/ Fiction /
It was the farthest north they had ever been. That this would be their last expedition never crossed Jakob’s mind, but Silvie had a premonition, a disturbing dream, that lingered. The image of a huge white bear, its fur flattened like a rug in front of a fireplace had appeared during her REM sleep cycle, accompanied by its roar, loud and continuous. The bear opened its jaws and from its huge tongue it spit a black, ash-smoking, sharp-edged lava bomb. She put up her right arm to avoid being hit and heard the sizzle of her skin burning. Looking more closely, she saw that under this rug-like ghost of fur, instead of the body of a bear, a mass of moving, flowing, glowing red-hot magma prepared to expel its lava blood out of the bear’s open, teeth-bared lips. The last image she saw, before waking up abruptly, was her bloody right hand. The skin on her fingers had melted away.
The day after Silvie’s dream, the hot magma near the intersection of the Jan Mayen fracture zone and the Mohns mid-ocean ridge, exploded in multiple lava flows from the flanks of Beerenberg, a large stratovolcano and the northern-most active subaerial volcano on Earth. Beerenberg, Dutch for “Bear Mountain,” was named for the polar bears the Dutch whalers had seen there centuries ago. Before the effusive eruption, the volcano could be seen from the air on the northern part of Jan Mayen Island, territory of Norway, as a calm white mountainous cone covered with glaciers. The last time the volcano erupted was 1985, forty-five years earlier.
Jakob dismissed Silvie’s dream. Said it was interesting, the coincidence with the eruption, but he didn’t believe in premonitions. Jakob never believed anything that wasn’t fact based, proved with credible scientific evidence. When Silvie thought she was pregnant, for example, in spite of the pharmacy quick tests, he did not believe it until Sylvie confirmed it with a positive test at the doctor’s laboratory. She was in her third month and finally he felt the baby bump and accepted that he was soon to be a father.
Silvie MacQuoid and Jakob Asbo, infrared sensor experts at the USGS Volcano Observatory in Menlo Park, California, were members of an international team of volcanologists called in to assess the situation at and around Beerenberg. Silvie, obsessed with her white bear dream, suggested to Jakob that the dream was a cautionary message from her subconscious. Having done dream work with a Jung-based group in college, she knew that Jung believed dreams came in the service of health. Was this dream a warning not to go?
By the time they were asked to help, completed the paperwork required by the Norwegian authorities and arranged travel, the eruption had lasted for three weeks. Ash plumes floating miles away presented dangers to airplane travel, and reports were that the ocean water along the island was heated from its normal temperature of zero to one-hundred-six degrees Fahrenheit, twenty degrees higher than the temperature of Silvie’s warm-water exercise pool at the Ross Road Y in Palo Alto. Jan Mayen, where they were headed, was four thousand miles north of home.
They had travelled north before. Last year Silvie and Jakob had flown to Alaska where they had studied another stratovolcano, Mount Redoubt. Working with fellow volcanologists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, their task was to plan the first use of new infrared sensors to be monitored by the NASA Orbital Volcano Observatory, launched into space in late 2028. The IR sensors could identify maximum flux rates and flow velocities, as well as measuring heat glow, all improving real time data collection critical for eruption forecasting.
These dedicated scientists were jointly committed to the goal of early evacuation to save lives from a volcano’s terrible death by fire.
Silvie and Jakob had met at UC Berkeley where they both studied geophysics at Berkeley’s Earth and Planetary Science Department. As graduating seniors, they had watched Sara Dosa’s 2022 documentary “Fire of Love,” the story of Maurice and Katia Krafft, married French scientists who devoted their lives to the study of volcanoes. Their photographs showing scenes of fire spewing out of rock, of ash blowing in clouds with giant, deadly cumulonimbus shapes, of boiling red lava racing down mountain sides, inspired them. The majesty, the power, the beauty of volcanoes—and the danger—fascinated Silvie and Jakob. On a dare they both applied to the USGS and got jobs in Menlo Park. They married the next summer.
Although Maurice and Katia died in the 1991 eruption of Mount Unzen in Japan, Jakob assured Silvie death by fire would never happen to them. Advances in detection over the last several decades would protect them. Silvie was not as sure of their safety as Jakob. With the baby coming, she wondered, should this be her last volcano?
As Silvie packed to leave, she folded her merino wool thermal leggings and long-sleeve tee carefully into her backpack; she smiled at how last night before bed Jakob had asked her to pull them on, in theory to laugh at her fashion statement, but in practice to remove them, bit by bit, rubbing his fingers across her skin in that way he had that made her forget everything, everything but her needs.
The scent of lamb invaded her bedroom, like the perfume of flowers overtakes the air in a greenhouse. For their dinner, in honor of their trip, and, as he always did at the beginning of autumn, Jakob made Fårikål, his famous stew with cabbage, potatoes and lamb, simmered until the pieces of lamb were so soft they fell apart on the tongue. Since 2028 everyone in California was required to eat a plant-based diet to do their part to reduce climate change, but application could be made once a year for lamb, justified as part of a family history cultural celebration.
Though they were married Silvie kept her Scottish birth surname MacQuoid and the marriage remained a secret at work. Although women had made progress in the U. S. patriarchy, it still was never wise for a woman to be associated with her husband in a career because people often deferred to the man. Sometimes she would look up from her cubicle and find his ice-blue Norwegian eyes staring at her in that serious way he had before sex. He could make handing her the latest paperwork on the efficiency of the new prototype lava suit feel as if he rubbed his wet finger around the inside of her belly button. Like making a crystal wine glass sing, she felt the wave of his hand set off vibrations. She would cross her legs to hide how she was squeezing her thighs together and look down at her work.
