Monday, February 23

Mount Saint Helens Meets Helene in the Mountains

Reflection from Nancy Osborne

In 1998, I visited the site of the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. My visit happened while I was at a national conference in nearby Portland, Oregon: the eruption had happened 18 years earlier, and it was still an incredibly powerful experience and sight. I wrote a reflection later that year about the visit and quoted from a chapter in a book about the occurrence and the ongoing recovery. The chapter’s title was, “Back to Life”. I was speaking at a Cancer Survivors event, and I made connections then about the devastation cancer can bring and about the resilience I had seen at Mount Saint Helens and often in people I had met who had experienced cancer.  

I haven’t thought much about the connection between our Helene in the Mountains and Mount Saint Helens, yet, but I’d like to do so during this Lent. Here, though, I just want to share the reflection from that day with perhaps a few points of connection for us, here and now. It went something like this: 

I saw Mount Saint Helens from a mountain top 5 miles away - the closest one can get by car - and I can still feel the awe of that moment. 1300 feet blown off the top of the mountain - I could see the huge crater and the “new” bulge of lava that formed a cone there in the crater as it continued to ooze. The observatory and the man studying the volcano from that mountain top 18 years ago had been blown completely off the mountain. A mile-wide avalanche had come down the mountain, and a billow of smoke and ash 80,000 feet high rose into the air. Caught in the airstream, it eventually traveled all the way around the world. From where I stood, you could see miles and miles of what looked like barren ground with the mud flow still clearly visible. The pumice plain stretched below where the avalanche had buried every living thing under 300 feet of mud topped with a superheated frothy rock. It’s estimated that 5000 black-tail deer, 1500 elk, 11,000 hares, 1400 coyotes, 11 million fish, and 300 black bears were killed that day. 57 people lost their lives directly or indirectly from the blast.

The area is described as having 3 zones: 1) right around the volcano is the blast zone, where the heat was so great and the flow so huge that trees simply were incinerated or buried; 2) beyond that circle is the blowdown zone, where huge trees were blown down like pick up sticks  (you still see them covering the surrounding mountains); and 3) farther out still, the scorch zone, where trees remained standing, like stakes in the ground, but all their leaves were scorched off.  It was an amazing portrayal of nature’s terrible power (much like our experience of Helene). 

I told the survivors that night, that as I had begun to prepare, it wasn’t only the devastation of cancer I thought of but also the amazing healing power of nature and of each person there, easily as powerful as its destructive power, and that even what looks like only destruction is part of the amazing life-giving natural processes which create life. Rob Carson, a Mount Saint Helens scholar wrote, “disasters have a way of producing heroes, sometimes out of the unlikeliest characters.” At Mount Saint Helens, one of the improbable heroes was the pocket gopher. Usually a pest, eating plants and burrowing everywhere, but some of the pocket gophers, from way down in their burrows, with supplies still stocked up for the winter, survived and eventually dug their way back out through the ash and helped leave organic matter all around for insects and small plants to build life upon. And life is everywhere now. 

As one botanist wrote, “the message is clear. While it took a beating, life was never obliterated from Mt. St. Helens” even though they had expected it to be. There are now, in fact, 3 main visitors centers in the 110,000 acre National Volcanic Monument. One is dedicated to the eruption itself. One is dedicated to the research being done in the park. And the mountaintop visitor center where I stood that day was dedicated to the survivors and to the recovery of life that was so amazingly occurring in that area. To those with cancer, I said, “Our time together tonight is like that visitor center. It is dedicated to you survivors who may feel like the most unlikely characters to be called heroes, but I’d sure label you that way. I know sometimes you don’t feel like a hero, only barely like a survivor, on some days. The message is clear though, that, like Mt. St. Helens, while you may have taken a beating, you are a survivor to be celebrated.” 

The connection I made that night with cancer survivors was that, while you may have taken a beating, you are a survivor to be celebrated. 

And I think we could say that same thing about ourselves here, following our own devastating “Helene in the Mountains” as well as during this time of devastating national realities. The message is clear that while we may have taken a beating, and are even still taking one, we are survivors, too. 

In one of the Mt St Helens’ videotapes, someone says that the blast zone should have a sign that reads “God’s country under construction.” Despite all the destruction of these recent and current days for us, perhaps nature can inspire us to believe that our Circle of Mercy’s sign might also rightly still say, “God’s country (every country, of course) and God’s people under construction,” too! May it be so!