30 years ago today

Thirty years ago today I was supposed to be writing a paper for history class. Instead I was glued to the tiny black and white TV in my sister’s room watching the news unfold and feeling the tremors that reached us from St. Helens. The Big Picture on the Boston Globe website has a nice collection of photos from that day.

Later that afternoon my father suggested that we try to get a better view of the ash plume. So we got in the car and headed over to the other side of Lake Oswego. When that wasn’t a very good view we headed over to the west hills of Portland. When we still couldn’t see too well, we headed across the Columbia into Vancouver, Washington, but couldn’t find a good place to stop. Dad did finally get some pretty good pictures of the plume…when we got turned around at the 20 mile line by the fact that the road was closed from there on. Yes, we were probably nuts to be driving towards an erupting volcano.