I certainly didn't know it until I read this piece in the New York Times a couple of days ago. It has been erupting quietly for the past 15 months. A column of hardened but still hot lava is being pushed up the main tube into the crater at the rate of a cubic yard per second. This has resulted in a dome that is building there.I visited Mount St. Helens for the first time in July while returning from a trip to the Seattle area, and took the picture I posted above. If you look closely you can see the dome inside the crater and the steam coming off of it. While there, I didn't see anything that referred to the current eruption, though to be fair we weren't there long enough to go into the main visitor's center. During the violent eruption of this volcano in 1980, we lived in Boulder, CO and I vividly remember the ash fall from it on my car.
Though born a flatlander, I have lived in or around mountains (Rockies and Sierra Nevada) for half my life. Seeing Mount St. Helens was unique in that it was the first time I have ever had a strong emotional reaction to a mountain. It seemed brooding and monstrous to me.
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In my childhood (Forties and Fifties) in Portland, OR, Mt. St. Helens was visible from my bedroom window and was a constant symbol of peace, harmony and tranquility -- rather like Fujiyama in its dependable symmetry. At both ends of the day it was likely to be pink.
Mt. Hood, also visible, was more jagged and had a fuming vent halfway up. I knew this because my father loved mountain climbing and made my mother climb Mt. Hood with him (and a lot of others -- it's really more of a tough walk than a climb and people go in groups) before he would marry her. He'd been up most of the Cascade peaks, including Mt. St. Helens.
When Mt. St. Helens exploded I was taking Clinical Pastoral Education in Illinois. It is a harsh, even traumatic, internship for ministers in a hospital where one is confronted with tragedy, melodrama, transcendent moments, and narrow escapes and then grilled to reveal one's deepest reactions. The intention is to purify and prepare people for when they are serving churches.
At that same time Bob Scriver's granddaughter was killed in a car accident that might have been suicide. She'd been in a dozen car accidents. Her life, rooted in the early cancer death of her mother, couldn't seem to get centered. I bullied her through high school but when she had her third abortion, I cut her off and headed to seminary.
What that summer produced in me is very well symbolized by your reaction to the present Mt. St. Helens, Reid. Damaged, fuming, threatening, and yet somehow recovering. The vegetation started to come back the next spring. By fall there were elk.
This will no doubt be a book, a story, a poem, a song someday and it is undoubtedly not the only life in which a mountain acts as both symbol and reality.
Prairie Mary
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