Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  There was no causal relationship—none that I know of—but the next day in Montana, snow began to fall, lightly. It fell throughout the next day, driven by high winds. By Sunday the ranch at Poison Creek was buried under three feet of snow. In places, the drifts were piled to six and eight feet. Certain of my neighbors, those in the ranching business, were using snowmobiles to get out to their pastures. Some newly born calves were already dead. Much of next year’s income was freezing, suffocating under the blanket of snow.

  Down at the lumber mill, 110 people had just been laid off as a result of unpleasant economic trends. Various friends who specialize in carpentry foresaw a bleak and workless summer. In New York, my publisher wasn’t willing to advance me any more money on a book I had been writing for the past six months.

  I was sitting at my desk, writing an article about scuba diving, and a massive drift was piling up over the window. The whole house seemed to hum in the wind. I was sorry for my neighbors and friends and for myself. And I was depressed unto death about the worms in the water. Little black fellows, about half the size of a fingernail. They swirled out into a glass held under the tap like so many rat droppings, a dozen or more to an eight-ounce glass.

  So, of course, I would get a call asking me to go cover the volcano. I was writing about scuba diving while calves froze in the fields and no one wanted to buy my book and everyone was going broke and there were worms in the water—and they wanted me to drive through a cattle-killing blizzard to cover a volcano. The world, clearly, was coming to an end.

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  It was best to pack up everything, typewriter and all, in my backpack and wade through waist-deep snow to the jeep, which was parked a mile away, by the plowed road.

  Outside Butte I picked up a hitchhiker, a big twenty-one-year-old fellow named Marty who had just finished his last year as a defensive tackle for a Southern California junior college. Marty didn’t think the eruption of Mount St. Helens signaled the end of the world. He had read a number of idiot pseudoscientific tomes and had learned that the world would end in “1984, I think,” when all the planets would be arranged in a straight line out from the sun—The Grand Alignment—and gravitational forces on the earth would cause earthquakes and more volcanoes and tidal waves and hurricanes and tornadoes. For his part, Marty figured the next four years would be a good time to “party,” and that a party under the volcano would be superior to one held in a Montana blizzard.

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  Just before midnight, in Spokane, the jeep broke down. We would ave to wait until morning to fix it, so Marty and I each got a motel room.

  The jeep was defective and there were worms in the water and the depression weighed on me so that life seemed to be a process of swimming one’s way up through an endless vat of spoiled custard. I picked up the Gideon Bible and read my favorite verse, the epistle in which the apostle Paul advises Timothy, my patron saint, to forsake water and drink wine “for thy stomach’s sake and for thine often infirmities.”

  But Timothy is near the Book of Revelations, and the pages fell open to chapter nine, where I read prophecies of the Apocalypse. The fifth angel, it says, will blow his trumpet and a star will fall to the earth, and to him, the star, will be given the key to the bottomless pit. Smoke will spew from the pit, as though from some great furnace, and the sun and air will be darkened by the smoke.

  Out of the smoke will come locusts with the power to sting as scorpions, and these will torture those who have not the mark of God on their heads, torture them with scorpion stings for five months.

  In chapter 13, verse 11, I read of the beast who will rise from the earth to enslave men; the Beast, in the Apocalypse of the Blessed Apostle John, shall bear the mark 666.

  There is solace to be found in the Bible, but not a whole hell of a lot of it in Revelations. I drifted off to sleep and the depression sat on my chest like a three-hundred-pound toad.

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  The mightiest peaks of the Cascade Range, which stretches from Northern California to southern Canada, are volcanic in origin, part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. The volcanoes of Alaska, Japan, Mexico, and Ecuador are part of the same system, and it is thought that in these spots the plate that forms the ocean floor is being thrust under the plate that forms the continents. This creates cracks, or faults, in the earth’s crust.

