The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

by Timothy Egan

  Any doubts that the land is alive and in command of all that lives atop its surface are removed by the view to the south. Still smoking and stuffed with debris, Mount St. Helens, the youngest of all Cascade volcanoes, looks like an ashtray after an all-night party. Denuded, it nonetheless pulses with new life as the dome inside the crater rebuilds. Surveying this lineup when Helens still had its Mount Fuji top, Winthrop wrote:

  The dearest charmer of all is St. Helens, queen of the Cascades, queen of Northern America, a fair and graceful volcanic cone. Exquisite mantling snows sweep along her shoulder toward the bristling pines. Sometimes she showers her realms with a boon of light ashes, to notify them that her peace is repose, not stupor, and sometimes she lifts a beacon of tremulous flame by night from her summit.

  His view, typically romanticized, erred only in the gender assignment: Helens was not named for a woman, but rather for the British diplomat Lord Alleyne Fitzherbert, Baron St. Helens. Fitzherbert himself never saw the mountain. Baron St. Helens spent most of his years in the Court of Madrid. During his lifetime, and that of Winthrop, Helens erupted on a regular basis, providing an ash-and-fire show powerful enough to keep most settlers out of the valleys immediately below. Different tribes had different names for the peak, but they conveyed the same point. One native name was Louwala-Clough, meaning “smoking mountain.” Another was Tah-one-lat-clah, “fire mountain.”

  Among the other volcanoes in the Ring of Fire, Mount Baker had minor eruptions in 1843, ’54, ’58, ’59, ’70 and then blew an unusual amount of steam and some ash in 1975, causing many a sleepless night in the cities of Vancouver and Bellingham. Glacier Peak, at 10,541 feet just slightly smaller than Baker, exploded with a great burst twelve thousand years ago, sending ash and debris as far as Saskatchewan. Hot springs at the base of Glacier Peak are a token of the heat that courses beneath all that ice. Mount Adams in Washington, and Jefferson, the Three Sisters, Thielsen and McLoughlin in Oregon have been relatively quiet in the eyeblink of geologic time since the arrival of whites. Mount Hood steams intermittently, giving off a sulfur stench to compete with any open sore in the Cascades. But only Mount St. Helens and Lassen Peak, which erupted off and on between 1914 and 1917, have thrown fire to the sky in front of a modern audience. Mount Mazama in Oregon, which lost enough of its top 6,800 years ago to cover much of the West and eventually become a caldera filled with the deepest lake in America, left a volcanic legacy that doesn’t need interpretation to demonstrate its power.

  Were it not for volcanoes, it’s doubtful there would be water and atmosphere. They helped to produce a habitable planet. In the early years of the earth’s life, volcanic vents released massive amounts of steam from the interior. Condensed, the steam formed oceans. Over millions of years, ocean algae took carbon dioxide from the primitive atmosphere, and, through the labor of photosynthesis, released oxygen into the air, creating a breathable blend of gases. On a much smaller scale, this primal act of creation continues today. Like all Cascade volcanoes, St. Helens is a product of the collision of ocean plates and continent, which forces magma and steam up through the summit openings. Seventy-five million years ago, the Cascade Range was still underwater; fossils of that period have been found in rock now high enough to hold a glacier. So many shells cover one place north of Mount Baker, for example, that it’s called Chowder Ridge. As the rest of the land settled down, the volcanic hot points continued to blow, venting magma from below and building new formations above. The fifty thousand square miles of the Columbia Plateau—the vast near-desert in central Washington and Oregon—was created by more than ten million years of intensive volcanic activity. The present peaks of the Cascades are anywhere from a million to twenty-five thousand years old. In that time, they were carved and given their craggy alpine look—the U-shaped valleys and numerous lakes and tarns—by Ice Age glaciers which draped most of the northern edge of present-day America in blue. Puget Sound was buried in an ice sheet four thousand feet thick. The basin’s unveiling is relatively recent; the ice left a mere twelve thousand years ago. St. Helens is about forty thousand years old, an infant compared to Rainier’s million-year age. The cone blown off in the 1980 blast was built up by eruptions since the time of Christ.

