I didn’t see this movie.  I didn’t watch “Volcano” or “Dante’s Peak,” either.  And sadly, my local video store doesn’t stock the 2005 Pakistani classic, “Volcano Island.”  These movies are NOT about how volcanoes spew ash and then wreck the summer of 8 million people living in the Pacific Northwest.  These movies are about how volcanoes are hot and spew lava and gas over an unsuspecting populace.

 Because it’s not exactly gripping drama when a glacier-covered volcano named  Eyjafjallajokull blows a cloud of ash in April and it so effects the jet stream that, exactly two months later, a 40-something lesbian in Portland, Oregon has to turn on her heat because it is only 56-degrees Fahrenheit. 

It is not drama, but it is tragic.  Still, I am certain Martin Scorsese doesn’t care that I find myself bundled up in Gortex and polar fleece and walking along a beach in the rain.  That picture to the left?  That was taken in early June.   And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt Stanley Kubrick isn’t going to film me out paddling during a deluge that put the river at flood stage.  (Even though it is awfully dramatic.  If you look closely at the opposite shoreline, you can see the rain pounding off the river.  But, Kubrick is dead, so, well, you know.) 

My dear friend Barbara would like to point out that a little cold is a small price to pay for being alive.  Yesterday she told me that on the island of Martinique, there is a volcano foolishly named — in classic French hubris – Mount Pelee that, in 1902, killed 30,000 people in 60 seconds when it blew out laterally.  Louis-Auguste Cyparis was one of only two survivors and he only lasted because he was in a dungeon-like prison cell.  When he felt the hot air oozing in between the door jamb, he took off his prison pants, urinated on them, and stuffed them along the crack of the door. (This is how today, we know what to do if there is a hotel fire.  Oh, except, use a towel and wet it in the sink.)

My point is: hot lava, cold ash, or hotel fire, the only life you can save is your own.