I was at a kind of seaside bar in Hawaii, having an
afternoon drink of some kind, non-alcoholic, when I met these two
volcanologists who were in Hawaii for a conference. One was from Alaska; one
was from Italy. I was interested in volcanoes, so I asked them about their
conference and their specialties, and we spent part of an afternoon gabbing away;
my own specialty was tornadoes, which they were both unfamiliar with.
The guy from Alaska, David, lived near Mount Pavlof, and
that’s why I’m bringing up this story again (it erupted recently, which
reminded me of it); that volcano goes off fairly regularly, and he was in the
business of predicting when it would. Usually, he said, they got about thirty
minutes warning, and they used it well. It didn’t endanger any towns, but it
endangered the air travel overhead; he described it as warning pilots not to
fly right into a sandblaster, which would surely damage their engines and
everything else. His specialty was
sensing heat and movement underground, and responding appropriately. He had
ended up near Mount Pavlof, he said, because it was so regular, and because
they could perfect their measuring systems so as to become better at warning
people about the impending volcanic ash; this was why he was at the conference.
It was at this point that the Italian guy, Aldo, mentioned
Pavlov, the Russian scientist who did his experiments with dogs, who salivated
before they got their food, because they heard the bell that announced the
imminent arrival of that food. The parallel was not lost on the scientists,
said the Alaskan, especially since they were in the business of prediction. We
were three guys, in a kind of outdoor bar, with the sea lapping up nearby, and
they were getting kind of gradually sloshed, drinking pina coladas or some such
thing, and laughing a lot. I remained sober, but when they grilled me about
tornado-chasing, I told them what I knew. I’d moved out to Kansas to chase
tornadoes and had had my fill of it; I was in Hawaii now to get away from it.
I’d met these guys who chased every tornado; at the time I was glad I’d found
them and wanted to know everything they could tell me. They considered
themselves masters at driving out as close as you could to them, and then
avoiding them at all costs. The problem was, and they were the first to tell
you this, they could change directions at the drop of the hat, and turn around
and come right toward you, and there wasn’t much you could do about it. Or, to
be more specific, sometimes the road you were on (as you were invariably in
your car or truck) would go only east-west, or only north-south, and heading
out over a ditch and through some farmer’s field was not really an option.
Tornado chasing also put you at odds with the authorities, who really didn’t want
you out there watching.
Aldo was a historian. He’d had an ancestor who had died in
Pompeii, and had become interested in it as a child; he had eventually come to
study every aspect of the destruction of Pompeii in the first century AD, but
from the volcanologist’s point of view. Historians of ancient Rome sought him
out because he was the expert on why volcanic ash could preserve some things
and not others; by virtue of his knowledge, he was very familiar with ancient
Rome, and the kind of civilization they had at the very moment that Mount
Vesuvius had blown. He liked to talk about the process of using plaster to
reconstruct exactly where people were when they were buried in ash; he knew,
for example, that they had probably died from heat in an earlier explosion, but
were buried in ash later, ash that was so deep that it preserved the culture of
ancient Rome for hundreds of years. He told us how Pompeii had been a kind of
sex tourism town, known for its baths, and how some phallic decorations had
been preserved, though secretly, and how these were highly valuable to some
people these days; at least, that’s what he’d gathered based on interest in his
work.
The ocean lapped up on our little corner of the beach, where
the tiny little bar kept serving us more to drink, and we kept talking away.
The tide, in fact, was coming in, but the day showed no sign of changing,
getting cooler or warmer, clearer or cloudier. We talked about out trips out here. David claimed that it was no big
deal to fly from Alaska to Hawaii; people did it all the time. Just going from
his home to Anchorage required a flight, and really, the only thing that
bothered him about it was the fact that if some volcanologist was not doing his
job, they might run into another sandblaster, so, he occasionally worried that
pilots would not recognize an obvious volcano eruption below. In fact, he was
aware that Hawaii itself was volcanic, that it could, then, blow at any minute,
and he always looked in on the pilot of any given flight, to see if he would
trust the guy to know what to do in that situation. Avoid it at all costs,
that’s what you want to do, the guy said. Don’t mess with volcanic ash.
For a while they asked me about my story and why I would end
up on this remote corner of a Hawaiian beach. In fact I had got my wish; after
establishing myself with a reasonably well-paying job in Kansas, I had gotten
my friends to take me to a tornado in Oklahoma, and we had gone out chasing it.