Silvie knew that being pregnant would cause curiosity. She and Jakob had arguments about whether to tell their co-workers. Jakob wanted to; he said he couldn’t keep a secret like that, he was so proud of becoming a father. He wanted to tell the world. Silvie preferred to keep it between them. She liked the intimacy of knowing they lived a double life, a secret one outside work.
As she closed her bag, she stood alone in the bedroom, looking at the bed, the chair, the familiar window with the eucalyptus tree outside. She heard the roar of a plane passing low to land at SFO, then the neighbor’s eager new puppy who, nervous, afraid, barked as each aircraft passed. The lid of a compost bin banging closed, the squeak of the neighbor’s garage door sliding open, the siren of a paramedic vehicle on the way to hospital: familiar sounds of home. Then she heard Jakob entering the front door signaling it was time to go. She breathed deeply, inhaling the lingering scent of Fårikål, one last time, and then quietly closed the bedroom door.
* * *
They had training in all the aspects of the high-endurance, foam-protected AirBus 2030X helicopter used for active volcano monitoring. They were taught safety procedures just like all USGS scientists who first joined. They had studied past and recent activity of the volcano. They packed their gas masks and heat-resistant gear. They reviewed the safety procedures over and over the night before, though they knew them by heart. They had all the electronic paperwork giving them permission from the Norwegian authorities, and the names of members of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute assigned to collaborate with them, as well as names of the Norwegian military personnel on the team. The infrared sensors placed on Beerenberg had failed to alert the NASA Orbital Volcano Observatory to this major eruption. Their assignment was to determine why.
After an overnight in Reykjavik, Iceland, they boarded the ship with a helipad supplied by the U.S. Navy, their temporary home base with lodging and food to travel the three hundred seventy-five miles across the water toward Jan Mayen Island. The ship also carried the AirBus prepared for its flight above the volcano. The next day the team, dressed in their lava suits, took the AirBus for a flyover to assess if and where they could safely land.
The ash plumes had cleared enough that Silvie could look down from the aircraft and make out the shapes of black lava, magnificent in its flows and curls, hinting at the red-hot rivers that preceded its cooling. She marveled at the lifting and shifting of Bear Mountain, the old snow-covered cone unrecognizable now in the layers and layers of igneous black rock. Marveling at the power of nature, for a moment she imagined the hand of God closed into a fist below the surface. From the core of the Earth, the angry fist pushed and shoved to let humans know that they were not, that they never had been, nor would they ever be, in control.
She shivered.
Beerenberg’s eruption had settled enough by this time that they were able to land near a fissure toward the northwest side of the island. Eight scientists in their lava suits, each with assigned tasks, deboarded the AirBus. Two had cameras to record the changes in landscape, another had equipment to measure vibrations in the ground, a fourth brought a supply of tiny new sensors with tools to attach them to the ground network. Another used a machine shaped like an old-fashioned metal detector which she waved across the ground to identify failed sensors, alerting her partner where to drill to place the new ones. Jakob, who had a fascination with rocks, collected tephra which he would take back to the lab to look for anomalies. Silvie used a volcanic air thermometer to measure temperatures in the cooling lava.
Suddenly a pyroclastic density current, completely unexpected at the Beerenberg eruption, began racing across the ground from a nearby caldera. Silvie’s thermometer detected the flow of ash clouds full of volcanic gas at temperatures over one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Jacob grabbed Silvie’s gloved hand and they ran together toward the AirBus. All eight scientists made it back on the helicopter and the protective foam allowed the aircraft to safely rise above the heat and ash without incident.
When they landed back at their temporary home base on the Navy ship, they entered the showers set up to clean them as they took off the lava suits. Silvie looked down at her hand. Four fingers were charred black and leathery, with severe burns. Later, looking for the cause, they found a tiny hole in her lava suit glove.
It was their last expedition. The USGS in Menlo Park closed to consolidate resources with the USGS at Moffett Field and several volcanologists were told to find other jobs. Jakob took a position as a lecturer in Petrology at Stanford University’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. He was a popular teacher and excited his students by claiming that in studies of volcanic rocks they looked for secrets ejected from the core of the Earth.
Silvie’s burned fingers had to be amputated. She received implants with the newest version of prosthetic fingers, with motion directed by thoughts in her brain. She suffered severe stress in her recovery from the injury and in adjusting to her artificial body parts. She was treated by a sound therapy coach. After she gave birth to their daughter, Marta, wanting a complete change of career, Silvie took classes at a sound healing institute and became a therapist.
From the time she was a newborn, Silvie liked to tell Marta stories of the day her Mama and Papa flew over Beerenberg. She enhanced the narrative, as mothers do in stories to their children. She described the volcano as a beautiful big white bear, its eruptions creative, drawing new landscapes for planet Earth, and its ash rich compost for their vegetables and flowers. She waited until Marta was much older to explain how she got her artificial fingers and to describe the failure of the lava suit glove. She never told her daughter about the fist of God.
Settling down in the easy chair by Marta’s crib, the aroma of Jakob’s Fårikål coming from the kitchen, the yellow light of autumn’s dusk through the window, Silvie took her small babe into her arms. She started her story: “It was the farthest north they had ever been.”