Aquifer: A Novel (13 page)

=/\=

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Round Spring

Tina’s yellow Jeep traveled along the narrow, twisty, tree-top canopied Highway 19, headed north out of Eminence. The tour of Alley Spring had greatly impressed Larry because he had never seen such a large artesian spring. He shot the equivalent of nearly an entire roll of film, claiming to be photographing the spring, but in reality Tina was his main focus.

Though he had truly enjoyed the day so far and was already looking forward to other opportunities of getting to know Tina, internally Larry was grappling with having to spend his entire summer in such a small town. He knew, of course, that the town would be small, but the culture shock he was experiencing was something for which he was not entirely prepared.

To buffer him in his cultural adjustment, Larry had devoted himself to long hours of work with Dr. Clayton, which he thoroughly enjoyed. Nevertheless, when not working, he continued to suffer from a mild case of Stuck-In-Hickville-Itis. Unbeknown to Larry’s conscious mind, however, Tina’s presence was quickly proving to be an effective cure.

“Okay, so other than this incredibly beautiful spring, what other claims to fame does Eminence have?” asked Larry, in a somewhat teasing demeanor.

“Well,” she replied, “we made the Guinness Book of World Records.”

“You’re joking, right?” said Larry incredulously, assuming that she was teasing him back.

Tina laughed. “No, really. We’re the canoe capital of the world. There are several float fishing camps around here. They all got together a few years back and piled up their canoes in a great big pile: 767 canoes; 40 tons of aluminum. It was a really big
to do.
Almost everybody in town got involved in it. One of our state senators even got his picture in the Guinness Book putting the last canoe in place.”

Larry laughed too. “That’s a good one. But hardly what I was expecting. Anything else?” he teasingly prodded.

“Well . . . let’s see,” Tina responded contemplatively as the breeze wisped her long blond hair about. She loved driving along the twisty, winding mountain roads with the Jeep’s top down. Effortlessly she down-shifted as the Jeep began to climb the steep mountain road. “Well, we were listed as the top outdoor sports town in Missouri in
Sports Afield
magazine and as one of the top fifty sports towns in the country . . . and we host the nation’s largest annual organized trail ride.”

“That’s nice. But all that stuff deals with tourism. Don’t you have anything of mention that’s really important?”

“Of course, lots of things. But most of the things we’re really proud of would never get heard of outside the county. Except of course, for our hometown astronaut.”

“An astronaut? From Eminence?” Larry chided.

“Yeah! Tom Akers. He’s a shirt-tail relative of our sheriff, but before becoming an astronaut he was the principal of Eminence High School. He’s a veteran of four space shuttle missions.”

“Tom Akers . . .” Larry drawled in amazement. “If my memory’s correct, he was part of the crew that captured the Hubble telescope and helped fix it.”

“That’s right.”

“He’s really from here?”

“Yup.”

At that moment Tina pulled the Jeep into the parking lot at Round Springs. She parked in one of the stalls at the end of the meadow, near the spring’s outlet branch. They got out and headed up the path toward the picturesque spring.

Round Spring had a recorded maximum daily flow of 336 million gallons but usually averaged about twenty-six million gallons per day. It was unique in that it had two surface openings for the same spring. The first was a round sinkhole forming a crater, the sides of which rose vertically from the water. The pool was rather small, only sixty feet in diameter, and like most Ozark springs the surface was as smooth as a sheet of glass.

Round Spring was one of the first State Parks in Missouri, established in 1932 and incorporated into the Ozark National Scenic Riverways park system in 1972. The Park Service operated a campground with sixty family camping sites, ten cluster sites, and three group sites. The campground offered canoe rentals, a camp store, restrooms with hot showers, and a coin-operated laundry. It was a very popular camping area and remained open year-round.

Tina and Larry stood on a wooden observation platform built along the sidewall of the crater, jutting out over the spring. Looking over the guardrail they gazed into the water of an almost perfectly round pool, thirty-five feet below. The abundant growth of underwater mosses and grasses growing around the spring’s perimeter gave onlookers the impression of looking into the depths of a giant iridescently green emerald with a heart of sapphire-blue.

“Round Spring . . . appropriately named,” Larry observed.

“This spring is truly one of a kind. The pool in this crater is about sixty feet deep before it curves back under the bluff. But the surface water flows into that cave over there,” she pointed to the far side of the pool where there was a fifteen-foot wide, four-foot high, ovoid opening in the crater’s sidewall right at water level. “The water winds through the underground caverns and comes out again in another pool on the other side of the hill behind us. From there it flows about a quarter of a mile and then empties into the Current River,” she explained.

“This is incredible,” Larry said in awe as he surveyed the crater above the spring. “It almost looks as if the whole thing should be a cave.”

“It was. Thousands of years ago, where we’re standing was about fifty feet underground. But then a sinkhole formed above this pool.” She leaned over the guardrail and gazed into the depths of the spring. “Gradually the sinkhole ate away at the soil above the cave’s ceiling and dissolved its support until the roof collapsed, opening the whole thing up to the outside.” She straightened up and turned to look at Larry. “But the ancient stream bed is still visible. If you’d like to see the inside of the cave, the Park Rangers conduct a two-hour tour by flashlight and lantern.”

“Yeah, I’d really like to do that.”

“Okay, but we’ll have to come back some other time ‘cause they only do it once a day, at ten in the morning.”

They stepped off the observation platform, turned and walked down the footpath toward the secondary pool which was located a hundred and fifty yards away and on the other side of a low hill. Tina continued to educate Larry about the spring as they walked.