  The land here is a long way from completed. While Winthrop felt a sense of immortality in the presence of these mountains, the volcanoes also remind us of the planet’s irascibility. Temperate and lush, fertile and flush with bounty from the sea and the alluvial valleys, the land here could all become uninhabitable overnight. I realized this on May 18, 1980—a day that has been seared into the collective psyche here. Suddenly, we realized that the sky could turn dark at noon, and cars could not start because of ash-clogging, and rivers could be buried and forests leveled and lakes displaced, all by something over which we had no control. On May 18, 1980, I felt transitory, a passenger on a short ride in time.

  At 8:32 on a clear Sunday morning an earthquake registering 5.1 on the Richter scale shook residents of southwest Washington out of bed. The north side of Mount St. Helens, which had been bulging outward at a rate of six feet a day, exploded with a force said to equal several hundred times the power of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Such comparisons are meaningless, on the whole. Reid Blackburn, a photographer with a shaggy beard and quick wit, was shooting pictures for National Geographic nine miles north of the crater. He took a few snaps, then ran to his car. He was found a few days later, buried and petrified in ash up to his neck. The heat from the blast, more than 680 degrees Fahrenheit, had killed him instantly. Farther down the mountain, David Crockett, Jr., tried to find his way through darkness and choking ash. Speaking into a recorder, the television photographer said, “Oh, dear God … my God! This is hell, hell on earth. Right at this moment I honest to God believe I am dead.” Crockett lived. But fifty-nine people were killed that Sunday morning. The valleys around the mountain are sparsely inhabited; an annual rainfall of about a hundred inches keeps most people away. Logging crews, which during the week were working well within the blast zone, had the day off.

  Within a few minutes, the mountain went through three transformations. First, more than half a cubic mile of rock, snow and ice—the entire surface of the mountain’s north face—avalanched at speeds of two hundred miles an hour. Spirit Lake, surrounded by an ancient forest and lodges to house the summer hordes, was raised by two hundred feet; in other spots, the debris piled eight hundred feet. The Toutle River, which flows from this lake that the Cowlitz Indians believed to be a home for the dead, was blocked by a mile-wide dam of debris. Blue went to gray, green went to black, all life was smothered.

  A lateral blast followed the avalanche. This explosion carried pulverized pieces of rock, organic material and hot gases at speeds of up to four hundred miles an hour. Imagine a hurricane, blowing at twice the speed of the highest winds ever recorded, with a temperature just under 700 degrees Fahrenheit, and you have some idea of the blast that carried the north side of St. Helens with it. All trees, including firs which had clung to the ground for three centuries, all shrubs, meadows and grass, all deer (more than 5,000), elk (1,500), mountain goats (15), black bears (200), birds and small game (several million), snakes, fish, bees and anything that might later have contributed to new life were wiped out within 150 square miles.

  A third phase carried ash to a height of ninety thousand feet, the dark upper ceiling of the stratosphere. The ash darkened the orchard country of eastern Washington, clouded parts of Montana nine hundred miles east, and eventually circled the globe. All told, 540 million tons of ash rained down on more than twenty-two thousand square miles. An estimated 4.7 billion board feet of timber was blown down—an amount equal to the entire annual harvest on all nineteen national forests in the Northwest. Such are the numbers from one small act in the ongoing formation of the earth.

  A few days after the eruption, a helicopter full of reporters started up the Toutle valley on a survey of the carnage. As they flew over the deforested lower slopes, g
asps were heard and jaws opened.

  “I can’t believe it,” said one reporter. “Everything is gone.”

  “Like the surface of the moon,” said another, pointing to gray-covered stumps and creekbeds shaved to bristle. “There’s nothing left standing.”

  Their frenzy was interrupted by a reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the only local writer on board.

  “This area wasn’t destroyed by the volcano,” he said. “We’re not over the blast zone yet.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s a Weyerhaeuser clearcut below.”

