As Wilson and I prepare to do some hiking on Haleakala, Maui's inactive 10,000 foot volcano, I have to post the question that has always puzzled me:
What was David Johnson Thinking? What in the hell possessed him to sit in front of a ticking time bomb?
We know what he said. We know what his last words were: "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"
Well, yeah. "It" was the collapse of the bulging side of Mount St. Helens and a stone wind traveling nearly at the speed of sound directly at him. No-one to date has found his remains. They've found evidence of his camp site, but like the Kingston Trio song goes, "he's the man who never returned."
How could a professional geologist with a keen interest in volcanoes have been so unprepared?
A single five-hour geology class that included a section on vulcanism would have been sufficient to clarify the folly of Johnson and other geologists who were pleased as punch to be hanging around an explosive mountain.
30,000 deaths
At the time, I well remembered the story of Mount Pelée, the stratovolcano located in the northern end of Martinique, an island in the Lesser Antilles arc of the Caribbean. In 1902, it became the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century, killing 30,000 people, most by pycroclasti (a boiling flow of hot ash and gasses called a nuée ardente) when it pushed a cinder cone up through its vent. The picture below shows the cone that scooted up to the top of the vent. For years afterward, until it wore away, it stood like a giant gravestone to commemorate its wrath.
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The cone of Mount Pelée |
The cone trapped what was below in the vent and grudgingly released and directed its nuée ardente right down the hillside, directly at the largest city on the island, Saint-Pierre. Rum casks on the dock exploded and the liquor flowed in the harbor, creating a sheet of fire. Boats were incinerated. Two people got out alive from the area below the volcano. One of them was a man who had the good fortune of being imprisoned in a dungeon below ground, yet he still was badly burned. Here's the Wikipedia report on Pelée: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pel%C3%A9e
Third house under the mountain
My friends, the Satterstroms, had a cabin at Mount St. Helens. It was the third house from the mountain. Now it is the third house under the mountain, or somewhere. They were among a core of people who imagined going into the volcanic zone to retrieve their belongings. Before they took that trip, I shared with Fred an illustration from the Seattle Times showing how the mountain was bulging. "You don't want to go there," I told him. But a whole bunch of people did go there on the weekend the mountain blew. They got in and most got out on Saturday. Then, at 8:32 a.m. on Sunday, May 18, 1980, St. Helens let loose, spilling her guts down the mountainside, and blasting ash and fire sideways and straight up, distributing the ash in immense quantities across Washington State. Not since The Cruxifiction had the skies grown darker and more foreboding.
Dodging the bullet
Winston Churchill once talked about the exhilarating feeling of hearing a bullet whistle past your ear and knowing you are still alive. It took millions of years for mountains like St. Helens to rise. Set against that immense time span you have the space of one day in which people entered the zone and retrieved their belongings. That is a tiny fraction of an instant in geologic time. You wonder: Do the people who made it out feel the exhilaration of having heard the bullet and knowing they are still alive?
What David Johnson had to know was that oceanic volcanos like those which formed the Hawaiian Islands, gurgle and flow. But continental volcanos tend toward the explosive, Mount Pelée type. And there was plenty of evidence that Mount St. Helens was a Peléen nightmare waiting to wake up.
So why did David Johnson stick around? In some accounts,he is depicted as a soldier who didn't abandon his picket line. By these accounts, he knew the danger, but he also knew that he wasn't the only person in danger. He faced it, monitored the mountain, and was partly responsible for the fact that dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of others didn't die with him, because he had communicated just how dangerous this fascinating mountain was. That leaves open the question as to whether journalists in the established news media were just a little too greedy about the story and just a little too lazy to do the research to properly warn the public. Would that estranged husband have gone there with his two sons if he had any idea of the potential consequences? There are people whose lives were snuffed out who might have stayed out of harm's way, if the media had more thoroughly and vigorously exposed the danger.
But why the danger? Why the difference between continental and oceanic volcanoes? Why do some gurgle and others explode?
As Wilson and I begin preparing for our hike on Haleakala--the volcano that created Maui--I'll be discussing that, in the next dispatch.
Meanwhile, here's some photos relating to Pelée: https://www.google.com/search?q=mount+pelee+1902&newwindow=1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=eOG_VJ_QDcaxogS90oH4Bg&ved=0CDQQ7Ak&biw=1280&bih=663
Love,
Robert,
And Wilson
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Saint-Pierre in the 1880s, with Mount Pelée in the background. |
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