… I was driving South on I-5, snaking my way from Seattle to Cowlitz County near the border with Oregon, to witness the eruption of Mount St. Helens.\u00c2\u00a0 I skipped school that day, along with my school chum Warren Lewis.\u00c2\u00a0 We had actually decided to skip school that morning because it was widely believed that the mountain would erupt that day.\u00c2\u00a0 In true form, it did – at 8:32 AM, while we were barely on the way.<\/p>\n
Most of the trip was anti-climatic, just 25 or 50 miles of ash-covered highways, while the ash was still falling.\u00c2\u00a0 We wanted to get close to the mountain, but the roads at the base were all closed.\u00c2\u00a0 We dawdled around the base for about an hour, and then gave up and decided to drive home.<\/p>\n
On our way back around the base (we had driven nearly the circumference of the base, trying to find a way in) we were on an old country road, very near the actual base of the mountain – you could see out the passenger window the curve of the mountain, stretching upward – a man ran down the base and toward the road.\u00c2\u00a0 He was tattered, out of breath, and looking for a ride.\u00c2\u00a0 He flagged us down.<\/p>\n
We were a bit skeptical at first, being high school juniors, not wanting to allow a stranger into our car.\u00c2\u00a0 But, upon thinking about it a bit more, we were at the closest point to the base of a mountain that just exploded three hours earlier.\u00c2\u00a0 How many ne’er-do-wells would pick that as their target?<\/p>\n
So we picked up the hitchhiker.\u00c2\u00a0 It turned out his friend’s house, where he was headed, was around the other side of the base, in the direction we were headed.\u00c2\u00a0 So we set off.\u00c2\u00a0 The hitchhiker was dazed, but began telling us his story.\u00c2\u00a0 It turns out, he was a resident of the mountain.\u00c2\u00a0 His house had been blown away by the eruption, and he nearly with it, save for the fact that he was several hundred yards away at the time.\u00c2\u00a0 His house went, he was saved.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s how close the line was drawn between still-standing earth, and millions of cubic feet of dirt, houses, horses, people, dogs, and cars that instantaneously evaporated into the soft ash that was still falling from the sky, like snow.\u00c2\u00a0 Every ash flake was unique.<\/p>\n
So we listened to our hitchhiker tell his story about surviving, then trying to find his way down the mountain that had just erupted.\u00c2\u00a0 He talked about new rivers that had formed, blocking his journey, and old rivers that were now clogged by tons of timber and ash-mud.\u00c2\u00a0 He told us about his house, on the mountain, and how he defiantly stayed there like many others.\u00c2\u00a0 He talked and talked, Until we reached his friend’s house, where we dropped him off, bid him a great life, and went back to our journey home.<\/p>\n
I’ll never forget this day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
… I was driving South on I-5, snaking my way from Seattle to Cowlitz County near the border with Oregon, to witness the eruption of Mount St. Helens.\u00c2\u00a0 I skipped school that day, along with my school chum Warren Lewis.\u00c2\u00a0 We had actually decided to skip school that morning because it was widely believed that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-ravings"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=897"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":899,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions\/899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/famille.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}