Fire in the hole

NASA Earth Observatory / Rob Simmon

This view of the Aleutian Islands and the Alaska Peninsula shows 52 volcanoes. It came from the MODIS imager on NASA's Aqua satellite. The names have been colored to match official activity status according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Green means no activity, yellow is "advisory" with activity possible, orange is "watch" meaning an eruption is close. Those uncolored don't have monitoring equipment on them.

For some reason this statement from a teacher has stayed with me since the seventh grade. In a Latin class (yes, I am old enough to have encountered Latin in a public school) we were studying Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii. The stiff, very proper teacher, an imposing presence with her perfectly coiffed white hair told us with all her authority that there were no active volcanoes in the world any more. We believed her. None of these kids in Western New York could refute that and mostly we weren't curious enough to look any further into it. Also, we didn't have Google where we could have found out quickly. If you wanted to know about something that happened since last year's Encyclopedia Britannica yearbook came out, it was a monumental task.

In fact at least three volcanoes around the world erupted in 1954, Kilauea in Hawaii, Ngauruhoe in New Zealand and Bam, which killed 25 people in Papua New Guinea. I am not sure about the others in that class but I lived on in perfect ignorance, believing what she told us and never hearing or reading anything to the contrary. Volcanoes never really came up in my life for a long time after that. Still in the back of my mind somewhere there lurked the suspicion, the wondering at how a person could say something so absolute about something as fluid as the natural world, a world that included lava. And, why would volcanoes just go dark en masse. I guess now in my mind it was linked somehow to something like the extinction of dinosaurs.

I am not sure when I noticed the first eruption of my experience. I do know when the first eruption affected me. That was in 1975 when Mount Augustine in Lower Cook Inlet, Alaska, blew its top. That sent an ash cloud over Anchorage and was the first time I stretched women's stocking material over the air intake for my car's carburetor to keep that fine caustic dust out of the engine.

And right on cue this happened June 2. The Alaska Volcano Observatory 

upgraded Pavlof Volcano in the Aleutian Islands to RED / WARNING 

status. An eruption was occurring and pilot reports indicated ash had 

reached 22,000 feet. According to the AVO,seismic tremors increased 

starting about 3:00 p.m. AKDT June 2. Satellite images showed a 

plume extending over 50 miles east of the volcano.

Since then I've been aware of several eruptions including a few that dusted my surroundings. And, every time one does that I think back to that seventh grade Latin class and the woman who said there were no active volcanoes left in the world. In fact, I now live near what is sometimes called the Pacific rim of fire, a string of volcanoes part of which runs along the south coast of Alaska and through the Aleutian Islands and follows faults between tectonic plates. It seems like one or another of them is at least steaming or smoking almost any time you look.

Though obviously they can be very destructive, volcanoes in the neighborhood are one more element that adds to the lure and mystique of Alaska. And in them lies the constant reminder of how absolutely wrong some of what we heard in public education was in the 1950s. There was a warning  going around later during the social eruptions of the 1960s that would have fit the volcano situation and certainly applies now with anyone who wants to saying anything they want to on the internet or on supposed news shows, and that is: "Question everything."

It wasn't until my mid 30s when everything I knew for sure began to unravel. The volcano statement being just one example. I found many things I had held as gospel weren't true or at least were only partially true. I remember telling a friend the older I get, the less I know for sure. It seemed my black and white knowledge had turned into several shades of gray. Of course a lot of this involved science, given all the discoveries since the 50s. What I began to see was an ever-evolving, shape-shifting, multi-colored, vibrant, alive flow of knowledge that took constant upgrading on my part to remain relevant.

This map calls it the "Ring of Fire" we call it "Rim," same thing. 

Those three volcanoes that  erupted in 1954 are in the same ring.

A line from William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life" comes to mind, the one where one guy at the far end of  the bar, occasionally rises to proclaim "there's no foundation, no foundation all the way down the line." With my body of knowledge now questionable, I was finding little foundation where I could stand. Eventually we have to adjust, reassess what we know according what we learn and to current conditions and move with the flow or be left behind in a sucking swamp of half-truths, untruths and even outright lies. One only has to listen to the same news item reported on a few different programs to see how difficult it is to pin down the truth; somehow we have to develop filters to understand.

In the process we need to decide what is a fact and what is questionable.  I started with the fact that there are active volcanoes, lots of them, and at times they do erupt. I have a jar of volcanic ash on my desk at the East Pole to prove it.

Alaska Volcano Observatory

A FRIEND MET ANOTHER VOLCANO DENIER, HERE'S HER STORY: "I will always remember the out-of-state piano teacher my son had when he was learning the Suzuki method at a summer camp on the Alaska Pacific University campus.  The young woman who was teaching came from Missouri, and she was well-meaning, but she made a mistake.  She had given the students, 9 or 10 years old, a homework assignment to make up a short piano piece based on some aspect of Alaska nature.  The next day she asked each of the students to play what they had come up with.  My son had created a rather dark and heavy-handed piece to represent the volcanos.  I was sitting in the back of the room, so heard her reaction.  She said, "That's not what I was looking for.  The assignment was to create something about Alaska.  There are NO volcanos in Alaska."  My son just looked down and did not say anything.  As an observer in the back, and mother of the poor kid, I did not feel it was appropriate to say anything, so I didn't.  I talked to him afterward, though, and felt he had handled it in an okay manner. I gave him some tips on how and what he could have said.  There would have been little point in arguing with her and as the teacher, that's disrespectful. He was never going to see her again anyway.  It still bothers me though."