KILAUEA VOLCANO’S “SLEEPING”HAZARD

KILAUEA VOLCANO’S “SLEEPING” HAZARD

Wendell Duffield

May 24, 2018

Numerous fissures that number into the twenties continue to open and erupt along the lower east rift zone of Kilauea. Tens of homes and ancillary buildings have been burned and/or buried by erupted magma. Roads paved with tar are now locally repaved with overlying thick glistening black basaltic pahoehoe lava. Elsewhere within the rift zone, lava flows have advanced southward far enough to spill into the ocean, which is at least locally no longer pacific. Noxious and potentially lung damaging fumes contaminate the atmosphere of the entire eruption region.

Meanwhile, miles west at Halemaumau crater within the summit caldera of Kilauea, a long-lived restlessly churning lake of molten basalt has retreated downward into its vertical roughly tube-shaped feeding conduit. When this retreat began, U.S. Geological Survey scientists of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory described a scenario for a time of similar behavior in 1924, when deep retreat of a Halemaumau lava lake led to violent phreatic (steam-powered) blasts that sent columns of rock and grit and noxious fumes thousands of feet into the atmosphere. The scientists postulated/predicted that similar steam-powered blasts might occur if the top of the retreating lava-lake were to sink to a level below the regional groundwater table. About a week ago, this situation came to fruition, resulting in several blasts, some powerful enough to send fine grit and sulfurous fumes as high as 30,000 feet into the atmosphere. Larger blocks of ejected rock, some two feet wide, fall out and litter the ground near the rim of Halemaumau crater.

Kilauea remains in eruption at Halemaumau and down-rift as I write these notes. No one can predict when the action will stop. As long as an adequate supply of magma exists within the bowels of the volcano, eruption is likely to persist. Keep in mind that Kilauea has been in continuous eruption since 1983. Hazards related to steam blasts at the summit and lava flows of the east rift will be a fact of life for local residents for the foreseeable future. In addition, a “sleeping” volcano hazard (landsliding) stirs and gestates within the bowels of Kilauea.

Kilauea is built against the south-sloping flank of its much larger and more massive neighbor … Mauna Loa Volcano. Thus, Mauna Loa serves as a stabilizing buttress for the north side of Kilauea. By contrast, Kilauea’s seaward facing south flank is free to slide toward the ocean if its internal cohesive strength fails. Magma that rises from its source in Earth’s mantle lifts Kilauea’s surface and shoulders the ocean side southward and upward as it feeds into rift-zone dikes and a magma-reservoir zone beneath the summit caldera. A background of small-magnitude earthquakes are triggered by the entry of new magma. Over time, large pieces of the south flank become unstable and fall downward and seaward as landslides.

The shape of the south-flank ground surface of Kilauea, from sea level to near the summit caldera is a veritable giant staircase of steep landslide headwalls ….  some are hundreds of feet tall. These are the risers of the staircase. They likely represent the cumulative result of multiple landslide events. Some have subsequently been partially draped by young lava flows that spilled over them.

During my three years (1969 – 1972) as a geologist on the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory staff, my wife and I and two friends camped for a long weekend along the south coast of Kilauea at a primitive National Park facility called Halape. We sweated during the long hike in, down two-thousand-four-hundred feet across the staircase of landslide headwalls. We were the only people there. We enjoyed the privacy of a small beach, with adjacent grove of coconut trees located at the base of a landslide headwall (ominously?) named Puu Kapukapu. Our hike up and out the lofty staircase was doubly sweat generating.

Three years later a scout troop and adult supervisors camped at Halape. A magnitude 7.9 earthquake shook Kilauea. Some of the landslide staircase blocks moved several feet … downward and seaward. A small earthquake-generated tsunami washed across the camp site and coconut grove. Two of the campers and several of their pack horses died. When the waters calmed, the camp site was several feet below sea level where it remains today.

Though Kilauea’s growing pains of this sort are rare, compared to eruptions along Kilauea’s rift zones and in its summit caldera, they are an integral part of the life of the volcano and should not be forgotten in long-range planning of how and where to live safely on such a growing mountain.

YES I DO; YES I WILL

(A poem for someone you love)

Do I love you today?

You ask with concern,

Thinking my answer may bring tears that burn.

Just know, my dear sweetheart, there’s no need for fear.

For yes, I do love you each year after year.

How do I love you?

It’s so hard to say,

At least with the words that can clearly portray

A love so profound it’s almost dismay.

Yet ‘tis safe to conclude that there’s many a way.

When do I love you?

At all times, and pure.

But often the truth is so blurred and obscure

That knowing the answer is not always sure,

And makes a mind wonder and wander too far.

Where do I love you?

At home and afar.

And once when much younger, inside my old car.

Still, love’s not just sweaty and physical stuff.

It’s doing the right things, some of them tough.

How much do I love you?

Can’t say I sure know.

Though some deep down feeling continues to grow

And grips at my body, the mind and the soul,

With such strong emotion, my loving is whole.

Why do I love you?

I can’t simply say.

Yet something about you fills every new day

With joy only seen in a child at play,

The kind guileless feeling you want to just stay, and stay, and stay.

Will I still love you tomorrow, you ask?

Well, knowing the future’s a difficult task,

Akin to a seer droning through a veiled mask.

But echo what yesterday’s answer had been,

Had you asked this very same question back then.

DEAR PERSONAL COUNSELOR

Wendell Duffield,  April 2017

I don’t usually read the Dear Anne Landers type of advice in the Sunday edition of our local metropolitan newspaper (the Seattle Times). But I find its presence (Dear Carolyn Hax in this case) difficult to ignore because it’s generally printed on the back side of the page where my must-do Sudoku and New York Times Crossword appear. As I attempt to fill in blank squares with appropriate numbers and letters of puzzle solving, the page inevitably slips from my fingers a time or two or three or ……  And seemingly akin to the odds of a flipped coin landing heads (or tails), from time to time Carolyn’s face smiles up at me once the page has fluttered to the floor.

Now …  I confess that I sometimes get distracted into speed reading and thereby briefly considering the interpersonal problems that others share with Carolyn … most of which I simply brush off with the sorry-folks shrug of aging shoulders. But WHAMO! On March 12, 2017, Carolyn’s discussion about intra-family dynamics triggered thoughts about my own genetic-family history. Part of Carolyn’s message to the write-in person of Weighing On My Mind hit home. There was no shrug this time. Carolyn’s statement “And family sometimes gets less important as you get older, particularly when childhood proximity is all you still share.” made me reflect on the dynamics among my five sisters and me. Readers of the following thoughts should keep in mind that I have no professional training beyond rocks and volcanoes …  non-thinking things that don’t complicate situations with human emotions.

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The ideal/traditional All-American family is commonly considered to be firmly warmly and lovingly bonded for life through frequent and long-lasting face-to-face contacts among living members. Given reasonable life expectancy, this often includes people of three generations

However, during life in what I think of as being in a fast-and-accelerating-lane … since about the mid twentieth century and on into the foreseeable future … the ties among members of a traditional nuclear family may weaken. Increasing ease of geographic, social, and economic mobility simultaneously create physical and mental space among folks with closely shared genetic codes. I ignore adoption herein.

Family spirit, cohesiveness, and sense-of-belonging among siblings may become less and less important as children age into young adults and beyond to mature professionals whose careers and even marriages take them far from their birth home and surroundings of origin. The seeds of parents are figuratively yet effectively scattered by the winds of time and can become rooted elsewhere.

As hinted at by Carolyn Hax, one result is that with increasing frequency it’s only the memories of face-to-face childhood proximity and its growing-up experiences that adult siblings now truly share. With time, closely related people may become virtual strangers. Electronic digital contacts via Facebook, Twitter, iphones etc etc help populate the physical-handshake-hug-conversation void, but can feel very superficial and are too easily forgettable and avoidable.

As we became teenagers, my five sisters and I dispersed from the hometown in diverse personal, professional, and geographic directions. Of course we still share genetic makeup, but an actual present-day gathering from homes located in Middle America, and adjacent to Mexico, Canada, the Atlantic, and the Pacific Oceans is challenging. As the years pass, face-to-face time is limited.

A popular saying with regard to inter-personal relationships claims that, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”. I’m sure this is true for some relationships up to a point, and perhaps for some even up to the death end point. But the target of an ever-growing fondness may eventually be transferred to a human object and reality with day-to-day presence, as feelings based on absence stagnate and perhaps even fade.

Thank you Carolyn Hax for causing me to think yet again about what often seems like an emotionally complicated array of relationships I have with my five sisters. I do love them all. But we are uniquely different individuals whose values, aspirations, etc have evolved along differing tracks since our childhood days of togetherness. Now deep into years of retirement from an exhilarating career, my less-occupied mind sometimes wanders, and wonders if I would have ever “connected” with one, some, or all of my adult sisters had we just happened to meet with no shared family background.

IS THE SOUTHWEST READY FOR A NEW DAM ACROSS THE COLORADO RIVER IN GRAND CANYON?

Anatomy alert! If the huge tract of land that comprises much of the USA Southwest is analogous to a human body, the Colorado River, fed by its several tributaries, is the aorta’s counterpart (vena cava). This drainage returns life-sustaining liquid to the seven-seas heart of Earth’s hydrologic system. From there water will be evaporated and re-circulated as rain … some falling on the arid Southwest. And the water cycle repeats.

The Colorado River’s water is the runoff stage of this lifeblood-loop that nourishes plants and animals on its path to the Sea of Cortez. Without that river water most of the American Southwest would be a much-less-developed arid terrain than exists today. Any human tinkering with the Colorado River drainage system must be carefully planned and executed.

