“The Mountain” by Randy Long

When the once dormant volcano became a live volcano again. Mt. St. Helens.

It started out with earthquakes, little ones, at first, and larger ones, progressively getting worse. The volcano was smoking and growing. One earthquake was really large. I was inside and things started to move. I was sitting at a table, and glasses and other things started to move. I got up and looked outside. Telephone poles were swaying back and forth, and I wondered, “Is this the big one?” Car alarms were going off, and people in cars were stopping their cars beside the road.

Just about as quickly as it started, it stopped. Then the minor aftershocks.

The mountain was spewing smoke. Finally, on May 18th, 1980, the mountain blew its top. A big bang, and the skies got dark and began to rain sand from the sky, sand called “silt” and “ash.” People hid in their homes that day and feared for their lives, while others, like myself, did not.

The wet ash falling from the sky made the sky dark for days. If you didn’t put pantyhose on your air filter, your car would clog up and not run. I had a Baha Bug at the time and put pantyhose over the carb intake and put rubber bands around it and kept the dirt out of the engine. You could drive around, but it was like driving in snow, but brown snow.

After the mountain blew and the skies cleared, people were devastated. There was a giant log dam up on the Toutle River that came down that day, rushed down through lakes and streams and into the Toutle River, wiping out bridges and houses and devastating everything in its path, from the Toutle to the Cowlitz and into the Columbia River, and eventually into the ocean, filling everything in its path with debris and silt.

It took out everything in its path. Dead animals, people, it literally picked up houses and took them away, filled others with silt and debris. It blew off the whole top of Mt. St. Helens. It changed thousands of lives that day.

It wiped out thousands of acres of trees. It made lakes where there wasn’t, and filled others in. It made roads impassable. My brother worked construction after the volcano blew and told me he seen a deer with no ears. I personally helped a friend go up on the Toutle, where he once lived. It had picked up his mobile home and it was between three trees, and I helped him get some things. We also went to Camelot, a trailer court in Castle Rock, to help remove essentials from his parents’ home. We actually waded through silt like quicksand, over 5 feet deep, to his parents trailer, pushing a canoe across the top of the silt and getting essentials back to shore. And, getting out, my clothes were shredded from the silt.

It took years after the volcano blew to become half way normal around here again. The mountain is growing again. It used to look like a perfect ice cream and came to a point.

—Randy Long

https://primitiveentertainment.wordpress.com
http://readadamnbookwithrfy.blogspot.com
https://schoolofmadnessastruth.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/richard.f.yates/