have briefly increased by five hundred percent, and the air speed may have exceeded two hundred and fifty miles per hour. Then the sensor stopped reporting.”
He looked earnestly into the camera. “We are getting word now of impact effects in Chile and New Zealand. Most of the Polynesian islands have been evacuated, and any of the inhabitants who remain will almost certainly be killed.”
By noon, it was pretty clear that the kids couldn’t keep watching, although Lynn stayed when Sarah shepherded the rest downstairs to play games in the stove room.
City after city in the southern hemisphere would report what was happening and then go off the air. None of the cities that had fallen out of contact came back. It was clear that even the news anchors were rattled. The effects had reached Manila, the Philippines, and Lima, Peru. When those cities stopped broadcasting, the networks stopped reporting which cities had gone dark.
We had a depressing and a very late lunch; our eyes were still glued to the TV. The network came on with news about the ejecta and the shock wave arrivals in the US, drawing rings with times every fifteen minutes. We were supposed to get ours at about six thirty in the evening. There were a few cautions, mostly about how it wouldn’t be a good idea to watch the meteors without eye protection because some could be bright.
About five minutes after six, the network showed a live picture from Oklahoma City. A secondary meteor had hit a car dealership and scooped out a crater about fifty feet across and had destroyed dozens of new cars — but no one had been hurt. It wasn’t quite played for laughs, but it was close.
“Should we go outside?” Sarah asked.
“No, I don’t think it’ll be worth it. It’s dark and raining; we won’t be able to see much, and if something’s bright enough to see, it might mess up our eyes.”
Sarah nodded and then called Mark on my phone. The nice thing about our phones was that for local calls, we had our own little co-op phone company, and they had capacity for ten times as many people as lived in their service area.
Mark said everyone was fine, everything in town was fine, and that there had been only two heart attacks, one fatal. That was remarkable, I thought, and then he paused for a second before continuing. “Portland reports that observers up on Mt. Hood can see the ejecta coming now.”
Five minutes later, he called back. “So far, so good, no reports of any falls nearby, and it’s falling in Seattle now.”
Lynn was the first one to speak after Sarah announced that. “Is that the worst of it?”
“Kind of,” I told her. “Except for the ongoing tidal waves, fires, famine, earthquakes, and floods everywhere on the planet.”
“There’s that,” Emma said, tersely.
“I don’t know how fast the tidal waves travel,” I stated.
I think that TV anchor and I were on the same wavelength when he announced that “A six-foot tsunami struck Acapulco a few moments ago, but no serious damage is reported. An observer said a short while ago a more serious tidal wave had struck in Panama and may have damaged the Panama Canal. There’s been no official confirmation as yet.”
A short while later, an insane tourist in Acapulco had emailed video of the wave striking the beach there. There weren’t any surfers present, and the water simply swept in like a regular wave and built up and built up until it was several hundred feet inland. I think the scariest part of it was the steady implacability of the rise of the water.
Most of the kids crashed, emotionally drained, by eight in the evening, after a dinner of baked frozen pizza. The adults and Lynn sat in the living room, with the TV turned down low. It wasn’t until almost midnight that I realized what I hadn’t seen — news of the fate of countries like the Philippines, Japan, China, SE Asia ... almost all of the news since the early afternoon had been focused on the US, and what appeals for assistance there had been, had been for the people in Hawaii where the tsunamis had been more destructive and many thousands of people were homeless.
Sarah received a call from Mark who said that all was quiet, there were no problems, no known damage in the area, and the only impact casualties in the Northwest had been a moron in a fishing boat who’d had the ill luck, if you want to call it being at the wrong place at the time predicted to be wrong — when the tidal wave hit the Columbia Bar — the sediment shelf at the mouth of the Columbia River, which was notoriously dangerous at the best of times. The forty-two-foot boat had been smashed to toothpicks in seconds, but two of the crew survived and so did their radio beacon and the Coast Guard had sent someone to rescue them.
With that, Sarah called it a night and so did the others. Lynn waited a few seconds and looked at me. “Sarah knew where I spent the night yesterday.”
“We didn’t try to hide.”
“No. Please, I promise that I’m not going to make this a regular thing, but can I sleep with you again, tonight?”
I was damned, I was sure. I was going to hell and there wasn’t going to be anything I could do about it. I was going to lose the confidence of everyone else who would assume there was one reason and one reason only for her being in my bed.
