The Occasional Odd Crop

The Occasional Odd Thought

Mount St. Helens

For today's 30th anniversary of Mount St. Helens' big eruption, Boston.com's The Big Picture posted a fantastic collection of photos. I lived in Vancouver, Wash., in 1980 and watched the eruption from a schoolyard a few blocks north of our house. So many memories:

-- My dad and our neighbors using a fire hose to wash the volcanic ash off our streets. I had a cast on my leg from some recent knee surgery, so I couldn't help.

-- Dust masks hanging from everybody's rear-view mirror for months.

-- Reid Blackburn, a photographer for The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, who was camping and shooting pictures near the mountain and died in the eruption.

-- President Carter saying "the moon looks like a golf course" compared to the devastation in the blast zone. Paul Stenkamp, a friend of the family, worked for the Forest Service and got to meet Carter. Mrs. Stenkamp was tickled that the president told her husband to call him Jimmy.

-- Feeling terrible for the people in Eastern Washington, whose towns were inundated by volcanic ash. At the same time, feeling thankful the wind wasn't blowing our way.

-- A cranky old guy named Harry Truman who refused to leave his cabin near Spirit Lake. "I'd die in a week" in the outside world, he said a few days before the eruption, when everybody knew what was coming. Harry died on May 18, 1980. Naturally, somebody wrote a song about him, what Dad called "a tribute to bad judgment." Today, he'd have Facebook fan pages.

-- The most haunting video footage I've ever seen (by a guy who got caught in the ash cloud, kept his camera going and narrated as he walked toward the only speck of light he could see. "I really believe I am dead," he said at one point. He got out alive).

Those pictures brought it all back.

I've been to Mount St. Helens a couple of times in the past few years, and the area has rebounded nicely. Take a look at this slide show from National Geographic.