Natural disasters are revelatory. The manner in which a society interprets a catastrophe and responds to the chaos exposes many of the accepted truths, prejudices, hopes, and fears of a culture.
—Nicholas Shrady, The Last Day
IN THE YEAR 1980, TOWARD THE END OF MARCH, NEWSPAPERS AND television stations began reporting on a series of strange events taking place in a largely unknown corner of the western United States. A volcano in southwestern Washington State known as Mount St. Helens was threatening to erupt. A crater had opened on the summit of the mountain and was spewing ash and steam thousands of feet into the air. Earthquakes were shaking the volcano so violently that people nearby said it was like being on a ship at sea. State officials, based on geologists’ predictions, were telling residents and visitors to stay away. Floods, mudflows, and withering blasts of superhot gas could, with little warning, sweep away trees, houses, and people.
It was a wonderful diversion at an unhappy time in the nation’s history. In 1980 the United States was still recovering from the traumas of Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil embargos of the 1970s, which had temporarily deprived Americans of one of their most cherished freedoms—the right to drive anywhere, anytime, for as long as a person might want. A long presidential campaign was just getting under way between an unpopular sitting president, Jimmy Carter, and the eventual Republican nominee, a former California governor and movie star named Ronald Reagan, who promised to return the nation to its former glory. Students backed by the revolutionary government of Iran were holding fifty-two Americans hostage in the US embassy. The most popular music of the time was disco; fashions ran from bell-bottoms to peasant blouses; and men sported bushy mustaches and long sideburns. In a 1976 magazine article, Tom Wolfe referred to the 1970s as “The Me Decade” for the period’s pervasive dissatisfaction and devotion to personal transformation, and the label seems more appropriate than any decadal label coined since.
In the Pacific Northwest, the mood was even grimmer. In the 1970s, when I left Washington State to go east for college, the region seemed to me to be teetering on the edge of insolvency. Employment at Boeing, the state’s largest company, had dropped from more than 100,000 people to less than 40,000, prompting two real estate agents to erect the famous billboard near Seattle-Tacoma Airport that read WILL THE LAST PERSON LEAVING SEATTLE—TURN OUT THE LIGHTS. A scrappy band of troublemakers, emboldened by the environmental movement of the 1970s, was threatening the state’s second largest industry—the extraction of timber from the vast forests of the Cascade Mountains. Commercial and sports fishermen were complaining about declining catches—the product of too much development, too many dams, and too much fishing. The copious bounty of the Northwest—celebrated in the potlatches of the native peoples, in nineteenth-century railroad advertisements, in the breathless promises of civic boosters, and in countless middle-class households like my own—seemed in danger of fading away.
In the midst of all this economic, geopolitical, and cultural gloom, a misbehaving volcano took people’s minds off their troubles. It made at least one small part of the country seem exotic, mysterious, exciting. After all, volcanic eruptions did not occur in the United States—at least not outside the distant annexes of Alaska and Hawaii. Though hurricanes and tornadoes still struck the South and Midwest with alarming frequency, the last volcano to erupt in the contiguous United States had been Lassen Peak in Northern California in 1917, so long ago and in such an isolated part of the country that it was all but forgotten. The last earthquake in the contiguous United States to cause more than 100 fatalities, in Long Beach, California, had occurred almost a half century before, in 1933. The United States felt settled and mundane, as if Americans had tamed not just the landscape but the very geological foundation on which their homes, roads, and businesses stood. That a formerly tranquil mountain in an otherwise unassuming range of peaks could suddenly spout fire seemed almost miraculous.
Less than two months after it first rumbled to life—on a bright Sunday morning in May—Mount St. Helens exploded with a violence out of all proportion to what it had done before. It was the single most powerful natural disaster in US history—more powerful than Hurricane Katrina when it hit New Orleans in 2005, more powerful than the 1906 earthquake that destroyed San Francisco, more powerful even than the world’s first atomic explosion on the high plains of New Mexico in 1945. The eruption generated one of the largest landslides in recorded human history; it devastated an area four times the size of Washington, DC; and it killed people thirteen miles away from the volcano’s summit—the distance from Central Park to Coney Island, or from downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean. Photographs taken from satellites a few weeks after the eruption show an angry gray blot amid the jade-green forests of southwestern Washington State, as if a gigantic hand had swept the earth bare.
A natural disaster is not a disaster until it becomes a human disaster; otherwise, in the minds of most people, it is mere spectacle. Fifty-seven people died that Sunday morning—a number that would have been ten times higher if the volcano had exploded on a weekday rather than on a Sunday. The dead were swept off hillsides, crushed by falling trees, carried away by floods, asphyxiated by ash. The bodies of almost half were never found and remain buried around the mountain.