I looked at Lynn, my mood rather bleak. But the fact remained that the night before had been good for me, too. When the world is going in the shitter, it feels really good to have someone snuggled up to you, someone who was there because she expected you to keep her safe.
“Lynn, I don’t want things between us to be about sex. You have your whole life ahead of you, and you deserve the broadest experience that we can provide.
“That said, I enjoyed last night and I’ll enjoy tonight.”
She went right to bed, and again, stayed dressed, and so did I.
About three in the morning, it started raining much harder, and Lynn woke up to it and woke me up. “Is this it?” she asked in hushed tones.
“No, this is normal weather in the Pacific Northwest. You’ve been in rainstorms like this your entire life.”
She kissed my cheek, and I fought as hard as I could not to kiss her back, even on the cheek. She settled down in the crook of my arm, and we were both asleep a bit later.
About six, I felt Lynn get up and silently steal away. I realized she was hoping that no one would notice where she had spent the night. Well, I’m not a sneak, and I had every intention of making the association official. The reason Sarah had noticed, of course, was that she’d gone to check on her daughters and found Lynn gone.
Things never work out the way you expect. I rolled back over to sleep, to be awoken at a quarter after seven by Sarah knocking on my door. “Logan, Lynn’s having screaming hysterics. Please, come.”
I found her in front of the TV, sobbing as though someone had run over her pet dog. Considering how much death and destruction the world had suffered the day before while we sat warm and comfy in my house, I was surprised that no one had broken down yesterday.
I sat down next to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “Lynn, can you tell me what’s wrong?” I asked in the calmest voice I could.
“You lied to me! You lied to me! You said the rain last night wasn’t part of what happened!”
“It wasn’t, Lynn. There’s no way the dust could have gotten here that fast.”
“They said it on the TV — they showed the sunrise today from a plane over Portland. The dust is here! You lied!”
I looked at Sarah, and she looked back. “There was a picture of a very red sunrise earlier, taken, they said, as Lynn just told you, from a plane that went up a short while ago from Portland. I didn’t catch what they were saying.”
I touched Lynn’s shoulder. “Lynn, I haven’t lied to you, okay? I’ve been the one with the worst-case possibilities all along. While I might not have lied, I can and do make mistakes. There are lots of things I don’t know...”
Sarah interjected, “And the scientists didn’t know either!
“They said that there was a lot of dust put in the air yesterday because of all of the stuff that came crashing back down. We could see it on the TV yesterday.”
I swallowed. Well, yes, I had seen it. I even knew what it was. Connecting the dots — adding two and two and getting the right answer — that had eluded me.
“Lynn,” Sarah said, “any of us can make a mistake. Logan made a mistake. If you heard anything at all yesterday about them expecting red sunrises and sunsets this early, you heard something I missed — and Logan missed.
“Lynn, you don’t have to hide how you feel about Logan. I’ve known him for years, and he’s one of the nicest people there is ... he’s just afraid another woman will hurt him like his ex-wife did. It makes him a little blind.
“And you’re blind too, Lynn, because you’re young and in too much of a rush ... and to be frank, you’ve learned not to trust adults. You don’t have to worry about any of the rest of us stealing him. It’s not something any of us would do. Emma, Amy, Virginia, and I all come from a religion that emphasizes the importance of marriage. In our religion, if a woman chased another woman’s man, intending on stealing him for herself — she’d be excommunicated — kicked out, and more, shunned. And in our church, that’s a far more powerful threat than in the Catholic Church.
“I’m happily married; Emma is happily married, Ginny will be married soon if we can find someone to do it, and Amy is more likely to steal you from Logan than Logan from you.”
“She’s ... like that?” Lynn asked, her tears forgotten.
“She’s gay, Lynn, she’s not like ‘that,’” Sarah made air quotes around the last word. “Lynn, none of the people here are those who play the usual suburban games of give and take. In my church, the only way for a person to get to heaven is to commit themselves to marriage and keep that commitment forever. Forever.”
“You really believe in the heaven and hell stuff?” Lynn asked.
I winced. I’d not known that everyone was a Mormon, but I knew a lot of Mormons, particularly from my time at Arizona State and in the army. They were happiest when they were with their families. The next happiest they were was when they could work on converting someone.
