Friday, October 01, 2004

I’ve been paying close attention to the new activity of Mt. St. Helens this week. I’ve been interested in this particular volcano since I was 12 because we lived in Oak Harbor, Washington in 1980 and I have vivid memories of the eruption of May 18, 1980. (If you click on the link to the map, you’ll see the red star that indicates where Oak Harbor is, on the northern end of an island in the Puget Sound. Look almost directly south and you’ll see St Helens.)

May 18, 1980, was a Sunday. At 8:32am, I was eating a bowl of cereal before I finished getting ready for church. There was a boom that was almost immediately followed by a larger, window-rattling BOOM. My thoughts as I continued to eat after a short pause: “I wonder what that was. This is a Navy base, so it’s not artillery. I wonder if a plane crashed. Maybe it’s Mt. St. Helens finally erupting.” A little later we were in the car on the way to church and talking about the booms. I threw out that maybe it was the volcano, but Dad pointed out that it was more than 200 miles away and we probably wouldn’t feel that.

Once we got to church we got the news. The volcano had erupted and it wasn’t looking good for the people down that way because of the ash. But there was no lava, so it’s wasn’t too bad. Little did we know.

Later that day we were riveted to the television and the first video of the eruption and the destruction in the neighboring towns. Pictures of mudflows and ash covered everything. Later that week we were seeing more images of Spirit Lake (this link has a cool slideshow of pictures from 1980, including this one of the sky over a town as the ash rolled in - spooky. Actually, this whole commemoration page by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has some great stuff.) and the downed timber that looked like matchsticks on TV. And we were learning more about the 57 people who died and how.

Then came the amazing video from a journalist who had been on the mountain when it erupted and his trek through the pitch black ash to the faint pinpoint of light that eventually disappeared ahead of him. It was intense viewing, even knowing that he survived.

We never got any ash, although most of the state got some. There was a weird V to the north and west of the mountain (over the Puget Sound) that didn’t get ash - we were in that V.

Several months after the eruption my father flew over the mountain and took a couple snapshots from the air. I’ll have to get his pictures to add to this post. My sister and I had a field trip to Seattle sometime after everything had been cleaned up, but there was still ash in the street gutters. Street vendors were selling little bottles of the stuff along with “I survived the eruption of Mt. St. Helens” t-shirts. When we moved to California in January of 1982, we drove south on I-5 and there was still ash on the sides of the road - it looked like gray snow banks, but ash doesn’t melt.

So I’m a little excited about the steam explosion today. Not that I want any significant damage, but another eruption would be cool.