Page 1 of Ignited in Iceland
1
IRIS BELLINGHAM RECLINED in her camping chair, the canvas shade above her doing nothing to diminish the heat of the mid-afternoon Hawaiian sun. With her eyes closed and the sun baking her from the outside in, she found it easy to imagine that she was on a beach somewhere else on the archipelago, rather than at work. It wasn’t that Iris didn’t love her job. She loved it so much that it didn’t feel like a job at all, but after a few weeks of crunching data in a research lab that was so nondescript it could be anywhere in the world, she was craving the outdoors.
Iris worked as a volcanologist and was well aware of how lucky she was to earn a living doing something so niche but so rewarding. All the data she helped to collect and analyse delivered predictability to some of the most volatile places on earth. The fact was that the better she and her colleagues were at forecasting, the safer it made these places for the people who lived there. People relied on her and she was good at what she did.
Today, Mount Kilauea wasn’t causing Iris any problems. It had been emitting steam and gases for a few weeks, but the level of activity had been reducing steadily and they had concluded that there was a low probability of anything else happening in the near future. The lack of activity had made her restless and unable to resist the call of the outdoors any longer, so she had suggested a field trip to her younger colleague, Dylan. With theimminent danger of an eruption well and truly off the cards, she wanted to show him where the data they spent all day looking at came from. And so they had spent most of the day watching the instruments that were installed around the caldera of the volcano from the safety of their laptop screens in a small clearing. The canvas sails strung between the spindly trees sheltered them from the sun or the rain, depending on the day. There hadn’t been many rainy days in the few weeks she’d been on The Big Island, but when it rained, it really rained.
‘Shall we call it a day? If we go now, we can catch the tide.’ Dylan had recently started studying at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and had been Iris’s sidekick for the duration of her visit.
‘Dylan, it’s almost as if you’re not interested in watching the seismometer any more.’ She’d been hoping that they might feel some minor tremors, a common occurrence around active volcanos, so that he could get a sense of the magnitude of what they had been looking at for all these weeks on their computer screens. As it was, it had been a very quiet day on that score and he was bored.
‘Iris, the waves are calling to me.’ He was from land-locked Minnesota and had signed up for surfing lessons the minute he arrived in Hawaii. Iris loved the water so had been happy to tag along with him a few times to nearby Kahaluu beach, where there was a surf school. The water was fierce compared with what she was used to. The beaches she’d holidayed on in the UK had waves which were far more subdued unless there was a storm. Here, she’d been astounded at the size of the breakers, but Dylan didn’t seem to be deterred. Perhaps because he had nothing to compare it to. Surfing here was far too intense, but at the end of a day in the lab, a dip in the shallows had been most welcome. Then she’d wait on the beach with a good book.
‘Okay,’ she said, good-naturedly. ‘I think we can safely say nothing’s going to happen while we’re away.’
‘I don’t think anything’s going to happen, period,’ Dylan said. He was fresh out of graduate school and hadn’t been in the field long enough to notice the nuances of the data. Today, he was probably right, but Iris had seen his impatience flare over the past few weeks and knew that meant he would likely miss something important. But that was what she was there for, and why he was with her: to learn from her.
‘Not today. That’s all we’re saying.’
‘Yeah, okay, Iris. I hear you,’ he said with a lazy smile, that if she’d been fifteen, maybe ten years younger, she’d have had trouble resisting.
‘Let’s pack up then.’
They collected up their small amount of equipment, putting it into foam-lined cases that made it easy and safe to transport, folded up their chairs and took a last look around before they hiked back the short distance to the truck.
‘You going to try surfing today?’ He was teasing. He thought it was funny that she was wary of the waves and asked her every time they went to the beach.
‘Nope, I’m happy watching,’ she said with a grin. ‘Not you, obviously. The really good surfers.’
‘Ouch,’ he said, hitting his hand on his chest. ‘It kills me that you’re not impressed by my skills.’
Iris threw back her head and laughed. ‘You’re in the wrong place if you’re looking to be the best surfer out there.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ he said ruefully.
‘Anyway, this might be my last surf trip. I’m probably going to move on now that Kilauea’s calmed down.’
‘Ah, Iris. Man, I’ll miss you.’
It warmed her heart that they’d struck up a friendship that mattered to him as much as it did to her. He was the little brother she’d never had.
They loaded their equipment into the truck and Dylan got into the driver’s seat, as had become their habit. Iris didn’t enjoy driving on the narrow tracks around the caldera, or the wrong side of the road for that matter.
‘I’ll be back if she so much as rumbles again, but I can’t stay when there’s nothing happening.’
‘There’s nothing happening anywhere, except maybe Indonesia and that’s the back of beyond.’
‘It’s beautiful, but it’s not the same,’ Iris admitted. There were so many places she’d visited that were miles, sometimes days away from civilisation, and most of the volcanoes in Indonesia that showed any sign of activity tended to be those ones. Dylan was right. It wasn’t often she could enjoy what any of these places offered because typically the volcano was all there was. ‘We can’t all be lucky enough to be monitoring a volcano one minute and lounging on the beach the next.’
‘Okay, you’ve just reminded me I live in the most amazing place on earth,’ Dylan said with a grin, throwing a huge dust cloud up as he brought the truck to a screeching halt in the car park at Kahaluu beach. It was a perfect afternoon. The sun was glinting off the waves and even though the waves were huge, the water looked inviting.
‘With the best job in the world,’ Iris added.
‘It’s different for you. You get to see all the action. I haven’t even seen an eruption yet.’
‘Stay here long enough and you will. Kilauea is one of the reliable ones. Don’t get impatient and leave. The key to seeing an eruption is patience.’
Dylan looked at her sullenly.