I became interested in writing this book while thinking about those fifty-seven people. What led them to be where they were that fatal Sunday morning? After all, many people in the Northwest could have been numbered among the dead. A friend could have called and said, “Let’s go see the volcano,” and a group of two or three or four would have climbed into a station wagon or RV, driven down Interstate 5, turned off on the Spirit Lake Highway, and camped overnight on a ridge with a good view of the mountain. When people who were in the Northwest in 1980 remember where they were the day the volcano erupted, many do so with the prickly sensation of having barely escaped disaster.
I also wondered about the legacy of those who died. In the Northwest and elsewhere, they often are remembered as daredevils who violated the law to get where they were when the volcano exploded. But that belief is completely at odds with the truth. Why do so many unfair misconceptions surround their deaths?
In retrospect, the fifty-seven people who died were too close to a dangerous volcano. That always struck me as odd. People have known for millennia that volcanoes can be deadly. On August 24 in the year 79 CE, after centuries of inactivity, the volcano known as Vesuvius, halfway down the west coast of Italy, suddenly erupted an immense column of ash and smoke that towered high above what is now the city of Naples. The scientist, author, and naval commander Gaius Plinius Secundus, known to history as Pliny the Elder, was in his villa in the town of Misenum, twenty miles to the west of Vesuvius across the Bay of Naples, when the volcano erupted. He immediately ordered that a boat be prepared so he could investigate the eruption. He died about ten miles south of the volcano, either from inhaling toxic gases or from a heart attack brought on by his exertions. In the coastal town of Herculaneum, four miles from the summit, and in Pompeii, six miles from the summit, thousands more died when their towns were overrun by volcanic blasts and buried by hurricanes of hot ash.
The day of Pliny the Elder’s death, his sister and her son, Pliny the Younger, tried to flee Misenum as a cloud of volcanic ash expanded toward the town. Later, Pliny the Younger wrote about their experiences on a nearby hill:
It was not the darkness of a moonless or cloudy night, but just as if the lamp had been put out in a completely closed room. You could have heard women shrieking, children crying, and men shouting. Some were calling for their parents, some for their children, some for their wives, and trying to recognize them by their voices. Those people were bewailing their own fate, or those of their relatives. Some people were so frightened of dying that they actually prayed for death. Many begged for the help of the gods, but even more imagined that there were no gods left and that the last eternal night had fallen on the world.
Today, eruptions like that of Mount St. Helens, with columns of ash that tower far overhead and descend upon their victims like the angel of death, are still known as Plinian eruptions to honor Pliny the Younger’s careful descriptions of the event.
• • •
To understand why fifty-seven people were killed in the eruption of Mount St. Helens, I first had to learn more about the geology of volcanoes. Geologists had obviously underestimated how large the eruption could be. But they had plenty of warning: Mount St. Helens had been shaking, smoking, and swelling for nearly two months before the cataclysmic eruption of May 18. How could they have been so surprised when it exploded?
I soon learned something else. Geological factors were only part of the reason for the disaster. The people who were around Mount St. Helens had many reasons for being where they were. Some of those reasons extended just a day or two into the past—to a promising weather forecast, to the opening of fishing season, to an incautious curiosity. But other reasons went back decades or centuries—to a lumberyard on the banks of the Mississippi River, to a dining room on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, to a railroad snaking across the high plains. Great forces that have shaped the nation throughout its history—the extraction of natural resources, the construction of nationwide transportation systems, the rise of the conservation movement—helped determine the fates of the people scattered around the volcano that Sunday morning.
To my surprise, a major theme of the story was logging—though perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, given the importance of logging in the Pacific Northwest. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of men and their families streamed into the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho to cut down the immense trees that once blanketed the hills and valley floors of the region. My own great-grandfather, who was born and raised in Boston, was killed in the forests east of Seattle when a massive tree he was loading onto a truck fell off and crushed him. My grandfather, who was helping him on the job, had to wrap his body in a blanket and drive it back over the mountains to my great-grandmother. My father worked summers during high school and college at a gigantic sawmill in Everett, a half hour north of Seattle, before opting for the more prosaic life of an accountant. Sawdust runs in the veins of many Pacific Northwest families.
Many companies have logged the great forests of the West, but one in particular looms large in the story of Mount St. Helens. In the year 1900, the lumberman Frederick Weyerhaeuser, who already had made a fortune cutting down the trees of Wisconsin and Minnesota, bought substantial portions of the land between Mount St. Helens and the Pacific Ocean, sight-unseen, from his next-door neighbor on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. That purchase turned out to include some of the richest and most productive forestland anywhere in the world. What John Muir wrote of America’s forests applied especially to those of southwestern Washington: “The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.”