  Such faults allow gas and molten rock—called magma—to rise up out of the bowels of the earth. We know that most of this gas and liquefied rock originates somewhere between twenty-five and two hundred miles below the surface of the earth, and that at those depths, the earth is very hot. Forty miles down, for instance, the temperature is probably twelve hundred degrees centigrade, more than hot enough to liquefy rock. There is gas present in deep magma, but the pressure of the rocks above keeps it in solution. Like bubbles in a bottle of Blitz beer, the gas will stay in solution as long as the cap is kept on. But when the magma rises—as it hawks its way up through the earth and into the throat of the volcano—the pressure lessens. The gas forms bubbles, and bubbles join together. The gas in the bubbles is under pressure still, pressure from the weight of the magma around and under and over it.

  When the gas pressure becomes high enough, it explodes out of confining, enclosing liquefied rock, blowing magma onto the surface of the earth. This reduces the pressure of the gases lower down, and they explode, reducing the pressure on lower down, and they explode, reducing the pressure on lower gases and so on.

  An eruption, then, is not one huge, cataclysmic explosion, but a series of them, each lasting several seconds or minutes and separated by periods of minutes or hours or even days.

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  I was sitting by my campsite under the volcano, a grassy park on Yale Lake, about two miles west of Cougar, Washington, reading about all this and glancing up at the silent mountain every now and again, when an angry older woman approached and demanded to know “why I can’t see it.” It was her impression that the volcano was erupting constantly and that great rivers of molten lava were roaring off down the wrong side of the hill, simply to spite her.

  There were thousands of people in the park, most of them in cars and campers, all lined up and facing the mountain, which rose in the distance. The drivers had politely aligned their vehicles so as not to obstruct the view of those behind them. It was a drive-in volcano.

  The woman who was mad at the mountain poked me in the shoulder. “What’s the matter with it? What does it say in those books you’re reading? Why’s it just sitting there?”

  I began explaining about magma and gas and intermittent eruptions and was about to show her a diagram in one of the books when I was stung, quite painfully, on the side of the neck. It was a wasp of some kind, but the implications were all too clear.

  Ash had fallen for days, tephra, the scientists call it, and when the wind was right, some had fallen on Cougar, so that there was a fine coating of it on the hoods and roofs of the locals’ cars and pickups. These sand-sized fragments of ash or dust couldn’t be wiped off the vehicles with a dry rag because they caused scratch marks and marred the finish.

  Ash had fallen. And out of this ash had come a wasp—a locust with the sting of a scorpion, if you will—and the little sucker nailed me right in the side of the neck. I explained to the woman that she was on hand for the Big One, that it was Good Friday, noon exactly, and time for the fifth angel to blow his trumpet, for the star to fall from the sky and open the abysmal pit. There would be fire and ash and plague, there would come wars and numberless hosts and rivers would flow with blood and the Beast 666 would rise from the earth and terror would reign over the land.

  The woman seemed relatively certain that I hadn’t read all this in my copy of Geological Hazards, and she wandered off to ask someone else. There were many knowledgeable people there that day, both locals and people who came from thousands of miles away. There were also a number of twenty-year-old cowboy shoe-clerks from Vancouver, Washington, who tipped th
eir Stetsons back on their heads, squinted up at the mountain, and let out with the sort of mystical wisdom that is given only to cowboy shoe-clerks. “Nah, lady, she ain’t gonna blow … no way.”

  My tent was out on a promontory over the reservoir called Yale Lake. Marty, the hitchhiking tackle, was still with me, and somewhere along the way we had picked up Ken and Len from Kansas, who’d come to the coast looking for work on the shrimp boats. They had taken acid for the eruption.

  If that is what you like to do, I suppose it was a good day for it. The sky was blue, and it was warm enough to sit around drinking beer in your shirtsleeves. A vendor, working out of a van, was doing a brisk business selling “I survived Mount St. Helens” T-shirts. Other people were wearing shirts reading, “Mount St. Helens, Lava or Leave Her.” One woman wore a button reading, “They laughed at Pompeii.”

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  Mount St. Helens stood white against the blue sky. It was a gorgeous mountain, curved, symmetrical, somehow more feminine in appearance than the more pyramidal, ice-carved summits of Mount Hood or Mount Adams. In geological terms, St. Helens is a youthful volcano, and its top section was formed a scant twenty-five hundred years ago. Hood and Adams were present in the ice age of ten thousand years ago, and glaciers have carved great cirques and valleys in them. The summit of St. Helens had never suffered the erosive scraping of the Pleistocene’s great glaciers.

