 | "May 18th, 1980 - Reliving the Blast" is an excerpt from Life Bits and Other Chunks: Memoirs of an untrained man, by Stephen L. Wilson. Available at Smashwords. All rights reserved. © 2013-2021. |
In March of 1980, the mountain moved. Not the major eruption it is famous for. Not at first. At first, steam started to spout out of the top of the peak, and a "bulge" began to form on the north side, I remember hearing. News was spreading fast, and I remember a story about an old man named Harry Truman who lived on Spirit Lake and refused to move. In an interview I saw him say that he would die on the mountain, if that was his fate. At the time, these strong words were a bit alarming to me. Death and all, I guess.
I was in third grade at the time, at a new school in Vancouver, Washington. It was up on a hill, and when I was sitting on the bus, my view of the mountain was unimpeded and beautiful to my young world. The most vivid memory in my mind's eye is of a light cyan, almost transparent blue sky gradually deepening to indigo in the distance, creating a vignette and backdrop for a magnificent, clear mountain about four inches high in the school bus window, with a continual tall mushroom of pure white steam above it. The cone was almost perfect, and I later learned that the shape and contour of Mt. Saint Helens was widely compared to Japan's famous Mt. Fuji.
After a couple of months, the mountain was just a bit of common news by that point, with current events plogging along, continually updating headlines and news stories. Oh, I think that maybe I remember some bits and pieces. There were earthquakes all the time, and the bulge became a dome, which was always being watched as it kept growing. Maybe in April or early May she burped or something, because I remember looking out of the bus window and the dazzling mountain was stained a stoic, uncompromising gray. The steam cloud was more ominous, and I remember missing the pretty white perfection of nature's creation, not realizing that the most amazing beauty, awe and spectacle was yet to come!
Wikipedia says this about the morning of May 18th, 1980:
"On May 18, a second earthquake, of magnitude 5.1, triggered a massive collapse of the north face of the mountain. It was the largest known debris avalanche in recorded history...For more than nine hours, a vigorous plume of ash erupted, eventually reaching 12 to 16 miles (20 to 27 km) above sea level. The plume moved eastward at an average speed of 60 miles per hour (100 km/h) with ash reaching Idaho by noon. Ashes from the eruption were found collecting on top of cars and roofs the next morning as far as the city of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada...By about 5:30 p.m., the vertical ash column declined in stature, and less severe outbursts continued through the night and for the next several days...The removal of the north side of the mountain reduced St. Helens' height by about 1,300 feet (400 m) and left a crater 1 mile (1.6 km) to 2 miles (3.2 km) wide and 0.5 miles (800 m) deep."
I felt that earthquake. I was sitting on the porch, reading the Sunday comics. I felt a "growling" type sensation as I heard a low, distant grinding noise. It lasted several seconds, and the porch was tremoring. It didn't feel like the "rolling earthquakes" I hear about in California. It felt more like a small, steady shaking, fast but short motion that became stronger, to where my bare feet could feel the activity. Something like, if you can imagine, sitting on a large brick or rock as it is slowly being dragged in the street behind a car. And then it stopped, after about ten seconds or so.
I rushed into the kitchen to tell my Mom, who was making strawberry jam. I asked her if she felt that, but she didn't. She seemed pretty busy, and I had to go. I was supposed to meet a friend of mine, who ironically shared the same name, with a different middle name. We went to school together, were on the same baseball team and were even in the same cub scout troop for a while. We were going to meet at Fred Meyer and spend our change on some Brach's candy before riding over to the old school to play some baseball in its run-down, gravelly field.
I had a black bike, with a chain guard that said "Hot Stuff," and there were flames all along the face of it. I slid my mitt onto my handlebars and grabbed my bat, which I carried. Fred Meyer was only a few minutes by bike, and I knew my friend would be there already. I was running late!
I met him just outside the store entrance. There weren't any bike racks then. In those days, you just chained your bike to a pillar or post, like cowboys used to do with horses. In our case, we didn't have chains, so we brought our bikes in with us. Nobody said anything to us about it as we bagged our candy, so it must have been okay. I bought some of the chewy nougat cubes with gum drops sliced into them and some butterscotch hard candy, if memory serves me.
As we walked our bikes out of the store, munching on our candy, what befell our astounded eyes took some time to process and comprehend. In the direction of the mountain was a billowing of gray clouds, roiling and building, quickly but softly puffing up and out; roiling, roiling. As the churning gray mass built, the sun was shining on the left side of the eruption, creating a dynamic and dramatic shading from light gray to almost black. As the blast continued to mount, these tricks of light were changing everywhere in the ash cloud, as the eruption continued to form.
Because of the intensity and friction, lightning could be seen all over the freakish cloud. The biggest and most insane lightning I have ever seen! Some would travel like spider-beasts, along the side of this now massive cloud, scrambling from the base all along the face, only to disappear at the top like some cheesy rope-climbing stunt performer. Other lightning blasts were forceful, giant bolts, stabbing out as if Zeus himself were administering the strikes. The oddest thing, looking back, is that there was no sound. This beauty and awe was unraveling itself before my very being, and here I was, not hearing a thing. Apparently we were too close to the blast; there was some kind of effect where the noise was projected beyond a certain point, and we were inside that range.
My buddy and I looked at each other, and without a word, we sped off in different directions to our domiciles and sanctuaries.
After that, I don't recall too much. I know that for the rest of the day, the mountain kept spewing ash that got dark and stayed dark. Since we lived on the "backside" of the blast, and the wind was blowing to the east, we didn't see too much ash compared to some other places. There was maybe a couple of inches of ash, and it covered everything. People were wearing masks, but not everyone. I don't remember wearing one.
I guess my sister must have been a baby, because my brother and I filled baby food jars with the ash. I don't know what ever became of those. My step-dad worked at a PVC plant, and brought home some T-shaped plastic pipe about an inch in diameter that hooked up to a garden hose, so that you could spray the ash off of the driveway and walkways. The fine particulate matter of the ash also clogged AC units and gummed up the works on some vehicles. I remember hearing about scientists who died like crispy critters, and it made me sad.
When it was all said and done, we didn't get nearly the ash that folks in eastern Washington and Idaho received, but the front-row seat was awesome! When I heard that the ash cloud circled the Earth several times, not only was I impressed, it convinced me that the world is round.
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