On May 18, 1980, I was 20 and living in my hometown of Spokane, the main target of Mount St. Helens’ wrath. Ignoring the warnings that the mountain had erupted (and figuring the west side of the state would bear the brunt of the activity), my then-boyfriend and I went out to shop.
Imagine our horror as an hour later we stood on a downtown sky bridge and watched as a huge, dark wall of ash came at Spokane. The drive home, usually a 10 minute hop, seemed to take forever as the truck wipers did little to help keep the ash off the windshield. It was like driving in the worst gray snowstorm you can imagine – visibility was absolutely nil.
We spent the next three days stuck in the house and ventured out only if needed (wearing surgical masks to keep the ash from getting in our lungs and using pantyhose over vehicle filters). We wondered if the ash would ever go away.
As you can imagine, Spokane and the surrounding areas were an incredible mess with inches of the fine, soft, flour-like ash everywhere. Twenty years later, we were still finding remains of the ash in my mother’s backyard under old bushes and shrubs.
