E B B T I D E

The Mental Landscape of Mt St Helens

Gather us together - any of us that lived here on that sunny blue-sky day in May 1980 - and we will tell you where we were, what we were doing the day "the mountain" blew.

Forty-five years ago today, she changed the way we thought about our landscape as dramatically as she rearranged the landscape itself. We can no longer take these snowy white gods for granted.

We have been told in no uncertain terms.

Before that year, of course, Mt. St. Helens wasn't "the mountain," but just one of several that dotted the view, along with Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood - Loo-wit, Pahtoe, and Wy'east in Native American legend.

Loo-wit was a magic mountain of slow time - berry picking in the spring and summer and a cool mountain lake for swimming. She of the generous campfires. She of youth and beauty - the prettiest of the mountains, it was always said.

It was jagged Hood - Wy'east - that had been rumbling longer, with little quakes now and then just to let us know he was sleeping, not dead.

According to legend, Wy'east was one of the great spirit's two restless, quarreling sons. The sons made the ground shake as they hurled rocks at each other. Covered with skiers, painted in Portland landscapes, Hood was the mountain everyone said would one day blow. He was the one we feared.

Loo-wit - St. Helens - was the peacemaker, the homely old woman granted eternal beauty. Loo-wit -- less developed and less visited than Mt. Hood -- we took for granted her peace and hospitality.

But in the spring of 1980, St. Helens woke up, rocking and fuming, sending us smoke signals that something big was going to happen. The local news ran daily updates from her press conferences. Geologists issued warnings.

She had been at this for a few months - long enough for it all to become kind of a nervous joke.

In fact, we joked about it that Sunday morning, May 18.

In Lyle, Wash., a little town tucked in where the Klickitat meets the Big River, it was Pioneer Days - the annual parade and picnic celebration. On a plateau above town our 4-H leader Gail Farris, was orchestrating barrel racing and pole-bending events from the little booth in the open air arena, while we waited our turn in the field outside.

I don't remember any sound - distant thunder if anything. The first thing I recall is Gail reading a report that Mt. St. Helens had had a major eruption, and we all made a joke. Nervous laughter. The event went on. I remember thinking about volcanoes and what an eruption looked like. The only kind I'd ever seen were Hawaiian volcanoes - fountains of lava. I remembered scenes of scientists taking samples a few feet from the lava rivers. I didn't think we'd be close enough to feel any effect.

It was finally my turn at pole bending. I remember whipping around the final pole to face west, toward the finish line. I saw it then - like the biggest thunderhead I could imagine, only dark, dark gray, and low to the ground. It was so massive, so muscular - a mountain in the sky.

It seemed to be moving fast, coming our way - and my horse and I stopped dead in our tracks, frozen for long seconds, staring. Then we bolted for the gate. Outside the arena, horses and people moved like excited bees outside a hive. We rushed our horses into the barn, pulling off their saddles.

The ash began to fall like a sinful snow. My dad, a volunteer emergency medical technician and always prepared, handed out surgical masks. We drove the short distance home worrying about our horses, worrying about our friends. The windshield wipers made a sickly scraping sound against the ash.

We sat in our little trailer, tried to watch TV. We saw the gray destruction sweeping along the Toutle River - houses and trees destroyed by the lahar, an instantaneous melt of 1,000-year-old glaciers. The ash-engorged flood of flowing concrete scoured the mountainside, like a freight train, destroying or incorporating everything in its path - forests of trees, houses, bulldozers - and even crushing steel bridges. We saw the mushroom cloud looming high in the air. Live TV from Yakima, Wash., showed the city to the east of us cloaked in inky black. Outside it was dark, like dusk in midwinter - nothing like the May morning of a few hours earlier.

Later we heard them read the names of the missing. Then the dead. Snowplows pushed the ash off city streets in The Dalles, Ore. We shoveled it, swept it, but it just floated up in a gritty dust.

Pretty white St. Helens - we called her "The Mountain" now - had torn herself in half, sullied herself in dark gray. Her trees lay prostrate to her, her new geography unrecognizable. She continued to crack and rumble. And for a while we wondered if worse would come. Eventually the fear of another big eruption quieted in our minds.

The ash stayed with us, floating up from the hooftracks as we rode our horses through the fields, and blowing out of the vents in our car.

We see St. Helens every now and then when we cross the Astoria Bridge. My wife, Amy, will point to the blunted white figure upriver when the clouds part just right. But we don't think of her much, except when we sit around with friends and play "Where were you when ..." It's like the Kennedy assassination, or the Challenger disaster, or 9/11 for us old Northwesterners - a permanent landmark in our memory.

The eruption launched a revolution in science, a greater understanding of how ecosystems survive such events, how nature can recover from devastation. How chaos is the melody of vigorous life.
It changed our thinking too. In many ways, Loo-wit taught us more about life than death. In this generous fire, we learned so much.

Love of nature is nothing without respect. Loo-wit seduced with youth and beauty, but it was her power that made the ground beneath our feet. Mountains - our mountains - are living things, and we are frighteningly humble in their presence.

It's hard to believe that was 45 years ago.
It is hard to believe we could ever take a mountain for granted.

