Today’s writing prompt referenced Mt. St. Helens, about which Megan Devine wrote: “Whole lives that could have been, that should have been, that were, have been disappeared. Not just the life of the one you love, but also your life: that life that could have been.”
It feels impossible for me to respond to a prompt that references Mt. St. Helens without saying I was there, close enough to hear the eruption on that Sunday morning in May of 1980. I was 10 years old, living in Federal Way, Washington, just under 80 miles away. Until this prompt, I hadn't thought about that event in relation to my life now, to my loss.
I remember, and I still have the newspaper clippings from the Seattle Times and the Oregonian, and the official slide show from the Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geology.
I suppose a suicide is like a volcano, except with St. Helens there was more warning. The rumblings were louder. The eruption was imminent and people knew it. The north slope of the mountain was there, and then literally all of a sudden it was gone. The sound could be heard for hundreds of miles. The ash rained down on eleven states. The mountain itself was instantly a lifeless wasteland.
The image I remember best is a forest of of stripped trees blasted flat to the gray ground. The color photo looks like a black-and-white shot of hundreds of spilled matchsticks. It's inconceivable. I remember waking up in that same landscape in early grief. Everything was covered in a thick layer of colorless ash. My life was unrecognizable, and the center of it was blown completely away.
I read something interesting about the sound of the blast. Yes, we heard it from miles distant. Yet some of those at the site reported they heard nothing at all. In a Stylus Radio report from WBUR, I found the following:
Many of the people on or near Mount St. Helens that day were geologists, who had been monitoring the mountain over the past couple months as it shook with smaller quakes. The U.S. Geological Survey had issued an official Hazard Watch and closed the mountain to the general public. But still some thrill seekers came in search of adventure, and were there on the day of the blast. One account comes from one of these thrill seekers, Terry Clayton. Note that this is his description of the blast itself, not the aftermath.
“Something didn’t feel right, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. Then it dawned on me. It was absolutely quiet. There was no twittering of birds or scurrying of chipmunks or other soft sounds that are usually in the background. I heard Pam gasp, then cry out, ‘My God, the mountain has blown!’
“At that catastrophic moment the energy equivalent of 24 megatons of thermal energy was released. Though the sound of that explosion was heard all the way to Canada, for us there was no sound at all. Similar phenomena have been reported on battlefields of the Civil War and World War One. Somehow the sound gets cancelled out for those at the epicenter.”
That last line speaks to me, in this life after life, thinking back to that moment of utter destruction: Somehow the sound gets cancelled out for those at the epicenter. Suicide is a volcano.
Photo by USGS in an article from The Atlantic