John Wesley Powell was the first person of European extraction who, as a trained scientist, recognized the importance of available water (in gallons per year) for sustaining food production to feed human populations in this desert-like environment. In the late nineteenth century, he designed a program that could support limited human populations around local hydrologic subsystems. He envisioned “watershed areas” in which a number of small dams could impound enough water to grow food for a defined/limited local population. As he warned a dubious USA Congress in 1883, “Gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.” But Congress was thinking of the arid west in terms of land development similar to the well watered and densely populated areas east of the Mississippi River.

With subsequent technical advances in storage and redistribution of water over great distances, the building of huge dams, water pumps, piping, and canals replaced restrictive limitations implicit in Powell’s watershed-area land-development model. By the early twentieth century, the main issue that needed to be agreed upon to support large regional human population was the number and location of huge dams that would “control” the flow and distribution of water throughout the Southwest. Agreement appeared only after years of spirited and often contentious debate. A major question during negotiations was what, if any, dams should be built within the spectacular landscape of Grand Canyon. This deep and steep-walled feature is close to a perfect site … possibly a dam-designer’s consummate wet dream.

The Bridge Canyon (sometimes called Hualapai) Dam, first proposed in the 1920s, was designed to impound water from near the uppermost reach of today’s Lake Mead bathtub to the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers, thus flooding most of Grand Canyon. Upstream of this confluence, the Marble Canyon (sometimes called Redwall) Dam, also proposed in the 1920s, would have impounded water to the point of greatly reducing “normal” flow through the heart of Grand Canyon and its brand new (1919) National Park (GCNP).

Justifications for these dam projects are couched in such terms as: generating clean electricity; helping to control large natural fluctuations in annual river flow … that is, to help damp out changes in cubic-feet-per-second (cfs) flow that may result from a year, or back-to-back years, of unusually dry or wet weather; creating yet another lake for recreation; and just plain diverting water for “other uses”.

Fortunately, at least in this writer’s view, the Bridge Canyon and the Marble Canyon proposals eventually were nixed, while the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams were approved. Hoover was completed in 1936 and Glen Canyon in 1963. Since then, the idea of letting the Colorado River in Arizona once again flow freely by removing the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams has resurfaced from time to time. But such major human designed deconstruction projects seem to be a fool’s errand (sorry Edward Abbey!) … extremely unlikely to occur.

However, the accidental breaching of Glen Canyon, and perhaps Hoover Dam too, nearly occurred in 1983 without the secret-back-room scheming of mankind. That spring, snow melt and rain of a particularly wet season filled Lake Powell to above the level of overflow spillways at Glen Canyon dam. By dam-construction design, overflow was channeled into forty-one-foot diameter concrete-lined tunnels through bedrock on each side of the dam. This was the first time these tunnels had been put to use. Faulty design triggered a process called cavitation (creation of low-pressure air pockets that are sources of damaging shock waves when they collapse) as water surged through the tunnels; this destroyed large sections of the concrete walls and permitted the erosion of the much softer sedimentary rocks behind the concrete. Had the rise of water in Lake Powell not serendipitously stopped before the degree of cavitation destruction became critical, the lake would likely have quickly drained, sending a downstream flow that might have caused Hoover to fail, or at least release unplanned and uncontrolled volumes of water. Potential havoc wreaked is limited only by one’s imagination. Whew!!

Any future construction of concrete dams that would further impact the natural pre-human-tinkering flow of water through Grand Canyon also seems unlikely in the extreme. Instead, the top-to-bottom deep and colorful grandeur of the canyon remains visible from GCNP rim-top perches for visitors that number several millions annually, and is accessible from rim to river-level for hikers. Boaters continue to experience river-bank scenery and the thrill of running challenging rapids between Lee’s Ferry and Lake Mead.

Nonetheless, a closer look beneath these rather superficial positives reveals substantial negative impacts to the Colorado River in GCNP due to Glen Canyon Dam. For example, lack of a steady supply of washed-in sediment to maintain sandbars and beaches results in gradual loss of these natural features through continuous erosion. They are washing away on a path to extinction. Most of what was formerly a constant source of replacement grit stays above Glen Canyon Dam, and eventually will fill Lake Powell. Moreover, pre-dam plants and animals that have flourished in and along the river in Grand Canyon also are threatened with possible extinction. The pre-dam sediment-bearing waters that ranged seasonally in temperatures between about 35 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit have been replaced by uniformly cold (46 F) clear water tapped year round from the bottom of the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam.

Still, an optimist’s (or apologist’s?) view of the situation now, in the early twenty-first century, might be that the GCNP stretch of the Grand Canyon is adequately and appropriately “protected” by up- and down-stream bookends of Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams. After all, the occasional natural extremes of wild flooding and trickle-like drought have been tamed. A somewhat variable, but regular flow of water is guaranteed.

As a realist, however, I note that any such view of “protection” ignores the possibility of a little-appreciated revolution from within. Whereas Homo sapiens sapiens may have finally stopped creating even further damn modification to the natural flow of the Colorado River, Nature has repeatedly dammed the river in a succession of “projects” whose lifespan is unfinished.

The natural dam-building processes are landslides and lava flows. Consider this. It’s not surprising that the steep-to-vertical walls of Grand Canyon occasionally slump in landslides large enough to dam water flow. None exist as I type these words, but geologists have mapped remnants of such past barriers … landslide leftovers perched on canyon walls above river-water level. Being composed of loose fragments of tumbled and broken rock, a landslide river plug likely is easily and readily eroded as water flows through and over the porous pile. Here today gone tomorrow … although tomorrow might be months or perhaps even years beyond a large landslide event. But a year or two is a minor time-window compared to a typical human life-span. For example, one may need to only reschedule a Grand Canyon river-running adventure until next year. As a college classmate of mine used to say about such situations back in our shared dormitory days, “Get over it. It’s no big deal!”

A volcano’s lava flow, however, is a completely different river-damming beast … a big deal that creates a solid coherent rock that can last for centuries or millenia, before erosion can abrade its way downward to a pre-lava river-bed level. Yes, the upstream part of a lava dam may consist of broken and porous fragments (akin to landslide debris) because when lava and water mix, steam explosions shatter what would otherwise solidify to coherent rock. But the permeability of this shattered stuff is low enough that contemporaneous lava flowing downstream from it has time to fill a virtually dry riverbed with solid rock. And as this sturdy stuff builds upward, it creates a dam nearly as effective for water-retention as the poured-concrete variety.

I fear that few people other than geologists and river-runners know that lava flows from volcanoes in and near the Toroweap (sometimes called Tuweep) section of GCNP have repeatedly dammed the river there. Remnants of these dams are obvious when seen, as thin black frosting on a colorful horizontal layer-cake of ancient sedimentary rocks exposed in canyon walls. But Toroweap is about one-hundred miles downstream from the canyon-rim views available to the millions of tourists who come to spend a few hours or perhaps a day or two in GCNP. Out of sight, out of mind!

John Wesley Powell was the first trained scientist to visit and describe what’s left of these lava dams, during his 1869 boat-float through Grand Canyon. Since then, many geologists have studied these remnants, in greater detail as new techniques developed to allow increasingly-accurate reconstruction of the dams from the remaining scattered fragments attached to high canyon walls on down to river level. The challenge for geologists is comparable to trying to accurately recognize the scene of a picture puzzle for which more pieces are missing than present. Nonetheless, the number, timing, size, and life-span of lava dams are now fairly well constrained.

 

Vulcan’s Throne cinder cone volcano, nearly surrounded by remnants of basalt lava flows, sits at the north rim of Grand Canyon in the Toroweap area of GCNP. Colorado River visible at lower right. View looking NNE.

The volcanoes at Toroweap number a bit over one-hundred and are within a roughly rectangular tract of ground (called the Uinkaret Volcanic Field) ten miles east/west and twenty miles north/south. All but a couple lie at and up to a few miles north of the canyon rim. Each is a basalt cinder cone in the parlance of geology … a smallish landscape feature in the gallery of volcano types, and characterized as a feeder of a lava flow that may extend many miles down-slope from the cone during an eruption that likely lasts a few years to a decade.

Such cinder-cone-fed lava flows created dams across the Colorado River at least seventeen times … the first about 800,000 years ago, and the most recent about 100,000 years ago. Some lava dams were as tall as their Hoover and Glen Canyon counterparts. The thickest lava dam may have stood nearly 2,000 feet tall … more than twice the height of Hoover or Glen Canyon. Most lava dams succumbed to erosion within years to centuries, but some likely persisted for millennia. Some dam failures were essentially instantaneous with presumably catastrophic consequences to downstream landscapes and their biota.

 

Remnants of basalt lava that flowed into Grand Canyon via Whitmore Canyon, along the west edge of the Uinkaret volcanic field. Colorado River at lower right. View to the NNE.

Will similar events happen again? A simple yes or no answer is impossible to defend. But the middle-ground of maybe is believable. Those who populate the no side of maybe can find support and comfort from the fact that the most recent lava dam was created so long ago. And by one track of logic this ancient age might indicate, or at least suggest that the Uinkaret Volcanic Field is finished with its dam-building phase. In fact, perhaps the volcanic field is now dead, caput, finished growing, not a threat for future eruptions. Who knows?

Those who populate the yes side of maybe can bolster their opinion with the fact that the youngest eruption in the Uinkaret Volcanic Field scorched a patch of ground there only 900 years ago. That volcano is informally called Little Springs cinder cone. Native Americans lived in the area and likely watched the eruption, presumably feeling some combination of awe, fear, and perhaps reverence for Nature’s power. Pieces of their pottery became embedded in blobs of molten lava that splashed down upon them and quickly chilled to solid black basalt rock rind.