  The rounded summit was perfectly white. I had heard that there was ash on the snow, on the present glaciers, but a snowfall the previous evening had renewed her, made her shine against the sun, virginal and glittering.

  At 12:20 by my watch, a great plume of steam billowed up out of the top of the mountain, out of the crater there, and it was carried north and west by the wind. Ken and Len watched with spinning eyes, and Len whispered that it was “bad.” Three minutes later, a black cloud rose under the steam, and two minutes after that an even denser black cloud followed. These clouds rose several thousand feet over the mountain, and the heaviest black ash was spread along a line by the wind, like a curtain. The ash fell along the northwest slopes like rain from a thunderhead. The eruption was visible from Portland, nearly fifty miles away.

  There was no noise, no sound at all, and it looked almost too perfect, like a diorama of the Jurassic period in some museum. There was a sudden sense of the Dawn of Time: the placid lake, the blue sky and green grass, and all that steam and ash rising soundlessly, eerily, from the summit of the most appealing mountain in America.

  “There should be dinosaurs,” I said. Ken and Len took up the thought. They wanted to see pterodactyls—great, fire-blackened flying reptiles—come belching up out of the crater. They wanted a brontosaurus to break the surface of Yale Lake. That would be “bad,” the taloned pterodactyls screaming down on all these people, thunderous bellows from the brontosaurus, oh God, that would be bad.

  At 12:31 the eruption came to an end. The whole northwest side of the mountain was covered with black ash. The Beast was still confined to the pit.

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  There isn’t much to do between minor eruptions on the volcano watch, and I spent hours reading, computing my chances of survival in case of a major cataclysmic event, a worst-possible-case scenario.

  Lava flows weren’t going to be much of a problem. Lava, the term for magma when it reaches the surface of the earth, advances quite slowly, and it is easy to outrun. One schematic drawing in Fire and Ice, a book about Cascade volcanoes by Stephen L. Harris, showed that lava flows during the past four thousand years had advanced almost to the town of Cougar. I was camped two miles farther on down the road. In four thousand years lava flows had never hit my campsite, but in a worst-case scenario, they might.

  The flow would look like a slowly moving heap of coal. By the time it reached the camp, the surface of the flow might even be cool enough to walk upon, but that would be somewhat foolhardy, because if one did fall through the upper crust, he’d find himself standing waist deep in a thick river of incandescent rock. Also, the heat of the flow thins the air above it so that a person working his way across the sharp, jagged clinkers of the crusted surface would possibly faint from lack of oxygen.

  (It is worth noting that one lava flow on St. Helens formed the Ape Caves. Located near the base of the mountain, the Ape Caves are actually a unitary lava tube some 11,215 feet long. Such tubes are formed when less-viscous lava, called pahoehoe, congeals on the surface, but a river of molten rock continues underneath, finally emptying out, leaving a smooth, often ovoid tube.

  The caves were discovered by a logger in 1946 and explored by a group of cavers who called themselves “the St. Helens Apes.” That is the official explanation for the name. But the Cascade Range is Bigfoot country. There have been numerous sightings in nearby areas: in The Dalles, in Kelso, even on St. Helens herself. On a summer’s night, so say some locals, you can hear them, the congregated ape things, howling and gibbering in the coolness of the caves.)

  Tephra falls—thick rains of black, glassy ash—would cause more deaths than the biggest lava flow. In a major eruption, exploding gases can throw up bombs—semimolten rock—and blocks—angular pieces of older, solid rock. Bombs and blocks would land somewhere on the slopes of the mountain. The problems at my campsite would be caused by sand-sized fragments of wind-carried ash and dust, and by light, gas-saturated stone, or pumice.

