On a recent Saturday, with a
heart heavy as concrete, I headed north, leaving my house in
Portland as rain pounded the windshield. The remnants of a recent
breakup cast the world in dull hues.
Mount St. Helens was
busy spitting ash into the sky, and what else cheers the soul like
a good case of natural fireworks? I grabbed a good friend, a camera
and picnic fixings and drove an hour and a half to join the throngs
of people at Mount St. Helen’s visitors’ center at the
Coldwater Ridge.
Unless you’ve spent the past month
shutting out all media, you know that Mount St. Helens has been
spitting and grumbling recently with the most fervor it’s
shown in 24 years. On Oct. 1, Mount St. Helens erupted with a
24-minute flow of steam and ash. After two weeks of intermittent
bursts, a relatively small amount of lava finally reached the
surface. Now, the volcano is back to venting hot gas and water, and
scientists don’t know when another eruption could occur.
With all that commotion, the crowds have already erupted.
On a typical day, about 900 people visit this national volcanic
monument and stay an average of three hours. In the last few weeks,
that number has nearly tripled. On one Sunday, an estimated 7,000
people came to pay homage to the volcano. Cars have lined up nose
to tail for nearly five miles. People have flown in from New York,
Florida and North Carolina; vacationers on road trips to Canada or
California diverged off I-5 and headed east.
Like
spectators at a tailgate party, waiting for nature’s big
game, people bring porch chairs and beach umbrellas; they set up
BBQ grills in the back of pickup trucks. On a day without any
noticeable action, a group of sixth-graders tried to rally the
mountain, counting down from 40 to one. Then, jumping with arms
raised, they shouted at the molar-shaped mountain, “ERUPT!”
When I arrived at the visitors’ center, perched
seven and a half miles from the mountain, the observation deck was
thick with tourists. Kids in parkas raced around, a busload of
Japanese tourists took pictures, an older woman with layers of dark
pancake make-up leaned over the edge of the wall and stared out
towards the mountain, saying simply that she’d come here from
Pennsylvania, “to be a part of history.”
There was one
small glitch: We couldn’t see anything. A thick blanket of
gray clouds shrouded St. Helens and the terrain below. There was
less than 100 feet visibility, and for all we knew there could have
been a strip mall on the other side of those clouds. Even so, we
were like crazed teenage fans outside a movie premiere, waiting for
clouds to part and give us a glimpse of the big star.
When St. Helens last erupted in May of 1980, I was only a
4-year-old child in Seattle. But I remember the Time of the
Volcano. My Mom, breast-feeding my newborn brother and worried
about ash-contaminated water, filled our 10-gallon camping jugs and
even the bathtub with water for our personal reservoir.
After the eruption, I carried a film canister full of ash around
for weeks. It was the coolest thing, better than Legos or Barbies;
I would sit in my very pink bedroom and pour that ash out onto my
small palm, to smell the Earth’s insides and feel the soft
gray dust.
When the volcano exploded sideways that May,
it blew south, killing 57 people. It blasted over 230 miles of
forest in just three minutes. Old-growth trees shattered like
glass. Cities like Portland and Vancouver, Wash., were a mess of
closed roads, ash-damaged cars and dismal air quality.
Scientists predict any explosion in the near future will probably
be puny compared to the explosion of 1980, but then again, you
never know. I wonder why we are drawn here, to voluntarily put
ourselves in jeopardy.
Park Service Ranger Todd Cullings,
who has worked at St. Helens for 18 years, thinks it’s
because people want to witness history. Myself, I like being
reminded of how small and insignificant ordinary life can be. I
never even saw the volcano that day. But my friend and I had a
picnic, we listened to a ranger talk about volcanoes, we stood
among the crowd, staring and straining our eyes at the spitting
rain, searching for a glimpse of something bigger than ourselves.
As I looked into that gray abyss, trusting that on the
other side geology was working its slow, steady magic, my heart
lifted.
Rebecca Clarren is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). She writes in Portland,
Oregon.
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