The lava flow of this eruption did not extend over the rim and into Grand Canyon. But from a geological point of view the Uinkaret Volcanic Field is still active, and maybe, just maybe, the next eruption will spill into the canyon and build a dam that impounds a large lake while millions of Homo sapiens sapiens and their physical accoutrements occupy the downstream landscape all the way to the Sea of Cortez. And maybe, just maybe, this lake will eventually drain catastrophically, as some of the earlier lava dams did … although human interventions might be able to substantially minimize downstream damage.

Whether or not any of my readers choose to worry about or even consider a catastrophic flood as an existential possibility, the fact is that we people cannot control the lifespans and behaviors of volcanoes. We are spectators. This spectator thinks the possibility of a new lava dam is too big a deal to just get over.

As Will Durant famously opined, “Civilization exists by geologic consent … subject to change without notice.”

 PUBLICATIONS WITH ADDITIONAL PERTINENT INFORMATION

 Ryan S. Crow and others (2015): A new model for Quaternary lava dams in Grand Canyon based on ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar dating, basalt geochemistry, and field mapping: Geosphere, v. 11, no. 5, 38pp. Results of the most recent and comprehensive study of the history of lava dams created by volcanoes of the Uinkaret Volcanic Field.

Gary Hansen (2007): WET DESERT, Tracking down a terrorist on the Colorado River: Hole Shot Press, 363 pp. A novel that describes a chain of events expectable down-stream if Lake Powell were to be suddenly drained by destruction of Glen Canyon Dam.

 

AN ALUMNUS OF PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY, CLASS OF 1959, FINALLY PROVIDES SOME INFO FOR HIS CLASS NOTES

March 4, 2016

  Dear Bart,

Greetings from a fellow graduate of PEA’s class of 1959. Your recent email (arrived on Leap Year day) request for information that could be used in future class notes of The Exeter Bulletin has triggered this response. Feel free to use all, parts, or none of the following. Better late than never? I don’t recall ever contributing to the class notes, mostly because my memories of being a student at PEA are fairly negative. But like a young wine, my feelings toward the raw PEA years have mellowed with age to a point that invites tasting.

Immediately post-PEA, I fled the New England/Ivy League scene. I was an uncomfortable misfit in that environment. But my years at PEA had created an intellectual curiosity that drove me to keep learning new stuff. And the next step up in my education staircase led to Carleton College, back in my home state of Minnesota. There I felt quite “at home” and graduated happy, mentally stimulated, and motivated to learn yet more. At that point, my ambition was to understand planet Earth as a geologist … you know, rocks, volcanoes, earthquakes and such. I applied to graduate school at Stanford, the University of Washington, and Harvard. I think my application to Harvard was to prove that I was up to Ivy League intellectual, if not societal standards; and I was accepted there. I was also accepted at Stanford and UDUB. I chose Stanford, where I earned MS (1965) and PhD (1967) degrees in geology.

Then I simply moved my office from Stanford/Palo Alto to the neighboring town of Menlo Park, where I was hired by the U. S. Geological Survey. Thus began an exciting career of studying volcanoes. My first three volcano years were spent at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory of the USGS, where Kilauea treated me to non-stop eruption. Whew! Tiring and exciting!! I then moved back to the mainland USA, from which home-base I enjoyed nearly three more decades of volcano studies for projects on many oceanic volcanic islands and on all continents other than Antarctica, where famous Erebus growls in continuous eruption. During this period, I lived in France one year, working with colleagues of their geological survey. Yes, there are some geologically very young volcanoes in central France. And of course I had to spend time with the active volcanoes on the French Caribbean islands, and on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. I also lived one summer in Iceland working with my volcanologist colleagues there. That country is one-hundred percent volcanic! Along the career highway post-Stanford, I published nearly two hundred peer-reviewed research papers, plus about half as many abstracts of oral presentations given at gatherings of societies populated by professional geologists.

Eventually, my body weakened from climbing too many tall volcanic peaks and toting heavy backpacks filled with lava samples. So I “retired” from the USGS in 1997, got a new right knee, and became an Adjunct Geology Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. My geologizing since then has grown to be mostly of the armchair variety.

And from that armchair, I’ve rediscovered that I just plain enjoy writing … on a variety of topics, some of which have nothing to do with geology. This joy first sprouted when I was a ninth-grade student in the Browns Valley, Minnesota, public school (I had a very inspirational English teacher there). It then continued to grow and flourish at PEA, in spite of Henry Darcy Curwen’s insistence on calling me a Midwestern Clod in his English class. I still harbor unsettling memories of my time in Curwen’s classroom. Nonetheless, my delight in writing persisted and has resulted in the publication of several articles in magazines and newspapers, and also the publication of eight books … some fact, some fiction. I think the PEA Library has copies of these. My PEA classmates might be interested in a few. From Piglets to Prep School is the tale of how I happened to leave the sheltered life of a small-town family-farm environment and attend PEA. Pages six through forty in Just in Case You Were Wondering are about my PEA life, too. An unforgettable student character by the name of Benno appears therein.

This message would be incomplete without mention of my life-partner-and-wife Anne. We met at Carleton, and as of September 2015 have been married fifty one years. Original plans for a family of two or three kids bit the dust during my Stanford graduate-school years. While I toiled at the MS and PhD projects, Anne worked as a lab assistant and Jill-of-many-trades for Stanford’s biology professor Dr. Paul Ehrlich. She was there as Ehrlich morphed from studies of butterfly population dynamics to research about the population dynamics of Homo sapiens sapiens. Ehrlich established the Zero Population Growth organization. He published The Population Bomb. Anne and I became believers in ZPG to such a climactic degree that a vasectomy made all of our future sexual climaxes sperm-free. Thus, “our” children have been those of our seven combined siblings and of our closest non-family friends. Though these kids did not carry our genes, we have experiences in child care from the diaper-changing stage and beyond.

Absent tots of our own making, Anne accompanied me on my volcano sorties, both in the USA and abroad. She gathered photos and took notes. Travel magazines published several of her tales about these adventures. When I “retired”, new material for her stories ground to a halt. Anne said she was ready for change anyway … too many rejection letters, she said! She and I now live on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, not far from Seattle. The view from our deck is westward, across the main shipping channel into the ports of Seattle and Tacoma. The Olympic Mountains loom in the background. A daily view to the west may include container cargo ships, tug boats and their trailing barges, pleasure-craft sail boats, aircraft carriers, submarines, ferries (Whidbey is indeed an island), orcas, dolphins, bald eagles, blue herons, etc. etc. As mid-septuagenarians, we are content to watch this action, garden, read, write a bit, and age.

Wendell A. Duffield

PEA Class of 1959

PS: Bart, our class representative for notes to The Exeter Bulletin responded on March 5. He likes my story and says it will appear in the next issue.

 

 

 

YEAR-END SUMMARY OF OUR LIVES

A CHRISTMAS  FABLE

 Mid December, 2015: The brilliant red color of snow-flake patterned wrapping paper that enveloped a UPS-delivered package radiated an aura of the year-end holiday season. This box sat at the front door of our house, when we returned from the daily walk-the-dog-off-leash session at the nearby public space of Greenbank Farm. And it was a big box … a cube that could barely fit through the door. I carried it inside while Anne garaged the car. She brought our Dobie dog Mele into the kitchen where the two joined me.

The red cube weighed barely a pound or two. I sat it on the counter next to the sink. Anne and I looked at each other and shrugged with hands open-side up in shared “what do you suppose this is?” expressions. We had earlier agreed to not exchange Christmas gifts this year. What might have been personal-gift money would instead go to worthy organizations outside our immediate family. Bored, Mele padded into the adjacent TV room, where she took her customary post-dog-walk place on the sofa, gently nudging our adopted cat Roomer aside. They were buddies.

Meanwhile, I fished a knife from a sink-side drawer, set the box on the floor, and cut tape to unwrap the mysterious “gift”. Beneath the red veneer was a simple cardboard cube with a hinged lid. I lifted it as Anne watched. Inside was a lumpy rough-surfaced more-or-less spherical object that filled the space. It had the feel of thin plastic, and produced a hollow sound when tapped with an index finger. Anne and I shared another look of joint confusion, as she poured two glasses of chilled white wine. We clinked glasses, intertwined our wassail-holding arms, said cheers, and sipped in silent celebration of another year of happily married life.

Then I lifted the “thing” from its cardboard container and set it on the floor. It was stabilized by a small flat bottom. Otherwise, it resembled a gigantic version of a nut variety that was a regular holiday-season snack offered to visitors in our house … a gigantic plastic walnut. The outer mottled-brown surface was rough, crinkled, and hard.

A girdling equatorial line mimicked the medial growth seam of a walnut. The “thing” was hinged at this line. I opened the lid. The space was empty save for a large folded sheet of paper. Shipping invoice? I handed that to Anne and reclosed the “thing”. We flattened the paper on the counter and together read a bold-print message.

THIS IS OUR YEAR’S STORY IN A NUTSHELL! WE HAVE SUCCESSFULLY LIVED ANOTHER 365 DAYS WHILE READING, WRITING, GARDENING, AND AGING. I LOVE YOU!

            Anne grinned, and sighed (or was it the groan of her typical response to my silly pranks), as I extracted a UPS credit-card receipt from my billfold and added it to the growing December pile in our office desk.

