Volcano

Volcano


It was May and we rose early to play
Wiffleball. My big brother was the wiz
and lasered crazy curves past us--
one, two, three--until we saw that
black and gray cloud

Rise above the west horizon. Puzzled
but calm at first, and then surprised
by the cloud's growth--its exponential
size--we rubbed and blinked our eyes
and wondered

What kind of storm was advancing on us
and our little rez. Then my sister
screamed, "I think it's the bomb!
We're going to die!" Suddenly
terrorized, we ran for home

Where our mother, usually filled with
cries and wails, whispered,
"Mount St. Helens Erupted."
Her calm voice was quizzical--
she'd usually panic in the presence

Of even the smallest of disasters--
but as a fucking volcano threatened
to turn us Indian kids into French
fries, she sighed when she should've
been praying hard.

Or maybe I'm prone to melodrama.
I mean, yes, the ash did fall on the rez--
was knee-deep within hours--and it
killed some plants and shrouded the
buildings and trees,

but what I remember most is that it
slaughtered the mosquitoes. Before the
explosion, you couldn't leave your house
on a summer night without getting bit
and sucked twenty or thirty times. I must
have tasted sweeter than most, because
I'd get bloodied so many times I'd come
home looking like a smallpox victim.
And then I'd be the brown boy turned white
from the calamine lotion. But after
the explosion, after the ash filled all
the ponds and puddles and abandoned
coffee cans, and soaked up all the
freestanding water, and suffocated all
the eggs, the mosquitos vanished from
the reservation. And they didn't come back
for years. So when people ask me what I
remember about the eruption, I say,
"If the mosquitos have a word for
Armageddon then they were singing it
that day." I say:

"If the mosquitos believed in some God
before Helen's eruption, then they lost
their faith soon after the ash fell.
Or maybe a new faith was created

From the ash. What if the mosquitos formed
choirs and sang about the eruption?
What if they sang about the deadly days
when so many of them wasted away?

What if they sang high-pitched songs
about blood and the memory of blood?
What if one Mosquito rose out of its
ashy tomb and flew into the glorious
sunlight?

O, how would your world change if you
knew Mosquitos believed in resurrection?"


Sherman Alexie

from his book FACE.