Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  There is a new vent just west of the lake, and it is spewing up a cloud of steam and dark ash to a height of about one hundred feet. The steam is the same color as several drifting pockets of fog, only thicker.

  Between the lake and the mountain is a hummocky mud flat. There are bilious standing ponds down there; jaundiced streams run aimlessly through the flat, searching for a new drainage. From three hundred feet up, the flat looks like the Canyonlands of Utah seen from thirty thousand feet.

  Soldiers who have searched this area on foot tell me that it is like walking on a water bed. The layers of water and mud and ash have turned the earth into a moldy poison pudding. Bubbles the size of a man’s head rise up out of the mud, and when they burst, there is a sudden stench of brimstone.

  Everywhere there are great dirty white humps sunk partially into the mud and surrounded by bile-colored puddles. These are sections of glaciers thrown from the flanks of the mountain by the blast.

  The Huey moves toward the base of the mountain, and I can just barely make out the crater through the mist: it is shaped like a horseshoe, the open end canted down to the north. There is the smell of smoke, of a choked, closed-in fire. Below, hundreds of logs, sunk in the mud and covered with ash, are still smoldering: these are the remnants of the dozens of forest fires ignited by the volcano. Dirty gray smoke rises to meet the leaden clouds.

  We skirt the base of the mountain and drop down over the South Fork of the Toutle in order to search the drainages just up from Disappointment Creek. The crew chief spots something angular in the mud along a steep slope, and our pilot wheels the bird around. We hover over the object, and the helicopter bucks like a skittish horse held tight.

  It is a toppled logging crane, the tower pointing downhill, a muddy logjam behind its threads. Gray ash billows around us as we land. The mud clutches our boots ankle-deep, and there is a cold, funereal wind whipping off the ridge. We find no body in the cab, no body in the vicinity. The crew chief marks the spot with a yellow smoke bomb: the vehicle has been searched.

  We lift off in a storm of ash and pass over the ridge, where we spot a small blue car. Two bodies were recovered there yesterday. In another drainage, we set down beside a small red car, an import. A sleeping bag is humped in the back seat. The crew chief breaks the window with a rock. There is nothing under the bag. On the front seat of the car there is a wallet with a driver’s license in it. The crew chief will see to it that it gets to the next of kin. There is some camera gear scattered on the front seat, but the camera body is missing. We trudge through the deep ash and mud to the top of the ridge, looking for anything that protrudes: an arm, a foot, anything. We guess that the occupant of the car ran to the top of the ridge to shoot some pictures. We find nothing.

  Farther down the South Fork, we come upon a logging-company truck. It is badly burned. The cab is crushed, and a mudslide has pushed it into the twisted roots of an overturned tree. We cannot get into the cab. It is partially buried in the mud and entangled in the roots. There is another odor here: something worse than the smell of ooze and sulfur and ash and fire. It is very faint, this odor, and it emanates from the vicinity of the truck. It will take a crane or bulldozer to get the truck out of the roots and mud. The helicopter crew marks the truck for further search.

  This mission is over. We rise up off the tortured land, and rain streaks race across the Huey’s insect eye.

  Weeks before the big blast, a sort of blister had been observed forming on the north flank of the mountain. The bulge was growing outward at the rate of five feet per day. It was an ominous development.

  On Saturday, May 17, the day before the eruption, Frank Valenzuela, twenty-three, was camped due west of Mount St. Helens, near Goat Mountain and just off N820, an all-weather road. He was about five miles from the base of the mountain. A naturalist for the St. Helens Ranger District, Frank had recently been evacuated, and everything he owned was piled in the back of his white Ford Maverick. On Sunday, he intended to hike into the Goat Marsh area. Near his campsite, Frank ran into Robert, a friend of his. Also camped nearby was Ty Kearney, an amateur radio operator who had volunteered to spend a week monitoring the volcano for the Washington Department of Emergency Services.

  Frank and Robert got up before dawn on Sunday morning and hiked down near the South Fork of the Toutle. They returned to the N820 campsite about 8:00 A.M. Kearney was talking to a second radio operator about three miles to the northeast.

