The mental landscape of Mt. St. Helens

Gather us together - any of us that lived here on that sunny blue-sky day in May 1980 - and we'll tell you where we were, what we were doing the day "the mountain" blew.

Twenty-five years ago today, she changed the way we thought about our landscape as dramatically as she rearranged the landscape itself. We can no longer take these snowy white gods for granted, we were told in no uncertain terms.

Before that year, of course, Mt. St. Helens wasn't "the mountain," but just one of several that dotted the view, along with Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood - Loo-wit, Pahtoe, and Wy'east in Native American legend.

Loo-wit was a magic mountain of slow time - berry picking in the spring and summer and a cool mountain lake for swimming. She of the generous fires. She of youth and beauty - the prettiest of the mountains, it was always said.

It was jagged Hood - Wy'east - that had been grumbling longer, with little quakes now and then just to let us know he was sleeping, not dead. According to legend, Wy'east was one of the great spirits grumbling, quarreling sons who made the ground shake and hurled rocks at each other. Covered with skiers, painted in Portland landscapes, Hood was the mountain everyone said would one day blow. He was the one we feared.

Loo-wit - St. Helens - was the peacemaker, the homely old woman granted eternal beauty. Loo-wit, less developed and less visited than Mt. Hood, we took for granted.

But in the spring of 1980, St. Helens woke up, rocking and fuming, sending us smoke signals that something big was going to happen. The local news ran daily updates from her press conferences. Geologists issued warnings.

She had been at this for a few months - long enough for it all to become kind of a nervous joke. In fact, we joked about it that Sunday morning, May 18.

In Lyle, Wash., a little town tucked in where the Klickitat meets the Big River, it was Pioneer Days - the annual parade and picnic celebration. On a plateau above town, Gail Farris, our 4-H leader, was orchestrating barrel racing and pole-bending events from the little booth in the open air arena, while we waited our turn in the field outside.

I don't remember any sound - distant thunder if anything. The first thing I recall is Gail reading a report that Mt. St. Helens had had a major eruption, and we all made a joke. Nervous laughter. The event went on. I remember thinking about volcanoes and what an eruption looked like. The only kind I'd ever seen were Hawaiian volcanoes - fountains of lava. I remembered scenes of scientists taking samples a few feet from the lava rivers. I didn't think we'd be close enough to feel any effect.

It was finally my turn at pole bending. I remember whipping around the final pole to face west, toward the finish line. I saw it then - like the biggest thunderhead I could imagine, only dark, dark gray, and low to the ground. It was so massive, so muscular - a mountain in the sky.

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