Memories of Mt. St. Helens

It is hard to believe Mt. St. Helens erupted 32 years ago today. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were in the pasture trimming the goat's hooves that morning. I just happened to look up as a giant, black cloud silently billowed upwards, continuing until it had thrust thousands and thousands of feet up into the early morning sky. We stood and stared, speechless. We watched it all day. At times we could see lightening zig-zagging horizontally back and forth as the event created its own weather inside the black, roiling, angry cloud. It wasn't until late afternoon we started getting news footage on television and saw all the trees rushing down the Toutle River. There were so many trees in the river, going shore to shore, that it seemed there was no water in the river, only trees. Crowded around the television our family watched a house amidst all the debris being smashed under a bridge as it was carried on the backs of the trees. At that moment the thought came to me that, as we had been watching the mountain erupt all day, we had been watching people being killed. Until then we really hadn't thought about the people. I worked in Longview, Washington for a company that sold and repaired log trucks & equipment. Over the next days and weeks it was strange to drive through town, everything covered with ash. Sounds were muted like they are when driving through snow and cars drove slowly as any fast motion kicked up the ash into dusty clouds. People were scared. I did our company's banking every day and it was common to go into the bank and hear only silence. No friendly chit chat, only frightened looks and silence. It was reported that there was a giant log jam threatening to break at one end of Spirit Lake. No one was sure what to expect or when to expect it, so we held our breaths and waited. Over the next many weeks Weyerhauser began to bring down its log trucks from the blast zone, the ones that could be salvaged. My company's job was to clean off the ash and repair them. Grey ash was glued onto the trucks like cement and it often took an entire day just to remove it from one truck. As each truck was towed into the repair yard we looked at its ash-coated, mangled and twisted steel and saw not a truck, but a war veteran, returning from combat and gave it a moment of respectful silence. Eventually, life returned to normal....a new normal. Words like pyroclastic flow, red zone, eruption, plume and lava dome became part of our every day speech. Across the Columbia River, in St. Helens, Oregon, my home town, we became used to seeing our beautiful cone shaped, namesake mountain that had often been compared to the serene and majestic Mt. Fuji in Japan, now a full third shorter and flat at the top. The mountain was wounded and so were we, but over the last 32 years we've come to accept it as it is and fondly remember as it was.