CONCUSSION DISCUSSION

 

 CONCUSSION DISCUSSION

Wendell A. Duffield

 

Concussion: noun  1: AGITATION, SHAKING  2 a: a hard blow or collision  b: a stunning, damaging, or shattering effect from a hard blow; a jarring injury of the brain resulting in disturbance of cerebral function

 

Professional promoters of the quintessential American version of football (not to be confused with soccer, the most popular variety of football in most of the rest of the world) have recently allowed the word concussion into their everyday parlance, thereby finally publicly recognizing that this sport is a common, if not primary (non-war) cause of the variety 2 b as defined above by Merriam-Webster.

Before this public awakening, concussions and their nearly-so breathern were simply considered temporary dizziness or headache … maladies that would dissipate to allow the hammered person to safely reenter a game within minutes, or perhaps after some “extended” rest associated with the half-time game break. Real men, their coaches, and team owners treated this type of battering as an expectable and acceptable part of the game. Personal reputations and money were at stake. And so these folks regularly opted for short-term gain while ignoring the reality of long-term health loss.

A physicist could calculate the resulting forces (and their possible effects on the human body) when two two-hundred-plus-pound helmet-wearing football players meet head-on, with approach speeds of, say, nearly 30 MPH each. But the scientific result would probably be meaningless to lay folks; perhaps especially those who regularly populate the gigantic stadiums where NFL games are played? (Confession time. I regularly watch professional football games … from the comfort of my home TV room.)

Maybe an easier way to grasp the degree of violence when behemoth fast-moving humans collide is to ponder what would happen to your car and you if you drove smack dab into a thick concrete wall at 60 MPH! It’s no wonder that relatively soft human brain tissue is often badly, and perhaps permanently damaged as a result of a football-player collision as it splats and flattens against its hard-bone skull container. Bruised brain? Even more? Perhaps. And sometimes, for sure.

I can develop a headache merely thinking, and writing, about this all-too-common occurrence as team A fights to secure Super Bowl fame and fortune by defeating team B throughout the duration of a multi-month season. Super Bowl, of course, is the pinnacle of success in the National Football League. A sadly “disposable” item in this scramble to the top is the long-term health of too many of the players. So I applaud the NFL for finally formally and publicly recognizing that sometimes the head-to-head (and head/ground) collisions can and do sometimes result in life-long brain damage, most especially if a player is the subject of repeated collisions. And now players are withheld from games if instant testing suggests a concussion has occurred.

As a related result, football-game announcers have quickly become comfortable with using the concussion word. It rolls off their tongues as smoothly as the old hackneyed phrases of broken ankle, separated shoulder, dislocated finger, etc.

Did you see … and hear that collision Jim?

Sure did Tracy. What a humdinger!

Yeah. Wow! What a savage tackle!! And look down there now. It appears that running back Joe Smasher is being taken to the stadium examination room to undergo the concussion protocol. We’re gettin’ a lot of those, these days. Way more than the old broken-leg game stopper.

Yup. That’s Smasher’s third time so far this season. We may or may not see him again in this game … or any future game. If he’s concussed today, he’s out. O U T!

But the games seemingly must, and do, go on. Though perhaps less “glamorous” in terms of national fame and fortune, the same head-injury situation threatens college and even younger football players. Concussions are not an age-specific result of player collisions. In fact, one might reasonably speculate that concussions are more likely as a result of collisions between young still-forming bodies, compared to fully developed adult skeletal frames, in spite of slower approach speeds and such with younger players. Whatever!

And whatever prompts me to recall flirting with concussions during my youth … although I knew nothing about that painful word or its ramifications back then, and my head was not a victim of playing football. A few of my best friends today, and this includes my wife of fifty years, sometimes describe me as a bit daffy. Have I perhaps been living in a semi-concussed state for the past sixty years? Read on and learn about that possibility.

My first contact with painful head banging was provided by iron tracks of the Great Northern Railway. The year was about 1948. A westward lateral spur of that transportation company entered, and dead-ended, in my hometown of Browns Valley, Minnesota. At the literal end of that line, the engine was slowly rotated one-hundred-eighty degrees on a human-powered circular platform so it could head back east toward the Twin Cities from whence it came. We kids enjoyed watching as this delicately balanced platform did its slow military-style “about face” to the guttural grunts of two adult men straining against wooden poles that protruded from opposite sides of the “wheel”. That turntable piece of equipment is gone today, as are the tracks that once bisected town. The Great Northern Railway abandoned Browns Valley decades ago.

But back in the day on the train’s path toward the merry-go-round maneuver, and just a couple hundred yards up-track, during many train visits a twenty-thousand gallon tank-car of gasoline was uncoupled and left on a short side track for my father to empty by pumping that volatile liquid into one of his several large silo-style holding tanks. Dad and a younger brother owned a Sinclair gasoline station and also maintained a bulk plant from which they delivered supplies to four other nearby stations. Dad handled the bulk deliveries, while brother Bill pumped Dino-the- Dinosaur fuel into the tanks of local autos. I loved to spend time with Dad at the bulk plant and to ride along during deliveries to the outlying stations.

I played on the tank-cars while Dad pumped fuel into the storage tanks. On one of these memorable days, I unwittingly flirted with being concussed. The tank cars had wood-plank walkways, from end to end at about mid-tank height on both sides. As Dad tended to the off-load pumping, I entertained myself by running along the wood walkways, front to back and back to front repeatedly until too tired to continue. Eventually, the inevitable happened. I slipped off the end of the plank and did a nearly vertical header on the steel track below.

I don’t remember if I passed out, or how and when Dad discovered what had happened. There’s no written record to document my age back then, either. I think I was in one of the high single-digit years of life. But I do remember a sore head that ached for the following few days. And I never again raced along those tank-car walkways.

Dad, and me (at age 14), and the gas delivery truck.

 Vignette two about addling my skull, and perhaps its contained brain too, was an unintended experiment in “better living with chemistry”. The sequence of events unfolded thusly. Dad supplied Sinclair gas stations at Peever, Summit, and Sisseton … each a small town about an hour’s drive westward into the neighboring state of South Dakota. He also delivered to Lohre’s Station, a kind of a supply post in the rural hilly hinterlands about twenty miles west of Peever. Mr. and Mrs. Lohre had a couple of cute daughters about my age, which added to the attraction of riding along on those trips. But I digress.

Dad’s delivery truck had five separate compartments, with a combined capacity of several hundred gallons. He pumped gasoline, and sometimes kerosene, into them from the large vertical storage tanks. As each truck compartment was filled, I stood at the open hinged-hatch lid to monitor the fuel level rise. Dad made me part of his delivery team by having me shout “it’s full” when a compartment was nearly at capacity. Then, he would turn off the pump, swing the delivery pipe to the next compartment, and switch on the pump again.

As we all know, or should know, gasoline used to power an internal combustion engine is an extremely volatile liquid. In today’s age of drivers having to pump their own gasoline at a filling station (except maybe in Oregon?), it’s impossible to not smell the fumes … unless your olfactory organ is faulty. There is a well founded reason for prohibiting smoking, or any other source of ignition, at places contaminated with gasoline fumes.

Well this young kid, the “it’s full!” member of Dad’s team, grew to enjoy the smell of fumes that wafted up from a compartment as it filled. I couldn’t avoid breathing in some of the gas-fume-contaminated atmosphere that rose from the filling space. And I quickly realized that I became pleasantly dizzy and dreamy if I inhaled this explosive contaminated atmosphere for several breathes. The tainted air induced a relaxed giddiness. I would giggle for no publicly apparent reason. I felt light-headed and even light-footed in the sense of a Peter Pan flight … though I never did jump from the truck-tank perch. For more of this “release”, I sometimes put my head right at the filling-compartment opening, where gasoline fumes were most abundant, and breathed deeply. Normal atmosphere there was increasingly enriched with volatile hydro-carbons. I remember those experiences as instantaneously living the most pleasant dreams one could imagine. But I also always remained in control enough to “sober up” as the time for my “it’s full” warning to Dad arrived.

I suppose I might have been chemically “cooking” my brain … albeit slowly? … and perhaps damaging  a few other organs. Dad saw, and understood, what I was doing. I have no memory of his forbidding me to continue my Sinclair highs. I suppose it’s unfair to add this thought, now that he’s not around to comment; but I wonder if he occasionally sniffed the fumes of his trade for a bit of instant relaxation, too. He was a strict Methodist, and thereby forbidden to consume the relaxant of alcoholic beverage. Perhaps he and I simply shared a little secret about how to create free and instantly happy smiley times that were a byproduct of supplying those South Dakota customers of his … just part of the job, so to speak.

Then I grew up, in age stature and strength, all the way into my early teenage years. For my family, as with most other families in our small-town setting surrounded by family farms, a boy strong enough for useful physical work was expected to “get a job”. Mine consisted of helping Uncle Bill at the Sinclair station after class-dismissed during the school year. I worked Saturdays at the station, too. This included hand-washing cars, pumping gas, lubing cars, repairing flat tires (this predated the tubeless variety, so a tube had to be removed patched and reinserted), and generally keeping the station-building interior clean. During summers, I mostly worked for my farming uncles, Willie and Clare. And this mode of manual labor led to another attack on my cranium and its contents.

Uncle Willie kept milk cows and beef cattle as part of his farm’s menagerie. And those four-legged ruminants needed hay for daily feed during the long cold and snowy winters typical of our part of the USA. This required baling two, or maybe three if weather cooperated, summer cuttings of alfalfa and storing this feed near the cattle pastures adjacent to his barn. He first filled the barn’s haymow and stacked bales beyond that volume outside where some weather-related rot was inevitable. A glitch in the process of elevating bales into the haymow rearranged (and perhaps almost did-in) my cranial orb and its upper-spine attachment fitting.