“Another of the really unusual things about this spring is that dye tracing studies have shown that some of the water actually comes from the other side of the Current River. The water from the recharging area has to make a complete circle, flowing from the east, going under the river, coming out in the spring, and then flowing back to the east again and emptying back into the river.

“You really know a lot about this stuff. Are you a geology major or something?” asked Larry.

“No, I just love where I grew up. Actually, I’m about to complete my Ph.D. in biochemistry, but I have a double minor in zoology and geology,” she replied.

“I knew there had to be a connection . . . but why biochemistry?”

“Well, just like you want to learn about that tumor-shrinking frog secretion, I want to learn how all sorts of enviro-pollutants affect the central nervous system, causing conditions like
Toxic Building Syndrome
, or
Legionnaire’s Disease
. If I could bring the effects of all this clean mountain air into the lives of city people then a lot of suffering could be eliminated.”

They stopped walking as Tina gazed into Larry's face. Then, becoming self-conscious, she suddenly gestured toward the pool by which they stood. “Here’s the secondary pool, where the water finally exits from the spring above.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this. And to think that all this water comes from one aquifer,” Larry stated.

“What?” Tina asked in disbelief.

“The Park Ranger said that all this water came from just one aquifer.”

Tina smiled playfully as she remembered her photo session at Alley Spring, “I didn’t think you were listening to her.” She paused momentarily. Then, as if the entire day had been carefully orchestrated to build up to this moment she asked confidently yet coyly, “Tomorrow is Sunday so Mom doesn't have to work. Why don't you and Dr. Clayton come over for dinner?”

“Your Mom?” Larry asked confused.

“Opal . . . the restaurant!”

“Opal's your mother?”

“Yeah, I'm the family caboose . . . shall we say one o'clock?”

“One o’clock?” asked Larry with a puzzled look on his face. “Isn’t that kind of early for dinner?”

“Oh, that’s right. You’re from the north. Down here
dinner
is what you northerners call lunch. The evening meal is called
supper
.”

“Ooooh,” said Larry as he shrugged his shoulders. Then he nodded his head affirmatively and broke into a wide grin, “Sure, that would be great.”

He took Tina by the hand and they lazily jogged through the meadow beyond the secondary pool, laughing and joking as they headed toward her yellow Jeep.

=/\=

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

Sink Hole

That same afternoon, in a military briefing room at Ft. Leonard Wood, Major Reid was in the midst of a telephone status report update with General Branigan. His crew had been working around the clock since their arrival at the impact site, but there was still much that needed to be done. Nevertheless, Major Reid was confident that his team would so completely sanitize the area of any remnants of the alien space craft that no one, even if they were suspicious and had been trained in what to look for, would ever find any indication of the craft’s presence.

“The alien crew were all killed upon impact,” reported Major Reid. “They appeared to be on some type of zoological and botanical collection expedition. Most of the animals they had collected died on impact, though we managed to retrieve a few specimens that survived. We’ve created a temporary quarantine area for them here at Ft. Leonard Wood. Similarly, the botanical collection was almost a total loss. We’re in the process of bringing in some experts to take charge of the viable specimens and others to begin the dissection and study of the non-viable ones.”

“I see,” said General Branigan on the other end of the phone line. “I’m disappointed that none of the crew survived, but at least you were able to recover part of their cargo. Have you gotten much interference from the locals during the cleanup operations?”

“No sir. We issued a press release to the local weekly paper claiming it to be a radioactive asteroid crash. Though there has been some discussion around town, none of the locals have seriously questioned our report. Beyond a small blurb in the local press, we’ve succeeded in keeping the story suppressed from any other news reporting entities.”

“Excellent! But keep your eyes open for any curiosity seekers. The last thing we need is for word of this to leak out,” cautioned the General.

“Sir,” Reid continued, “There was a professor from St. Louis University who tried to view the site, but our M.P.s refused him access and he left.”

“Do you think he suspects what really happened there?” asked the General.

“No sir. He arrived on the scene about noon yesterday. He claimed that he wanted to investigate a meteorite crash. I did have him checked out though . . . a Dr. Thomas Clayton from the zoological department at the university, a frog specialist doing local research on logging and environmental pollution,” said Reid.

“Just what we need, a tree hugger tramping around checking us out. To be safe you had probably better keep an eye on him,” advised the General.

“Yes sir. I’ll keep on top of him.”

“How are you disguising the impact area?”

“As I said, we circulated a story about an asteroid crash. However, the impact crater is too large to fill in so we’re making it look like a natural sinkhole, there are a lot of them in the area. The bottom of the impact crater broke through a cave roof, giving credence to our cover story and will make the whole thing look very convincing, We should complete the entire cover-up by the end of the summer,” responded Reid.

“Very good. Keep me updated with any changes,” snapped Branigan.

“Yes sir,” Reid replied, hanging up the phone.

Reid felt very confident in his choice of a sinkhole disguise. There were literally thousands of sinkholes in the surrounding area and new ones were continually being formed.

Sinkholes come in all shapes and sizes; they can be funnel-shaped or bowl-shaped, deep or shallow. Sometimes they are ragged chasms with steep bluffs that swallow entire streams underground. Or, they may be gentle depressions with slopes so gradual that they often go unnoticed. Their openings can be so small that only rodents and other small creatures can enter them, or so large that a semi-truck could enter them with lots of room to spare.

Yet all sinkholes have one thing in common. They are all found in the presence of broken, weathered limestone bedrock or caves near the soil’s surface.