Mt. Saint Helens
I’ve always feared explosions, you know, like a backfire on an ill-tuned car or propane lighting with a whosh. I think it stems from an explosive father, but who knows these things? The first major explosion that wasn’t personal happened when Mt. St. Helen’s went off. And she went off big time. I was camping just 40 air miles from the volcano. We lived in Yakima at the time. Our baby was three, and we went up the Athanum Creek west of Yakima, met with some friends, set up for the night, had our dinner and went to bed. The campsite was noisy, some other campers, some road noise, but mostly frogs in a pond near by, croaking away. I couldn’t go to sleep with all the noise and wondered in the dark about whatever was on my mind at the time. At that stage in the game, probably my loneliness. And then the frogs stopped. Silence. I didn’t feel a quake or anything, but I’m guessing now, there must have been a tremor. You know how those elephants went inland just before the sunami? I’m guessing it was similar, the frogs all stopping, waiting for the next thing to come. The volcano went off early in the morning. It was loud where we were, like a barreling logging truck coming around the bend just up from the campsite–and then Kay said, it’s the volcano, and then the sky darkened and we ripped up camp. We were out of there in seconds, and the ash was falling heavy, sandy stuff, the first heavy stuff coming from the explosion. Day turned to night and Jack drove along the river, hardly able to see, all of us hardly able to breath, my daughter’s head inside my sweatshirt so she could breath, and we followed the taillights home. I guess if the folks in front of us had gone in the river, we’d have had time to stop. Back at home, we ran the tub with emergency water and turned on the TV and drank wine while we watched the eruption unfold. We somehow expected everything to get contaminated. But is didn’t. Just inches of gray ash and swishing clouds coming up from the feet of cows as they tried to graze in the fields. Eerie. Exciting. Something not everyone gets to live through
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