Noise Not Heard

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Afterwards

 

Somewhere around here, maybe under this new lake called Spirit Lake, rests what remains of Harry Truman.  Not the Harry Truman famous for claiming the “buck stops here.”  I’m talking abouts the Harry Truman who once lived at old Spirit Lake, though he might have said “the buck stops here” also, and meant it.

The logs gather on the northeast side of the lake, some hours ago they were together on the southeast side.  The wind and water move them from one area to another.  The wind often comes from the west here, off the Pacific some seventy miles away.  These logs cover less than a quarter of the lake’s surface, not long ago, a moment in geological time, logs covered almost the lake’s entire surface.  Some logs have sunk, some have found their way to the shore.  These logs were trees when Harry lived. Most ceased being trees about the same time Harry stopped being Harry.

Harry is no longer Harry.  He is part of the mud.  The mud and the water and the logs floating on the lake are real things.  You can get wet in the water and dirty in the mud, which is in part composed of the former Harry.  If you kick one of the logs hard enough you will hurt your foot, you can’t wish that away.  In the eighteenth-century Samuel Johnson, to refute a seeming irrefutable philosophical argument for the subjective existence of matter, said “I refute it thus” and kicked a “stone… till he rebounded from it.” There is something real about the world.  There is also something real about Harry being dead and gone.

It isn’t just the body that dies, the reputation goes as well.  The reputation of Johnson, a man known for his great intellect and literary prowess, studied by scholars and students throughout the twentieth century into the twenty first, will fade.  He will be forgotten just as Harry has almost already.  Influence is a ripple on a pond, diminishing as it travels.

Nearly half a mountain tumbled towards the old Spirit Lake and Harry in his lakeshore paradise.  A boiling wind carrying ash, rock, trees upended and splintered shredded Harry and his resort.  The enormous mass help send one Spirit Lake up the foothills.  When it returned, rushing back down, a new Spirit Lake formed.  It was hundreds of feet higher in elevation after the land slide.

What happens to elk drinking from a reflective pond, a summer’s night cricket sounds.  What happened to the old Spirit Lake.  Some who attended the scout camps there, who dived into the cold mountain water carried the lake with them, they wanted their children to hear the sounds and feel the cold, breathe in the pine and cedar perfume, sing camp fire songs, be in the majestic.  When will the ripple of that first Spirit Lake die, the children of the children no longer be influenced. 

In billions of years the sun goes out, if all goes as imagined.  New Spirit Lake will be gone.  In one scenario, the stars will keep moving away from each other, eventually the universe will go cold, and the kind of life we know will be no more.  Then it will be something like nothingness and the spirit of man may travel there, but probably not. 

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The Event

 

 

Roland wakes.  Not wanting to bother Julie he raises out of bed cautiously, dresses quietly, and goes into the kitchen.  He fixes a coffee, grabs a cup, and walks out the door, wincing as the door slams.

Use to getting up and heading off to his work tramping up and down steep slopes his body doesn’t shift into low gear automatically on a day off.  He needs to get up and do something.  Still, he feels relief knowing he has a day off, can feel the muscles in his legs and feet, his hands and arms pulsing in relaxation. 

He wanders through the small gate into Julie’s garden.  Curious, he pushes on the gate which gives way easily.  It and the fence are not strong or tall enough to keep deer out.  He’s going to have to tell her.  Better to put up posts and wire now than after the deer give it a good munching.  In the city they don’t have deer to contend with.  A little different here.

He walks back into the house.  She is up and in the kitchen.

“I didn’t wake you, did I.”

“It’s your day off.  We shouldn’t waste it.”

She is making oatmeal.  He would rather just have toast, but she does make it taste good, adding cinnamon and raisons.  They talk about going up to Olympia, maybe taking a drive along the sound.  She will get Eddie up in a little while, he will enjoy the drive. 

The phone rings.  It is early for someone to be calling.  Roland says “no shit” into the receiver, he says “right now”, “ok”, “I have to go see”.  He hangs up the phone, looks over to Julie and says, “the mountain has just erupted big.” 

Julie and Roland go out the door and look to the east towards Mt St Helens, though from their porch steps they cannot see the mountain they know where it sits.  They are awed.  A billowing grey and black plume fills the sky.  It resembles a plume a forest fire produces, but this plume is enormous, larger than any they have seen before, it spreads across almost the entire horizon into the upper atmosphere.

“I didn’t hear a thing,” Roland says to her.

“I didn’t either.”

Most people in the area didn’t hear a thing, no boom, no explosion.  In Portland sixty miles away they didn’t either.  But people sixty miles from Portland on the Oregon coast heard loud thuds, they wondered what it was, people hundreds of miles away on Orcas Island off the Washington coast line heard the noise, people in Canada still further away heard it.

An immigrant cutting small trees, contracted to thin out a site just seven miles from the base of the mountain, doesn’t hear an explosion.  He hears a sizzling sound just before the heat strikes.  The hot wind leaves him burnt and in pain.  It is difficult to breath.  The sky darkens, hot ash falls around him.  Inhaling burns and obstructs his breathing passages.  Not sure of what has happened, he struggles to survive

Months before magma moved into the mountain’s depths and began heating water inside the mountain to temperatures high enough to vaporize it.  The rocks and the soil acted like a stopper and kept the water from escaping, provided the pressure needed to keep the super-heated water from turning to steam.  The magma swelled the mountain’s northwest side.  When a small earthquake shook the mountain early Sunday morning, before Roland walked into the garden with his cup of coffee, it caused the bulge to slide towards Spirit Lake and Harry. 

As the northwest face of the mountain rumbles away, producing the largest land slide any human has witnessed in recent time, super-heated water relieved of the mass acting as a stopper obeys the laws of gasses and turns to steam.  Like steam escaping from a tea kettle the scalding vapor rushes from the mountain.  It races laterally at speeds near a hundred miles per hour carrying rock and earth towards the north and west and the immigrant working thinning trees.  It blasts the paint off trucks and campers workers and sight seers have brought with them, campers who are there to watch the volcano, who hoped to see it erupt.  The steam parboils a young teenager who has come camping with his parents.  Authorities find him shirtless and pink lying in the back of a pick-up truck.  It downs thousands of trees on thousands of acres of forest land, a forest dominated by Douglas Firs towering hundreds of feet into the air.  Like so many super-sized match-sticks the downed trees litter the landscape. 

After the land slide, after the steam raced from the mountain, magma relieved of tons of pressure erupts from the volcano.  It explodes from its reserve throwing and pulverizing rocks and boulders blocking its way.  The dust and rock joined by the burning forest billows upward.  Falling ash replaces the color of green pine needles, ferns, and moss, aqua blue mountain lakes and cascading streams, bright red and yellow wild flowers dotting mountain meadows and hillsides with gray.  Ash blown east by the prevailing westerly winds will fill the countryside, towns hundreds of miles northeast of the volcano will find themselves buried.  Foot after foot of ash will amass in streets, on homes.  The sky will darken, the ash will get into the intakes on carburetors, traffic will come to stand still east of the volcano, responders, police and fire men will do their best to guide folks to shelter, to get them off the roads, they often will be unable to continue their work, their vehicles will go dead, inundated. In Portland people watch from lookouts, from high points.  They witness lightening in the angry black storm reaching eighty thousand feet into the atmosphere, caused from silicone particles rubbing against each other.