I’ve been thinking about those scenes a lot the past few days and wondering … how to talk about this without spoilers … whether Haley, my protagonist, didn’t leave some loose ends lying about at the end of her story, or maybe not quite succeed in doing all the things she set out to do as well as she thought.
Haley’s father, Gabe, who’s a geologist, would insist that Iceland has always been a hugely geologically active island, that volcanoes and earthquakes have always happened there on a regular basis, and that there’s no reason to think anything Haley or anything anyone else did would change that, magic or no magic. But Ari’s mother, Katrín, who is also a geologist, would say that that just because the island is geologically active doesn’t mean it isn’t magically active as well.
I picture Haley, now back in the States, worrying as she watches the news no matter what her father says, IMing Ari — and Katrín — and trying to find a flight to Keflavík amid the shifting winds and that moving ash cloud around.
Haley finds watching all the volcano footage much more unsettling than I do.
Speaking of which, some more links: a webcam, volcano photos from The Big Picture, and a gallery over on flickr. (via galeni, lnhammer, and the iceland community.)