A typical bale contained about sixty pounds of alfalfa compacted into a roughly three-feet-long-by-one-foot-square mass held together with two strands of twine. Bales were raised into the haymow by a tractor-powered elevator designed for lifting such grains as oats and wheat into storage silos. This was the only machine Willie had that could lift the bales into the upper story of his barn.

Suffice it to say, as an example of a classic understatement, the flat-bottomed crudely V-shape of the grain-elevator’s open trough relative to the size and shape of a hay bale were misfits that only a designer such as the infamous Rube Goldberg could create. Oh yes, Willie and I eventually got all the bales up into the haymow, but only after many fell from the elevator en route to their desired second-story destination. Willie loaded bales into the elevator. My task was to retrieve the fallers and repositioned them into the undersized trough to send them on the upward trip anew. It’s while I was retrieving one fallen bale that a second “misfit”, unseen by me, targeted my head.

Sixty pounds of compacted alfalfa fell from a height of roughly fifteen feet, directly impacting my head. I fell … stunned. Was I knocked unconscious? I don’t know. But if yes, only briefly. Willie quickly came to help me to my feet. We rested long enough to verify that none of my body parts was broken, and that legs, arms, and head were “normally” functional. We continued our work, and of course I was especially watchful for another head-pounding missile as I retrieved fallers for reentry into the lift system.

Now, according to the value of Earth’s gravitational constant, which I retrieved from an old physics textbook, after its roughly fifteen-foot vertical fall, the bale of hay impacted by skull at about twenty to twenty-five miles per hour. Though there’s no modern-day video selfie as proof, I’m guessing that impact was “head-on” literally and figuratively so to speak. Perhaps a glancing blow would have broken a few vertebrate? The only noticeable “permanent” effect was an accentuated forward bow in my vertebrate from the shoulder-height up to basal skull.

An ensuing three years of remedial posture therapy accomplished little to undo the new spinal curve. Now a septuagenarian, I’m reminded of the alfalfa-bale incident by a persistent upper spine ache. Whatever!

And this whatever, my readers, introduces the last of my concussion-discussion trilogy. A current someone, now in retirement from being a talented and praised brain surgeon, is seeking the elected office of President of The United States of America. Yet this skilled and seemingly intelligent man spouts many easily disproved public statements (at least up to my November 2015 writing of this essay) in his run for this high office. Might Ben Carson have suffered a concussion in his youth? One that originally went unrecognized, yet some of whose deleterious effects still linger in his cerebral package? One that rearranged his ethical value system, yet permitted him to successfully perform the mechanical acts of brain surgery? To bring this essay back to its beginnings, might Carson be another Frank Gifford, an unknowing victim of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy)? There must be some rational explanation for Carson’s many “misstatements” on a path to seek the Presidency. Whatever that explanation may be, I suggest that he reconsider a Latin phrase that he almost certainly learned during his medical training and perhaps heard repeatedly throughout his years of medical practice. Cura te ipsum … physician, heal thyself.

THE COLD CASE OF THE COUNTERFEIT-PENNY CAPER

THE COLD CASE OF THE COUNTERFEIT-PENNY CAPER

As recalled by one of the perps

Wendell A. Duffield

2015

It all began innocently enough, on a hot and humid mid-week July afternoon in the nearly flat contours of Upper Midwest family-farm country. July was the middle of vacation from the rigors of school. A time of freedom for young folks like me back then to do the stuff that book learning and academic homework too often made impossible. So, my best friend Gary and I were hanging out, trying to find some excitement that would include the least-possible sweat-generating exertion. We were ten-year-olds, next-door neighbors from birth, and pretty much like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer when it came to preferred company and scheming up ways to have fun.

We weighed in at about fifty-five pounds each, pretty solid pounds too, for all the exercise that came with a farm-town style of life. On this day, like most summer days, we were wearing faded blue jeans … besmirched with a grass stain here and maybe a paint spot there … and whitish-gray T-shirts whose tails hung well below waist line when not tucked in. My jeans were kept waist high by a cowboy belt, decorated with various metal attachments and cinched by a horseshoe-shaped buckle. Gary’s belt was a piece of twine that he had salvaged from a bale of alfalfa. Our hatless heads were topped with the currently popular flattop style for young boys … a covering of short brush-like bristles held vertical by some sticky cream. Our shoes were weathered canvas of PF Flyer fame. The laces bulged with multiple repair knots where the original strands had repeatedly failed from overuse, and tightening tugs too powerful for their age-sapped strength.

A year earlier, Gary and I had been summer-season bare-foot boys. But that style of walking-around freedom came to an abrupt end because of two nearly simultaneous accidents. The first hit during one of our free-style foot races. Gary lost when he stepped on a grass-hidden scrap of weathered 2×4 stud whose lone rusty nail penetrated straight through his right foot to peek out the top, just behind the big toe. He screamed a lot as I pulled that nail out. I supported his right side as he hobbled home. Treatment was a tetanus shot, a daily changed bandage for a couple of weeks, and some stay-at-home rest.

A few days into Gary’s recuperation, my left bare foot found a large sharp-edged shard of grass-hidden glass. Once wounded, I picked up the enemy and saw that it came from a Hamm’s Beer bottle, probably an empty thrown from a moving car by a teenaged someone who wanted to jettison evidence of drinking before he got home from a night of fun with friends. Might even have been Gary’s older brother. Whatever. Later in life, Gary and I would learn about the hard-to-abstain tastiness of beer on a hot summer day. But I digress.

Holding my sliced blood-dripping foot off the ground, I managed a one-legged hop to home and yelled for Mother’s help at the back door. She quickly arrived and together we examined a gory three-inch-long gash that exposed what I remember as a kind of speckled meat. It looked a bit like the pork sausage that Mother often served for dinner. I guess that meat was my body’s version of muscle. Mom sat me down on our back porch and bathed the injured foot in pan after pan of icy cold water, until bleeding slowed to a near stop. Then she wrapped the foot in some kind of impermeable bandage to keep blood from seeping onto the flooring of our house. And I was stuck pretty immobile inside that two-story Victorian place for a couple of weeks.

Our town had a certificated medical doctor, who might have been able to heal me faster than simply resting on the couch and listening to radio programs did. There was neither TV nor hand-held digital toys for entertainment back then. We’re talking about true hinterland during the very early 1950s. Most of us farm-town families did our own doctoring for any mishap that was considered non-life-threatening. Folks with enough “extra” money for professional medical care were rare in our village.

Because of the two foot accidents, and in spite of protests by Gary and me, our mothers laid down the always-wear-shoes-outside rule. We obeyed, and also laughed about that rule. Yes, we quickly fell in love with our PF Flyers. They were about the fanciest, if not the only athletic footwear for young boys back then. But we knew that even the best of such shoes were inadequate protection from the pointed end of a nail … even a rough rusty nail that was a bit harder to push through rubber and flesh than a slippery shiny new one … or a razor-sharp glass shard lurking in the grass.

Well on this hot July day, Gary and I were healed, shod, and ready to explore summer fun. Our parallel supine bodies rested on long green grass in the shade of a Box elder tree in the town park. The toes of our foot-protecting … HA! … PF Flyers pointed skyward. We were silently wondering how to have fun without lathering up.

Eventually, Gary broke the silence. “Let’s walk out to the lake and take a swim.”

He punctuated that idea with a loud burp. Not because he had to burp, but because he knew how to swallow “extra” air at will, and then expel that gas with a loud guttural noise that was likely to disgust all age-contemporary girls within hearing range. I could do that, too. And, you know, practice makes perfect, lore says.

There were two lakes nearby … pretty shallow, but still they provided year-round recreational opportunities. The closer lake (Traverse) was a long mile from town, and by July its water was flirting with tepid while going steady with green slime that flourished by feeding on chemical fertilizers leached in from nearby fields of oats, flax, wheat, and corn. Ditto for more-distant lake two, too.

“Nice burp!” I said. “Our girl classmates would sure be grossed out by that!”

We giggled, knowing that these schoolmates would at least act disgusted, although we were pretty sure that most of them liked the attention of being burped at.

Not to be outdone, I sat up, bent my right arm to ninety degrees, and raised the arm away my side. Then I licked the palm of my left hand, cupped that slippery wet thing under my T-shirt against my right armpit, and lowered the arm as fast as I could. I don’t know how to string letters together to describe the resulting sound of compressed air as it rapidly escaped around the edges of the moist hand-formed pocket, but it was a perfect imitation of a well modulated fart.

Gary giggled.

Fart-on-demand was another trick we boys liked to use to make our female contemporaries squirm … except for Janet. She enjoyed making her own fart sounds. Some of hers were even louder than Gary’s or mine. She was our kind of female friend!

I broke the post-burp-and-fart silence with a “Naw” as I laid back into the grass. “No sense hikin’ out to the lake. We’d maybe get a quick cool-down swim. But then we’d be all hot, sweaty, and sticky by the time we walked back to town. There’s no winnin’ in that.”

“Yeah. I guess you’re right,” Gary said.

We went back to silent supine noodling about how to enjoy this summertime-freedom day. There was not even a cooling breeze. The shade where we lay was so uncomfortably hot that we’d soon want to move. But move to where?

