Blast from the Past

Memories are faulty, and the faults of mine seem to be showing. For years, I have been telling listeners what may or may not be a true story about my experiences on the morning of Sunday, May 18, 1980--30 years ago today. I thought I recalled getting up early, having a bit of breakfast, and then descending the stairs of my apartment building in downtown Portland, Oregon. As was frequently the case, I was running late for my job with Willamette Week, the city’s principal “alternative” newspaper. As I left my building and started toward town, I noticed there was a remarkable amount of what looked like dust scattered everywhere--on the sidewalks, in the street gutters, blowing off of windowsills. Then it hit me: Mount St. Helens, located 50 miles northeast of the city, in the Cascade Range, had blown its top, just as news reports and geologists predicted it would. I was wading through volcanic ash.

So much for memory. After researching that initial Mount St. Helens blast, I realize that Portland was spared its ill effects. In fact, Portlanders didn’t even hear the mountain explode, thanks to an odd “quiet zone” phenomenon. (Wikipedia explains that “This so-called quiet zone extended radially a few tens of miles from the volcano and was created by the complex response of the eruption’s sound waves to differences in temperature and air motion of the atmospheric layers and, to a lesser extent, local topography.”) The peak erupted that morning at 8:32 a.m. PST. There’s simply no way the ash could have reached my hometown in quantity by the time I was speeding off for work. Furthermore, reports say that winds spared Portland on that first day, carrying the ash eastward instead. Not until mid-June was the Rose City dusted by St. Helens’ spewing.

Maybe, then, I’m conflating two incidents: the initial explosion, and Portland’s eventual ash dusting, which caused many people in Oregon’s largest city--including me--to don protective masks (which, believe me, was hardly a favorable fashion statement).

If so, I stand chastened.

My personal recollections of May 18, 1980, though, are insignificant compared with the historic volcanic events themselves. For weeks prior to the big blow-up there had been newspaper and television stories about steam venting in large quantities from Mount St. Helens. Earthquakes had been felt around the mountain, flaming gases were spotted, and almost all of the people who made their homes nearby--with such notable exceptions as irascible innkeeper Harry R. Truman--had evacuated from around the suddenly rumbling peak. Yet the idea that a volcano--one that had sat dormant for 123 years--might explode in our vicinity in the late 20th century seemed, well, incredible. Many Portlanders were convinced there would eventually be an anticlimax to the whole story, that the then 9,677-foot-high mountain would conclude its geological tantrum with a whimper, and our lives would return to normal.

No such luck. That morning, a 5.1-magnitude earthquake provoked a mammoth landslide on St. Helens’ north face, exposing partially molten rock and causing an explosion of lava that toppled forests and plunged into once-tourist-friendly Spirit Lake. A column of volcanic ash and gases skyrocketed 8,000 feet into the atmosphere. Over the coming weeks, that ash spread across 11 U.S. states, while melting glaciers on St. Helens precipitated mudslides and swelled adjacent rivers, turning them into sluggish gray snakes upon the landscape.

The explosion was so violent, it ripped 1,314 feet from the mountain’s summit and created a horseshoe-shaped crater where a symmetrical, snowcapped peak had once risen.

Mount St. Helens had become the Lucy Westenra of alpine eminences, a formerly beautiful and sweet-natured landmark transformed into a monster. Fifty-seven people were killed (including the aforementioned Mr. Truman) by the blast, and some 200 homes were destroyed. All life was decimated within an 18-mile zone. And more than 4 billion board feet of timber were felled and damaged (about a quarter of that later to be salvaged). Commercial air flights were cancelled in the area and Interstate 90, connecting Seattle to Spokane, was closed for more than a week, due to poor visibility.

President Jimmy Carter, touring the devastation long after the original eruption and several later explosive events, remarked: “Someone said this area looked like a moonscape. But the Moon looks more like a golf course compared to what’s up there.”

Carter wasn’t the only person who wanted to see what had become of Mount St. Helens. Perhaps a week after the May 18 eruption, my brother, Matt, and I drove up Interstate 5 from Portland to see what had become of the now-infamous peak. We couldn’t get very close, but we at least obtained a clearer view of the ash column, and saw the blackened surrounding countryside.

