David Johnston and Harry Truman: Two Men the Mountain Took

In the spring of nineteen eighty, two men became famous on opposite sides of the same argument.

David Johnston was a thirty-year-old volcanologist with the United States Geological Survey who had spent the months before the eruption trying to convince officials that Mount St. Helens was more dangerous than they understood. He wanted a larger exclusion zone. He kept writing memos. He kept arguing. He was stationed at Coldwater II, a monitoring post six miles from the summit, as part of a rotation that would have ended twenty-four hours after the eruption. His colleagues later said he knew he was in a dangerous position. He stayed because the monitoring mattered.

Harry R. Truman was eighty-three years old and had operated the Mount St. Helens Lodge at Spirit Lake for fifty-two years. He had been through the Great Depression at that lake and every hard winter since nineteen twenty-eight. He told reporters, famously, that the mountain was a part of him and he was a part of the mountain. He became a national celebrity. Fan mail arrived at Spirit Lake by the bagful. Schoolchildren sent him petitions asking him to leave. He did not leave.

When the mountain erupted on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty, both men died. Johnston's post at Coldwater II was destroyed by the lateral blast within seconds of his final radio call. Spirit Lake, where Truman refused to leave, was buried under about one hundred fifty feet of volcanic debris. Neither body was recovered.

Johnston had been right about the mountain. Truman had known that. What he believed was that his life was his own to spend where he chose, in the place he had chosen fifty-two years before. The mountain settled the argument in its own way. It kept them both.