Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  So, in case of tephra falls, it was piss in your shirt and get out the shovel. In the event of a mud flow, it was a quick sprint to the high ground. That left one last, terrifying hazard, the glowing avalanche. Clouds of incandescent gas and ash and other debris can burst from the vent and travel down the slopes of the mountain at speeds of nearly one hundred miles an hour. The superheated mass of a glowing avalanche can be particularly deadly when an obstruction in the throat of the crater causes an explosive eruption to blow a hole in the side of the crater. A glowing cloud is aimed directly down the slope. Sometimes the explosion is a vertical one, and the hot ash and gas simply falls back onto the area around the crater and rolls down all sides of the mountain.

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  This last is what happened during the eruption of Mount Pelee, on the island of Martinique on May 8, 1902. The huge cloud belched up out of the mountain, and at first it seemed totally black. But as its darkness blotted out the sun and the light failed, the cloud could be seen to glow purple and red. It howled down the mountain at a hundred miles an hour, uprooting trees and shattering buildings. In less than two minutes, the burning avalanche hit the city of St. Pierre, killing some thirty thousand persons.

  Many died from inhaling the hot gases; others were horribly burned. The cloud emerged from the crater at a temperature of about a thousand degrees centigrade. As it moved, bubbles of gas continued to ignite, so that it hit St. Pierre not much cooler, about eight hundred degrees centigrade. The heat lasted only a few minutes, and the cloud cooled rapidly so that there was not much damage from fire. The blast was not hot enough, nor was it of sufficient duration, to ignite cotton, and many corpses were found fully clothed. The heat did, however, turn body water to steam, so that the fully clothed bodies were hideously distended. In some cases, sutures in the skull had cracked open, like the shell of an overboiled egg.

  Mount St. Helens had spewed out a number of glowing avalanches in its readable geological history. Could such a cloud reach the campground on Yale Lake? I checked the distance from Mount Pelee to St. Pierre in Geological Hazards, by Bolt, Horn, MacDonald, and Scott. It appeared to be about four or five miles. We were double that distance from St. Helens, three times the distance by way of the drainages. And the glowing avalanche, like a mud flow, would follow the drainage.

  It seemed a safe enough distance, but not in a truly catastrophic situation. Then there would be a mighty eruption, and the inky black cloud would hide the mountain from us, then blot out the sun. Minutes later, in the gritty midnight, we’d see it rounding the bend in Yale Lake, a huge cloud, a hundred feet high, glowing purple-red, like a burning bruise.

  The glowing avalanche would follow the river valley like a mud flow, but because of its greater speed, it would climb ridges hundreds of feet high. Gas bubbles, separating the particles of glowing ash, reduce friction and allow the burning cloud to move at such great speeds.

  The nearest ridge appeared to be 150 feet high, and it was situated in such a way that a glowing avalanche, rounding the bend in the canyon, would be propelled directly up its slope. There was a higher ridge across the lake, but it was a hopeless distance away. And there would be no refuge in the lake itself; in seconds the surface would become a thick mass of scalding mud.

  In a minute, maybe two, the cloud would pass and no one on the campground would be left alive. Those not stripped of their clothes by the force of the blast would still be wearing their “I survived Mount St. Helens” T-shirts, and the buttons reading “They laughed at Pompeii” would be only slightly warped.

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  On March 20, a week before the first eruption of Mount St. Helens in 123 years, seismologists began detecting earthquakes in the vicinity. Three weeks later, there had been a total of 105 quakes registering over 4.0 on the Richter scale. Almost all volcanic eruptions of major significance are preceded by a series of earthquakes.

  On April 2, the University of Washington seismic lab detected a “harmonic tremor,” a rhythmic expanding and contracting of the ground quite unlike the sharp crack of a conventional quake. Harmonic tremors are caused by the movement of magma and gases within the volcano and, even more than conventional quakes, signal the possible onset of a major eruption.

  Forest Service workers on the lower slopes had already been evacuated, and loggers were banned from job sites deemed dangerous.