But, the unthinkable, the nightmare, happened to us in front of our eyes; it
had turned on us, and we weren’t able to get out of the area fast enough. We
were out on a dirt road, and one of my friends had turned his truck around so
quickly that I, being on the outside, was dislodged entirely and thrown from the
truck; I landed in the ditch. But that, in fact, was what had saved my life;
minutes later, the tornado swept over the ditch, bringing with it cars, trucks,
pieces of buildings, even some large propane tank. In my ditch, I was somewhat
protected, but my friends weren’t so lucky, and they and their truck were found
in wreckage the following day. I went back to my job, but was unable to
concentrate; at night, I woke up to that tornado turning on me suddenly.
Aldo now had very wide eyes and a look of complete horror on
his face. He, of course, had come the furthest of us all, having to get a plane
from Rome to Chicago, and then from there to Hawaii. But it wasn’t his long
flight that had given him that look. He, also, had a recurring nightmare, and
finally, after enough to drink, we got him to tell us what had caused it. The
two guys were roommates at the conference, from some previous arrangement, and
the Alaskan reminded the guy that he’d woken up, in the middle of the night,
screaming, and at the time, was unable to tell him what the nightmare was. We
badgered him to tell, knowing that it would be a good story. You have to
understand, by now, the sun was beginning to go down on the Pacific, off of
this Hawaiian beach. A cool, clear day, with the sky turning blue, it was one
of the most beautiful, perfect day I’d ever experienced; of course, I’d just
come from Kansas, and before that, rainy Seattle. Finally, after considerable badgering, the guy
agreed to tell about his nightmare.
Aldo's story, from when he was a boy, was set in Tenerife in
the Canary Islands, in a dense fog, and he went to great lengths to describe
how you couldn’t see a foot in front of your eyes. He was seven at the time; it was 1977, and he
was passing through the Canary Islands with his family, though his father was
back home in Italy. He had two brothers and three sisters, and was with his
mother and brothers and sisters in an airport, but it was not the main airport;
it was the second or smaller airport in the islands. All of the main flights on
the island had been diverted to this airport, due to a bomb explosion and the
possible threat of another bomb at the main airport, and there was a feeling of
general chaos, with families stranded in the small airport waiting for various
flights to take off. The announcements on the loudspeaker seemed especially
urgent, though the boy could barely understand them, since they weren’t in
Italian.
Suddenly, he had been gripped by a terrible feeling, as if
he knew something terrible was happening, and he tugged at his mother’s skirt.
But his mother could not figure out the source of his terror, and continued
trying to understand the announcements on the loudspeaker, hoping to get
information about their own flight. The feeling the boy had gotten clearly had
lasted thirty five years, and was just as strong now, in the voice of the
Italian volcanologist, as it had been in his youth. It was the feeling of
knowing an extreme truth, and being totally unable to communicate it; of
knowing something terrible was happening, and being totally powerless to
prevent it, or even to explain that knowledge to anyone.
The boy had been right, as it turned out; out on the runway,
the worst aviation disaster in history was happening, and over 500 people died,
as one plane smashed into another in the dense fog, and killed most of the
people on both flights. It was a crash caused by a misunderstanding, but it was
a horrible event anyway, and affected the aviation world for years to come.
Aldo told how it affected his life, and his mother’s, but that was minor,
considering that none of their loved ones was involved; in fact, the worst Aldo
had suffered, really, was that his family had that much longer before they
could continue on their passage to their destination.
David questioned him extensively, convinced that there was
no such thing as premonition; surely he had heard something, or gotten some
physical clue that there was a crash out on the runway? David was a scientist,
tuned in to the physical signs of an impending disaster, like cows sitting in
their pasture, knowing somehow, with heightened senses, that a disaster is
about to happen. Animals have this, we agreed; people generally don’t. Aldo
stuck by his story, though, and said that he was the only one who had felt or
experienced anything. He also said that this was how his nightmares looked. He
was tugging at his mother’s skirt, and some airport announcer was going on,
with an upset tone, in another language.
The sun had now set, and as is inevitable, we went our
separate ways. They were on their way to some social event related to the
conference; I, though I had been hungry earlier, had now lost my appetite
entirely, and so had absolutely nowhere to go.
