The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (26 page)

There has been much firing to desperate enthusiasm in the last century. An Army pilot, flying through the cloud halos which blow off Rainier’s summit like smoke rings from a cigar, swore he ran into a swarm of flying saucers in 1948. His account, widely publicized but never completely put to rest in the tidy bed of government conclusion, produced the first use of the term Unidentified Flying Object—UFO. Since that time, friends of the extraterrestrial have gathered annually on a summer evening in a meadow at the base of Rainier and linked hands, calling forth the saucers from Out There. Inevitably, they are satisfied. Farther down the mountain, near the damp taverns where out-of-work loggers shoot pool and curse the spotted owl, the New Age movement has set up base. First, Ramtha, the thirty-thousand-year-old spirit who resides inside a young woman with a gift for mass marketing, moved into a million-dollar home in the Nisqually valley. Then Shirley MacLaine bought a house nearby. They both believe the volcano attracts an unusual amount of psychic energy.

I feel today as Winthrop did when he walked the Cascade Crest east of here in August of 1853. Though he would live only another seven years, to his thirty-third birthday—my age on the day I stand atop this peak—the alpenglow of the volcano brought him a hint of eternal life. In that, he was surely ahead of his nature-savaging countrymen when he wrote:

And, studying the light and the majesty of Tacoma, there passed from it and entered into my being, to dwell there evermore by the side of many such, a thought and an image of solemn beauty, which I could thenceforth evoke whenever in the world I must have peace or die. For such emotion years of pilgrimage were worthily spent. If mortal can gain the thoughts of immortality, is not his earthly destiny achieved?

Another generation would pass from the time of Winthrop’s visit to the first successful climb of Rainier. In 1853, he considered the summit unclimbable, a view shared by many. “No foot of man had ever trampled those pure snows. It was a virginal mountain, distant from the possibility of human approach and human inquisitiveness as a marble goddess is from human loves.” But his prophecy on that day came in the form of a command: “Up to Tacoma, or into some such solitude of nature, imaginative men must go, as Moses went to Sinai, that the divine afflatus may stir within them.”

Today, we are but three of six thousand climbers who attempt to walk this crater rim every year, of which about half succeed. I look to the west and see the Puget Sound basin, wherein reside those millions who stare back at us in first light. Beyond are the Olympic Mountains, and farther, the Pacific, shrouded by the blue wall. To the north, Mount Baker and Glacier Peak tower above the spine of the Cascades, two white cones among the jagged edges. To the south, I see Hood and Helens and Adams and Jefferson and even a wisp of Mount Shasta, which last blew ash from its northern California base in 1786. All the majors in the Ring of Fire are visible this morning. I move closer to the north edge of Rainier, where the mountain was cleaved and sliced, losing perhaps a thousand feet of the top some 5,800 years ago. The north wall drops down a straight vertical mile. Weakened by hot volcanic fumes, the upper part of this side of the mountain was shaken loose and then slid away, eventually carrying a half-cubic-mile of mud 45 miles down the valley toward the tidelands where Seattle originated, covering 125 square miles. If a similar event happened today, a half-million people would flee for higher ground. To the natives who lived near the shoreline, the mud storm of long ago fortified the mountain’s position as forbidden high ground, a place for angry gods.

Any doubts that the land is alive and in command of all that lives atop its surface are removed by the view to the south. Still smoking and stuffed with debris, Mount St. Helens, the youngest of all Cascade volcanoes, looks like an ashtray after an all-night party. Denuded, it nonetheless pulses with new life as the dome inside the crater rebuilds. Surveying this lineup when Helens still had its Mount Fuji top, Winthrop wrote:

The dearest charmer of all is St. Helens, queen of the Cascades, queen of Northern America, a fair and graceful volcanic cone. Exquisite mantling snows sweep along her shoulder toward the bristling pines. Sometimes she showers her realms with a boon of light ashes, to notify them that her peace is repose, not stupor, and sometimes she lifts a beacon of tremulous flame by night from her summit.

His view, typically romanticized, erred only in the gender assignment: Helens was not named for a woman, but rather for the British diplomat Lord Alleyne Fitzherbert, Baron St. Helens. Fitzherbert himself never saw the mountain. Baron St. Helens spent most of his years in the Court of Madrid. During his lifetime, and that of Winthrop, Helens erupted on a regular basis, providing an ash-and-fire show powerful enough to keep most settlers out of the valleys immediately below. Different tribes had different names for the peak, but they conveyed the same point. One native name was
Louwala-Clough
, meaning “smoking mountain.” Another was
Tah-one-lat-clah
, “fire mountain.”