The forests west of Mount St. Helens made the Weyerhaeusers, already a rich family, an American dynasty. Early in the twentieth century, many members of the family and their business associates relocated from the largely cutover Midwest to the virgin forests of the Pacific Northwest. There they sought to blend in with the reserved and self-effacing culture of their new homeland. But even today, in the upper-left-hand corner of the country, no family name is as richly evocative as Weyerhaeuser.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of the Weyerhaeuser Company to the history of the Pacific Northwest. William Boeing dropped out of Yale and moved to Washington State in 1903 to become a lumberman when he learned about Frederick Weyerhaeuser’s massive timber purchase—only later realizing that the gigantic spruce trees that grew in Washington’s soggy loam yielded ideal frames for the wonderful new invention of airplanes. Whole towns and cities took shape around Weyerhaeuser’s operations, thriving if that part of the business succeeded or withering if the business faltered. The company pioneered the idea of tree farms that would grow successive crops of trees in perpetuity. The physical appearance of the land, on drives through the Pacific Northwest hinterland, was often the result of decisions made in Weyerhaeuser’s headquarters.
Weyerhaeuser and other economic interests have formed the backdrop against which much of the region’s history has played out. That turned out to be the case at Mount St. Helens too.
• • •
Another reason I wanted to write this book is because 1980 was such a pivotal year in American history. Before 1980, income disparities in the United States were narrowing; since then, incomes have become steadily more unequal. Union membership peaked in 1979 and has never been as high since. The year 1980 saw the highest divorce rate in US history. The release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere accelerated after 1980 as more countries joined the United States and Europe in burning fossil fuels without restraint.
The year 1980 was even more consequential in the Pacific Northwest. In 1979, Bill Gates and Paul Allen moved their fledgling company, then named Micro-Soft, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, back to their hometown. In 1982, Howard Schultz became the marketing director for the old downtown Starbucks coffee shop, which he bought a few years later and began to expand. In 1983, Costco opened its first store in south Seattle and quickly became the fastest-growing company in US history. A few years after that, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon after driving to Seattle while drawing up cost projections for his new venture on the way. Today, those four companies—Microsoft, Costco, Starbucks, and Amazon—are the largest and most profitable companies in the state. Logging, fishing, and agriculture, while still active, have faded into the background.
Of course, the eruption of Mount St. Helens did not bring about the economic revival of the Pacific Northwest, at least not directly. If anything, people moving to the Northwest worried for a few years about relocating near an active volcano. But the eruption focused attention on a part of the country that previously had been an afterthought. The Pacific Northwest has a combination of assets unknown elsewhere—a breathtaking natural beauty, a gentle rain-washed climate, a tolerant and ecumenical culture. As the economies of Seattle, Portland, and other big cities boomed in the 1980s, the media began to celebrate the region’s innocence and quirkiness—from the Space Needle to Pike Place Market, from Sleepless in Seattle to Frasier. By 1996, in a cover story entitled “Seattle Reigns,” Newsweek proclaimed, “Sooner or later, it seems, everyone moves to Seattle, or thinks about it.”
At the same time, the revival of cities in the Pacific Northwest masked a darker trend—one more accurately captured by Twin Peaks than Frasier. In small towns like the one where I grew up, the decline of the old-time extractive industries and the cultural fallout of the 1960s and ’70s caused immense human hardship. The incomes of men began to fall, and more women entered the workplace. Rising divorce rates caused families to dissolve and reform, leaving children confused and directionless. Illicit drugs, from cocaine in the 1980s to meth in the 2000s, hollowed out the lives of friends and spouses and cast a pall over small-town life. Of course, these trends were not limited to small towns, and many people remained in small towns or moved to them to escape the stresses of city life. But small towns suffered disproportionately.
The eruption of Mount St. Helens marked the dividing line between the old Northwest and the new, between the decline of the countryside and the rise of the cities, between an economy based on resources and one based on ideas. The stories of the people who were around the mountain when it exploded reflect this turning point, as if caught in an unexpected snapshot.
• • •
Finally, the 1970s and ’80s were decades of heightened environmental activism, which also is part of the Mount St. Helens story. The first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, and the environmental movement grew in size and influence for the next decade. The Limits to Growth report released by the Club of Rome in 1972 suggested that civilization would collapse in the twenty-first century if consumption continued unchecked. In about 1980 the first articles began to appear in national magazines warning that the continued burning of fossil fuels could cause the climate to warm. A few years later the nation went through a brief frenzy at the thought that even a limited nuclear war could plunge the planet into a prolonged nuclear winter.
In the midst of this upwelling of environmentalism, the eruption of Mount St. Helens added a note of uncertainty, of peril, to how people thought about the future. It reinforced the idea that the earth is at best indifferent and at worst hostile toward its human occupants. The eruption of the volcano took no notice of human affairs. It snuffed out the lives of people who were too close to the mountain as casually as a leaf drops from a branch. The people who experienced the eruption could never again think of the ground on which they stood as beneficent and forgiving. The earth could reach up and crush them at any time.
The loss of life at Mount St. Helens occurred because people were unable to see a risk that in retrospect was obvious. They thought that the risk was small, or that they were smart enough to get out of the way if something happened. Most of us go through life this way. We ignore the risks we face so we are not paralyzed by dread. Only in retrospect does the extent of our willful ignorance become clear.