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Outside Magazine February 2005

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Mount St. Helens
Eruptus Interruptus (cont.)


	The virtual volcano in Castle Rock (Photograph by Sian Kennedy)

I LEARNED IN GRADE SCHOOL that volcanoes were pagan phenomena that afflicted barefoot villagers in places like Hawaii and Indonesia. Now we had our own volcano, erupting amid lumberjacks and shitkickers and guys named Harry and Dave. The inhabitants fled its destruction not in grass skirts but in work boots.

Mount St. Helens simmered on through much of the eighties and went dormant in 1991. Her handlers seized the downtime to reinvent her as a repentant sinner who really just wanted our love, a celebrity whisked away to rehab after a public tantrum. The scientists served as therapists, assuring us that she was better now. They kept the blast zone tightly regulated to study our girl's recovery, while, along the brand-new Spirit Lake Highway, five visitor centers sprang up to interpret the mountain like a talk-show circuit, complete with a giant-screen theater where MT ST HELENDS ERUPTS HERE EVERY 45 MINS.

While she slept, America changed. In the quarter-century since her big eruption, we went giddy in our quest to be entertained. We got Internet, cable, cell phones, and 24-hour news. We saw riots sparked by home movies and watched the world recoil from digital snapshots taken in an Iraqi prison and e-mailed home to friends. For a single indicator of how much America has changed in the past 24 years, consider this: In 1980, when Mount St. Helens delivered the most spectacular show of the century, nobody—but nobody—got it on video.

This time it's different. When Mount St. Helens reawakened in September, she was not the biggest or most dangerous; but she was far and away the most closely watched volcano on the planet. She was America's Volcano, and America was coming to greet her.

All through October they arrive, but with the walking trails closed, there's little to do but pay a few bucks to check out the Coldwater Ridge Visitors Center, where a creepy diorama features a mannequin dressed like a ranger lecturing tourist mannequins about nature—you know, that place outside the building where you're not allowed to walk. The real action is out at the tailgate bazaar. Parked on the shoulder of the highway, a family from Portland wheels out a propane grill and sells burgers, brats, and candy bars. Another guy is hawking baggies of ash left over from 1980. "Back then I sold enough one-dollar baggies to buy a new Ford Fairlane," he says. This year the price has inflated to four bucks.

Vivian Wilder, who looks about 60, and her son Clifford Reyes, about 40, are sitting in lawn chairs beside a station wagon. They've driven up from Corvallis, Oregon, and they're prepared to stay as long as it takes. They have bicycles. They have a mattress. They've got chicken grilling on a barbecue in the shape of a football, and they've been camped out for two nights in the rain.

"At first they were saying the rain was making it hiccup," says Vivian, "when it got down into that red stuff—"

"Magma," said her son.

"Right. Magna. But now I think maybe the rain has drowned it out. Get on the stick!" Vivian hollers toward the volcano, stamping her foot slightly. "I didn't come up all this way for nothing!"

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