Also, I was contemplating atmospheric dust. Yeah, volcanic eruptions didn’t launch rocks and things into partial Earth orbit, bringing it raining down at remote locations. How much of it was there?
Half, I thought, of the rock had stayed in the crater and was undoubtedly still boiling water. More of the rock would be broken up in the steam explosions and lofted into the air, but that was more like a huge volcano and wouldn’t affect things for a month or two like I had originally expected. It had happened within ninety minutes of Rock Fall.
I’d never given it an instant’s thought, but if half of the rock was lying under the ocean, still spitting up dust, that meant the other half of the dust would have already been deposited into the atmosphere by the event. The dust had already arrived. Maybe two hundred cubic miles? Maybe more? Maybe we were just screwed?
“Lynn, I know you’re upset with me, and I don’t blame you. You were right to be a little upset. Still, you have duties here that have to be done — chores. I want you to find a good book downstairs, and when the other kids wake up, you keep them down there until we send down for you all, for breakfast, by nine or so, I imagine.”
The only adult upstairs was Amy, who slept downstairs from my room, and she was standing now, a few feet away. “Lynn, don’t wake the other adults up yet, but if they do get up, you should ask them to come upstairs right away.”
She nodded, then ran to me and hugged me around my waist. “I’m so sorry, Logan!”
“You don’t need to be sorry, okay? We’ll talk more, you and I; you and I and everyone, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, then went downstairs, her head high. It was hard to imagine, but I’d been her age once. If someone had put me in charge of a couple of other kids, I’d have been a petty tyrant.
I turned to Sarah. “Use the kitchen phone and call Mark. This is important enough to wake him up if he’s asleep. Put it on conference so we can all talk.”
She nodded and went ahead. Amy padded up to me, barefoot, her hair a tangle, and still in a long football jersey nightgown. “What’s up?”
“A miscalculation I made.”
“It sounds serious.”
“It is serious. Worse, the government has really, really fucked the country. I might not have known about this, but some of the scientists would have known. We are so screwed...”
“Logan, Mark’s on the phone, he’s been up for an hour.”
“Mark, Logan. Have you been watching the TV?”
“Yes, there’s an amazing dearth of news about any country beyond our borders.”
“Yeah, and yesterday I wasn’t sure why. Now I know. Did you see the aerial shots they had from above the cloud layer this morning, from here in Portland?”
“A pretty sunrise.”
“Yeah, I haven’t seen the picture yet, and I’m not sure if they’ll replay it. Mark, the fucking government has killed us. I was thinking the dust from the Rock Fall would take a month or six weeks to get here.”
“I remember you saying that. Has that changed?”
“How red was the sunrise?” I asked.
He paused. “Pretty red. They said the dust would clear out of the atmosphere quickly.”
“Mark, the dust I thought would take weeks to get here is here today. It’s all sizes and is going to take a couple of years to get all of it out of the atmosphere. How long it will be until it starts affecting the weather I don’t know, but I think it is possible that it will start affecting the weather almost at once.”
“And you think that’s bad?”
“Well, you’re going to be in a better position to determine that than we are, Mark. You have the weather station. I know you just send the readings to Portland and don’t really care that much about what they are. Now you need to get the daily temperature profile and keep track. See if you can get profiles from as many previous years as possible and compare them.”
“We’d be looking for what?”
“A downward trend. For instance, we’ve both lived here our entire lives. Currently there’s no wind and there’s no front due to pass through. The temperature at four this afternoon should be higher than it is now. If it’s not, it means the dust is absorbing heat. A little wouldn’t be bad, but a lot ... that’s not good.”
“Christ, you’re saying this could be global winter? Now?”
“Now,” I agreed. “You really need this information, Mark, and...” I paused. “The government is famous for playing games with the numbers that those automated weather stations produce. You’re going to want to have someone physically check a couple of times a day and record the time and data.”
“I’ll get someone right on it. Christ, we’re not nearly ready for things to go in the toilet!”
“Yeah, and if you want to be worried, if things are going to come unglued, you’re going to see a temperature decline during the day today — even if the temperature stays the same throughout the day wouldn’t be good. You don’t want to think about a one or two degree drop today. The air is stagnant and should warm slightly. At this time of the year, we don’t see big temperature swings unless a front blows through.”
“Yeah, let me go wake up Jim. Christ! He was up half the night, but we are going to be short on time. Logan, can you and some of the others come in if we need you?”
