Pyroclastic tendencies

I would never live anywhere near a volcano with pyroclastic tendencies. I currently live in the California Bay Area and some days I think even that is that is too close to some of them. (Pumice is bad for your hard drives—never mind the floppies.)

I visited Pompeii and Herculaneum (right on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvio, not far from Napoli) back in 1969 when I was 12 years old. In preparation for the trip, I had read Pliny the Younger's letters to Tacitus (in translation, I'm still the only one in my family not to read Latin...[sigh]) so I had some idea of what to expect, but the extent of the devastation is awesome, even 1,900 years later.

When some of the victims where covered by the ash fall, they left cavities as their flesh rotted away. Later the archaeologists discovered that filling the strange holes they found with plaster, would let them recover the exact shape of the victims at the moment of death. Sometimes the casts would turn out to be of plants or animals. (The "sculpture" of a dog frozen in time as it makes a final futile attempt at escaping the burning hot chain around its neck, still stands vividly in my mind.) But most casts shown are of the everyday people of the cities fleeing from what they thought was the safety of their homes.

The casts made of these victims where so evocative; a mother covering her child with her body; a man covering his head with his arms even though he is inside a building (maybe his home?); stacks of victims trying to get out through the narrow streets.

To this day I don't really see the plaster when I look at them, but the flesh and blood of the victims slowly asphyxiating under the ever growing mounds of hot ashes.

Because the bones and teeth are still inside the cavities when they pour the plaster, the teeth shows behind plaster lips if they died with their mouths open—and many did, gasping for air even as their throats filled with hot volcanic ashes. Looking at one of the casts in the museum in Herculaneum, my mother—an MD—coolly observed "Look! You can see the lead-lines on their teeth" pointing to a dark band across the teeth of a huddled body. The dark horizontal band across the front of the teeth indicative of severe lead poisoning was clearer than any medical textbook could have described it. No wonder, I wasn't looking at a picture or even a sculpture, I was looking at the actual victim of the metal poisoning. The flesh was gone and replaced with plaster, but everything else was still as it was the moments after death.

The Romans not only used lead in their fresh water pipes—L. plumbum : lead; thus our word plumbing—but also liked to make jams in lead cooking pots because it sweetened the taste of the jam as lead acetate formed when the acids of the fruit reacted with the lead oxide on the inside of the pot -- lead acetate is quite sweet to the taste, often called lead-sugar. Definitely a bad habit, however sweet the jam.

So, not that I want to work for MicroSloth anyway, but Mt Rainier and Co. makes the choice to stay far away a no-brainer.