mt st helens anniversary

This past week was the 30th anniversary of Mt St Helens going off.

May 18, 1980. It feels almost like last year, but it was 30 years ago.

Two things come to my mind strongly.

One is that I have never in my life seen a more awesome demonstration of power than that volcano. We lived through hurricanes a lot growing up in Freeport, Texas. They are big but they do not scare me. Except for Hurricane Carla in 1961, we stayed at home for all of them.

I have also been near tornadoes and earthquakes and other stuff. But that volcano. That was something. The earth blew up.

I was trapped in central Washington State for three days because of it. I had gone to Ephrata, WA, to preach that Sunday and it went off during Bible Class. So by the time church was over, the highway patrol had closed the roads.

My friend and I were stuck there at the pastor’s house, who was a friend of mine..

Ash everywhere. It looked like a Twilight Zone with Vincent Price driving around in a station wagon fighting zombies or something.

Everybody was afraid they would get silicosis, (miner’s lung), so everybody (except me) wore painter’s or surgeon’s masks. I didn’t want to.

But still, it was scary. When I finally got home, I was so grateful. My wife and baby daughter were there and everything was okay.

But the absolute power was astonishing. It brought the Northwest to a screeching halt. We found ash in stuff for the next decade, long after we had moved away.

The second thing was that it has been 30 years. Thirty years. THIRTY YEARS. That is a 3 with a 0 behind it and measured in years.

I suppose that is the hardest thing of all. It seems like just a short time ago. I was 30 years old at the time and healthy as a team of horses (better looking, of course, than that before mentioned team).

And what was absolute power to us then is ancient history to our kids. And so it will ever be. That is a hard lesson for us baby-boomers to learn.