Dangers Evaporating

      

Who could ask for more?

Mount Pelee was mentioned in Sharp Stick in the Eye. It was in a paragraph I wrote about the tour I took of Martinique island ‘way back in 1980. Pelee is spelled incorrectly in Sharp Stick in the Eye, sigh, and technically, it is still not correct here because there should be an accent over the second e, and in the two minutes I’ve given myself today to learn how to put an accent over a letter in Word, yeah, it does not appear to be going to happen.

       Anyway, the story of Mount Pelee, a volcano on Martinique, has come to mind a few times during this our world’s coronavirus spring.

The version I was told that day on the tour was that back in 1902, there were signs that the usually quiet Pelee was going to erupt. But would it really erupt? Was there really an imminent danger to the city below? Or were folks overreacting when they spoke of evacuation?

       The mayor of the city was concerned because election day was upon them. He was being advised to have the townspeople leave, but then again, what a hassle that would make of the elections! What if the danger were not so imminent? What if everyone got mad at him for disrupting their lives, their jobs, forcing expenses as they moved out and moved back, especially if the volcano ended up not erupting? What a mess that would be.

But, what if evacuation could be delayed? Pelee had not erupted in any of their lifetimes, what were the chances it would blow soon? The mayor decided to wait until after elections.

Wrong choice.

       Mount Pelee blew! Its top went from solid to gas spewing onto the land below.

 The entire city burned, melted, evaporated. On the tour, seventy-eight years later, we stood on the very few bricks that remained. Of the rest of the bricks, the rest of the town there was nothing left!

       It was said that the only survivor of the city of nearly 30,000 people was a prisoner whose cell was mostly underground on the outskirts of the town. In Wikipedia today, there is mention of a girl who took a boat upstream to a cave and also survived. But no one else – not even the mayor.

       And of course, what is going on today reminds me of the story of Mount Pelee and the mayor. It is so hard for our present day governors and mayors to decide which course of action is best. Should everyone be quarantined, or should they be allowed to go about their daily lives or should some limited activity in between those two extremes be agreed upon? Is quarantine an overkill? Will no or limited quarantine indeed kill?

These decisions are difficult, and not because the governors and mayors are worried about reelection, (I, perhaps naively, would like to believe), but rather they are truly wanting to do what is best for all their constituents. And the choices are not pretty – enforce a quarantine and incur the wrath of those who believe the dangers aren’t that great and hold our officials responsible for our personal monetary losses, or take a chance and go without quarantine and be responsible for the many more deaths that might occur!

It is tough to know when the danger is really really real. And yet if we end up waiting a moment too long, a hundred years from now, people could be taking a tour of our hometowns, standing on a couple of bricks and being told that everything else had evaporated in an instant.

(prints from Library of Congress, I think it is okay to use them?)

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