The Inn’s great room was packed. The room is styled on the lofty old national park hotels, with colonnades of sugar pine and Paiute-weave carpets and a boulder-framed fireplace large enough to roast a bear.
If Adrian Krom called the meeting here to pull in a crowd, it worked.
I buffeted my way forward and ran into Stobie. I hadn’t seen him since he pulled Georgia’s sled down from the glacier. “Hey babe!” he boomed, the easygoing Stobie I’d always known, not the tense guy on the recovery mission. He caught me around the waist, dipped me, and whispered, “Beer.”
I whispered back, “I think there’s coffee.”
“Bill’s birthday. Beer. Designer. Club. Monthly.” Stobie righted me, then bellied through the crowd toward his buddies — Eric and my brother Jimbo. The three biathletes, lifelong friends, lounged against a colonnade, shooting the shit, hanging out.
As if all was normal.
And then I caught sight of Bill Bone himself, over at the snack table restacking the sugar packets. Beer? I thought. Well, Stobie used to bus dishes for Bill at the Ski Tip, so Stobie would know. I suddenly was desperate to get Bill’s birthday gift right. I knew he wouldn’t care — he’ll be monumentally touched no matter what we get him — but it mattered to me. We’re a community, Georgia always preached, we’re more than L.A.’s playground. And no matter how windy Georgia got I’d always find myself grateful to be included. And now we were a community without our longtime mayor, a community without an insurable future, and if we intended to keep acting like a community then we should goddamn know what the proprietor of the Ski Tip Cafe wanted for his birthday.
I checked my parka and then scanned the room for the man who’d called this meeting. I spotted him finally, the burly man light-footing his way through the crowd, turning anxious heads. A touch more formal than his guests. Brown sweater, brown cords, brown hair, deep tan. Every time I’ve seen him he’s wearing brown. Actually, I hadn’t seen him since Red’s Meadow, four days ago. What stayed with me was my hand in his. I’d had the impulse to keep holding on, because Adrian Krom’s the closest to a safety net we’ll get.
Mike Kittleman came inside and flattened himself against the far wall. He stood alone.
I spotted Lindsay and Walter, who were chatting with Jefferson Liu. Jefferson stepped up from his position as head of the town Council to become acting mayor, after Georgia disappeared. And Adrian Krom held his position as Emergency Operations Chief at the pleasure of the Council, and the acting mayor. I guessed silver-goateed Jefferson qualified as one of Mike’s ‘old people’ and I could see why Krom would not want him to slip and fall.
I came up beside Linday, and nudged her. “Anybody else here from the Council?”
She said, tight, “All of them.”
Then it’s big.
There was a shifting in the room toward the fireplace, where Krom leaned against a table. He could not have chosen a better frame: the hearty fire at his back, the table a huge chunk of red fir polished to a cinnamon gleam. Krom held up a hand and the nervous chatter ceased. He said, “It’s been, what? Couple of months. You all know me. Right?” He paused. The room was still. “No, you don’t. Let me reintroduce myself. I’m Adrian Krom. I’m your worst nightmare.”
In the strained silence, somebody giggled.
“You say no? I say yes. I’ve been your best friend. It’s not working, chums.”
I began to grow worried.
He moved to the easel. The map showed the geography of the town and the greater environs. “Look hard. You know the geography. What the hell were you thinking? I’ve walked it. Have you? Scared the bejesus out of me. It’s time to scare the bejesus out of you. If you’re not scared, if you’re not prepared to see me and this map in your dreams, then go home and watch TV.”
Nobody moved.
“Then let’s get serious.” Krom flipped an overlay, superimposing it on the map. It looked like a child’s drawing, a crooked line and two circles alongside. “This,” he dragged a finger along the line, “is the Bypass.”
I glanced at Lindsay, who’d gone on alert. Was Krom trying to start a war? The Bypass is hers — an escape route, currently only half-done. She’s the one who walked the geography and conceived the Bypass, she’s the one who pushed the Council to fund it, and she’s the one who named it. A mile was already bulldozed when Krom first came to town.
But until the Bypass is finished, there’s only one road out of town: Highway 203, which leads to the major through-road in the eastern Sierra, Highway 395. That highway runs all the way south to Los Angeles and north to Nevada, following the Sierra scarp like a fault. You can’t go anywhere north or south without taking 395.
Highway 395 runs through the caldera, the gigantic crater that encircles Long Valley and Mammoth Mountain and our hometown. You can’t escape to anywhere without taking 395.
That’s why any road out of town must connect to 395. Problem is, 203 connects with 395 in a very dangerous place in the caldera — near the heart of the awakening volcano, where the magma has been rising.
That’s why, when the the volcano got serious, Lindsay said we needed a second way out, a way to connect with 395 at a less dangerous place. She’d been saying this for decades, but this time she said now.
Lindsay was glaring at Krom’s map. He’d drawn a line, extending the half-built Bypass to show the finished route. When finished, it will connect with 395 well north of the caldera’s growing magma chamber.
We all stared at the Bypass on the map, our lifeline. There was a camera flash and then the Mammoth Times editor Hal Orenstein slipped to the front of the crowd, his stringbean form hunched to angle a shot for the local paper.
Now Krom studied the drawing anew, as if the flash had illuminated something revealing. He let the moment run, then turned to us. “Why are you building this? Isn’t the point to evacuate and live to tell the tale?”
I reached for Lindsay but it was too late. She was on her way.
“I know your attention is on the caldera,” Krom was saying, “and rightly so — but what exactly is the point in running your new escape route smack dab through this?” He fingered the circles. “Volcanoes, chums.”
I saw what he was doing. It wasn’t fair. He was diverting attention from the active caldera to the Inyo System, which is another volcanic system entirely. Inyo’s volcanoes have been dormant for hundreds of years. They’re dormant now. Otherwise, Lindsay wouldn’t have championed a road that ran right past them.
She strode up to the easel and peered at Krom’s drawing. She shook her head, as though she couldn’t believe the line he had drawn was the Bypass and the crude circles he had drawn alongside were meant to represent the old Inyo explosion craters. She said, “Are you a volcanologist, Adrian?”
“I’m trying to run a meeting, Lindsay.”
“Are you a volcanologist?”
He folded his arms.
“Are you a volcanologist?”
“For anyone here who doesn’t know, I’ve worked around volcanoes for over a decade.”
“Not Inyo, you haven’t.” She drummed her fingers on the drawing. “I monitor the Inyo system every day and I assure you it’s quiet.”
“Can you assure us it will be quiet tomorrow?”
She smiled, almost in pity. She took the marker from the easel tray and went to work on Krom’s overlay and when she’d finished, the map was marked with circles and stars and crosshatches, crude as his. “Vents,” she said, “and domes and fumaroles and seismic hot spots. The whole system is capable of mischief. We live in active country. There’s no way around it. You have to go through it. You can’t build a road that does not go through it.”