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Outside Magazine February 2005

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Mount St. Helens
Eruptus Interruptus (cont.)


	God only knows! Lloyd Anderson, proprietor of the Seven Wonders Museum, in Toutle, Washington (Photograph by Sian Kennedy)

WHEN MOUNT ST. HELENDS REFUSES to perform on cue, most of us leave. Even the diehards pack up their lawn chairs as visitation tapers down to normal levels. I'm certainly tired of waiting. The longer I stay, the more the object of our fascination appears like a grizzly in a zoo: big and impressive, to be sure, but made tawdry by the throngs of gawkers. Maybe if I want to really see the thing, I'll have to get farther away.

I backtrack off the Spirit Lake Highway and drive around the mountain to the south side, where a lone sheriff's deputy patrols the unpopulated roads. There are no visitor centers here, only hunters: a trio of muzzleloaders eating lunch in Jack's, the restaurant that houses the mountain's official climber's register. Deeper in the woods I find the Eagle's Cliff General Store, a place with no cable, phone, Internet, or newspaper delivery—off the energy grid and out of cell-phone range. Surely the proprietor has some pure, spiritual connection to the awakened giant? No, he tells me. There is too much government regulation in these parts. He and his wife are moving to New Zealand.

Up another wooded road and I find a Mount St. Helens overlook. It's dark now, and I'm the only one there. I get out of the car and feel the cool breeze blow through the pines. I look out at the cone-shaped giant, with her snow-dusted flanks now glowing in the starlight. I watch.

Even if it were just a plain mountain, it would be magnificent. But there's more. There against the purple horizon above the flat-topped dome rises the gray trickle of steam, barely visible, a thin ribbon unraveling into the night. And for all the snarking about the media circus and our dopey country, I am struck dumb: Holy shit, there's smoke coming out of that mountain!

The ground I'm standing on—it's not quite finished. Beneath our feet it's doing things that science can't fully predict, that technology can't replicate, that microphones and satellite transmitters can't capture.

Later that night I drive back to Toutle, the town that lost homes and bridges in 1980, the gateway on the Spirit Lake Highway through which pilgrims pass on the way to America's Volcano. The high school football team is playing. Otherwise it's quiet. I pass the darkened Grange Hall, and up on its marquee someone has distilled our predicament into six words, offering to whoever drives by this simple reflection:

WHEN
HOW BIG
AND WE WAIT.

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