  Nearly a decade later, I stare down at the lava dome inside the crater of St. Helens. The dome has grown to a height of nine hundred feet, oozing up from the floor, gradually refilling a two-thousand-foot-deep crater. Blue-tinted plumes rise from cracks and fissures; the texture looks like fresh-cooked oatmeal steaming in a bowl. Sometime within the next two hundred years, the volcano will have regained much of its form; these mountains grow fast, especially the young ones. The previous top took just under four hundred years to build. Standing so close to this oozing mass of hot land, I feel as if I am present at the maternity ward of nature: raw earth at birth. A festive mood predominates on top, unlike anything I’ve ever seen on a mountain summit. Two dozen or more people, an assortment of characters, some in costume and drinking wine, have made the long hike up the south side of the snow slope to the new 8,365-foot summit ridge above the crater. We crossed a young forest, walked over light pumice slopes and kick-stepped up the final three thousand feet to reach this sharp-edged apex. Some of the other volcanoes are out in full glory this morning: Rainier just to the north, Adams on the east side, Hood and Jefferson to the south.

  Spirit Lake now has a touch of color, but it looks as if it belongs in Nevada—devoid of green, surrounded by lifeless banks of brown and stuffed full of rotting timber. To the south, where the volcano did little damage, is a patchwork of large clearcuts on Forest Service land, as devastated in parts as the mountain valleys cleared by the lateral blast of 1980. Despite all the apparent wounds, the mountain has a relaxed atmosphere to it, much in the way of Spirit Lake before the eruption. Every day, several hundred people wait in the dark of 2 A.M. in hopes of receiving the handful of permits issued to climb St. Helens. They are warned about getting too close to the crater rim, warned about the explosive potential, warned about staying out of the crater, warned about disturbing the National Volcanic Monument. Helens seems too healthy again for such talk. Like many newcomers to the Northwest, the mountain has remade itself—the volcano as metaphor.

  Though the inside may seem like a newborn, the rest of the mountain is growing like a toddler. Three months after the eruption, asters, fire-weed, lupine and avalanche lilies sprouted. A few elk were spotted nibbling on alder saplings. Weyerhaeuser foresters brag about trees they planted in the summer following the blast which are now twenty feet high. The ash, which is sterile and has the chemical composition of glass, doesn’t help the trees; they were planted in the topsoil that’s buried beneath the volcanic cover. Inside the blast zone, John Fraenzl, a Forest Service ranger, is showing off the new trees he’s planted. This tree-growing-in-a-wasteland business can get competitive. On the other side of the mountain, Weyerhaeuser is raising a tree farm, not a forest—a “plantation,” as it’s called in industry parlance—which will be cut in thirty to fifty years. Their trees, greenhouse-bred for maximum growth, are to the rest of nature what silicone-filled breasts are to a beauty contest. They stand out, but there is something … odd … about them. No snags. No variety. No slow succession through the different life stages of a forest. No sense of what came before.

  “Time is nothing to nature,” says Fraenzl, standing at the head of the slowly recovering Clearwater valley, east of the crater. “We want to see trees out here right now. We’re in a hurry. Nature could care less. A natural forest will come back here, but not for a long time.”

  Two days before the May 18 eruption, Fraenzl worked in a section of woods so thick and overgrown it looked like the Olympic Rain Forest. On Monday when he returned to work, he flew over the gray, desolate land that he used to know as well as his own backyard, and he could not find a single landmark. That summer, his boss asked him if he wanted to be transferred, perhaps to some national forest with trees in it. The work ahead would be tough; never before had anyone tried to reforest an area that had been so thoroughly bereft of life. In places, the ash was three feet deep. Fraenzl decided to stay. He did a literature search, looking for hints on how to proceed, a model from anywhere else in the world—nothing. For a forester, working on a surface that resembled the moon, the job was like that of a war zone medic.

  Two years after the eruption, he started planting trees in earnest: a patch of lodgepole pine here, a quilt of Douglas fir there, a few noble and silver firs higher up, even some cottonwoods. On weekends, he would return with his seven-year-old boy, to plant more trees as volunteers. Standing among the skinny saplings with his son, he thought about the future—fifty years down the road—when the boy would come to look at the forest he helped to plant with his father. It took three hundred years to grow the old forest, John Fraenzl told his son, and just a few minutes to wipe it out.

  By the mid-1980s, Fraenzl noticed that the firs were growing up to three feet a year. Soon, he would need to start thinning them. To his astonishment, a few trout started showing up in Clearwater Creek. Now, even in the worst part of the blast zone, no more than five miles from the crater, some trees are ten feet tall. The scraggly hardwoods, particularly alders and willows, grow without help in the draws where moisture gathers. Fireweed and lupine, the vanguard of a forest that will take hundreds of years to return to climax phase, seem to need nothing more than air and water to proliferate. We walk over a flat stretch where the pumice is so deep nothing will ever grow, and pass a small lake which survived because it was covered by a protective floor of ice. We go up the hill, and then drop down a little bit.