  “There are two vents,” the second operator said.

  “Yeah.” Kearney sounded bored. “I see them clearly.”

  Frank was sitting on a stump, eating an orange. The stump began to sway under him. It was 8:31 and 31 seconds, according to various seismic stations, and the earthquake that rocked the land was centered some three miles under Mount St. Helens. It measured over 5.0 on the Richter scale.

  The ground wobbled like Jell-O, and Frank turned toward the mountain. Immediately, the north flank began to slide into the Spirit Lake basin. There was no sound.

  “I see the face moving,” the second operator told Kearney.

  As the north flank dropped away from the mountain, almost simultaneously, Frank saw a white cloud with pink and yellowish tinges burst out of the lower north side of the shattered mountain. It moved in a lateral direction, to the north, and Frank could see into it but not through it.

  At precisely the same time, two dark plumes shot out of the upper slope of the north flank. They were as black as sheets of heavy construction paper. Both the upper and lower blasts seemed to be moving at incredible speeds.

  The lower, white blast spread out to the north. It seemed to Frank, from his high vantage point, that the cloud was at least fifty yards high.

  Kearney’s radio crackled. “It’s coming toward me,” the second operator said. There was panic in his voice. He mumbled something, perhaps his call letters. There was the sound of a revving engine, then sudden silence. My God, Frank thought, he’s dead.

  The north flank slid into the basin toward Spirit Lake. At first it stayed together as one huge plate. Then it began to ripple, and finally it broke apart and became an avalanche.

  A white, cloudy substance appeared around the summit, and it seemed to Frank that the entire top of the mountain had caved in. St. Helens lost at least thirteen hundred feet in those few seconds.

  Frank wasn’t checking his watch, but he felt perhaps thirty seconds had passed. It took that long for the sound to reach him. It was an incredible roar, like a jet engine at close range, and he could feel its vibration in his chest.

  To understand the mechanics of that initial blast, it is necessary to start at least sixty miles below the surface of the earth, where the temperature is thought to be about twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Though this is more than hot enough to melt rock, the weight of the earth above keeps the rock from melting.

  Any crack or fissure allows the rock to expand, to melt and to move toward the surface of the earth. Great quantities of water and gases of carbon and sulfur are contained in the molten rock, and as it moves upward and the pressure lessens, these substances begin to form gas bubbles, which expand and coalesce as they push the superheated rock, called magma, upward with ever greater force.

  A pool of magma fed St. Helens for months. The upward movement of magma heated the very rocks that composed the mountain. Snowfields and glaciers began to melt, liberating enormous quantities of water. Some of this water found its way into the various drainages, but much of it dropped into cracks and fissures and sank into the mountain. As the water seeped deeper, it came into contact with even hotter rock, and its temperature was raised well above the boiling point. Even before the major explosion, bursts of steam and ash had erupted from several vents within the old crater.

  The big explosion, when it finally came, is thought to have been at least five hundred times more powerful than the atomic blast that leveled Hiroshima. Huge boulders and great chunks of glacial ice were thrown for miles. A hurricane of fragmented
rock and steam literally shattered trees on the ridge above Spirit Lake; small slivers of wood can be found everywhere beneath the ash and mud on those hills. Other trees were sheared off at ground level or simply uprooted. A low volcanic cloud limbed and leveled 156 square miles of forest.

  The upper section of the blast pulverized the old rock above it. Tiny fragments of this rock gave the cloud its dark color. The lethal lower section of the blast did not carry as much fragmental material, which accounts for the lighter color of its cloud.

  It was a searing explosion, the temperature of the lower cloud probably near 390 degrees Fahrenheit. It spread like a white blanket below Frank. The roar was deafening, a massive composite of various cataclysms: the slide and avalanche, the collapse of the rock summit, the explosion, the hurricane of steam and pulverized rock, the shattering of forests.