The park was a grassy strip that paralleled the bank of a little river, whose path meandered through town on its way to join the more distant of our two nearby lakes (Big Stone). During spring snow melt and rapid water runoff from surrounding low hills, the river flooded the west side of town nearly every year. Those were exciting events for us kids. We loved to wade into the knee-deep barely moving water and try to hand catch spawning fish … slippery critters confused about what direction was upstream for lack of a distinct channel. Then usually by June and for sure by July, the sheet of flood had receded and evaporated to a chain of interconnected puddles along the river bed. In fact, the river right now was almost dry, so we couldn’t even enjoy the swimming hole where a nearly horizontal tree branch loomed out over the water as a natural diving board. If we jumped from that five-foot height today, we’d probably break an ankle or arm on a rocky bottom barely hidden beneath the residual shallow murky water.

So, after a frustrating series of what ifs and why nots, Gary and I decided to visit one of the only two artificially cooled spaces in town … the village hardware store. The town’s one-and-only bank was air-conditioned, too. But the “strictly business” owner would not allow non-customer folks to loll in his place of commerce. And any time of year, kids as young as Gary and me were allowed in only if accompanied by a parent. He was a stuffed shirt kind of person, that banker. And being quite overweight, he literally looked like he was stuffed into his shirt and slacks. But again I digress.

“Okay. Let’s go,” we said in near unison.

We stood and set a slow pace toward Lundstrom’s Hardware Emporium … three city blocks from the park. That store, like almost every other place of business in town, was located along the four blocks of an east-west street known locally as Main. According to the official original city plat-map displayed at town hall, the street was actually Broadway. But no locals used that name. Most didn’t even know it existed. If someone wanted to sound formal and informed, Main became Minnesota State Highway Twenty Eight … which in fact it is a very very short segment of.

We got to Main, stopped, and scanned east and west. Our target store … a two-story rectangular brick building whose shorter dimension fronted Main … was at the southeast corner of this intersection. A couple of unfamiliar cars drove by, headed west. Unfamiliar cars meant out-of-towners. Gary and I watched as these “foreigners” disappeared around a northward curve at the end of Main.

A half-dozen local cars were parked along Main … two at the Post Office, two at Pete’s Hang Out, and two at the Municipal Liquor Store. Pete’s was a dark dingy dive where male regulars played cards, smoked, told tall tales, and drank beer. The Muni was the place to swap stories, drink the hard stuff, and maybe even buy a bottle to take home. It was the only legal source of hard liquor in town.

As Gary and I continued to scan the Main drag, a block to the east a pale green Kaiser sedan pulled away from the Sinclair gas station and crossed Main, heading north.

“Looks like old Mr. Toller has done his monthly fill up,” I said. Gary nodded.

In a town like ours, people tended to learn village habits … both the quirky and the mundane. It’s hard to hide, even if you want to, when you are one of so very few within a pretty small space. Excitement beyond the mundane came with something like the annual Fourth of July fireworks display. Greater excitement, of the unplanned and unexpected variety, came with an event like a house catching afire; then volunteers swarmed to Town Hall to see if the aging community fire-truck engine would start this time … or not. Mr. Toller’s driving habits were a mix of mundane and exciting, and of special interest to young and old alike for different reasons. Kids like Gary and me laughed at his car driving habits. Adults worried that those same antics might result in a deadly traffic accident.

Smoke enveloped Toller’s car as we watched. Soon odor from an overheated asbestos clutch plate would flavor the atmosphere up and down Main. Toller was nearly deaf and could not hear his car’s engine as a clue to how many RPMs it was turning. To avoid stalling, he had eventually learned to race the engine and very slowly engaged the clutch. He was now on replacement clutch three, or maybe four.

“Hope he gets home safely,” Gary said. “Gassin’ up that Kaiser seems to be the most exciting part of his week.”

There, of course, were no farmers among today’s Main Street folks. Unless some machinery emergency needed the healing touch of the blacksmith, farmers came to town only on Saturday nights … to shop and socialize a bit. Well, they did also come to town briefly most Sundays, to thank a celestial something for their life’s blessings. Otherwise, they stayed home to tend crops and livestock. This year, corn had been even a bit taller than knee high by July 4 … a favorable indicator of an abundant crop during fall harvest. About now, late July, farmers would be baling and stacking a second mowing of alfalfa in preparation for winter.

Once Gary and I finished taking in this Main Street “action”, we walked the few steps to the Hardware entry door. It was painted bright red. The upper half was a window. Much larger panes of plate-glass flanked the door. A variety of power tools were on display. I pushed through the door, triggering a bell that alerted the proprietor of someone entering his place of business.

We knew the owner, Mr. Lundstrom. Pretty much everybody knew everybody in town. Lundstrom stood at the far end of the central aisle, looking our way. He moved from behind the checkout counter, and we met midway. He was six-feet-tall, slender, and about the age of my dad. He wore neatly pressed tan slacks. Pasty white skin was exposed above the collar of his white shirt, which was cinched at the top by a red necktie. His blond hair was just long enough to want combing. He was definitely not of farmer ilk. He and his wife lived in the upper story of their building. Town gossip claimed that nearly the only time they left was to walk directly across Main to resupply their pantry with food purchased at the Red Owl grocery store. They also regularly attended Sunday morning services at the Lutheran Church.

“Hello boys,” Mr. Lundstrom said, looking down at us. He ran fingers through his hair, and then brushed something invisible to us from the left sleeve of his shirt. “Hot day isn’t it!”

“Yes sir, Mr. Lundstrom. It sure is,” we answered in unison. There were obvious beads of sweat on our brows. Our clothes stuck to our bodies, while his hung as loose as window drapery. “It’s no fun bein’ out there in the heat,” I added.

“I can only imagine that,” he said.

We could hear the fan of his air conditioner distributing cooled air throughout the store. As Mr. Lundstrom raised a hand to gently tug an ear lobe, lack of a sweat-soaked armpit proved he hadn’t ventured outside yet today.

Truth be told, he had his thermostat turned so low, that Gary and I would soon be almost uncomfortably chilled. Going from the high nineties to high sixties in one entry step is a thermal shock to a human body’s circulatory system. He watched as Gary and I mock shivered a bit. But we’d soon adjust to our new environment. Then …

“So,” he said with hands firmly positioned on hips, projecting what we read as impatience. “What can I do for you boys today? What brings you here, rather than being outside enjoying vacation from school?”

He knew us by family name, probably by first names too, but preferred to be impersonal, treating us almost like we were strangers. Town population was about seven hundred, which might seem like a lot of names to remember if one wanted to sound aquaintedly friendly. But then, the average family size was about seven. So there you go … a possibility of only one hundred family names. And, oh yes, the town’s phone book included multiple entries for common names of northern European origins. So it didn’t take much gray matter and memorization to come up with the correct last, and maybe even a first name for a chance meeting with anyone in town. But we remained “boys” to Mr. Lundstrom. And boys rarely entered his store to actually purchase something.

Now it was our turn to speak. While walking from the park, Gary and I had agreed to the story we’d use.

I led with “We’re thinkin’ of raisin’ rabbits to make some pocket money, Mr. Lundstrom. Money we could use on a day like this for cold soda pop and ice cream.”

Lundstrom’s wrinkled forehead and facial frown projected disbelief.

“Sure, we’re townies,” I continued, “but we can do projects just as good as those 4-H farm kids can.”

I paused for a deep breath. “And there’s a lot of demand for rabbits now … people eat the meat and rabbit fur lines winter gloves.”

Mr. Lundstrom nodded, so my story must have begun to sound somewhat convincing.

Then Gary jumped into the conversation. “First, we need to build some rabbit cages,” he said. “It’ll take some nails, screws, and maybe bolts to do that. The kind of stuff you have in your store. We’re hopin’ maybe we can salvage boards and wire from the scrap pile at the lumber yard for framin’ up cages.”

“Okay then, boys. Take a quick look at the fastener material I have. It’s along the west aisle.” He pointed as he spoke, and then turned and walked slowly back to the checkout counter.

Gary and I browsed up and down the fasteners aisle, fingering this and that and mumbling nothings to each other, as if shopping for specific somethings. Simultaneously, we cooled below sweating temperature. About ten minutes later, Mr. Lundstrom approached.

“Can I help you boys find something in particular?” he asked.

“No sir,” I said.

“We’re mostly lookin’ at stuff like wood screws, hinges, and snap latches for cage doors,” Gary added. “Looks like you’ve got what we’ll need. I guess we’ll be back if we can round up enough wood and wire to get started.”

“And if our dads will help out with the cost,” I said.

Mr. Lundstrom checked his wristwatch and then …“Very well, boys. Good luck. Come back when you know just what you need. I’ll see you to the door now.” He waved his lowered hands the way some people do when they try the impossible task of herding cats. Gary and I retreated a few steps to avoid a tap.

“That’s okay,” I suggested in a friendly tone. “We can find our way out.”

Mr. Lundstrom backed slowly toward the checkout counter, straightening and neatening some of the product displays along his path… and watching us as we turned toward the street door. Unseen by him, my left hand snatched two small flat metal washers from a display box.

If he’s gonna treat us like delinquents, I thought to myself, though maybe not with such a long fancy word in mind back then, why disappoint him. I rubbed the washers back and forth between thumb and index finger as the bell announced our exit. I liked to run smooth and slippery objects between thumb and fingers … fabrics, mud, nose pickings, just about anything. You name it. I’ve rubbed it. Maybe this was a nervous fidgety thing? I never really thought about the reason. I just, knee jerk, did it.

“So much for coolin’ off,” Gary said.

“Well, it was better than stayin’ outside in this heat.”

“Yeah, for awhile. But here we are outside again,” Gary moaned, about the obvious.

“So. Let’s head to the Family Café for a pine float,” I said. “At least that way we can slow down the return to sticky sweat.”

“Good idea,” Gary agreed.

