Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

REFLECTING ON THE 25TH

...it's 8:32 a.m. PDT right...

...now...

...and I thought that would be the most fitting time to begin typing. This morning it is raining, occasionally heavily in Central Oregon; twenty-five years ago it was a beautiful sunny Sunday morning that cried out for a bike ride around the small town of Battleground, Washington. And it was right about now, just about 8:40, that I looked to the north and then looked again when it registered in my brain that I couldn't see Mt. St. Helens 30 or so miles away when I had clearly seen it just a few minutes before. I began to make out the frosted edges of what appeared to be a cloud plume rising up impossibly high into the sky above where the mountain should be. I never before or after that day rode that old 10-speed Schwinn as fast as I pedalled to get back to my place in the upscale trailer park in which I lived at the time (lawns, man, and landscaping...of a sort; paved streets and carports). I turned on my TV, screaming and beating on it for the 15 more minutes it took for one of the Portland stations to break in on Sunday morning programming to report that "something seems to be happening" at Mt. St. Helens. "Look out the f..king WINDOW, you moron!", I shrieked at the unlistening news anchor fella, who looked as though his plans for the day hadn't included either being up that early or sitting in the studio...

...and so began a day that ended 57 lives and sent those of many others caroming off in odd unpredictable directions that they never could have guessed if you had posed the question on May 17, 1980. Curmudgeonly old Harry Truman and his lodge full of cats - along with all the other recreation-based businesses, a Forest Service work center comprised of a bunch of cool old buildings that used to be Spirit Lake Ranger Station, a campground, more than 50 recreational cabins, and the pristinely beautiful Spirit Lake itself - were gone. One hundred fifty square miles of forested landscape - including half of my assigned work area - lay flattened by blast effect or fried by pyroclastic flows or washed away by lahars (mudflows) from the melted glacial snow on the mountains flanks or just plain buried under a couple of feet of fresh volcanic ash. Downstream homeowners on the Toutle and Cowlitz Rivers stepping outside to get the Sunday paper found the paper box, the road, and pretty much everything else between them and the river was gone, having unexpectedly been replaced by a churning chocolate maelstrom of mud, broken trees, shatters buildings, chunks of bridges, and other odd pieces of flotsam. The transition in realities was abrupt and brutal. On that first day, two coworker friends and I packed an enormous quantity of beer and chips out into a field behind my trailer park to watch the show and become gloriously drunk. The next morning, a tall burly Washington State Patrolman at a roadblock found himself listening to three poorly dressed, obviously hung-over hippy-types in a ratty old pickup trying to convince him that they worked at the federal land management office just down the road inside the newly-designated closure area (we didn't dress for success, we dressed to crawl through brush out in the woods all day; that was our job but it didn't lend itself to creating a recruitment poster image of Smokey's ideal "agency man"). It's amazing how suddenly a federal driver's license can start to look so amateurish and fakey when you're trying to convince someone that it's legitimate identification. Had we known what our work-life would hold for the next few years, we may well have not presented such a spirited case to get to work that day. Suffice it to say, from a purely selfish ego-centric point of view, one volcanic eruption per career is sufficient...

...I've tended to think of the St. Helens eruption as being something personally of my own, which is an easy trap to fall into a few hundred miles removed from the scene and in a place where, for those who live here, it was something on the evening news and not a lengthy personal reality. In truth, however, thousands of lives were changed to greater or lesser degrees, whether it be the small band of federal employees who dealt with the eruption and its aftermath, the woods workers caught up in the eruption or its aftermath, the downstream residents to the west who's appreciation of the river outside the door changed dramatically, the families of those who were lost, or the residents of eastern Washington, who in many cases found themselves plunged without warning and without even initially knowing why into a hellish "midnight at noon" scenario full of sand raining down from the dark sky to accumulate up to a foot deep in some areas and billowing dust clouds whose unknown glassy abrasiveness destroyed vehicle engines within a couple of miles. The 25th anniversary of the eruption is notable and fascinating for lots of people, but for those who experienced those direct impacts, this anniversary divisible by five is a suitable enough moment to reflect on the experience and where we ended up as a result of having lived it...

Photo's courtesy of University of San Diego History Dept., Weyerhaeuser Corp, and US Geological Survey, respectively.
Posted by: Jack K. / 3:29 PM

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