May take a minute to load... please be patient :-)


The Day the Sky Fell by Peter S. Felknor

 

 

For several years I made my home in western Washington state, in the shadow of some of the country’s biggest volcanos; at one point, when I lived in Everett, I could see Mount Baker and Glacier Peak out my living room window and even Mount Rainier if I cared to crawl out onto the roof.

 

One unusually cold morning in January I was on my way home from work when I topped a hill and saw an immense cloud of steam rising from Mount Baker. I pulled my car over to the shoulder and gaped in awe. Although I was perfectly aware that these perpetually snow-shrouded, magnificent summits looming head and shoulders above the rest of the Cascade Range were, in fact, volcanos, I never really thought of them as volcanos. Like the vast majority of other Northwesterners, I had learned to appreciate the stately grandeur of these peaks and the many opportunities they offered as recreational wonderlands. They helped to make the Pacific Northwest a special part of the world.

 

Even though the cloud I saw above Mount Baker was nothing more than steam condensing in the frigid airand even though I was familiar with the hot springs and steam vents on the slopes of the mountainI was now suddenly and rather rudely reminded of the mountain’s volcanic nature. It was more than just that blob of strawberry ice cream that caught the smoky rays of the setting sun, or the icy monolith that guarded the head of the valley on frosty winter mornings. Mount Baker was an active volcano… and it was only sixty miles from my front door.

 

**********

In March of 1980 I moved back to Spokane, more than two hundred miles east of the Cascade Range and ostensibly out of the reach of any volcanic activity. And by the time I relocated, it was no longer Mount Baker and its steam vents attracting attention from scientists and volcano-watchers. Sudden and much more ominous activity had commenced on Mount St. Helens, a remote volcano in southwest Washington renowned for its symmetrical, Fuji-like beauty. Mini-earthquakes known as harmonic tremors were being registered dailya sign that magma was moving upward in the chambers beneath the volcano. During the week I moved, the state Department of Transportation closed off White Pass on US Highway 12, diverting cross-state traffic south to the Columbia Gorge or north to Interstate 90. There was talk that St. Helens could “blow” at any minute, although it was hard for most Washingtonians to imagine anything more than a big steam cloud, or maybe a couple of pretty streams of molten magma, resulting from such a “blow.”

 

By mid-May there was still lots of scientific chatter about an impending cataclysm on St. Helens, but it wasn’t making the front pages of the paper anymore and most people, myself included, had pretty much forgotten about it. The DOT was being pressured to reopen White Pass and early-season recreationists were flocking to Gifford Pinchot National Forest surrounding the flanks of the uneasy volcano. There was almost a sense of merriment, as if we were all about to be treated to a harmless little spectacle of nature that would make for more tourism dollars and cool photo-ops.

 

Sunday, May 18 was the most gorgeous spring day we’d had “east of the mountains,” as the part of Washington where it doesn’t rain every other day and snows in the winter is known. I had slept in; my girlfriend and I were planning to drive up to the Idaho panhandle for a long-overdue visit with one of my college buddies. If the weather was sufficiently warm, Joe had been talking about taking us out in his boat on Priest Lake. I grinned as I made my morning coffee. It was a hell of a day for a boat ride.

 

I took my coffee and went out to read the paper on the back porch. I hadn’t been there long when it seemed as if something had dimmed the sun, just a little bit, like a stray puff of cumulus.

 

And when I glanced up, that’s when I saw the cloud. It was coming from the west, whitish-gray on top, solid gray toward the middle, and an ugly black toward the ground. Having grown up in the Midwest and seen my fair share of spring storms, I was pretty certain that that was what we were in for. But the meteorology student in me wasn’t buying it. The conditions just weren’t right for an outbreak of severe weather.

 

I went inside and called to Lynn, “Looks like the boat trip’s a scrub. We’ve got a big storm coming.”

 

“A big storm?” Lynn was incredulous. She stepped out onto the porch and took a long, slow look at the cloud. “Nah,” she said. “That’s not a storm. That’s Mount St. Helens.”

 

“Yeah, right. We’re three hundred miles from Mount St. Helens.”

 

Lynn had already gone inside and turned on the radio. I followed her. The report was spotty, but it was a lady in Yakima some 200 miles to our southwest calling in to the news station. The part I caught was, “The ash started falling at about nine o’clock this morning.”

 

“Ash,” I said.

 

Lynn said, “I told ya.”

 

“This is nuts,” I muttered as we went back out onto the porch to wait for whatever was coming next.

 

**********

 

We’d first seen the cloud at a little past noon; by one p.m. it was almost as dark as night. The news, sketchy at first, was now coming thick and fast: Mount St. Helens hadn’t just erupted, it had exploded. The doomsayers from the U.S. Geological Survey had been vindicated. We were witnessing the greatest volcano disaster in American history.

 

Sharing equal news time with the ongoing eruption itself was, bizarrely enough, speculation as to what had become of Harry Truman [no relation to the late President], a flinty old eccentric who ran a lodge at Spirit Lake at the base of St. Helens. Truman and his coterie of cats had refused to evacuate the area, even after the USGS had pleaded with him to leave in the days just before the eruption. There was a lot of concern being expressed on the radio for lovable, crotchety Harryeven people who promised to “get up there and check up on him, make sure he’s okay.” But it was obvious from the sheer volume of ash that had drifted over us, three hundred miles from Spirit Lake, that nothing whatsoever would be found of Harry Truman, and nothing ever was. Spirit Lake had become a boiling cauldron of mud. Harry’s lodge was probably vaporized within seconds.

