I heard the sirens bleed through the air five or six minutes after I first smelled the hint of a fire. I smelled the fire 30 seconds after my roommate asked me if I smelled something burning. Originally, I thought it was the overheated, burnt coffee that festered in the bottom of the pot for a couple minutes too long. I tend to leave my coffee pot on for a couple of hours when I am home.
You know that moment when the late night turns into the early morning? It is a moment taht has no “in between.” The transition is whole, complete, and instant. That was the same experience when I first had the sensation of smelling the smoke. All of a suddent, there was a heavy scent of smoke and fire, where the was only the nothing scent of normal urban air an instant before. The air now smelled electrical, of melting plastic, and of burnign wood.
I opened the front door to my apartment. A thin veil of brown smoke dominated the air but, at the same time, was barely distinguishable from it. I placed a call to 911, bot knowing where the fire was, only know that a fire was.
Others had already called.
Each moment of controlled chaos fell into the next. The momentum of each urgent moment propelled time forward into the next moment of quiet panic. We heard the sirens in the distance. By now, I discovered the fire. It was burning the far corner of the apartment complex next door. As I left the house, I did not grab anything–I did not think to. I thought we would be allowed to return to our own building. I remember being concerned that an ember could float from the burning roof to ours.
I remember thinking that this could be bad. I remember thinking, “Everything does not always end well.”
Fire trucks arrived. Five of them A news chopper circled overhead. Sheriffs evacuated our apartment and cordonered off an area. We, neighbors, stood from behind the yellow plastic tape, wondering what had happened, wondering what would happen.
And then, for us, for those who lived next door, the excitement and anxiety left as quickly as it arrived. Shrug. An unwritten law of nature, I guess.
Everything does not always end well. That’s true. But, most of the time and for most of the people, this is also true: everything usually ends well.
And so it did.
A couple of years ago, I heard that the whole of Yellowstone National Park is actually just an ginormous caldera to a super volcano.
Picture it: A mild Saturday afternoon. I’m lying on the couch, fighting off a nap. I’m flipping through the channels before landing on Discovery, NatGeo, or History. Great! A documentary on Yellowstone, I think. I often refer to Yellowstone as “Nature’s Disneyland.” I’m fascinated by the place and have warm memories of family visits. I nestled more deeply into the couch and settled in to a nap.
Until I heard the ominous voice of an announcer explain the horrific truth: all the geothermal activity underneath–the geysers, the hot springs–signal the reality that Yellowstone is a slumbering giant waiting to explode. Gulp. And like any disaster movie: panic and paranoia ensued.
It’s a super volcano. It erupts, like, every 600,000 years. And the last eruption…was 640,000 years ago. Yeah, see the comment about panic and paranoia.
Apparently, if this volcano erupts, we’re all screwed. The last eruption (640,000 years ago), brought the human species to the brink of extinction (Thank you wikipedia for that quote).
Sometimes I hear the harsh realities of the natural world and I shrug them off. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes: each equally terrifying, but each ultimately manageable. At the end of the day, the majority of people who experience these natural disasters survive. A super volcano? That’s not Dante’s Peak or Inferno. That’s on the magnitude of Deep Impact or Armageddon. We’re talking immediate deaths of millions within the very aptly named death zone. Scientists would expect the demise of millions more via suffocation because the tiny particles of ash would get into your lungs and cause internal bleeding. We’re talking about nuclear winters.
Yeah. Panic. Paranoia.
Sometimes I just do not need to hear about the slumbering giants…that have snoozed and overslept by 40,000 years.