  The scenarios I had been so assiduously frightening myself with seemed unlikely, but that night, Good Friday, at the Wildwood Inn, a bar in Cougar, I heard that there had been, that day, a thirty-five-minute harmonic tremor, the longest yet recorded. Rumors flew. The roadblock would be moved down the mountain several miles. The National Guard would be called in. The Big Blow was imminent.

  I woke to an ominous rumbling at 5:00 A.M. on Saturday morning, but it was only a convoy of green National Guard trucks moving on up toward Cougar.

  Local folks were allowed to move through the roadblocks. Guardsmen handed them slips of paper which read: “Hazardous Area—Volcano—Enter at your own risk.”

  At the Wildwood Inn there were stacks of a single-page bulletin from the U.S. Geological Survey entitled “What to Do When a Volcano Erupts.” Readers were advised to get indoors during ash falls, to shovel accumulated ash from their roofs, to breathe through a damp cloth, to keep their eyes closed as much as possible “when the air is full of ash,” and not to drive cars because “the chance of accident will be increased by poor visibility.”

  Mud flows, the bulletin said, would resemble wet, flowing concrete. They “move faster than you can walk or run, but you can drive a car down a valley faster than a mud flow will travel.” The bulletin advised drivers to check upstream for mud flows before crossing any bridges and said that pedestrians should move to high ground.

  In big, screaming capital letters, the bulletin said, “MOST IMPORTANT—Don’t panic, keep calm.”

  This was all good advice, and the last sentence, which was underlined for emphasis, was the best advice of all, even if it was somewhat self-evident: “During an eruption, move away from a volcano, not toward it.”

  The bulletin didn’t mention glowing avalanches. Either the Geological Survey didn’t think them likely, or it felt that since there was nothing to be done about them, the damn things were better left unmentioned. The very idea could cause a panic.

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  It rained all day Saturday, and I spent the dreary hours at the Wildwood, drinking beer and playing pool. The rumor was that they were going to tighten up the roadblock. The media would no longer have access. Marty and Ken and Len and I took Paul’s advice to Timothy to heart, and among us we killed a half-gallon of rot-gut bourbon.

  On Easter Sunday there was rain mixed with snow. I drove down to the roadblock and found it was true; the road was closed to the media. An ABC network television crew had gotten in under the wire and interviewed Ken, who had had a great deal of trouble getting out of his sleeping bag that morning. The acid and the bourbon and the beer had caught up with him and he had spent most of the night on his hands and knees, vomiting. The TV crew found him lying in his tent with his dog, Guy.

  “Are you excited when the volcano shoots out plumes?” Ken was asked.

  “Not particularly,” Ken said. He wanted to die.

  The TV people decided that it would be best just to get some interesting shots of a man and his dog, living in a tent under the volcano. “Don’t talk,” they told Ken. “Just pretend we’re not here and do what you’d be doing otherwise.” Ken zipped up his tent and went back to sleep.

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  I like to think there is an underlying mystical logic to events, a mathematics of catastrophe, a symmetry to the Apocalypse. It was Easter Sunday afternoon, and a cold rain mixed with snow fell on the all-but-deserted campground. It was one of those soul-chilling, incessant, Pacific Northwest drizzles: a steady, endless, timeless rain.

  I looked out over the gray surface of the lake. On the ridges, frosted trees g
leamed dully in the leaden light. St. Helens was shrouded in fog. Everyone was gone: the press, the sightseers, everyone. The only people left on the campground were a group of geology students from Montreal and myself and the three hitchhikers. Symmetry demanded that Easter Sunday be the day of The Big Blow.

  Ash would fall, stinking of brimstone. The day would drown in gritty night and no light would show. Out of the sudden blackness would come the high whine of wasps and locusts and scorpions. In the distance, howling and hissing and steaming, there would be seen a tortured light, the burning bruise of a glowing avalanche, moving at unholy speed. The incandescent cloud would melt the mountain itself, and the rumble of a mighty mud flow would shake the land. It would be over us then, all of us, everywhere; this great wall of mud, stinking of the bowels of the earth.

