By Rick Stanton
I grew up and lived a lot of my life in the Southwest Washington town of Longview.
One day, in May of 1980, my phone rings. It was my Mom.
“Honey, I think something really bad just happened.”
While she was at the kitchen sink, she heard and saw the explosion that was the Mount St. Helen’s eruption.
Spirit Lake was gone, as was the venerable old coot, Harry Truman. Not to mention everything I remember about that glorious temple to Mother Nature.
I feel bad for people who never experienced it. As a kid, I water skied there, I caught big, fat trout there and I camped there.
In fact, my last memory of camping there was when I was around 23 years old. My friends, Gene, Mike and Jerry, and I hiked up to about five miles above Spirit Lake.
It was a one-night camp over, highlighted by a bear sniffing around our tent in the dark, and waking up in the morning to find we didn’t have milk for our cereal, so we had Wheaties with beer. When you’re 23, beer is the first thing you buy in preparation for a camping trip.
I can remember being in a rowboat in the middle of the lake and looking down, God knows how many feet, and being able to see the bottom. I never have been anywhere else in my life where I’ve seen water that clear and clean.
The eruption broke my heart. That place was so special it really is difficult to explain.
The violence was hard to comprehend. A park ranger who knew me and my Dad told us that, 40 miles away, there were evergreen needles stuck in the sides of other trees, like knives that had been thrown from a few feet.
Two years later, I returned to assess the carnage. I literally sobbed for several minutes.
It was an epic eco-horror story—the deadliest eruption in U.S. history. God forbid anything like that ever happens again. When Ma Nature is pissed off, man doesn’t stand a chance, as evidenced by COVID-19, too.
My Mom was right, something really bad had happened. But it didn’t erase the special memories and pictures in my mind of the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.
Anniversaries of indelible events in one’s life can be tough. Forty years ago is one of those.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYla6q3is6w