Outside, the sound of rain increased loudly. “Sure, but the rain is no longer a drizzle.”
“I know. You’ve got me worried. But we need to be sure before we go making fools of ourselves.”
I personally thought that the better choice would be to not wait that long, but that was me.
“Love you, Mark,” Sarah told him. “The girls and I miss you.”
“I’m going to come and visit this evening unless things are really crappy. If they are, I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get up there.”
“We’ll leave the light on for you,” Amy said with a laugh.
Amy and I left Sarah to talk to Jim in private. Amy went to get a shower, while I went downstairs to talk to Lynn.
None of the others were awake yet, and I sat down next to her on the couch she was sitting on. I grinned at her. “Do you know I grew up reading on that couch? When I wasn’t wandering in the woods or at school?”
“No. Logan ... do you forgive me? I was awful.”
“You were. These things happen, Lynn, even between the best of friends. It’s not that you make a mistake, it’s what you take away from it, how you change what you’ll do the next time.”
“I shouldn’t have blamed you. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, do they?”
“I don’t know everything, that’s for sure — I don’t think any one person is capable of knowing it all. The fact that this wasn’t a volcano spewing ash into the sky over days and days — I just plain overlooked how massive this one single event was.”
“Do you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
“The last two nights — they were special for me.”
“And they were for me, too.” I took a breath. “You and I may or may not ever change our relationship to one closer than today. But the fact is, I know Sarah spent last night sleeping with her daughters, and Herb and Emma’s son slept on a cot in their room. It’s a natural feeling to want to be close to someone at a time like this.”
She nodded soberly. “What I’m trying to say is that if you want, I’ll talk with the others and tell them that as far as you and I are concerned, I’m your father, and if you want to spend the night being comforted, that’s your right.”
She cleared her throat. “Logan, I have a father and I don’t much like him. You had a wife and you don’t much like her.”
“That’s true enough.”
“So, why can’t we be Logan and Lynn, joined by the L’s in our names?”
I frowned. “I’m not sure I understand your meaning.”
“We are important for each other, if for no other reason than our first names start with the same first letter.”
“Okay. I’m serious though, about going past where we’re at now — don’t hold your breath waiting for a change — it may never happen.”
“That’s okay.”
“Now, I have a new chore for you. It’s not very glamorous, it’s not always going to be fun, but it’s going to be important. In a while I’m going to print up some paper on my computer printer. Right now, I want you to get a coat and come with me.”
She got her coat, and I got my jacket from the downstairs coat closet and I handed her an umbrella and took my own. I led her outside into the rain that was a harder drizzle than we’d seen in the last few days, over to the barn.
I pointed to a thermometer next to the barn door. “This is here because the barn isn’t heated, so the house won’t affect the temperature. It’s eight a.m. now, but most days I want you to come and read the temperature at seven a.m., noon, and five p.m. I want you to write down the date, time, and what the temperature is, whether or not it’s raining, and if there are clouds, how many and what kind.
“This sounds simple; it sounds boring — but the fact is, we need a temperature baseline from hour to hour, day to day, month to month, and year to year. It may be that I’m all wet about what’s going to happen, and in a month or two, you can stop. If I’m not wrong, you could become one of the most important people here, telling us if things are getting worse, staying the same, or getting better.”
I waved at the thermometer. “So, what’s the temperature?”
She looked at it and beamed. “Forty-four degrees.”
I checked the thermometer and walked a few feet and got an empty milk case, turned it over, and put it right in front of the instrument. “Now try it again, from the step,” I told her.
She stepped up and read it and frowned. “Now it’s forty-three.”
“It’s called perspective. Lynn, I’m not running you down, but you were looking up to read it before, and now you are level with it. Come on back to the house.”
We made our way back to the house and took off our coats, and then I made Lynn write down the data. Later, Lynn spent most of the morning with the younger children, helping them with schoolwork, just being an older mentor.
At two, Mark called back. “Sarah, can you and Logan, maybe Amy and someone else, come in? We’re going to start the ‘Check your neighbor’ process tomorrow, and I need the lists.”
“Lynn,” I told Sarah. “She’s spent all morning being a teacher. It’s someone else’s turn.”
Sarah looked at me and smiled. “She’s really good, Logan. The twins adore her. Roger pays attention to everything she says.”
I nodded. Emma was only too happy to take over, and so the four of us headed into town.
