Under the Mountain

The Disaster Journals, Part 3

By all measures, I’m a very lucky person, and yet my proximity to disaster has been frequent, even excessive. It’s as if destiny has decided it wants a journalist on hand for some of its more spectacular catastrophes, and I’ve been available.

I grew up in the Midwest, where tornadoes occasionally hopscotched through town, but otherwise, it’s a pretty placid environment. Moving out west is where things went sideways. I moved to Portland, Oregon, after college, and on clear days we could see the slumpy outline of Mt. St. Helens to the north. Unlike the sharp-peaked Mt. Hood, which we could also see, Mt. St. Helens had a rounded, gentle appearance; it always reminded me of a scoop of cottage cheese on a luncheon plate.

Photo by Laura Matthews on Unsplash

That it was a volcano and not a scoop of cottage cheese seemed like an irrelevant technicality, until 1980, when the mountain began to burp and pop, as its molten innards started to churn. Still, it was hard to believe a volcano would erupt in the continental United States: wasn’t that more of an ancient-world Pompeii sort of thing?

I was camping in eastern Oregon with a group of friends, sitting in a hot springs out of the range of any radio signal, when another group of campers arrived and told us the mountain had erupted and that hot lava was coursing through the streets of downtown Portland. Until we drove somewhere we could hear the news, several hours later, we pictured our houses melted, the city incinerated.

We finally learned that the rumor of the lava flow was just that, wild rumor, but half of the mountain had indeed blown off, with atomic force. That day the wind was favoring Portland, and the ash drifted northward, away from the city. But a few days later, the mountain erupted again, sending up a thick black trunk of ash spangled with microscopic shards of silica, and the whole city came out to watch as the plume, so dense that it looked concrete, bent gently in the breeze and then loosed its load on Portland.

At that particular moment, I was in a movie theater, watching the seven-hour long Hans Jürgen Syberberg film “Our Hitler”, a bleak, terrifying meditation on the rise and fall of the Nazi leader. Cosseted in the dark theater, we had no idea what was going on with the mountain. At intermission, we stepped out of the theater for fresh air. Instead, we walked into a snowfall of corrosive ash, piling into little drifts and swirls. Police cars crawled up the street, barking orders over their loudspeakers to stay inside, to avoid breathing, to not drive, to keep away from the ash. The film, with its grim images of the Reichstag fire and a raging Hitler had put us all in an apocalyptic mood, and now we had stepped into it playing out in real time, a moonscape and a gentle, whitish, murderous drizzle. It felt like the end of the world, and for a while, it was.

In the next Wordy Bird: Me and the Northridge earthquake.

Thanks for reading. Special thanks to my many new subscribers and especially those of you who have signed up for paid subscriptions. You make writing Wordy Bird possible, and a pleasure. If you haven’t yet signed up for a paid subscription, please consider it; that’s how the sausage gets made.

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xSusan