Free Danger on Peaks by Gary Snyder Page B

of tall trees goes flat down
    lightning dances through the giant smoke

    a calm voice on the two-way
    ex-navy radioman and volunteer
    describes the spectacle — then
    says, the hot black cloud is
    rolling toward him — no way
    but wait his fate
    a photographer’s burnt camera
    full of half melted pictures,
    three fallers and their trucks
    chainsaws in back, tumbled gray and still,
    two horses swept off struggling in hot mud
    a motionless child laid back in a stranded ashy pickup

    roiling earth-gut-trash cloud tephra twelve miles high
    ash falls like snow on wheatfields and orchards to the east
    five hundred Hiroshima bombs

    in Yakima, darkness at noon

B LAST Z ONE

    Late August 2000.
    An early plane from Reno to Portland, meet Fred Swanson at the baggage claim. Out of the Portland airport and onto these new streets, new highways, there’s a freeway bridge goes right across the Columbia, the 205, piers touch down on the mid-river island, but there’s no way onto it. This is the skinny cottonwood island that Dick Meigs and I used to sail to and camp on the sandbars. Blackberries growing around the transmission towers.

    In an instant we’re in Washington State, and swinging north to join the main 5. Signs for Battleground, Cougar. Crossing the Lewis River, the Columbia to the left, the Kalama River, the old Trojan nuke plant towers, then on to Castle Rock. Freeway again, no sign of the towns — they’re off to the west — and we turn into the Toutle River valley on a big new road. Old road, old bridges most all swept away.

    (Remembering two lane highway 99, and how we’d stop for groceries in Castle Rock, a hunter/logger’s bar with walls covered solid by racks of antlers. The road east toward Spirit Lake first climbed steeply out of town and then gradually up along the river. It was woodlots and pasture and little houses and barns, subsistence farms, farmer-loggers.) Air cool, clear day, bright green trees.

    The new Silver Lake Mt. St. Helens Visitors Center is close enough to the freeway that travelers on the 5 can swing by here, take a look, and continue on. It’s spacious, with a small movie theater in back and a volcano model in the center large enough to descend into, walk through, and at the center look down a skillful virtual rising column of molten magma coming up from the core of the earth.

    The Center’s crowded with people speaking various languages. Gazing around at the photographs and maps, I begin to get a sense of what transformations have been wrought. The Toutle River
lahar
made it all the way to the Columbia River, some sixty miles, and deposited enough ash and mud into the main channel to block shipping until it was dredged, weeks later.

    We go on up the highway. Swanson explains how all the agencies wanted to get in on the restoration money that was being raised locally (and finally by Congress). They each put forth proposals: the Soil Conservation Service wanted to drop $16.5 million worth of grass seed and fertilizer over the whole thing, the Forest Service wanted to salvage-log and replant trees, and the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build sediment retention dams. (They got to do some.) The Forest Ecology Mind (incarnated in many local people, the environmental public, and some active scientists) prevailed, and within the declared zone, zero restoration became the rule. Let natural succession go to work and take its time. Fred Swanson was trained as a geologist, then via soils went into forest and stream ecology research in the Andrews Forest in Oregon. He has been studying Mt. St. Helens from the beginning.

    The Corps of Engineers went to work along the Toutle with hundreds of giant trucks and earth movers. Swanson takes a turn off the main road, just a few miles on, to a view of an earthwork dam that was built to help hold back further debris floods in the new river channel. The lookout parking lot had clearly been more of a tourist