  Frank thinks that it was somewhere near the thirty-second mark, just after the roar started, when he could no longer differentiate between the upper and lower components of the blast. A heavy black cloud began rising, billowing, moving toward him with frightening speed.

  The initial blast tore away much of the mountain. Magma had been rising toward the vents, rising slowly, but now there was almost no downward pressure on it at all. Steam and gases in the magma ripped upward through the molten rock. It was a continuous process: as magma was hurled into the sky by the gases, pressure was reduced on deeper magma, causing more explosions. The force of the continuous blast reduced the magma to tiny fragments that eventually fell to earth as ash. The ash was blasted ten miles into the air.

  The great black cloud was expanding in all directions, and it was moving toward Frank. It was so huge, its speed so rapid, that Frank found he simply didn’t comprehend it. The black cloud opened like some great, poison black flower in a time-lapse film.

  Other clouds, white ones, were forming somewhere in the new crater, and they were bubbling up out of that awful hole like vapor out of a beaker of dry ice. These clouds, called pyroclastic flows, are gas-charged mixtures of small glassy fragments of cooling magma combined with larger hunks of cooling molten rock saturated with gas bubbles and called pumice. The explosions that propelled the pyroclastic flows were not strong enough to send them into the atmosphere. Instead, the flows rolled out of the crater and, since they were denser than air, then rolled down into the drainages like a series of searing avalanches. Such flows are hot—392 degrees Fahrenheit by some estimates—and because the fragmental material is separated by gas, they are not substantially slowed by friction. The pyroclastic flows were rolling up out of the crater constantly and moving at speeds of nearly one hundred miles an hour. They were accompanied by the sound of hundreds of separate explosions, as closely spaced as popcorn popping or violently boiling tar. This burning material may have been forming its own clouds in the cool mountain air, and one of these white clouds rolled down the slopes of the mountain. Its momentum carried it up and over a nearby ridge where Frank knew a family was camped.

  “Those poor people,” Robert said.

  Ty Kearney said, “I’m getting out of here.”

  The eruption cloud was billowing toward them. Frank and Robert, suddenly afraid, decided to drive out, too. There followed a series of events that might have been comic if they had not been so nearly deadly.

  Frank’s car was stuck in some mud. A logger came speeding down the road in his pickup. Frank flagged him down. The logger, a big, burly man, was terrified: his face was white and his eyes bulged in his head. “The gas,” the logger screamed, “the gas is coming.” He sped away without offering any assistance. It was almost funny, Frank thought, that sweating, comic-book caricature of fear on the man’s face.

  Frank and Robert got the Maverick out of the muck and raced up to a high ridge near Goat Mountain. Only a few minutes had passed, and Frank knew his emotions had been erratic. He had first felt great awe—as if his heart were expanding in his chest—and then the pyroclastic flow rolled over the ridge and down to where the family was camped. He had been ashamed that he didn’t go down and offer help, but he knew they were dead, they had to be dead, he would die in any attempt to find them. Then came the fear, and the logger, whose fear made Frank laugh at himself.

  And now, once again, the mountain held him in thrall. There was a vast, obscene beauty to it all, something mystical, perhaps even holy. The cloud, which now had the appearance of being black with a glowing purple tinge, rose above him and around him and it was so high he could no longer see the top of the ridge. There were billows within billows: it was a great, heaving, convoluted thing. The particles within the cloud rubbed against one another and charged the air with static electricity. Long streaks of orange-white lightning shot from cloud to cloud. Thunder rolled continuously.

  One bolt dropped out of a billow and struck a spot on the next ridge. The lightning seemed to hang there for several seconds, stationary in the cloud, stationary on the ground. But the body of the bolt wavered back and forth, striking several trees, which immediately burst into flame. There were forest fires everywhere. Frank could see at least five of them.

  The black cloud was on them then. The heat was oppressive, the heavy stench of sulfur was sickening, and there seemed to be no oxygen in the air.