A version of this essay originally appeared in the Christian Science Monitor in 2005. You can find it online in its original form here.

Immigrant Song

My grandmother came to the US on the Gripsholm.
She was just 18 years old.

The natives have been complaining about the immigrants for a good 500 years at least.

The first explorers didn't stay long and so they weren't too much of a problem. They would come when the weather was nice, but one winter was about all they could take.

My people first arrived on these shores in 1644. The Gagné brothers had packed up their families and sailed across the Atlantic to New France. They were the early French colonizers of the New World - which, let's face it, was someone else's old world at the time.

Unlike the Coureur des bois, Voyageurs and soldiers that had come to Quebec before them, they were coming to stay, to colonize the King's few acres of snow. They were to be a counterbalance to the growing population of English and Spanish colonizers.

Pierre did not live long after his arrival, but Louis carved out a farm above the St. Lawrence river. Both brothers had sailed from La Rochelle with children and pregnant wives in tow. Louis and his wife Marie leased the land from a corporation, but by 1650 a different corporate land owner --Company of Beaupre -- gave him a land grant provided that he build a house on the property by the following year.

If you go to the town of Sainte Anne de Beaupre in Quebec today, you will find a house built on those stone foundations. This house measured just 24 by 22 feet, but the walls are two feet thick.

The home the Gagne brothers left behind in France
(source Gagnier History Website)

The Gagne bothers were pioneers -- immigrants sent by the King to make a new life in a strange world. They braved a dangerous journey with their young children and pregnant wives in search of a better life with hope of a brighter future than they faced back in Ige.

Some were welcoming in the in the land they found, but not everyone. Louis was one of eight people killed and captured by Mohawks in during the Beaver Wars in 1660.

His widow, Marie, was 41 years old and the mother of eight children at the time of his death.

Despite the passing of Pierre and Louis, the Gagnes were fruitful and multiplied in the new world. One of Louis and Marie's sons -- Ignace Gagne born in 1656 in Quebec -- is the father of a long line of "greats" leading directly to my Pépé.

My grandfather, Joseph Gagné was born in Quebec more than two centuries later in 1911. He grew up, for a time at least, as a migrant worker. Moving back and forth across the northern boarder with his family to the United States to work in the textile mills of New England. When he was 18, he decided to stay in the United States and found work as a mechanic. Eventually he became a chauffeur for a well-to-do family in -- ironically -- New Rochelle, New York. There he met a recent Swedish immigrant named Edith Marta Palmgren who worked as a cook in the big house.

Edith had left her family behind and boarded a ship to the New World when she was still a teenager. No one was calling it the New World by that time, but America still was a land of hope of a better life. Many people watched their children sail across the seas to find a better life.

They were married, had children. During World War II, Joseph -- still a Canadian citizen -- continued his job for Electric Boat building submarines. On the 4th of July 1943, their daughter Alice was born.

Alice is my mother. My mother tells the story of how they didn't bother getting their US citizenship until much later - until after their children had graduated high school.

Patrick Cooper Hunt fled Ireland in black 1849. Starvation was all he left behind. He had an Uncle in New Jersey, so he sailed for the Port of Philadelphia in search of a better life. He was 19 years old. Ireland at the time was occupied by England. The native Irish were oppressed. The legal system did not recognize their language. Indeed, family lore has it that Hunt was just an anglicized version of the Gaelic -- since his Gaelic surname would have been made illegal .

Patrick Cooper Hunt and his children did well in the US. His great - grandson worked for NASA and military designing things that go into space, and things that go boom. My father John Hunt designed a lot of other things too, of course. He even designed that grocery checkout scanner that you find in every store.

Researching my family history left me with a lot of great stories to tell. Sure, I have roots that go deep on American soil.

Yet the idea that strikes me most is how my story is a story of immigrations. Centuries apart, young fathers and mothers, teenagers often, gambling on the unknown in hopes of improving their lot.

That is what immigrants bring -- the search for something better. They struggle, risk, strive and hope for a better life. They come to the United States -- often exploited, working long hours at the worst jobs -- sacrificing to create a future for their children. They build businesses, they invent things. In so doing, they help the economy of the entire nation.

Given the short sighted nature of our politics and our nation's failure to invest in the education and infrastructure that will build a better world, a little immigrant thinking is not such a bad thing.

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Volunteers Like Us

The musty old Grays River Grange Hall had standing room only.

Yet, I sat with a handful of others at the front of the room, in two rows of old theater seats, staring back at neighbors, family, and friends. Those of us up front were more than a little embarrassed with all the attention. As if we were heroes, I thought, but what had we done? We had joined the Grays River Valley Volunteer Fire Department and completed 140 hours of training to become emergency medical technicians. Two of us had signed up to become volunteer firefighters as well. This community celebration was a way of acknowledging our dedication.

Yet, it was something more, too.

A similar size crowd had gathered in the hall six months before. At that meeting, the news was grim. Without new volunteer firefighters and EMTs to answer calls, we were in danger of losing our ability to maintain these services. For our valley, that would have been dire news indeed. In a community like ours, a volunteer from the fire department is the person who shows up on the scene when you call 911 for an ambulance. After a car accident, volunteer firefighters free you if you are trapped in your car and then provide important emergency care.