Two years later, with the mountain at least temporarily quiet once more, Matt and I decided to climb St. Helens. It wasn’t Matt’s first trip up the slope, but it was mine. I hope my memories of that expedition are keener than they are of May 1980. I recall that we went with a childhood friend of Matt’s, and that the ascent was more arduous than I’d expected. It was a warm, sunny day, and all three of us were wearing shorts and T-shirts, though we had jackets with us, just in case. Given our exertions--scrabbling over giant boulders and wading through thick ash deposits--our casual dress was for the best. We didn’t overheat. But by the time we reached the summit, and could look carefully over the edge into the vastly enlarged crater, we were still pretty damn beat. After recording our conquest with photographs, we began our descent. Not far from the top, we observed another contingent of mountaineers going up, only they were clad in full alpine gear. Either we were too stupid to know that we ought to have been similarly equipped, or we were too daring for our own good. No matter--this story has a happy ending. After trying to walk all the way down the mountain to our car, we realized that we didn’t have to: the gray ash worked very much like snow, and we could slide down many of the slopes, sitting on our jackets. What a sight we must have made for anybody looking up at the mountain that day! It was as if Mount St. Helens had never been the site of a cataclysm, never been the cause of death on a large scale. We were just three crazy guys sledding down a mountain, laughing.

I have driven past Mount St. Helens many times in the succeeding years, and on each occasion my thoughts of the violence that beheaded it are mixed with those of the delights we experienced that day, slip-sliding down its ashy slopes.

Not a bad mix of memories--if I recall them at all correctly.

Mount St. Helens, pre-1980

Mount St. Helens today

MORE ON MOUNT ST. HELENS’ ANNIVERSARY: “Mountain Transformed: Thirty Years After the Blast, Mount St. Helens Is Reborn Again,” by McKenzie Funk (National Geographic); “The Future of Mount St. Helens 30 Years Later,” by Phuong Le (Associated Press); “Mount St. Helens Yields Ecological Lessons Three Decades Later,” by Tom Banse (KPLU-FM); “Songs of the Mount St. Helens Disaster,” by Paula Wissel (KPLU-FM).

Fly-by Frights

The headline alone makes me want to read this historical account: “Some Washingtonians Prepare for the End as Earth Begins Passing Through the Tail of Halley’s Comet on May 18, 1910.”

Messed Up in Texas

The Texas Board of Education’s determination to rewrite school history books with a distinctly right-wing bent continues. As TPM Muckraker reports,

With the long-running Texas history textbooks standards fight scheduled to end with a final vote by the State Board of Education Friday, arch-conservative board member Don McLeroy is proposing a new set of changes that read like a tea party manifesto.

The new amendment, which is expected to get a vote on Thursday, would require high school history students to “discuss alternatives regarding long-term entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, given the decreasing worker to retiree ratio” and also “evaluate efforts by global organizations to undermine U. S. sovereignty.”

More on this idiocy here.

READ MORE: “CA Lawmaker Proposes Bill to Keep Away TX’s Textbooks (Which Call Slavery the ‘Atlantic Triangular Trade’)” (Think Progress).

Age Inflicts Even the Best of Us

Holy time warp, Batman! Can it really be a fact that Yvonne Craig, the alluring young actress who played Batgirl in the 1960s ABC-TV series Batman, is celebrating her 73rd birthday today?

(Hat tip to Pulp International.)

The Crazies Are Now in Charge

I’m not always fond of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s editorializing, but his piece from tomorrow’s edition of the paper is absolutely priceless. It begins:

Future historians tracing the crackup of the Republican Party may well look to May 8, 2010, as an inflection point.

That was the day, as is now well known, that Sen. Robert Bennett, who took the conservative position 84 percent of the time over his career, was deemed not conservative enough by fellow Utah Republicans and booted out of the primary.