  Only a few survivors would hear it; the demonic howl, the gibbering, the inhuman laughter as the Beast emerged from the Ape Caves to take possession of his newly born kingdom. The Beast had waited long for this time. We always knew he was there, but we could never see him, nor find him, nor kill him, nor even film him. He would stride boldly over the broken, burning land, through the stench of sulfur, and the thing we called Sasquatch or Bigfoot or Yeti would have the number 666 on his forehead.

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  It rained, and sometimes it snowed; other than that, nothing much happened on Easter Sunday. No ash, no fire, no mud, no Apocalypse.

  On Monday morning we broke camp, but at 11:00 the clouds cleared and the mountain sent up a great mushroom-shaped black plume. There was a faint rumbling, and on the northwest slope, near the crater, we could see a sizable snow avalanche. The mountain erupted four more times in two hours. Through my binoculars I could see boulders being thrown for what looked to be several hundred yards.

  Ken and Len were going on down to Texas where they had lined up a construction job. Marty thought he’d tag along with them and see if he could find work in the oil fields. They were all going to hitchhike together: three tough-looking guys, three big backpacks, and one wet dog. Anyone would pick them up.

  I dropped them all off in Portland. That fat, dreary depression came back and sat on my heart.

  The next day, at the Forest Service press conference in Vancouver, Washington, geologists said they thought the volcano had entered “a constant mode of activity.” It could, they said, continue ejecting steam and ash in minor quantities as it had done for twenty-five years the last time it erupted. Instruments had been placed near the flanks of the mountain, and they showed no significant lift or tilting of the ground. “All these observations,” the geologists said, “imply that there is no indication that a major eruption of molten rock will occur in the near future.” The monitoring system would provide advance indications of changing conditions that might lead to an eruption.

  Roadblocks were moved back up the road, east of Cougar, and loggers went back to their job sites after signing disclaimers. Fishing season would open as scheduled.

  On Thursday there was no volcano photo on the front page of The Oregonian. The lead photo and story came from San Bernardino, California. It was about a sixteen-year-old who sold his five-year-old cousin to a convicted sex offender who wanted to “teach the young girl things.” The sixteen-year-old bargained the buyer up from an initial offer of $50 to $230. The girl was rescued after four days, and the sixteen-year-old was arrested. He had $6 in his pocket. He told police that he had plunked $150 into pinball machines and bought his girl a corsage.

  The story had its own hellish smell of brimstone. When the toad is sitting on your heart, you don’t have to look very far to see the Apocalypse coming. The mountain, as of this writing, is still steaming up north of Portland, but there are any number of ways to bring it all to an end.

  Author’s Note:

  This article appeared in print two weeks before the cataclysmic eruption of Mount St. Helens. It had been a tough story to write: what can you say about a bunch of people watching an occasional puff of smoke emerge from a pretty white mountain? In order to give the story a little drama, I went and spoke to geologists who had studied the mountain for decades and asked them to help me draw up a worst-possible-case scenario.

  At Mount St. Helens, two days after the eruption, reporters from across America were walking around carrying copies of Outside containing the article. The worst-case scenario I had elicited from the geologists was eerily accurate: there had been intermittent blasts, massive mud slides, pyroclastic flows, and they had all occurred on the Spirit Lake side of the mountain.

  One reporter even confirmed a fact I didn’t want to know: at least one victim had died wearing an “I survived Mount St. Helens” T-shirt. So the article had been prophetic and, since I was there, working on a follow-up story for the late lamented GEO, I was interviewed a few times by my colleagues. It was, I told them, the geologists and vulcanologists, not me, who had predicted what might happen. In retrospect, it was only the tone of the article, the sense of dread and depression I felt under the volcano, that seemed somehow clairvoyant.

