Mt. St. Helens Erupted 25 Years Ago Today

Twenty five years ago? Really? Memories, of course, don't arrive in the same order that they occurred. So I take them down. That morning, May 18, 1980, I woke, and I knew something was going on. I heard something. It woke me. My parents were awake. Maybe one of them had said something that woke me. I don't know. I went to the window and looked out. I'd been waiting. We'd all been waiting. For what, we didn't know. What are we waiting for? This. This is what we'd been waiting for. There was the front of the cloud plume. I'm almost certain something has changed in my memory, but my memory tells me that I saw the very first of the plume heading out way, with lightning streaking across it. Lightning in the clouds? This had to be what we were waiting for. We were far enough away from Mt. St. Helens that we didn't think we were in any real danger. We lived in Mineral, Washington, and the only way we could see Mt. Rainier was to get up somewhere high, somewhere with a clearcut... and then it seemed like a small mountain... not much to worry about... Pellets began to fall. Pellets of ash and pumice. They looked a bit like hail. But they weren't hail. They were ash and pumice. Mostly ash, it seemed, as they came apart. Would these get any bigger? Were we in any real danger? Were they hot? Were they cold? We watched them fall from inside the house. This was what we'd been waiting for. We'd had a fire recently in our house and there was a hole in our roof, through the ceiling, and the hole was covered with clear plastic. Our house still smelled of smoke. And now Mt. St. Helens had erupted. Not a good year for us. The pellets didn't last. They didn't get any bigger. Somebody in the house must have been watching the news, or listening to it on the radio. Did we still have power? I think we did. We were headed out. We seemed to know that we were inside the red zone. The red zone was the area within which it was recommended people evacuate. So we packed our things and set out. It didn't seem as if we were in any real danger... but I believe the ash had begun to fall by then. It fell harder throughout the day. It grew darker throughout the day. We didn't know what the ash might do. How it might affect us. We were headed out. As we crossed the Nisqually river into the town of Elbe, about six miles from where we lived, we also passed out of the red zone. The Nisqually River, incidentally, is a glacier fed river running from Mt. Rainier--a mountain which is rated the number 3 most dangerous volcano in the U.S. (no, this is not common knowledge... I heard it on the radio this morning). Had it been Mt. Rainier that erupted, this story would be very different, as would much of the Pacific Northwest landscape. In any case, we stopped in Elbe. We were hungry, and relatively certain we were out of any real danger--unless it turned out the ash falling was somehow harmful. We had breakfast in Elbe. We talked to the locals about what they planned to do. And most of them seemed set on just hanging around and seeing what happened. People in this area tended to be prepared for things. They had stockpiles of firewood if the need arose. Water was readily available from wells and rivers. Freezers were stocked with food. There were few conveniences in the local towns, so people made their own conveniences by stocking up. We too were prepared. So my parents decided to head home. When we stopped at the bridge across the Nisqually (I don't remember what brand of official was doing it, but they were stopping cars at the bridge and warning them that they were entering the red zone), we explained that we lived just a few miles up the road. "Okay then. Good luck." Did he tip his hat as he said it? If he didn't, he should have. There seemed some irony in the man's voice. Some reluctance. Some questioning of our sanity. But nobody really knew what to do. There were no rules to follow. This was new territory, and it looked and felt and was steadfastly new to everyone. The ash fell. And it fell and it fell and it fell. We lost power. We spent the evening with another family who had power, trying to call our relatives. The phone circuits were seriously jammed. We listened to reports of ash falling all across the state. Eastern Washington had turned to night, the ash plume completely blocking the sun. We'd had some of that, but nothing like they'd seen in Ritzville, in Spokane. School was cancelled. We were warned not to breath the dust. We wore masks and tried to keep the dust down. We were warned that the dust could be bad for our cars. But all this was relatively minor compared to living in such a gray gray world. Who knew that the world could be so gray? Imagine a snow with the white sucked out of it. She shine stolen from it. A dismal snow. Faded. Muted. We tilled up the earth. We planted a garden. Volcanic dust stayed everywhere. It invaded everything. You could taste it. But now? Twenty-five years later? It seems like nothing. Like something that happened somewhere else. Something that made a difference in our lives... but how much of a difference? What did it really do? What we forget about disaster seems almost as important to our survival as those things we remember. If I carried the fear of exploding mountains, of falling buildings, of stillbirth and earthquake and flood and tornado, would I be able to keep moving forward, keep even a little bit sane? I doubt it. So as much as I complain (and I do complain) about how we forget, I also give thanks that I'm able to move on, to have a life with new experiences worth remembering. My son's first piano recital. My daughter's arms around my neck. Twenty-five years. Has it really been twenty-five years? It has. We're not the same people we were then. We're not sitting still. If we're lucky, were not waiting, anticipating, looking for something to happen to us. We're making it happen. I hope I'm making it happen. I work. I try. Maybe that's the difference. I'm not waiting anymore. Are you making it happen? Tell me a story. Technorati Tags: mtsthelens, sthelens, mountain, volcano, sainthelens, ash, may18, 1980, eruption

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