Less well known, but equally ominous, is what happened that same day, 2,500 miles east in Maine. There, the state Republican Party chucked its platform--a sensible New England mix of free-market economics and conservation--and adopted a manifesto of insanity: abolishing the Federal Reserve, calling global warming a “myth,” sealing the border, and, as a final plank, fighting “efforts to create a one world government.”

One world government? Do our friends Down East fear an invasion from the Canadian maritime provinces? A Viking flotilla coming from Iceland under cover of volcanic ash?

The full essay can be found here.

READ MORE: “Another Angel Loses Its Wings,” by Steve Benen (The Washington Monthly); “Maine Tea Party: Worse Than You Think,” by Joan Walsh (Salon).

Carter Country

Sorry for the lack of posts during the last few days, but I’ve been hunkered down over a piece for my Killer Covers blog about onetime best-selling crime novelist Carter Brown. That post, which includes eye-catching illustrations from artists Robert McGinnis and Ron Lesser, is finally available here.

Vintage Views: San Francisco, 1905

I’m inaugurating a new series here at Limbo, focusing on rare and fascinating old film footage I have come across while surfing the Web. Today’s first “Vintage Views” video was apparently shot from the front end of a streetcar heading east along San Francisco’s spacious Market Street in 1905, a year before the earthquake and fire of 1906 devastated most of downtown.

The clip isn’t perfect; it was filmed more than a century ago after all. But it’s somewhat mesmerizing to watch the people and assorted vehicles navigate the old Victorian city’s principal east-west arterial, to see automobiles and bicycles dash across the streetcar’s path, and pedestrians stroll over its tracks, confident that they have plenty of time to avoid disaster. Before long, one starts to imagine himself a passenger on that trolley, approaching the clock-towered Ferry Building on the Embarcadero.

At about the 1:25 mark, the streetcar reaches what used to be known as “Cape Horn,” at the windy intersection of Market, Geary, and Kearny streets. That’s where you may spot Lotta’s Fountain and the San Francisco Chronicle headquarters off to the left, with the white San Francisco Examiner headquarters on the right. Slightly further on, also on the right, you’ll sight the original, seven-story Palace Hotel, with its redundant banks of bay windows.

With few exceptions, most notably the Ferry Building, what you see over the course of this eight-minute clip either tumbled to the 7.8 magnitude temblor, or was consumed by the hungry flames that followed that 1906 shaking.

No More Bombs, But Still Bombshells

Like many other fans of TV mystery series, I was saddened to hear in the summer of 2008 that Foyle’s War--the World War II-era drama starring Michael Kitchen as a steadfast and charismatic police detective in southeastern England--would no longer be shown after five seasons on the air. Produced by the UK’s ITV and carried in the States by PBS, the show’s 90-minute episodes were particularly well-scripted (primarily by author-screenwriter Anthony Horowitz), integrating plots rife with devilry, deceit, and persistent greed into the broader backdrop of a bombarded, beleaguered Britain. However, Foyle’s War also benefited from having three continuing characters who boasted emotional gravity as well as intriguing back stories: not only Kitchen’s Detective Chief Inspector Christopher Foyle, a fairly solitary widower with a dashing young son in the Royal Air Force; but also Honeysuckle Weeks who played his driver, the resourceful and mischievous vicar’s daughter, Samantha “Sam” Stewart, and Anthony Howell as the more restrained Detective Sergeant Paul Milner, a policeman who has returned to his former occupation after losing a leg in the Allied defense of Norway.

Unfortunately, ITV complained that staging this period police procedural was too significant a drain on its bottom line. So it was decided that Foyle’s War would finish with an episode (“All Clear”) set during the concluding week of the fighting on the British Home Front in 1945. And then the series would itself disappear into history.

Things didn’t quite work out that way, though. Viewership for those concluding episodes was especially high, persuading ITV execs that it would be a smart idea to revive the series. Within just a couple of months of the supposed finale of Foyle’s War, Ms. Weeks told Britain’s Daily Mail that negotiations were underway to bring Foyle, Stewart, and Milner back for more.