  Eruption

  The ashfall was light in south central Montana, where I live, and it hung in the air all around, like a brittle yellow fog. A thin layer settled on my car. It was like face powder, and I knew people were dead. The news was sparse. I couldn’t even get a phone line to Cougar, to Vancouver, to anywhere I’d been in the state of Washington only a month before.

  It was Monday, May 19, the day after the cataclysmic eruption of Mount St. Helens. I had visited the mountain shortly after March 27, when it began to vent ash and steam after a silence of 123 years. On April 22, the mountain abruptly stopped venting. In those few weeks, I met many people who lived and worked on or near the mountain. Some of them had become my friends. I had no way of knowing how many were dead.

  All planes were grounded due to airborne ash. Accumulations near ground level often reduced visibility to only a few feet, and the roads were closed. The governor had declared a state of emergency.

  There was an eerie, almost palpable silence, and it hung heavily over my town of Livingston, like the ash itself. All the gaudy honky-tonks opposite the train station were silent, locked up tight, and there were no cars or people on the streets. The mountains were hidden behind the yellowish haze.

  I stood on the corner, and ash scratched my throat as I breathed. The sun was beginning to set. It was barely visible, low in the haze, and the disk was an alien crimson color. It set the drifting ash aglow, and the air itself glimmered with a color out of time.

  I stood there thinking about death—about ash and gas, about hellfire and boiling mud—and I knew I’d find some way to get back to the mountain within the day.

  The Army, Air Force, and National Guard run their search and rescue operation out of the tiny one-runway airstrip at Toledo, Washington. There are press lines, and the media are not allowed into the Army camp where the bodies are unloaded. The helicopters—the Chinooks and the Hueys—come and go constantly, setting up that chopping, staccato sound, the clatter of war and remote tragedy.

  I am sitting in a UH-1 Huey with a crew of four out of the 54th Medical Detachment, Fort Lewis, Washington. There is a medic aboard. Stowed under my seat are a shovel and several rubber body bags.

  The Huey lifts off, and its insect eye is splattered by a glittering drizzle. We turn up the North Fork of the Toutle River and begin rising toward the mountain. I see whole forests that have been washed down the river, as well as the major debris flow of the eruption. The riverbed appears to be scoured and widened several times over. Farther on, the river runs over the mud flats in several thin, choked channels, like varicose veins, and the water is a jaundiced yellow-brown.

  There are paved roads running down to the flats on either side, but no sign of the bridges that must have spanned the river at those points. There is a collapsed hay barn. Several houses are buried in mud to the roof line. Farther on, a big steel bridge is down, its twisted girders half-buried in the sick, yellow-brown mud. />
  Here, twenty miles from the mountain, there apparently was escape. The forest still stands on either side. But as we rise higher, the mud flats expand—two hundred yards, five hundred yards—until, past Camp Baker, a vast valley perhaps one and a half miles across has been reduced to mud flats. The river here has not yet found its new channel, and it runs in thin yellowish dribbles, like bile.

  Now the high ridges on either side of the river appear to have been scoured, and we are into the devastated area, where all trees are down and stripped of their limbs. The blast area extends about thirteen miles north of the mountain and is almost eighteen miles wide. At the outer edges the trees lie across hillsides, and you can follow the lines of the blast by the way they lie.

  The mind simply refuses to comprehend the force of the blast that tore over the land. It is one thing to imagine something capable of stripping the limbs from a hundred-foot Douglas fir and instantaneously snapping it off at the roots. It is another thing entirely to realize that whole forests of these giants were sheared and shattered and ripped from the earth.

  The color below is constant, a combination of the brown of the mud and of the black and the yellow-white of the ash. It is like no other color on the face of the earth, and it stretches, constant, from horizon to horizon. It insults the eyes, this color, and it will not allow the mind to fasten upon it. The color excites a sense of horror: it is like looking at the carcass of a skinned animal.

  We follow what is left of the Toutle to the remains of Spirit Lake. The lake is yellow-green, like a thick cesspool. The water itself was set aboil by a literal mountain of boiling mud and glowing rock. Everything in the lake is dead. You can smell the death from three hundred feet.