We turned left and walked toward the café … a block and a half west on Main. Gary noticed my left-hand fingers rubbing something.

“What ya got there?”

“Oh, I grabbed a couple of washers back in the store. They were part of a pretty big pile. Old starchy Lundstrom won’t even miss ’em.”

Gary gave a smiling nod, punctuated with a loud yes!

We sped up our pace a bit, to minimize sun time. Suddenly we heard a familiar noise, approaching from behind.

“That’s gotta be Donnie,” we said in unison. We turned to look back, confirming our guess.

Donnie Johanson would be a senior in high school the coming fall. He had a coal-black ’49 Ford sedan rigged with dual straight pipes that sounded like machine guns when he revved and then backed off the engine. The burps and farts that Gary and I produced were pathetic whispers by comparison. He and his car were considered super cool by all the kids in town. As he drove by, he waved, and blasted our ears with his ahooga horn. Like us, he lived on the north side of town so we were friends, in spite of the age difference. He made Gary and me feel important, just for being publicly recognized by him.

We waved back and watched him curve on out of town … probably on his way to the closer lake for a swim. His bathing suit was looped over the Ford’s four-foot-tall radio antenna … ready to wear.

We continued to the café. Of course, it wasn’t air conditioned. But a large fan perched on a low shelf toward the back of the dining room swayed slowly left and right and kept the air moving in a cooling way. This space was one rectangular room, scaled down a bit from the size of the hardware store. Four booths lined the west wall. An eating counter ran along much of the east side, with a row of pipe-supported swivel-top circular stools for less formal seating. We greeted a couple of school friends who were in one of booths, and then sat at the counter and started to spin on our seats to get a bit dizzy … something all of us young kids liked to do. Spinning generated shrill metallic squeaking, a bit like the classic sound of fingernails across a blackboard at school. Hearing that, the café owner Mr. Jens appeared from the kitchen, which was out of public view at the back of the building.

“Hello my young friends,” he chirped when he saw us. “Good to see you again. It’s been a few days. What’s up?”

We just smiled and feigned embarrassment as his over-sized hands tousled our flattops.

“So. What’ll it be on this hot day?” He was maybe five-foot-six and a bit overweight from eating the greasy food that was the staple of his menu. He wore a body-length apron that had been pure white before it met the spatterings from the hot surface of the café’s kitchen stove. A tall conical white hat covered a bald pate. His ever-present broad toothy smile decorated a gray-bearded face.

Mr. Jens was popular with town kids. He treated us like real people, almost like adults, rather than nuisances who were always in the way of serious business. He had two sons about the same age as Gary and me. All three Jens males seemed always smiling and cheerful. Dad was easily recognizable, even unseen, from his familiar laughter. In unlikely contrast, his wife was a stay-home introvert.

“We’ll have our usual Friday summer special, Mr. Jens,” I said quietly, not wanting to broadcast that we couldn’t afford a costly treat. Our friends in the booth were feasting on banana-split sundaes. Unlike Gary and me, they must have had real money in their pockets.

Sure, we each got a weekly allowance from our parents. That “largess” came on Sundays, and today was Friday. I was down to a last penny in my jean’s pocket, and I imagine that Gary, too, was now almost broke. So the Friday usual at Mr. Jens’ café would be our free treat today.

“Very good choice lads,” Mr. Jens chimed. “Two pine float specials, coming right up.” He understood our money situation. “They’re unusually tasty today. I have a fresh supply for the pine part. You’re gonna like this.”

Our drinks came in tall upward-flaring glasses normally used for malted milks. But instead of blended ice cream, malt powder and milk, these were filled with water and ice cubes. The signature pine tooth-pick floated on top. I guess the pine surprise was that the tooth-picks were tapered to a point at both ends, instead the old taper-and-blunt shape. Straws for drinking the icy cold beverage came individually wrapped in paper. I tore about an inch off one end off my wrapper and briefly considered aiming the other end at our booth friends, while blowing in the now-exposed end of the straw. Gary knew what I was thinking.

Back in the day, individually wrapped drinking straws were a playful kid’s version of a harmless gun. Blow into the exposed end of the straw, and a hollow tubular paper missile took flight. Experience showed that this paper “bullet” had a range up to twenty feet, depending on the strength of the shooter’s lungs. And impact, even with human flesh, was harmless.

Fun loving kids quickly learned that if the tip of a “bullet” was dipped in something sticky, it would adhere to the target. And so, kids being kids, many a café ceiling became decorated with a myriad of those paper bullets hanging down like the long blades of grass of an inverted hayfield. In our town, we kids never did this to Mr. Jens’ café. He was our friend. But there were two other cafes to target along Main.

Not currently in a playful mood, Gary and I sucked the cold water up through our straws, fished out the pine picks, thanked Mr. Jens, and headed for the exit while pretending to clean between our teeth with the signature part of our free treat. It was too embarrassing to hang around in the company of our better-off friends.

In the store-front vestibule, I grabbed Gary’s arm. “Wait a minute.”

Each of the three cafes in town had a gumball dispenser. I guess the notion was that after eating, a departing patron might want a strongly flavored something to chew on. And it was hard to go wrong at only a penny a ball. I fished the lonely penny from my pocket, inserted it in the coin slot, turned the mechanical twist handle, and a pink sphere about the size of my favorite taw marble rolled down the chute. I popped the gum into my mouth and began to chew. Gary looked on … disappointed. He pulled his pockets inside out and shrugged to indicate no money. He started through the door.

“Hey. Stop!” I said. “I’ve got an idea.”

I fished one of the flat washers from my pocket. I held it between thumb and index finger, directly above the coin slot, and slowly relaxed my pinch. It dropped into and filled the space. I gripped the machine’s handle, took a deep breath, and eased into a gentle clockwise twist. A gumball appeared. I grabbed it, handed it to Gary, pushed him to the door, and hissed, “Let’s get out of here!”

And that, faithful readers, is when I became a real crook, a thief, one of those bad guys of movies at the Roxy Theater. Up to that point, I could have gone back to the hardware store, confessed my criminal behavior to Mr. Lundstrom, handed him the washers and all would be square. But I don’t think Mr. Lundstrom would have accepted one washer and one gumball as adequate repayment for my thievery.

******************************************************************

This penny caper happened too long ago for me to accurately describe my feelings back then. Was I ashamed, frightened, proud, a mixture of such emotions? I’ll never know. But I do know that Gary and I suddenly had access to lots of virtually free gumballs.

We did in fact start to raise rabbits that autumn, which gave us a legitimate reason to buy lots of penny-sized washers at the hardware store. A penny bought ten washers. And we didn’t get so greedy as to cast suspicion on our gumball gambit. With three gumball machines in town, we spread our business about equally among them. And we always purchased a few of those chewy delights with real pennies. Whoever periodically collected the pennies from those machines never publicly complained about the few washers among the coins. Maybe he had a use for those washers?

I can’t remember why or when we stopped cheating the system. Perhaps we stopped when the sale of our first batch of rabbits lined our pockets with lots of legally earned pennies … plus nickels, dimes, quarters, and even a few folding dollar bills. The next year, we dropped the rabbit business and began hand raising runt piglets whose mothers had abandoned them for lack of enough milk taps to feed their entire broods. We did that for a couple years. Gary and I felt downright rich from our porker incomes. At twenty cents a pound, every one of our several two-hundred pound market-ready hogs made us so rich that we opened savings accounts with the town’s stuffy banker! We were quite the entrepreneurs. Mr. banker even began to allow us into his air-conditioned place of business on hot summer days!

Then fate whisked me away from my hometown and my best friend. I visited often, but I was never to live there again. On those return trips, I always connected with Gary. About two decades ago, Gary left life, forever; I can’t consult him for fact checking anymore. I fear that as an adult he may have hung out too many days at Pete’s Hang Out, where the air was not healthy to breathe.

Anyone who reads this story might like to know that I have never before publicly confessed to my gumball crime. Some combination of too silly and too embarrassing kept me from doing so. I feel comfortable in fessing up now though. Surely the statute of limitations has run its course for such petty theft, so that no litigious sort can sue me. Besides, my aging body has about run its course. And it would seem a shame to bury this entertaining tale with the ashes in my urn.

Postscript:

 

The town, its geographic setting, and the counterfeit-penny caper of this story are as real as my memory can reconstruct. I have used fictitious names for people, other than Gary and me.

While writing this story, I visited my local hardware store and purchased two flat washers of exactly the same dimensions as a penny coin. Yes, they still exist. The price was five cents each, a fifty-times increase relative to the early 1950s washers that sold at ten for one cent. I instinctively rubbed those two “expensive” washers between my thumb and index finger as I walked to my truck to drive home. Old habits are hard to break.

For anyone interested in learning more about the young-boy adventures shared by Gary and me, read my book “From Piglets to Prep School”, published in 2005.

A MUSICAL EXIT TO ANOTHER WORK WEEK

NEVER TOO OLD TO BE A BIT SILLY!

 Good morning readers!! Please hold up your hand if you remember that smooth voiced pop crooner, Patti Page. She was in my USA Today crossword puzzle this morning. I’ll understand if a hand-raising exercise is somewhat painful at our shared advanced age. An upturned index finger will do.

Patti was so very popular in the 1950s. She looked as luscious as she sounded. She died just last year at age 85. As someone who has always enjoyed singing, I often sat in front of the family radio back when to make her performance into a duet. And there’s something about selective memory that allows me to now sing solo such hits as Doggie in the Window, Mama from the Train, Oo! What You Do to Me, and Cross over the Bridge. I serenaded Anne this morning with the Doggie song, as our Doberman Mele looked on.