 

Even at a considerable distance, though, there really isn’t much you can do during a major volcanic eruption. You can’t go to the basement like you would during a tornado. You can’t drive to higher ground like you would during a flood. You can’t board up the windows like you would before a hurricane. In point of fact, you’re kind of stuck.

 

We peered out the living room windows. It was dark, and not only dark ; it was an all-encompassing darkness that seemed to swallow even the light from streetlamps and passing cars. “Well,” Lynn sighed, “it’s only silica, in any event. We can’t get killed by breathing a little bit of it. Let’s go back outside.” And as we stepped through the front door, someone on the radio was saying are you sure it isn’t poisonous? Like, do we need gas masks or something?

 

The scene on Francis Street was utterly surreal. People stood around in little knots, not sure what to do, and one lady was marching back and forth yelling that it was the End Of The World and that we’d better all say our prayers. I had to admit: It certainly looked like the end of the world, considering that it wasn’t even midafternoon and it was totally pitch dark and you could see the ash coming down like ultra-fine snow when you looked up at the streetlights. There was a vague odor of biblical brimstone. Little eddies of ash swirled through the gutters.

 

There were a lot of cars in the parking lot of Snoopy’s Tavern, over at the corner of Francis and Nevada. Snoopy’s was the nearest thing to a neighborhood hangout in our corner of northeast Spokane, and Lynn and I had spent many an evening playing pool there. But Snoopy’s was more crowded now than it ever was on a Saturday night. We elbowed our way inside.

 

“Free beer!” giggled a man we’d never seen before, just inside the door. “They’re serving free beer and rail drinks!”

It took us a few minutes to squeeze our way up to the bar, but when we got there our free beers were already waiting for us. We were late arrivals. The mood in the tavern was apocalyptic and tipsy, a rather heady combination. The jukebox was cranked up, like it always was (the usual back-and-forth between country and hard rock), but the management had turned the television up just as loud and about two thirds of the revelers were trying to watch. Even though we were too far away to make out much of the commentary, it was clear from the flashing news pictures that we were seriously screwed. Pilots were filming the eruption, still very much in progress and looking like those paintings of Vesuvius hurling doom down upon Herculaneum and Pompeii. We recognized a shot of Interstate 90 somewhere out in the Columbia Basin; cars were stranded everywhere. Then there was what looked to be a road grader or a snowplow moving huge drifts of ash. “Ritzville, WA,” it said on the screen. Ritzville was about sixty miles southwest of Spokane.

 

The ash was still coming down outside. New people were straggling into Snoopy’s, not for the free beer, but for a reason that in hindsight was perfectly obvious: their cars were conking out because ash was choking their air and fuel filters. And you didn’t have to think very long or very hard to imagine the kind of additional friction ultra-fine silica fragments could inflict upon the moving parts of an engine.

 

Well, we’d seen about enoughand were still seeing it, thanks to the blaring televisionto know that life as we knew it was going to be seriously disrupted for a long, long time. It was midafternoon, St. Helens was still spewing ash into the stratosphere and it turned out that the city of Spokane didn’t have any emergency plans for a volcanic eruption. The thing to do, most of us in Snoopy’s Tavern agreed, was to sit tight for the time being and drink more free beer.

 

**********

 

That was the summer that wasn’t.

 

There was a kind of odd humor to the first couple of weeks after the eruption. The fire department insisted that everyone wear dust masks when they went outdoors; you had to report to your local engine company and pick up a supply of dust masks right away. People with asthma and other respiratory ailments were encouraged to go someplace else for the time being (that seemed like a good idea to a lot of the rest of us too).

 

The city issued an edict that everyone had to hose the average one- to one-and-a-half-inch ashfall off their sidewalk and driveway. So everyone did. A day later, the city sewers were paralyzed by millions of tons of high-density sludge. New edict: Anyone caught hosing ash off of anything would be fined a great deal of money. So I tenderly scraped a Folger’s coffee can full off my little Honda Civic with my bare hands. Not like there was any rush; no one in their right mind was going to drive their car anywhere.

 

Ash got into everything, from your bedclothes to the food you ate, and there wasn’t much you could do about it. If you tried to vacuum, your vacuum cleaner would be dead within the day. If you swept, you pretty much just moved the ash from one place to another since it was finer than the finest flour (if you got it on your hands, it was nearly impossible to get it off ). You wanted to open your windows to let that dead, dusty smell out of your house… but if you did, invariably, more ash found its way inside.

 

The summer months were inordinately cloudy and cool because of the amount of dust in the atmosphere, so even a month later when it became possible to drive out of town if you carried a spare air filter or two, there wasn’t much point because it was too cold to go swimming or waterskiing and if you went for a hike in the mountains, you needed to wear a parka.

 

People on the Coast, as they were wont to do, laughed at their country cousins on the other side of the mountains (we lived in the newly-minted state of “Ashington”). We Spokanites muttered to ourselves as we beat our way along the gray sidewalks in our windbreakers. Snoopy’s Tavernand every other tavern in town—did a brisk business. It was hard to find a silver lining in any of this, until months later when the wheat harvest was in and it turned out the wheat farmers had had one of their best years ever, owing to the ash’s considerable properties as a soil conditioner.

 

We were deliriously happy for the wheat farmers.

 

 

 

Image credit: Austin Post, US Geological Survey

 

 

Want to Leave a Comment?

 Name / Article Commenting On:

              Your E-mail Address:


Comments:
                           

                                                                                                  

                                                              View Comments

 

 

 


 • Running Out... of Control The Airlines' Flameout

 • About Face, Forward March • Rural Medicine's Medicaid Woes

• American Health Care: What Can Be Done Back Cover
Home