Boom goes the Mountain

Maybe I'm the weird one... I guess it's totally possible. But I prefer to think it's because I didn't grow up with it and go through the whole story the way the others did. But I still see it in the distance, especially on days like yesterday when the weather is unseasonable clear and sunny (although colder than normal by several degrees).

   *** I was walking back into the building, up the deteriorated cement steps, flanked by the overgrown shrubs, in the shadow of the smelly brick building with the bad plumbing... I had just come from the mess hall and was on my way to my room in the barracks when Doug and Jamie walked out the front door and Doug said "Hey, you wanna go fly over Mt. St. Helens with us? Come on... Cooley just bailed, said he doesn't want to go... come on man, it will be awesome!"***

  Mt. St. Helens is in southwest Washington, about 50 miles away as a bird flies. I vaguely remember the days in my freshman year of high school when it erupted in May 1980. At that time, I don't think I could have told you that Portland and Seattle were the two closest major cities without looking at a map. I don't even think I actually saw the pictures of the eruption on television until several days later, and then I don't even think I realized the full magnitude of what happened until 7 years later, when I got the opportunity of a lifetime.

  It was June 1987. I had recently transferred duty stations from Schofield Barracks, Hawaii to Fort Lewis Wa. At that time, Fort Lewis was thought of, at least by the troops, as a holding station for two things... people who are due to go over to Korea, or people who just got back from Germany. I actually requested the assignment there, otherwise I probably would have been stationed somewhere else. But I ended up in a transport company that had about as little significance as a military unit could have. Even the company officers, including the CO and XO told us that if our whole unit were wiped off the map by the enemy it wouldn't even make the local news. We were nowhere near wartime, I was getting out of the military myself in just 6 more weeks, and I had been keeping a short timers calendar for years already. I think I started counting down from 1000 days.

  There were hoards of losers and no-go's in our battalion. For some of them, this was their first duty station after getting out of basic training and AIT schooling. This was the only thing they knew of the military, and looking back on it knowing what I know now, I feel sorry for them. It really was much more appealing in other places. Two of those guys that lived in the same building I did were Doug and Jamie. They were both 19, had just graduated high school about a year earlier, and they both had zero interest in making any improvements in their military experience. Thankfully, Jamie's parents had the resources to do something very cool for him.

  Ft. Lewis and McChord Air Force Base were side by side at the time, and different stations. Today they are combined and have some fancy name... but I digress...

  Jamie's parents wanted him to get something out of his military experience, and they did some research on their own. And what they decided to do was too cool! There was a flight school on the Ft. Lewis base so soldiers could learn to fly airplanes. Small top wing, 4 passenger prop driven planes, and classes were twice a week in the evenings, and schedules were flexible enough to not interfere with deployment trips and such. Jamie's parents enrolled him and on this particular night, on my way back from the mess hall, Jamie's instructor was taking us on a trip over Mt. St. Helens, which was just south and east of us. I had seen it a couple times from I-5 on my way to Portland, but this particular night ended up changing my life.

  The weather was perfect on this particular evening. We arrived at the airfield and met the instructor whose first words were "You guys ready?"  We wasted no time getting on the plane, which was awesome, since I was antsy on the inside like a little kid going to see Santa. I seated myself behind Jamie, on the left side of the plane, which proved to be the better of the two sides, and had the better view for the route we took. The engine fired up and the whole thing shook like crazy... I remember thinking it was actually okay if this thing crashed, as long as we made it to see the volcano first. The interior of the plane was loud too... Jamie and his instructor both had headsets on and were talking back and forth to each other a lot, but Doug and I couldn't hear a thing. Once we got in the air, we quickly resorted to tapping each other on the shoulder and pointing to things as opposed to yelling at each other.

  The plane’s wings bounced around as we climbed in altitude. A small single engine prop driven plane climbs much differently than a jetliner does, and our trip had some moments that probably should have scared me. The shaking and rattling of the plane made no obvious concerns to Jamie or his instructor, so I did my best to ignore it all too. I also remember it being much colder in the air than it was on the ground. Not uncomfortably cold, but much cooler than I was expecting it to be.

  It didn't take long for us to get to the northern edges of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest where the destruction from the volcano's blast was clearly evident. From the air, it was as if someone drew a line on the ground and commanded the destruction to not cross this line... and it didn't.

  On one side of the line, the trees were tall, green, and looked just like the ones we had been flying over the last 45 minutes. On the south side of the line... it was a completely different story. The landscape was unlike anything you could possibly imagine. The trees, some 4 or 5 feet in diameter, were blown over on their sides... void of all branches, stripped of life and all signs it ever had any. The trees laid side by side like toothpicks, all in the same direction, and all appearing to be the victim of something more massive and devastating than anyone has ever encountered. Nothing is green. Even though the blast was 7 years earlier, nothing showed a single sign of life having ever been there. The entire surface of the one-time forest was gray and looked like the bottom of a giant ashtray.

  The images I saw on the news 7 years earlier did not do this place justice.

  There was no music playing here.

  There was nothing that resembled the peaceful outdoors.

  There was no flora and fauna.

  There was nothing harmonious.

  The landscape told the story of just how bad it really was.

  After several minutes once we crossed "the line", I realized Doug and I were no longer tapping and pointing... the instructor wasn't telling us where to look, not telling Jamie where to go, not telling us where we were... he's seen this reaction in people before. People being overcome with the awe and he understood the process their brain has to go through to sort this out. We all just looked. Well, Jamie flew and looked... but the rest of us just looked. We were still quite away from the crater of Mt. St. Helens, which was directly south of us as we came to a strange, flat plain of logs and debris which pointed all different directions. It was Spirit Lake, and the trees which littered its surface were all flat and on one plane, like you would expect the surface of a lake to look like. But there was no sign of water at all. Nothing. In 1987, Spirit Lake was still much more like a child's mud pie. It was muddy, slimy, and full of tree trunks that looked like toothpicks floating in a glass of chocolate milk.

  We went around the western side of the mountain and counter clockwise around the south of the crater. (Thus why my left side seating choice proved to be the optimal one.) We still didn't say much to each other. We looked. We stared. We looked at the steaming mound in the crater where the small mound of lava had already started to create a new mountain top for this peak which lost nearly 1/4 mile of it’s vertical reach just earlier that decade. We looked in awe at the hole left behind by the near one full cubic mile of land that had disappeared in the landslide/eruption that fateful May 1980 Sunday morning.

  It took several minutes to make our way around the crater and start to head north towards Mt. Ranier. We circled that mountain too that night... but I don't even remember anything about it other than the fact that we went there. We still didn't say much to each other. We all just looked. We were all still speechless by the sight of all those downed trees, and I know that for me, I still couldn't wrap my head around what it took to do that.

  Yesterday was one of those unusual November days in Oregon where it was actually clear enough to see Mt. St. Helens from my home near Portland. It was covered with fresh snow and was a clean, majestic white, even with its broken, topless appearance. Most don't even remember what it used to look like. I never saw it the way it used to look, only pictures and the videos I've seen in countless documentaries. When I first moved here, 20+ years ago, the local media did stories of one sort or another every year on the eruptions anniversary. They've dwindled to almost nothing now, unless it's an anniversary that is a multiple of 5 or 10.

  I tried to take some pictures of the mountain yesterday, to send to friends and family afar... I didn't get any good ones, nothing worth saving anyway. But that mountain still makes an impression on me. So much so that 33 years later, I'm taking an hour out of my life to write about it. On a Friday.

  If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it.... Wait a second... What if there are tens of thousands of trees getting blown over?

  Seven years later... they produced a unique silence.