I took this photo at Crater Lake National Park two summers ago while I was on a research trip gathering information and inspiration for my natural disaster thriller, RAINIER ERUPTS!
Nature greeted Shelley and me with resplendent beauty at every turn of the road. Everywhere I looked there was another vista of both compelling loveliness and awe-inspiring revelation about just how powerful the forces within the earth can be.
When Mount Mazama blew its top seven thousand years ago, it devastated the land for sixty miles in every direction and left a yawning hole in the ground more than a mile across. When it first formed, there was no lake in the hole. There was just a barren, craggy landscape devoid of life, swept by sulfurous fumes, and punctuated with a central lava vent that spewed out a whole new mountain over the following years—a cinder cone that somehow looks small within the crater now, but which would make a grand summit if it stood elsewhere on the landscape.
Over the millennia since the big blast, life has returned to the crater, and trees even dot the cinder cone, which goes by the name of Wizard Island now that rainwater has filled the hole up to about the halfway level. That water has a legendary deep blue tint to it, something that scarcely comes across in a photograph and really has to be seen to be believed.
At the end of RAINIER ERUPTS, a new vast hole in the ground existed where mighty Rainier had once stood. But ever-nurturing Nature was already raining down torrents of water that would someday work a similar transformation from devastation to heavenly beauty. That slow-but-sure process would, however, take thousands of years to accomplish.
So I faced an authorial dilemma. In writing a sequel to RAINIER ERUPTS, was I going to start with a State of Washington that had a gaping hole in it, or would I start with things the way they really are today, with Mount Rainier standing tall, white, and beautiful on the horizons of Seattle and Tacoma?
My next natural disaster story is likely to be about an earthquake, a tsunami, or an asteroid impact—I haven’t quite decided which yet. But what about Rainier in those stories? Will she be present or absent?
I decided to press the Reset Button.
Rainier will be officially restored to her former majesty and all the destructive forces she unleashed will be undone. That way, the next book in the series can take a look at a whole separate scenario of Nature venting her wrath against an overconfident, complacent civilization that is as yet untouched by disaster.
Never fear. Even though I am determined to look into every dire situation that might arise and put my home state through some major changes that actually COULD happen, it remains true that Nature and time have the power to heal the land and restore the world-renowned beauty of the place.
Conveniently, as an author I can just hit the Reset Button.