The Bridge title is what prompts me to type today’s essay. Patti’s message about bridges was aimed at somewhat overly fickle and amorous roués who flitted from partner to partner, instead of finding one true lover. My revised wording to that song is aimed at extending the longevity of my remaining true teeth, rather than going fickle with multiple unnatural impersonal crowns, implants and such. That comparison may sound like a bit of a stretch, but ….

You see, I have two molar-spanning bridges — one on each side of my lower jaw. They’ve been there for nearly four decades now. And I’m striving to take those constructions and their end underpinnings with me to my very last chew. A little music, ala revised Patti lyrics, helps me keep practicing what’s needed to maintain those bridges. It’s a lyrical form of moral support, so to speak.

 So while Patti would sing:

Cross over the bridge

Cross over the bridge

Change your reckless way of livin’

Cross over the bridge

Leave your fickle past behind you

And true romance will find you

Brother, cross over the bridge

 I warble:

Floss under the bridge

Floss under the bridge

Change your lazy way of cleaning

Floss under the bridge

Leave your fickle ways behind you

And healthy teeth will find you

Brother, floss under the bridge

 

 Thanks for the memories, Patti. Maybe I should share this message with my dentist and his hygienist? Compared to the current childish lineup of Bieberish vocalists, you Patti are my bedrock.

 

A DAMMED INTERESTING TALE: PAY ATTENTION!

THAT DAMMED COLORADO RIVER!!

 Airhead armchair philosophers have been known to pontificate that water flows downhill, an obvious yet important generalization. When a volcano erupts, the ground-hugging products (be they lava flows or turbulent flows of fragmental debris) also move downhill, powered by the same force that moves flowing water  …  gravity. Should such volcanic stuff encounter and come to rest in the valley of an active river, a dam is likely to be instantaneously constructed. The new upstream reservoir immediately begins to fill. And the story that unfolds beyond then depends on a variety of factors related to the size and strength of the new dam and the rate at which water is added to the reservoir.

There must have been hundreds or thousands or even many many more such occurrences in planet Earth’s long volcanic history. Even historical examples are fairly common. I had a professional experience with one in 1982 at El Chichon Volcano in Chiapas, Mexico (See blog of October 23, 2013). Lessons learned help guide those whose concern is recognizing natural hazards and making plans for their mitigation.

Counting Hoover Dam near Boulder City, NV, and Glen Canyon Dam near Page, AZ, as bounding bookends, twenty other dams have been built along the intervening path of the Colorado River. Actually, the total number of these constructions is uncertain; it may be a bit greater or less than twenty. But what is certain is that only Hoover and Glen Canyon are creations of mankind. The other dams are the products of basalt lava flows erupted from scores of river-flanking volcanoes. A few landslide-created dams add to an overall total, but the volcanic constructs are the focus here.

Deists might credit Hawaii’s Pele, or whatever their favorite volcano goddess/god figure may be, for these lava eruptions. As a volcanologist who cut his professional teeth, to say nothing about actually cutting a variety of his flesh-covered body parts while studying the hot, sharp, and glassy basalt lavas of Kilauea Volcano where Pele currently resides, I can imagine that she might have repeatedly vacationed on the mainland and conjured up eruptions there to disrupt the smooth uninterrupted flow of water along what would eventually be named the Colorado River of North America once humans of European stock appeared on the scene.

Yet, as a research scientist I realize that a naturally hot, roiling and unstable rocky mantle a few miles beneath the Uinkaret Plateau of the Colorado River corridor partly melted into basalt magma that cork-like buoyed upward to the surface, time after time, where it fed lava flows that spilled into the canyon to build dams. Pele’s purported supernatural talents are unnecessary. Earth’s internal heat drove the process and is capable of doing so again and again.

The vents for most of the dam-building volcanoes are located on and a bit beyond the north rim of the canyon. A couple sit atop the south rim. All are sandwiched between the north/south-trending Toroweap and Whitmore Canyon Faults. Each is what geologists call a basalt cinder (or scoria) cone volcano, which typically erupts fluidal lava flows over a period of a few years, while building a cone-shaped pile of cinders (scoria) at the vent.

 

View to the NNE across the canyon of the Colorado River where eruptions created lava dams. The thin dark-colored rocks are basalt lava flows draped over a thick succession of horizontal sedimentary formations. The cinder cone on the north canyon rim is Vulcan’s Throne

During his exploration of the Grand Canyon in 1869, John Wesley Powell was the first scientist to visit and later publish descriptions of the remnants of nature’s lava dams across the Colorado River. Many geologists have since supplemented Powell’s observations, with the benefit of ever improving analytical techniques that help add information about when each dam formed, its probable height, its life span, and the current status of dismemberment by erosion. As of 2014, the accumulated data suggest that at least seventeen eruptions created dams at various times between 850,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Suggest is an important qualifying word in the previous sentence. Documentation of the formation of each dam and its current near-total erosional destruction derives from mere bits and pieces left behind. Some lava-dam remnants are in their original positions, attached at various heights on the canyon walls. Other dam fragments are now downstream gravel and boulder deposits. Reconstructing the life story of a lava dam from such evidence is complicated.

For example, lava flow remnants attached to opposite canyon walls at the same elevation are not necessarily parts of what was originally a single level lava dam. All dam remnants are basalt, and basalt is quite homogeneous in appearance and chemical composition. However, some minor chemical constituents may vary from flow to flow, providing a possible tool to help determine whether or not those two side-wall bits are part and parcel of a single flow.

View to the NNE. Stream-like ribbons of black are basalt lava flows, several of which spilled into Whitmore Canyon on the left as they moved toward, and some into the Grand Canyon. Colorado River is visible in the lower right. The Vulcan’s Throne area is upstream from here.

Even with exact matches in rock chemistry, however, two flow remnants attached to opposite canyon walls at the same elevation may differ in their eruption age. The time of eruption in years before the present is recorded in a rock by radioactive constituents that begin their time keeping as soon as lava solidifies and thus begins to trap the products of their radioactive decay. More time means more decay, which occurs at a known rate. The uncertainty attached to a calculated age can be thousands or even tens of thousands of years. Different ages beyond uncertainty limits of so-called radiometric ages indicate lava flows of different eruptions.

Lacking the somewhat expensive and time-consuming determination of radiometric age, even something as simple as determining relative ages of two lava flow remnants in stacked contact with each other can contradict geology’s fundamental “Law of Superposition”. In a layered sequence of rock formations that have not been overturned, the age of separate layers decreases successively upward. In their Grand Canyon setting, however, a lava remnant that abuts against a wall can be directly underlain by a younger remnant that flowed into place once most of the original older and higher lava dam had been eroded away. Sigh!!

The difficult job for the geologist is to critically analyze such a hodge-podge of evidence, knowing that he/she is confronted with a challenging exercise analogous to accurately creating the cover image of a picture puzzle when so many of the individual pieces are missing. It’s today’s state-of-the-art reconstruction within such uncertainties that suggests nearly twenty lava dams were created across the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon since 850,000 years ago.

“So what?” a random lay reader might opine. “I’m not a geologist, but I pretty much grasp the technical stuff and understand the pitfalls in trying to uncover the details of the history of forming those lava dams. Still, why should I care about exactly how many times it happened? Especially since you geologists say the last dam is a hundred thousand years old! What’s that ancient history got to do with my life or those of foreseeable generations?”

I caution that yes, the youngest dam formed about then. But there’s no scientific justification to call it the last (the doubter’s word). It’s just the most recent.

Consider this fact. The most recent eruption in the group of volcanoes that created all the dams took place about nine hundred years ago. People were there watching the fireworks. Blobs of the lava splattered down on some of their pottery. The heat and noise might have sent them fleeing in fear. The scene of Earth opening to spew out molten rock must have been a mind-bending experience. It likely gave rise to new tales of folklore.

That eruption didn’t last long enough to feed a lava flow all the way to and into the canyon. But given the overall record of eruptions in the area, any thinking geologist would be beyond foolish to predict that there will be no future eruption that could create a lava dam. If nearby seismometers ever start shaking from a tremor that typically reflects magma working its way upward, the next eruption may be imminent. Maybe it will spill into the canyon.

A tall new lava dam with a large full upstream reservoir that emptied quickly, as many of the older ones appear to have done, could be devastating to downstream infrastructure and populations centers. For an extreme case, imagine the possibility that a wall of water takes out Hoover Dam as it surges downstream.

The threat of breaching both Glen Canyon and Hoover dams occurred in 1983, without the help of a volcano. That spring, snow melt and rain of a particularly wet season filled Lake Powell to above the level of overflow spillways at Glen Canyon dam. By dam-construction design, overflow was channeled into forty-one-foot diameter concrete-lined tunnels through bedrock on each side of the dam. This was the first time these tunnels had been put to use. Faulty design triggered a process called cavitation (creation of low-pressure air pockets that are sources of damaging shock waves when they collapse), which destroyed large sections of the concrete walls and permitted the erosion of the much softer sedimentary rocks behind the concrete. Had the rise of water in Lake Powell not serendipitously stopped before the degree of cavitation destruction became critical, the lake would likely have quickly drained, sending a downstream flow that might have caused Hoover to fail, or at least release unplanned and uncontrolled volumes of water. Potential havoc wreaked is limited only by one’s imagination.

Food for thought: When Hoover and Glen Canyon dams were built (1931-36 and 1956-63), the age of the youngest eruption within the field of volcanoes that created lava dams in the Grand Canyon was not known. That only came to light about 2005. I wonder if the construction and design of those dams would have been modified if a significantly higher probability of a new lava dam within, say, a few hundred years had been known.