Oregon150

by Kathy Haynie
Oregon City, OR

The day was silent, and I was alone. The children were indoors, asleep for their naps. We didn’t have a television, so I was going by what I’d heard from my gossipy next-door neighbor. Call me young, call me naive—all I wanted was to do the right thing.

I really thought the sky would rain ash. Mt. St. Helens, about 100 miles to the north of us, had erupted the day before. The next day, Monday, May 19, 1980, I didn’t know whether to feel desperate or foolish as I spread the sheets of newspaper over the seedlings in our garden.

This was my first spring in the Northwest, and I was doing anything I could to encourage the growth of “webs” between my toes. During my first six months as an Oregonian, I had learned to take the weather seriously. Portland was so much colder than I had imagined. We were heating our 80-year-old farmhouse with just a woodstove. Temperature mattered; I wanted my children to be warm and healthy. On the other hand, as a new Oregonian I had learned to not take the weather too seriously. This wasn’t Alaska, after all, and it was only a little drizzle, so what was the big deal? The children weren’t going to melt from a little rain.

Spring 1980, I was so anxious to plant a garden that my first round of seeds rotted in the wet ground. By the end of April, the ground was drying out enough for real planting; by the middle of May, brave little pepper, tomato, lettuce, and potato plants were rearing their green heads. After the long, gray winter, I was anxious for greenery and fresh vegetables.

But now Mt. St. Helens had finally erupted. We had been waiting for it for weeks, and the day before on the way home from church, we had seen her column of ash tower into the afternoon sky. The Monday morning paper was full of photos of Yakima, Washington, dark at mid-afternoon, with several inches of ash accumulation raining down. Word was that the winds would probably shift, bringing the Portland area a couple of inches of ash; we all went out and bought dust masks and worried what the ash would do to our vehicles’ air filters.

It was strange, waiting for the ash to fall from that still, gray sky. On Tuesday I went back out to the garden, sheepishly, hoping the neighbors wouldn’t notice as I gathered up the newspapers, clean of all that ash that never fell.

If the sky had fallen on Oregon City that day, it would have been terrible. People with lung disease would have been taken ill, cars would have broken down, gardens might have been smothered in all that ash. We would have had to help each other; we might have struggled to survive.

If.

But that’s a story that didn’t happen. I remember is how quiet it was that day, so still. I was alone.