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Jimmy switched to the Emergency Weather Band.
      Static; then more static, then a faint voice.
     
      “Daddy, are you OK?  Talk to me, please. (girl’s voice) Oh, God—please make it stop…Daddy!  (sound of destruction)
     
      “Why’d you stop it?” Penny asked.
      “I didn’t.” It’s gone”, Jimmy James twiddled with the dial. “It was, I don’t know. The signal’s gone!”
      The voice of the girl on the emergency weather station was terrifying. She wasn’t supposed to be there. Where’d the signal come from?
      In front of them was a beautiful valley, mountains on two sides, and what they knew would be a large meadow, now buried under twelve feet of snow. It was shaking.  Everything was shaking. The whole valley was shaking, trembling just a bit. The fir trees were shaking, their snow dusting dribbling down like confectioner’s sugar.
      Jimmy James ran his hand across his mouth, now dry.
      To the west the sky was dark from the explosions.
      The ground began to shake again, violently.
      The young couple was thrown down. Around them a cluster of pines swayed back and forth, what remaining snow on the branches shaken to the ground.
      They were surfing on the ground.
      Penny sh rieked. “Stop it!” she shouted.
      The two skiers bounced to the earth’s vibration.
      Then it stopped again. 
      Oblivious to the cold, the pair was spread-eagled, each trying to gain a measure of control over their out-of-control environment. After a full minute the dull roar of the catastrophe to the west subsided; trees stopped shaking. Penny got to her feet, followed by Jimmy.
      “We can’t go back there,” Penny said, pointing to the west.
      “That’s where our car is,” Jimmy James said simply.
      “I don’t care,” Penny replied. “I’m not going—there—“she pointed to the west where the evil clouds had continued to climb into the morning sky.
      The two of them had parked their car at the West entrance to Yellowstone. The road to Cody was open most years, although the road over Beartooth Pass closed at the first snowfall, normally late September. They then skied into the backcountry across a beautiful forest setting; laughing, swooshing, and loving where they were and what they were doing. They were happy. Two days of constant skiing had brought them northeast of the park, flat up against the Absaroka Range.
      “We can’t go back there,” she repeated, her eyes pleading with Jimmy James, who stood there and shook his head. In the distance the black crap from hell continued to rise into the blue morning sky. To return to their car meant skiing directly back toward the ever-growing cloud of ash.
      Penny turned to her left and began to calculate her options.
      “Babe,” Jimmy said, knowing what Penny was thinking. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can; shit, I don’t know if I can make it. You’re a hell of better skier than me.”
      “We can’t go back to the car,” Penny replied, scared.  The wolves resumed their howling in the distance. They were afraid as well. The ground started to vibrate again.
      Jimmy James started to get a loosey-goosey feeling in his bowels. Penny was the first to speak.
      “If we get over the pass, we’ll have clear sailing. We can ski downhill to Billings if we have to. It’s all downhill. If we go east we’ve got range after range, valley after valley; nothing but crap skiing!”
      Skiing east from Yellowstone was impossible because of the terrain. Skiing north you only had to clear Beartooth Pass, at 10,947 the third highest road pass in the United States, in the dead of winter. 
     

I-90 Floating Bridge/Mt. Baker Tunnel
    Seattle 6:20 PST
     
     
      BJ Tucker carefully maintained speed as he crossed under the Mercer Island “lid” on I-90, a route he’d done for twenty-five years, even before there had been a “lid”. He’d been there on that fateful Thanksgiving Friday in 1990 when the original I-90