Volcano

"History shows again and again

How nature points up the folly of man"

-Blue Oyster Cult, Godzilla

As the first consistently cool days wash over the Southern Tier, promising frigid days and nights ahead, my thoughts turn to lava.

Well, specifically, this idea of mine that it's time for P and me to build our dream home inside a volcano.

Wait. I'm not crazy--we wouldn't build in an actively erupting volcano. That would be stupid.

No, I'm thinking of something more along the lines of a Vesuvius or Krakatoa, someplace that promises warm, slightly sulfurous breezes where we would never need to shovel snow, where the living would be easy. Low taxes. No more big heating bills. No Nanny State telling us what to do or where to build. A slice of the Real America, smack in the middle of a dormant caldera.

And we should buy a lot of acreage down there in the crater, because once we start posting photos of ourselves on Instagram sipping blender drinks along the rim of the volcano, enjoying that one-of-a-kind sunset you get looking down through the steam and fumes at the proles below, there will be others. Before long, our little paradise will be home to thousands of double-wides, chain restaurants, and maybe even a Publix or two.

Yep, life will be a dream down in our basalt crowned neighborhoods, ascending to the mailbox every month to pick up the government retirement checks that fund our lifestyle.

Sound risky? Think we should be worried about, I don't know, a massive explosion in our midst and being consumed in a river of boiling lava?

Look, that stuff only happens every century, if then. Everyplace has its risks. Am I right or am I right? They have earthquakes in California, and people still move there. Is it really so crazy to live at the bottom of a volcano?

Of course, we'd need to insure against the risk of having our cliffside villas blown to smithereens in an eruption, and that kind of insurance ain't cheap. I figure we start lobbying for federal volcano insurance, remind folks that the western U.S. from New Mexico to Puget Sound is peppered with them, so we all benefit from collectively protecting our investments by having you subsidize my volcano insurance. Come on. Don't be selfish. How can our beloved volcano community grow and thrive if everyone else isn't willing to pay a few bucks to cover our losses if this steaming crater explodes one day?

When that moment inevitably comes, I plan like most of my neighbors up here in Crater Bay to ignore the days of warnings, the rumblings and the occasional geyser of magma in the middle of the fairway on seventeen. We'll ride it out, so later we can tell epic stories of holding our doors shut against the crush of burning lava, or maybe become the subject of a hagiographic newspaper article when we wade into the river of molten rock to save a cat trapped on a rooftop.

But wait--that would be completely crazy.

Only a fool would create a massive community of like-minded fools in the path of a predictable, entirely natural phenomenon that is guaranteed to wipe the place clean at least every few generations. And only a nation of fools would subsidize the lunacy.