  In 79 A.D., two thousand people lost their lives in an ash fall when Mount Vesuvius erupted. In that year, on August 24, just after noon, ash and pumice began falling on Pompeii. The ash fell throughout the day. The darkness was so intense that a lantern held at arm’s length could hardly be seen. Pompeii was being buried. The ash reached a depth of nearly nine feet. Most of the twenty thousand people fled, but some of those who stayed were crushed when their roofs collapsed. Others took refuge in cellars and were literally buried alive. Some bodies have been found with pieces of cloth held to their faces, suggesting that gas given off by the pumice as it solidified might have filled the air with toxic fumes.

  Pompeii was about five miles from the vent of Vesuvius. I was about ten miles from St. Helens. The ash fall, in a worst possible case, might be expected to pile to eight or nine feet. The winds on Good Friday would have carried the ash to the east, but if they changed, and a major tephra fall developed, it seemed likely that many lives could be lost. Most of the people at Yale Lake would want out, fast. They’d highball it on down Route 503, a perpetually wet, winding road that follows the Lewis River valley. Headlights would not penetrate the darkness. Dozens would die in accidents.

  If ash and pumice fell on the campsite in any volume, I intended to go back to the jeep and wait it out. I was unintentionally prepared. A snow-shovel is a necessary tool for any Montana driver, and I had one in my car. I would simply step out of the jeep every once in a while and shovel the light ash and pumice from the roof and sides. Likely it would be no more heavy than wet snow.

  That left the remote problem of choking gases given off by cooling pumice. One book I read suggested the use of industrial gas masks. Lacking them, it said, a wet cloth might remove some harmful gases. A cloth saturated with a weak acid such as vinegar or urine would be even more effective.

  I read this section to Marty, the hitchhiking tackle. “Buddy,” I said, “when that ash starts to fall, we’re going to have to piss in our shirts.”

  “I’m buying vinegar,” he said.

  “What happens if the ash fall lasts twenty hours? You could run out of vinegar. I have enough beer stashed in the car that we won’t have to worry about running out of urine.”

  “No way,” Marty said. He vowed that he’d choke to death on toxic gases before he’d piss in his shirt.

  We could survive a tephra fall, but mud flows seemed to be a more significant danger. Mount St. Helens was mantled in snow, and there were a number of young glaciers on her flanks. Great clouds of burning volcanic debris, ejected during a major eruption, could cause rapid melting and then flooding
at the top of the mountain. The flood would resemble a high-altitude tidal wave, and would be propelled down the steep slopes of St. Helens by gravity. The speed of a mud flow depends on the steepness of the slope and the viscosity of the mud. A mud flow would contain boulders, uprooted trees, shattered homes, cars, cattle, and men.

  In a worst-case scenario, a major mud flow would scour St. Helens and move at speeds in excess of sixty miles an hour on the upper slopes. The flow would be largely confined to the drainages.

  There is evidence that about three thousand years ago mud flows made their way down the Lewis River canyon, a distance of some forty miles. I checked my map. We were a little more than ten air miles from the vent, and fifteen miles from it by way of the drainages.

  The mud flow I envisioned on our side of the mountain—it was actually much more likely on the other side—would sweep down over Ape Caves and pour into Swift Reservoir, just above Yale Lake. The water level in Swift had been lowered thirty feet to accommodate a possible flow, but nothing could hold back a really big one. It would tear through the dam and inundate Yale Lake and, incidentally, the place where I happened to be camped.

  On this lower, more level land, the flow would lose velocity and begin piling up.

  I looked out from my tent perched on the promontory. There was a ridge before the mountain, and St. Helens was perfectly framed by a pass in the ridge. Yale Lake swept around a bend to the right and passed out of sight, obscured by the canyon walls.

  The mud flow would arrive with the roar of a hundred snow avalanches, and the ground would tremble beneath it. It would come rolling around the bend in the canyon, carrying tons of debris—a thick, dirty tidal wave perhaps twenty feet high moving at the rate of, say, twenty miles an hour.

  I wasn’t going to try to drive out from under anything like that, not with hundreds of cars clogging 503. You could barely do forty on that road anyway. The wall of mud would simply roll over the crawling cars, and it would set like cement. No, when the mud came, I’d run for the high ground and watch my jeep and a thousand dollars’ worth of my camping gear roll on down the Lewis River valley another thirty-five miles.