There was a semi twisted across the First Street bridge, blocking it, so I continued north on Main across Cedar River into Waterloo. I turned right, east, on Lincoln, figuring I’d skirt between Waterloo and the airport. I needed to get to Highway 20, but I also wanted to get out of town as fast as possible. If I went straight to 20, I’d have to pass through most of Waterloo. Maybe the people there would be fine, organizing and helping each other survive. Or maybe there’d be more looters. My palms got sweaty at the thought of meeting more people like Tire Iron and Baseball Bat. I didn’t see any reason to risk it.

I passed under Highway 27. Enough ash had blown under the bridge that I didn’t have to take off my skis—I was able to keep sliding along. A little farther on, Lincoln became West Airport Highway. There were lots of commercial and industrial buildings along the road there, mostly newish metal buildings with flat roofs. Every one of them had been crushed by the ash.

The road was deserted. I knew the airport was somewhere north of me, but I couldn’t see it. On a normal day, I might hear a plane passing overhead or taxiing on the runway. That day, there was no sign of activity. The only noise was occasional thunder.

After a couple hours, the commercial buildings petered out, so I knew I was in the boonies. The corn was also a big clue. Cedar Falls and Waterloo form an island amid a sea of corn. In early September, it stands higher than my head. Now, though, the ash had flattened it. The only way I could tell I was passing a cornfield was the few hardy stalks still standing upright, coated in gray ash, leaves broken under the weight. Every now and then a metal seed sign protruded a foot or so above the ash bed. I passed an occasional field completely covered in ash, an unremittingly flat, gray expanse. Soybeans, maybe.

I might have been skiing on the surface of the moon for all the activity there was. I passed four or five farmhouses but saw nothing moving. Everything I normally saw in the Iowa countryside was missing: There were no people, no cars, no cows—not even a solitary turkey vulture circling in the sky.

The weird, rainless thunder and lightning continued. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so every time a series of lightning bolts lit up the landscape, it hurt. The thunder seemed strangely muted. Maybe the falling ash muffled it somehow, or maybe my ears hadn’t fully recovered from the first enormous explosions.

Despite the ash, the road was easy to follow. It was raised, with deep ditches on each side. I skied along the crown of the road, where the centerline was buried under its blanket of ash.

I’d been skiing for four or five hours when I saw a thin line of trees looming in the dark about thirty feet ahead. They’d been beaten down by the ash. Most of the leaves were gone, and there were scars on the trunks where entire branches had ripped away. What was left was coated with gray-white ash. A small creek, only three or four feet wide, coursed along the line of trees. It had cut a channel through the ash, forming little cliffs almost two feet high on either side of the creek bed.

I unclipped my skis, slid my pack off my back, and leaned against a tree to eat. Lunch was a can of Dinty Moore beef stew, cold of course. Disgusting, normally, but I was so hungry I barely noticed. I drank a bottle of water with my stew.

The creek was so choked with ash that I couldn’t see any water. But the ash was flowing, so there must have been water there, and I was worried about running out. I worked my way down to the water’s edge, slipped in the ash and nearly went swimming. I found a sapling and held onto its trunk while I dipped my bottle into the sludge.

In my bottle, the water was grey-brown and opaque. It looked utterly undrinkable. I sniffed—it reeked of sulfur. I touched my tongue to it experimentally and immediately spit it out. The rotten-egg taste was overpowering, plus the water left a grainy texture on my tongue. I dumped out the sludge, packed the empty bottle, and resolved to drink less.

By late afternoon, the ash had pretty much dried out. Pushing the skis through it got tougher—they ground against the ash instead of sliding. I unclipped my boots and tried walking. In some places, the ash had dried into a fairly compact surface that wasn’t too bad to hike on. In others, ash was blowing and collecting in drifts. There, my feet sank quickly in the fine, dusty ash, and pulling them free was difficult. I put the skis back on.

The scrap of T-shirt tied around my mouth and nose kept drying out. When it got dry, the tiny ash particles came through it, coating the inside of my mouth with nasty-tasting sludge and bringing on coughing fits. I remembered coughing blood at my house after breathing ash, and so I used more of my precious water to keep my breathing rag damp.

When the dark day started to fade to full night, I began looking for a place to sleep. Before the eruption, when I’d driven around Iowa with my parents, there was almost always a farmhouse in sight. Skiing through the darkness of the ashfall, I felt as if it were as deserted as Death Valley. I grew more and more worried about finding a place to sleep that night.

At full dark, I gave up looking for shelter and skied off the road into a cornfield. I don’t know why I left the road; there hadn’t been any traffic. I could have slept safely on the centerline. I shrugged off my pack.

A solitary stalk of corn coated in ash stood next to me. I broke off an ear, peeled back the husk, and tried to bite it. The kernels were small and hard. I almost broke a tooth gnawing a couple off the cob. I couldn’t chew them, so I swallowed them whole instead. I tossed the rest of the ear away. I guessed this corn wasn’t the kind meant for people. Growing up in Iowa, maybe I should have known more about corn. But while there was a lot of corn in Iowa, there were also lots of people who didn’t know anything about it, like me.

For dinner, I ate chicken soup, cold and straight from the can. Tendrils of grease floated in the soup. They felt slimy sliding down my throat, but I was hungry enough that I didn’t care. I drank another bottle of water, too. At this rate, I’d run out in the morning. At least my pack was getting lighter.

I slept wrapped in my plastic tarp with my pack as a pillow. It wasn’t a particularly comfortable bed, but the day of skiing had worn me out, and I fell asleep quickly.

I dreamed about Laura. The first dream was just weird, not particularly embarrassing. (The embarrassing one was stupid. Black lace under that long denim skirt? I doubted it.)

In the first dream, some guy was hauling Laura up into the sky by one hand, through the ashfall. He was nobody I’d ever seen before: a short black guy with a strange expression on his face. Looking at him in my dream, I felt calm and peaceful for the first time in days.

So he was towing Laura up into the sky, and she reached into her purse and started pulling out Snickers bars and tossing them down to me. She was throwing them gently, like she was tossing me a gift, but I couldn’t catch them and they kept hitting me: little missiles raining down and thwacking me on the head. Actually, thinking about them again, the first dream totally sucked. The second one was much better.

Chapter 13

I felt awful the next morning. My breathing cloth had dried out in the night, so I woke with a nasty cough. The inside of my mouth was caked with ash. I pulled the rag off my face and inspected it for blood. I didn’t see any, which was a huge relief, although it was really too dark to be sure. I rewet my breathing rag and used a little more water to rinse my mouth. I drank the rest of the bottle. One bottle left. I had to find water today.