Among the other volcanoes in the Ring of Fire, Mount Baker had minor eruptions in 1843, ’54, ’58, ’59, ’70 and then blew an unusual amount of steam and some ash in 1975, causing many a sleepless night in the cities of Vancouver and Bellingham. Glacier Peak, at 10,541 feet just slightly smaller than Baker, exploded with a great burst twelve thousand years ago, sending ash and debris as far as Saskatchewan. Hot springs at the base of Glacier Peak are a token of the heat that courses beneath all that ice. Mount Adams in Washington, and Jefferson, the Three Sisters, Thielsen and McLoughlin in Oregon have been relatively quiet in the eyeblink of geologic time since the arrival of whites. Mount Hood steams intermittently, giving off a sulfur stench to compete with any open sore in the Cascades. But only Mount St. Helens and Lassen Peak, which erupted off and on between 1914 and 1917, have thrown fire to the sky in front of a modern audience. Mount Mazama in Oregon, which lost enough of its top 6,800 years ago to cover much of the West and eventually become a caldera filled with the deepest lake in America, left a volcanic legacy that doesn’t need interpretation to demonstrate its power.

Were it not for volcanoes, it’s doubtful there would be water and atmosphere. They helped to produce a habitable planet. In the early years of the earth’s life, volcanic vents released massive amounts of steam from the interior. Condensed, the steam formed oceans. Over millions of years, ocean algae took carbon dioxide from the primitive atmosphere, and,
through the labor of photosynthesis, released oxygen into the air, creating a breathable blend of gases. On a much smaller scale, this primal act of creation continues today. Like all Cascade volcanoes, St. Helens is a product of the collision of ocean plates and continent, which forces magma and steam up through the summit openings. Seventy-five million years ago, the Cascade Range was still underwater; fossils of that period have been found in rock now high enough to hold a glacier. So many shells cover one place north of Mount Baker, for example, that it’s called Chowder Ridge. As the rest of the land settled down, the volcanic hot points continued to blow, venting magma from below and building new formations above. The fifty thousand square miles of the Columbia Plateau—the vast near-desert in central Washington and Oregon—was created by more than ten million years of intensive volcanic activity. The present peaks of the Cascades are anywhere from a million to twenty-five thousand years old. In that time, they were carved and given their craggy alpine look—the U-shaped valleys and numerous lakes and tarns—by Ice Age glaciers which draped most of the northern edge of present-day America in blue. Puget Sound was buried in an ice sheet four thousand feet thick. The basin’s unveiling is relatively recent; the ice left a mere twelve thousand years ago. St. Helens is about forty thousand years old, an infant compared to Rainier’s million-year age. The cone blown off in the 1980 blast was built up by eruptions since the time of Christ.

The land here is a long way from completed. While Winthrop felt a sense of immortality in the presence of these mountains, the volcanoes also remind us of the planet’s irascibility. Temperate and lush, fertile and flush with bounty from the sea and the alluvial valleys, the land here could all become uninhabitable overnight. I realized this on May 18, 1980—a day that has been seared into the collective psyche here. Suddenly, we realized that the sky could turn dark at noon, and cars could not start because of ash-clogging, and rivers could be buried and forests leveled and lakes displaced, all by something over which we had no control. On May 18, 1980, I felt transitory, a passenger on a short ride in time.

At 8:32 on a clear Sunday morning an earthquake registering 5.1 on the Richter scale shook residents of southwest Washington out of bed. The north side of Mount St. Helens, which had been bulging outward at a rate of six feet a day, exploded with a force said to equal several hundred times the power of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Such comparisons are meaningless, on the whole. Reid Blackburn, a
photographer with a shaggy beard and quick wit, was shooting pictures for
National Geographic
nine miles north of the crater. He took a few snaps, then ran to his car. He was found a few days later, buried and petrified in ash up to his neck. The heat from the blast, more than 680 degrees Fahrenheit, had killed him instantly. Farther down the mountain, David Crockett, Jr., tried to find his way through darkness and choking ash. Speaking into a recorder, the television photographer said, “Oh, dear God … my God! This is hell, hell on earth. Right at this moment I honest to God believe I am dead.” Crockett lived. But fifty-nine people were killed that Sunday morning. The valleys around the mountain are sparsely inhabited; an annual rainfall of about a hundred inches keeps most people away. Logging crews, which during the week were working well within the blast zone, had the day off.