There wasn’t much traffic on the roads. It seemed like most people were sticking close to home, uncertain as to what to do. At the community center, Mark was talking with the deputy mayor, who looked disbelieving and then angry.
“Mark, Roland was right. You’re simply off your nut. We don’t need to start implementing the emergency plan yet! You’re just going to scare people!”
“People need to be scared, Tom. Did you know it’s two degrees colder now than it was at seven this morning? Not warmer like you’d expect.”
“At this time of the year, the weather is famous for changing and being unpredictable! You know what I mean!”
“Check the weather map, Tom. A front went through yesterday afternoon, which is where the drizzle came from. I talked to the Portland weather bureau, and they said that twenty percent of the sunlight is being filtered out by the dust. The meteorologist there told me, privately, that they were told not to update their weather predictions for the rest of the day or change them for tomorrow. The government is screwing up, Tom.”
“You say! You say!”
Mark sighed. “Tom, you do understand the difference between you and me? Between Roland and me?”
“What?”
“The people of this town elected me. I hired both of you. I can fire both of you. The city council had to approve your hiring, but they can’t do anything if I can. You’re fired; Roland was fired a while ago.”
“I’ll protest to the council! They approved of my hiring! They should have to vote on my dismissal.”
“Tom, I’m not going to argue with you. If I call a council meeting, you’re going to stay fired. You know perfectly well how most of them feel about you.”
Tom Biggs looked green. “Please, Mark, don’t fire me! Not now!”
“According to you, there is no problem, Tom. But to me, you’re part of the problem. I’m standing here arguing with you instead of getting the town ready to deal with this.”
Tom Biggs was, Logan noticed, sweating.
“Mark, I’m sorry. I was out of line, and I apologize. Please ... I need the job.”
“Tom,” I said mildly, “if you need the job, why argue?”
He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Because Mark is blowing the problem out of all proportion.”
Mark said quietly, “Tom, Logan is my principal scientific advisor. If I told Logan it was two degrees colder this afternoon, he wouldn’t think that was a rosy scenario.”
“You’ve lived here all your life!” Tom remonstrated, “you know what the weather is like! You shouldn’t make a big deal out of this!
“Tom, if you want a job five minutes from now, you need to shut your mouth, get over to your desk, and start the call list on the ‘check on your neighbor’ operation. Today it’s just a warm-up. We may need it in a few days.”
“You’re scaring a lot of people for no reason, Mark.”
“Four minutes,” Mark said without hesitation.
“Am I supposed to be a rubber stamp?”
“No, you’re supposed to give me your best-considered opinion, and then when the elected mayor decides, you get with the program. Three minutes.”
Tom walked over to his desk and picked up a phone, pulling a list from the top of the pile.
“I took no pleasure from that,” Mark said quietly.
“Mark, I was an army officer. Mostly we had good juniors, good NCOs, and good subordinates. But when they didn’t do what was needed, you kicked ass and took names. Let people run roughshod over you, and you’re not their leader ... it’s as simple as that.”
“This isn’t what I’m best at — I like to lead by consensus.”
“Who doesn’t?” I told him. “But when you need a firm decision and when there is no way to reach a consensus in the time available, leaders decide. And, as Tom just learned, after that, you either follow or get out of the way.”
“That two degrees scares me. Tom’s right about one thing ... I’ve seen it two degrees colder in the afternoon a hundred times growing up. Most times, you know why. But now and then — it just dropped.”
“And those times,” I told him, “are when the front formed here, not west of here. If you think things don’t look good for us, think about the rest of the US. If this is a developing front, it’s going to start moving sometime early tomorrow and head east.”
He sighed. “And we can’t expect much improvement until a year from this spring, right?”
I simply nodded instead of saying, “Hopefully by then.” I was not pleased at all with the rapid onset of cooling. I remembered all of those woolly mammoths who’d frozen to death in Siberia, literally with food in their stomachs. That didn’t inspire much confidence.
Mark got with Sarah and Amy, and they gave him the “movers and shakers” list, and he started on that.
Lynn and I entered a few more additions to the database, then ran a couple of the simpler queries for Sarah, while Amy handled the more complex ones. We weren’t there for long, and by five, we were headed back, with a promise to return at ten Monday morning.
At the house, Emma and Ginny had dinner ready, and Herb and Josh had finished moving the rest of the food out to the garage.
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