The first of three new, postwar installments of Foyle’s War will air tonight, May 2, as part of PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery! series. The show begins at 9 p.m. ET/PST on PBS. Two additional episodes will be broadcast on May 9 and 16.

As we rejoin the story, VE Day has come and gone, and so has much of the confidence in Britain that conditions will soon return to normal. Food shortages and other privations persist, families are still struggling to recoup after being torn asunder, and postwar poverty has brought an escalation in crime rates. More than ready to start afresh, the UK electorate has turned out the man who led them through the fighting--Prime Minister Winston Churchill--and replaced him in the 1945 general election with Labour leader Clement Attlee.

Meanwhile, after having maintained law-enforcement in the coastal town of Hastings, even as greater crimes were perpetrated on a worldwide scale, DCI Foyle is ready to do some moving on of his own. He’s determined to retire, to give up tracking killers and other malefactors in favor of wetting a fishing line, imbibing his share of good malt whiskey, and visiting America. At the same time, Sam Stewart has taken on duties as the housekeeper and secretary to Sir Leonard Spencer-Jones, an eminent local artist, and Milner has accepted promotion to the rank of detective inspector in Brighton.

Tonight’s episode, “The Russian House,” focuses on Russian soldiers who, at the height of the recent hostilities, switched to the side of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis rather than continue serving with the forces of the Soviet Union, a country allied with the UK. Following the war, such collaborators captured by the British Army were shipped back to England for processing and return transit to their home country. But rumors are circulating that this repatriation will result in execution for the soldiers, rather than family reunions. If they want to live, it’s said, the only hope for the Nazi collaborators is to escape to sanctuary at London’s mysterious, anti-Soviet Russian House. One such ex-soldier has been working on Sir Leonard’s estate. When he escapes in the wake of the artist’s slaying, he naturally becomes suspect number one in the crime--and it’s up to Foyle, with Sam’s assistance but some unexpected hindrance from DI Milner--to identify the real murderer.

The second episode is even more fascinating than the first. Titled “Killing Time,” it puts Hastings at the center of racial tensions facing U.S. soldiers returning from the battlefields. Prior to World War II, you’ll remember, the American military was segregated, just like most of the United States itself. African Americans could serve in the armed forces, but they were assigned duty mostly as truck drivers and stevedores, and there were pitifully few black officers. Not until 1948 did President Harry Truman, a child of the segregated South, order that the military be integrated. In “Killing Time,” it’s still 1945 and black GIs streaming through Great Britain on their way stateside chafe at being restricted from local clubs, especially when British law allows for no such discrimination. However, a black soldier named Gabe Kelly has fathered a child with Mandy Dean, a white Hastings girl who’s been banished by her family as a result of that birth and has moved into the rooming house where Sam Stewart now works. With animosities peaking, a murder is committed, and DCI Foyle must wrestle with military authorities to untwist the web of evidence suggesting Kelly’s guilt.

Finally, episode three of this new series, “The Hide,” finds Foyle retiring at last, only to become consumed by the case of a young man, James Deveraux--the scion of a distinguished local family--who’s on trial for having joined a German SS unit composed of British volunteers. Strangely, Deveraux refuses to defend himself, leading Foyle to suspect that there’s more to this case than anyone understands. Although it’s not clear at first why Foyle takes such an interest in Deveraux’s predicament, we eventually come to understand that he has a sad personal stake in the matter. There’s a personal stake, as well, in this episode’s parallel story, which has Sam and Adam Wainwright, the proprietor of the rooming house where she works, defending that property against developers who wish to raze it and many other Hastings abodes in order to construct new housing units for returning soldiers. If Sam and Wainwright needed anything else to convince them that they belong together, this fight against “progress” may be it.

There’s a strong suggestion in “The Hide” that this is not the ultimate appearance of Foyle’s War; there are simply too many questions deliberately left unanswered, especially regarding the former DCI’s purpose in traveling by sea to America. (Might it have something to do with a previous investigation?) Given the strong comeback of this award-nominated show, and the fresh story lines opened by the new life trajectories of its main characters, I won’t be at all surprised to hear sometime soon that Season VII is in the offing.

Let’s hope.