MOUNT ST HELENS 1996

A long time ago, way back in February 1996, I took a trip to the United States of America for the very first time and all on my lickle lonesome. After a gruelling journey taking the better part of  24 hours, I landed in Seattle at 7.00PM on a Saturday evening (which was 2.00AM by my body clock) after which I rather fearfully picked up my hire car and nosed it out slowly into downtown traffic and made it down the four blocks or so to the motel I’d booked into at the airport and, after a number of refills of my coffee at the local “Denny’s Diner” spent a restless night worrying so much about something the Car Rental Agent had said about the car insurance that I drove back to the airport and took out more of it, just in case, even though this turned out to be utterly unnecessary, as I discovered when I got home.

Wisdom comes with experience, they say, although the identity theft incident I suffered whilst I was out of the country did rather make me forget about it. Whilst I was busily trying to put the brakes upon the false me – and why would anyone want to be me…? - who was running around the country “buying” stuff, somehow a little bit of overpayment made on a trip three months earlier seemed unimportant in comparison.

Anyway, after nervously venturing into traffic on that Saturday evening, I soon got the hang of it and within 48 hours was barrelling down the old I-5 like I’d been driving upon those roads all of my life, sightseeing and rubbernecking for all I was worth and drinking in this new world which I was only just discovering for myself.

One of the visits I made was to Mount St Helens, a mountain in southern Washington State which now had a Visitor Center which, at that time of year, I had to reach by hurtling that hire car up a road six inches deep in slush and ice.

Bravery, or foolhardiness, really doesn’t take that long to gather.

I found an old envelope or three the other day containing the “panoramic” shots I took during that trip on one of those “throwaway” cameras that you used to be able to buy, and which included a couple of the fuzzy results which I snapped on that quiet morning on the edge of that mountain, and which is probably why my mind has returned to that place this morning.

Slightly under sixteen years earlier, at about 8.30 in the morning, on May the 18th 1980, Mount St Helens had suddenly erupted, killing 57 people and destroying 250 homes, 47 bridges, 185 miles of roads and another 15 miles of railway, and blowing over 1000 feet off the height of the mountain.

It was all perfectly quiet when I was there of course. I don’t imagine that I would have been allowed to within thirty miles of the place if the scientists that were monitoring the place even considered that another eruption had been likely on that damp February morning.

But the place was still a desolate place even a decade and a half on. Fascinating, but desolate. The plant life was beginning to return from where the massive avalanche of debris had torn through the landscape on that fateful morning, but for me, the most memorable image remains all of those burnt tree stumps jutting out of the ground from where the forests had been obliterated.

It seems odd now that I had no-one to talk to as I was making that journey down the coast towards California, no-one to share my “Wow!” or “Look at that!” moments with. Perhaps that’s why I’m finally sharing them with you now…? I don’t know about that, of course, but I do know that I suspect that as I was looking out from that Visitor Center that morning, it’s quite possible that I might not have been able to think of anything that much to say anyway.

Sometimes we underestimate the awesome power of the planet at our own peril and it doesn’t do any harm to be reminded of that every once in a while.