  Robert had left some precious possessions back at the N820 campsite, and the two men got back into their cars and tried to drive back. Their headlights couldn’t pierce the blackness, and they got lost. Finally, they got back to the campsite. They sat in their cars, the air-conditioning going full blast to equalize the atmospheric pressure. The darkness was complete but for the slightly larger pieces of glowing ash that fell through the gritty midnight like drunken falling stars.

  Within an hour or so, a stiff wind out of the west sprang up and began pushing the cloud to the east. Light dawned over the N820 campsite. Frank wrapped a T-shirt over his face and stepped out into the cloud. Lighter ash fell like fog, a tired yellow fog. To the north, thick ash was falling out of the penetrating black cloud like rain from a thunderhead. Frank had felt at least a dozen earthquakes, and the ground continued to roll under his feet like pudding. Lightning was still striking within the cloud, and fires howled under the roll of thunder. The explosions rumbled on, and those deadly white clouds kept boiling up out of the crater and floating on down the drainages with hideous and graceful speed.

  By 1:30 P.M., five hours after the initial blast, Frank and Robert thought it was clear enough to drive out. They reached the town of Cougar a little after 3:00 P.M. and reported to the sheriff.

  Of the scores dead and missing, the only one I knew was Reid Blackburn, a photographer for the Vancouver Columbian. I had met him once, very briefly, sometime in early April in the town of Cougar, on the south flank of the mountain. They found him in his car, ash piled to the windows.

  A coroner who had personally examined five of the victims told me that all had died from “mechanical obstruction of the air passages.” Ash had simply clogged their throats and lungs. “Aside from those who suffered trauma—who had trees fall on them, for instance—this is the way most of the victims died.” The coroner couldn’t tell me if death came quickly. We both hoped so.

  Harry Truman, the tough-talking eighty-three-year-old who had refused to leave his lodge near Spirit Lake, was probably buried when the north flank of the mountain rolled over him. The avalanche carried glowing rock and boiling mud all the way across Spirit Lake. The water probably ran several hundred feet up the ridge behind the lake, gathering in the shattered trees, until it spilled back into the basin and began flowing down the North Fork of the Toutle River. This debris flow—which contained much of the north flank—may have been twenty feet high or more; it may have moved as fast as thirty miles per hour. It leveled the forests before it and carried them down the drainage.

  The mudflow on the South Fork of the Toutle was fueled by melting glaciers. These high floods of boiling mud and water scoured the slopes of the mountain and may have moved as fast as sixty miles an hour.
As they hit flatter ground, they slowed and piled up, forming a great, thunderous tidal wall of mud.

  Both the mudflow and debris flow set like cement. Many of the missing must be buried there, somewhere along the banks of the North and South forks of the Toutle River. Others lie under fallen trees, under the debris from pyroclastic flows, under a thick blanket of ash somewhere in that steaming, trackless devastation.

  I thought a lot about the missing and about a conversation I overheard outside the press information office in Toledo. An army colonel was talking to a young man.

  “We have eighteen we are going through the process of identification with,” the colonel said.

  “I guess … I guess some will never be found.”

  The colonel did not like what he had to say. “Yes.” He paused. “How old was your father?”

  “Forty-eight.”

  “He was a young man,”

  “Yes.”

  There was a strange, helpless expression on the colonel’s face. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s not your fault,” the young man said.

  The Killing Season

  The bars in Montana are like the families of China: Millions upon millions of them, with only a few names. In China, you’ve got your Hongs and Wongs, and, aside from an occasional Sun Yat-sen and Mao Tse-tung, that’s about it. In the same way, thirsty individuals throughout Montana are confined to places called the Mint, the Longbranch, and the Stockman. You’ve got to go out of your way to drink in a classy joint like the Owl Casino or Trixie’s Antler Saloon.

  Long about mid-March, you want to avoid bars of any name in Montana. Even in the genteel and marginally famous Livingston Bar and Grille, one notices an alarming increase in the rascalur density (defined as the number of bona fide sons of bitches per square foot). Brothers punch one another in the Longbranch for no apparent reason. Previously married individuals mope about the Mint, where they are heard to mutter things like, “Left me a note, said she couldn’t take it anymore, she was going to California.”