Within a few minutes, the mountain went through three transformations. First, more than half a cubic mile of rock, snow and ice—the entire surface of the mountain’s north face—avalanched at speeds of two hundred miles an hour. Spirit Lake, surrounded by an ancient forest and lodges to house the summer hordes, was raised by two hundred feet; in other spots, the debris piled eight hundred feet. The Toutle River, which flows from this lake that the Cowlitz Indians believed to be a home for the dead, was blocked by a mile-wide dam of debris. Blue went to gray, green went to black, all life was smothered.

A lateral blast followed the avalanche. This explosion carried pulverized pieces of rock, organic material and hot gases at speeds of up to four hundred miles an hour. Imagine a hurricane, blowing at twice the speed of the highest winds ever recorded, with a temperature just under 700 degrees Fahrenheit, and you have some idea of the blast that carried the north side of St. Helens with it. All trees, including firs which had clung to the ground for three centuries, all shrubs, meadows and grass, all deer (more than 5,000), elk (1,500), mountain goats (15), black bears (200), birds and small game (several million), snakes, fish, bees and anything that might later have contributed to new life were wiped out within 150 square miles.

A third phase carried ash to a height of ninety thousand feet, the dark upper ceiling of the stratosphere. The ash darkened the orchard country of eastern Washington, clouded parts of Montana nine hundred miles east, and eventually circled the globe. All told, 540 million tons of ash rained down on more than twenty-two thousand square miles. An estimated 4.7 billion board feet of timber was blown down—an amount equal to the entire annual harvest on all nineteen national forests in the Northwest.
Such are the numbers from one small act in the ongoing formation of the earth.

A few days after the eruption, a helicopter full of reporters started up the Toutle valley on a survey of the carnage. As they flew over the deforested lower slopes, gasps were heard and jaws opened.

“I can’t believe it,” said one reporter. “Everything is gone.”

“Like the surface of the moon,” said another, pointing to gray-covered stumps and creekbeds shaved to bristle. “There’s nothing left standing.”

Their frenzy was interrupted by a reporter from the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
, the only local writer on board.

“This area wasn’t destroyed by the volcano,” he said. “We’re not over the blast zone yet.”

“Oh?”

“That’s a Weyerhaeuser clearcut below.”

Nearly a decade later, I stare down at the lava dome inside the crater of St. Helens. The dome has grown to a height of nine hundred feet, oozing up from the floor, gradually refilling a two-thousand-foot-deep crater. Blue-tinted plumes rise from cracks and fissures; the texture looks like fresh-cooked oatmeal steaming in a bowl. Sometime within the next two hundred years, the volcano will have regained much of its form; these mountains grow fast, especially the young ones. The previous top took just under four hundred years to build. Standing so close to this oozing mass of hot land, I feel as if I am present at the maternity ward of nature: raw earth at birth. A festive mood predominates on top, unlike anything I’ve ever seen on a mountain summit. Two dozen or more people, an assortment of characters, some in costume and drinking wine, have made the long hike up the south side of the snow slope to the new 8,365-foot summit ridge above the crater. We crossed a young forest, walked over light pumice slopes and kick-stepped up the final three thousand feet to reach this sharp-edged apex. Some of the other volcanoes are out in full glory this morning: Rainier just to the north, Adams on the east side, Hood and Jefferson to the south.

Spirit Lake now has a touch of color, but it looks as if it belongs in Nevada—devoid of green, surrounded by lifeless banks of brown and stuffed full of rotting timber. To the south, where the volcano did little damage, is a patchwork of large clearcuts on Forest Service land, as devastated in parts as the mountain valleys cleared by the lateral blast of 1980. Despite all the apparent wounds, the mountain has a relaxed
atmosphere to it, much in the way of Spirit Lake before the eruption. Every day, several hundred people wait in the dark of 2
A.M
. in hopes of receiving the handful of permits issued to climb St. Helens. They are warned about getting too close to the crater rim, warned about the explosive potential, warned about staying out of the crater, warned about disturbing the National Volcanic Monument. Helens seems too healthy again for such talk. Like many newcomers to the Northwest, the mountain has remade itself—the volcano as metaphor.