  “I want to show you something,” says Fraenzl, leading me to his secret.

  “There—look at that.” A few acres of lodgepole pine, green and thick, among noble fir, Douglas fir and hemlocks. Not a plantation, but a slice of forest. Like most scientists, foresters are not given to emotion or descriptions tinged with romance when discussing their subjects. Under this volcano, lost in his thatch of green, Fraenzl now hoots like Tom Sawyer on a rope swing over the river.

  When young Winthrop headed up the Willamette Valley, the deepest lake in America had yet to be discovered by white men. The Klamath and Modoc Indians knew about it, but for a long time the secret never leaked outside tribal circles. The great mysteries of the world, natural and spiritual, were kept in the caldera of cobalt blue buried inside the Oregon Cascades; it was a place so sacred the natives were forbidden to speak of it to others. Only a few Indians were allowed to even gaze upon it. By the 1820s, the Hudson’s Bay Company had a fur-trading post on the Umpqua River to the west. They conducted a vigorous business with the Indians, married their women, raised families, and crisscrossed the mountains within sight of the Big Secret. Still, no native told them about the blue waters inside the old volcano. The natives grew up with legends, born in eyewitness accounts, about the fiery fight between gods that led to the decapitation of a twelve-thousand-foot mountain. To have told others of the living conclusion of those legends would have been to risk further disruptions of the land. Throughout the 1840s, wagon trains pushed over the Continental Divide on the Oregon Trail and emptied twenty thousand people into the new country of the Willamette. Before long, they spilled into the south, to the Rogue and Umpqua river valleys and into the Siskiyous. At the same time, goldminers from the spent lodes of the Sierra pushed north, finding precious metals in the Rogue, which drains the west slope of Mazama. Still, the natives kept the secret of Crater Lake.

  Then, on June 12, 1853, just a few days after Winthrop left the Umpqua valley and returned north, three prospectors looking for a lost goldmine came u
p to the seven-thousand-foot rim of the hollowed volcano and fell to their knees. A thousand feet below the rim was the bluest lake any white man had ever seen, filling a crater six miles across, with a cinder cone growing inside it, and off to one side, a basaltic rock that looked like a ship. The entire mountain had been sheared off at its midsection. No water flowed into the lake, and nothing poured out. With all the imagination expectable of someone who spent his life scraping at the rocky edge of the planet looking for gold specks, John Wesley Hillman named his discovery Deep Blue Lake. And then he led his prospectors back down the slopes of Mazama and continued looking for that lost goldmine, which he never found. There is no record of any whites returning to the lake for ten years. Then, found again, it was called Crater Lake.

  The lake has a proselytizing effect on most people who stare down the pumice and ash slopes to its surface. By 1902, less than fifty years after the prospectors’ accidental discovery, Crater Lake became the nation’s seventh national park—a Teddy Roosevelt legacy—a few years after another volcano, Rainier, was added to the park system. Justifiably suspicious, Roosevelt felt that the forests and rock around Rainier and Crater would be scraped bare if they weren’t locked up. He was right.

  I come to the rim of Crater Lake, arriving at the spot where the prospectors fell to their knees, on a day when a small, one-man submarine with two mechanical front arms is being lowered by helicopter down to the lake. I walk over to a park rangerette in a Smokey Bear uniform and ask about the sub. She tells a story about the struggle for the inner power of Crater Lake, a fight over geothermal vents. The land is alive here in a caldera that lost five thousand feet of its summit in an eruption forty times greater than that of Mount St. Helens. A power company from south of the border—those hated Californians, the scourge of Oregon—has leased seventy-six thousand acres in national forest property just east and south of the park. They are drilling a series of holes four miles from Crater Lake to find the best place to construct a hydrothermal power plant. Once built, the plant is supposed to pipe steam out of the ground and use it to power turbines for producing electricity. The power, of course, would not go to Oregonians—who still have such abundant supplies of hydropower they sell it to California—but would be sent to users in the San Francisco area.