We live more than 40 miles from the nearest hospital. Only a few hundred people reside in the Grays River Valley. There is no way we could afford to pay for professional fire and ambulance services. It is cold comfort to know that our community is not alone in struggling to find volunteers. The number of volunteer firefighters has declined nationwide by 15 percent over the past 20 years, while the number of 911 calls they must answer has increased significantly. Some fire departments reported a brief spike in interest after the attacks on Sept. 11, but most still report a shortage of volunteers.

As we work longer hours, commute long distances, we've come to guard our free time jealously - even if it is spent in front of a TV. Meanwhile, training requirements for firefighting and emergency medicine have increased dramatically. More hours of training are required every year.

This valley has long been home of dairy farms, loggers, and fishermen. Yet, as those industries have faded over the past 20 years, it has also become home to people who work outside the area, telecommuters, and early retirees. The EMT class represented the spectrum of people in the valley: two retirees, a dairy farmer, a mother and a grandmother, a worker for the local phone company, a mill worker, and a website editor - three men and five women.

EMT training was four months of classes two nights a week - from 6:30 to 9:30 - and a half-dozen Saturdays for all-day hands-on training sessions. Often I would get home from work, study during dinner, and then be off to class. In the last two weeks before the state certification tests, we were at the fire hall five nights a week - sometimes until 10 or 11. Our need to learn competed with family obligations and postponed vacations.

We gained confidence and inspiration from our instructors' dedication as they, too, put in long evenings and weekends. They, in turn, said that they were inspired by us. In fact, wherever we went in the community people stopped to thank us and to tell us how important all this was.

The veterans have warned that we'll see things that we'll wish we could forget. That too often the call will be to someone's house that we know. That we might often be the best thing on the worst day of someone's life.

So why did I join?

In truth, I guess I was hungry for something. It seems as if there's been a hole inside me for the past two years - dating back to a Tuesday in September 2001. I remember watching the crowds of people lining up to give blood for victims who would never be found. I understood then their need to get out from behind the TV and to do something, to strike against the feeling of uselessness. It took me two years to respond to that inner call. When asked, I joke that I joined the fire department because I realized I'd feel pretty stupid if my house was burning down and no one showed up to put it out.

But joking aside, isn't that exactly why we form communities, cities, states, and nations? We invest a part of ourselves to make something larger than us better - whether it be a volunteer fire department or a nation. Who wants to live in a place where no one comes when you need help? If you don't volunteer - or support those who do - why should you expect others to answer the call? A community isn't a place, it's the sum total of the interactions of group of people. I think that's really what we were celebrating that night in the Grange Hall.

"The thing this tells us about our community, is that we have one," one speaker at the celebration said. "Different people, with different talents coming together when needed, making a commitment to serve each other - that's what a community is. That's what a community does."

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This piece was written for the Christian Science Monitor and first appeared in that publication in September of 2003.

Don't Forget to Sharpen Your Ax

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wallace_Denslow

There are always times when we try do too much. We take on too many projects and allow the weight of the world to be placed upon our shoulders.

We think we are strong and can power through anything and we suffer in silence, wrapped in the warm steam of our own stress.

Our ego is often swollen and fed by our labors. We tell ourselves that no one else knows how hard we are working. No one else has their nose to the grindstone like we do. We are martyrs. We look around and everyone is enjoying the sun, laughing while we slave away.

When I was trying to get into nursing school I took a college algebra class with a friend who was trying to get into dental school. It was summer session, so after a long class, we would go to the tutoring center at the college to grind through hours of homework while the world lolled about in the sun. I wanted to be home with my family and my new-born daughter. I hated math, hated that I was in my late 30's and starting from scratch trying to build a new career to support my family.

I would grind away at the homework, never taking a break or allowing myself a moment of daydreaming.

"I have to get this done," was the mantra that a mouthed with each new problem.

Each day my friend and I would start our homework at the same time and each day we would finish within a few minutes of each other, closing our books and walking out together.

Yet my friend would punctuate his homework with frequent stretches and walks around the building to enjoy the sun. One day while walking out I asked how he manged to get the same work done while finding time to sit on the grass while I was working.

His response to my question is one of my favorite parables - one which my friends and coworkers have often heard me repeat.

Here is what he told me:

Two lumberjacks went into the woods one day. One was young and ambitious, the other was old and wise. The young lumberjack was eager to prove how much stronger and faster he was and so he worked furiously throughout the day, never taking a moment of rest. As the day progressed, he often found the old lumberjack sitting on a stump relaxing while he worked. He felt sure that his dogged efforts would outstrip the old man when the tally was made at the end of the work day.

Yet when the work was totaled, the old lumberjack had equaled the work of the strong young man.

How could this be, he asked the old man in frustration. It seemed like every time I looked around you were taking a break. How could you possibly chop as much wood as I did?

The old man smiled and said:

"Every time I took a break, I was sharpening my ax."

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Originally posted at my Redtriage.com blog.