Lady of the Yellowstone

by Mike Kennedy

Overview

When one or both of the tunnels connect, the Yellowstone magma chamber will drain, releasing pressure, and giving mankind a century, or an age, or an epoch in which to prepare once more.

PBS will broadcast the two-hour special to an America that waits behind the Mississippi, or across the Canadian border, or beyond the high Sierras, facing the interior of a continent they have fled. The super volcano is awake.

A lazy summer of field work at Yellowstone is always the plum of Purdue’s PhD program. The Geology Department sends one lucky candidate out with Professor Bennington and his four Karelian Bear Dogs. Pretty Claire Cheviot is this summer’s lucky pick. West Lafayette, Indiana moves slower than erosion during the summer sessions. Even a romantic fling would seem a still life compared to drilling holes for dynamite charges.

It will be just the two of them. Separate tents seemed to end the argument about sharing a remote campsite with the professor. There are rumors in the department about Bennington, but they move slowly and have not worked their way around to Claire. The middle of May is still too early for tourists. The isolation at Craig’s Pass is complete. The wilderness of Lodgepole Pine and fantastic shapes must ever work its strange magic. Claire will return to the professor’s tent each night. Of all the many hidden things in Yellowstone, she will understand this least of all. The science at this place becomes her lover. Everything the Earth does, it does for her.

A vast construction project will set two tunnel boring machines in place four miles down inside an empty geologic feature discovered by Digger O’Dell: the Madison Valley Abyss. These will grind against the rock face of 40-foot diameter tunnels toward the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone National Park. The work will run round the clock. They will proceed a mile farther each month from subterranean stations that are much like man-made environments orbiting in the cold of space, and the workers will be suited-up much the same.

The Russian Federal Security Service sends over agent Victor Rostov to sabotage the American tunnel boring machines. A super eruption will level the playing field. With the Americans knocked out, the Russians will be free to turn their full attention to China, who has sent five million squatters into Siberia.

Bennington and Purdue gave Digger O’Dell his PhD five years ago on the strength of the discovery of the Abyss. Now Digger is off fracking wells in Pennsylvania. The army will bring him back for the big meeting that assembles after Claire finds the first of the lava starting a fire near Craig’s Pass.

Digger turns the two hand-wheels of the hatch and pushes it open. The air is full of ash. Still in his suit, still gripping his mouthpiece in his teeth, he climbs half of the steps and peers out the hatch through the rectangle of gold tinted glass in his hood. A brown cloud floats above the Industrial Village. The skeletons of I-beams stand like rows of scarecrows in a ruined field.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940046088908
Publisher:	Mike Kennedy
Publication date:	08/29/2014
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	431 KB

About the Author

FICTION FOR THE SPOKEN WORD – Full length recordings of contemporary American short stories by Mike Kennedy – Paste this link into your browser >>> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMX-gWZQGvdo9xovZTl-ZOA Indianapolis author Mike Kennedy described by Trident Media Group, saying: Kennedy has a way with words and that readers attracted to Hemingway and Mailer will love Season of Many Thirsts (A novel brought to E-Books under the original title: REPORT FROM MALI). Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says of the manuscript: "This is a potentially important and significant novel on many levels, including formally." Little, Brown says of the novel: "Our admiration for its ambition and the energy and high-octane force it applies toward these engrossing geopolitical events. Chance and his team are memorable characters." Random House says: "Kennedy captures the strange, and intriguing world of Mali." Playwright Arthur Miller said of Kennedy: "Marilyn and I used to think there was something funny about Mike, and then we realized that he was simply hilarious." Kennedy's message to the publishing world, "I have read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from time to time across fifty years. During this, my most recent reading, it occurs to me that I am Kurtz and that all of you are Marlow. Kurtz lay dying in the pilot house of the river steamer. Marlow, the company agent, has found him and returns with him. Kurtz has spent years in the jungle pulling out ivory and sending it downstream. Finally, Kurtz agrees to return down river to civilization because he realizes that he has something to say, something with a value beyond his ton of treasure. Kurtz realizes that he has achieved a synthesis from out of his brutish experience. Kurtz imagines being met by representatives at each one of the string of railway stations during his return to civilization. He tells Marlow, 'You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability.' And then, sounding as though he steps into our own millennium, Kurtz adds, 'Of course you must take care of the motives—right motives—always.' Now I see that Kurtz is Conrad. Kurtz is not unique. He is every writer. It is only Marlow, the agent, who is unique, unique in his fidelity, not just to the job, nor only to the company, but to the civilization that sent him. Gutenberg published only 160 bibles, not enough to cause anyone since to reject it as a "previously published work." Flannery O’Connor criticized readers for draining a concept from a story. Character, plot, and voice cannot hold Kennedy as much as can a concept. Hamlet’s characters and actions were for the groundlings. The galleries could have the concept and conclude that the play was all about revenge as they witnessed everyone serve the ghost as accomplices, as dupes, or as road-kill. Hamlet will revenge the ghost. Laertes will revenge his father. The son of Old Norway, will arrive at the end to revenge his father upon the ghost who, by now, surely has had his own surfeit of revenge, and has skulked from the ruins and back to Hell. In a larger sense, this is the concept of the tyranny of the old men. In one way or another, every younger generation is commanded by Hamlet’s ghost to “fight for a fantasy and a trick of fame, and for a plot of land which is not tomb enough to hide the slain.” Similarly, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is less memorable as the story of the returning king. For Kennedy, the Watchman is the story, watching the irony of man unfold: Cassandra’s “painted show.” In this same way, Kennedy’s five novels and twenty-four stories of shorter fiction practice the same alchemy of HIGH CONCEPT wherein the characters are trapped, as the reader is trapped, as the Greek chorus was trapped by the bounds of the proskenion, all witnesses to a story “that is as it is”, a story which can only “end as it must.” Greek stories were old tales told to audiences who already knew their endings. In this way, tension was diverted from the surface into deeper levels. With unconscious irony, Flannery taught us this. Concept driven stories are more likely to have drama (the Greek word for “deeds”), and more likely to have genuine endings. Concept must be served. The Indianapolis Public Library has purchased all seven of these works of fiction. It was at their Broad Ripple Branch, by way of bicycle, where the abundant scope & compass of books was discovered. This was eventually followed by the venerable rack of paperbacks at McSoley's Drug Store, where paper route profits were given over in that unblemished faith that makes calamity of so long a life. Having these stories back at the place of those beginnings imparts the Greek's almost-perfect almost-elliptical shape that the ancient tragedy of the Cretan Labyrinth demands. When Kennedy writes, his sympathy is with the public patience, for a customer betrayed by the broken promise of a cover, for a reader angry at a reviewer’s brazen flim-flam, and in empty moments before a crash as a story slows to stall speed when a reader must cut it loose like ballast. This writer's purpose is modeled after Robert Louis Stevenson's dedication of his novel Kidnapped: “…a book for the winter evening school-room when…the hour for bed draws near…[whose] purpose [is] to steal some young gentleman’s attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands…and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle with his dreams.”