Friday, October 1, 2004 - 12:15PM

For a week now suspense has been brewing in the news, as well as in a mountain closer to my home than I want it to be right now.  The newspaper has been flooded with headlines such as “Mount St. Helens may erupt within days, experts say” says MSNBC and “Mount St. Helens on the Verge!” Says CBS.

Well today on October 1, 2004 these things came true…Mt. St. Helens erupted. Now I will be honest with you, this was nothing more than a burp in comparison to Mt. St. Helen’s earlier eruption 24 years ago on May 18, 1980. Still, Please sit and imagine this…that tiny burp had to work its way through living rock and earth to reach the air of the surface. How much power does it really take to do that? For steam, ash, and smoke – three insubstantial things, and yet they cracked stone and forced it’s way to the top of the world. Also imagine what those three would have said when they tasted the fresh free air? They would say, “Here we are! Stand shaking in terror and awe at our wondrous might. Stand not in our way, but instead yield to our onslaught to your world, for we will tear you down like the mountain we came from!”

Pretty Powerful idea huh? Scary Idea in my opinion…It terrifies me to know that that much power lays in wait just beneath the surface of the very ground I walk on.  Waiting until you least expect it and then rearing it’s powerful head to you in defiance of logic. Doing mind boggling things, things that can’t be imagined until you see them with your own two eyes.

It is strange for me to stand at work and look out the window at what I think is a once in a lifetime sight. I stand there and listen to the people behind me talking about a time when I wasn’t even born. Discussing where they were that frightful day in 1980. The I begin to think to myself…if I stand here and think that this situation is “once in a lifetime?” Then what are they thinking? What is going through the mind of those who have witnessed the horror for the first time. Now they stand at the same window with me and watch once again that which haunted their minds with it’s raw power. What of those who thought that it was a “Once in a lifetime” event the first time? What are they thinking now? What would they think if all this was only a glimpse of what the future holds? Imagination of another human beings thought…now there is a challenge. I think that they would be thinking that they are luck to be able to see the power of nature once again at work.

Scientist say that the coming eruption is supposed to be more powerful that the eruption in 1980…can you imagine…ash covered the world in 1980…what will be left of the mountain when the main eruption begins? Will it instead be a crater, sinking deep beneath the earth, grow over time to its once majestic height only to blow again and be reduced to ruin and then to nothing…repeating a vicious cycle…Who is to say…all I know is I will be around when the main eruption begins…I will live and see the end of a beautiful, majestic Mountain…our skyline in New York changed on September 11, 2001. What will the date of the change in Portland’s Skyline be?

-Eric