Mount St. Helens: Eight Thirty-Two A.M.

At eight thirty-one in the morning on May eighteenth, nineteen eighty, David Johnston was sitting at his monitoring station on a ridge six miles north of Mount St. Helens, talking on the radio to the United States Geological Survey office in Vancouver, Washington. Johnston had spent the previous weeks arguing that the mountain was far more dangerous than state officials were acknowledging. He was thirty years old. He had been on the mountain most of the spring.

At eight thirty-two, a magnitude five point one earthquake triggered the collapse of the mountain's entire north face. The largest landslide in recorded history unloaded in seconds. Johnston had approximately one minute, possibly less. His final radio transmission reached Vancouver as the lateral blast, traveling at speeds approaching three hundred miles per hour, reached his position.

"Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"

His body was never recovered. The ridge where he died is called Johnston Ridge. The observatory that bears his name looks directly into the crater.

The eruption killed fifty-seven people. It devastated two hundred thirty square miles of forest in less than two minutes. It deposited ash across eleven states. The mountain ejected nearly a cubic mile of material. Coldwater Lake, where David Johnston's station stood, was buried under hundreds of feet of volcanic debris.

Harry R. Truman was not at Johnston Ridge. He was at Spirit Lake, on the north side of the mountain, where he had operated the Mount St. Helens Lodge for fifty-two years. He was eighty-three years old. He had refused every evacuation order, told reporters he was not leaving under any circumstances, and become a national figure for his defiance. Spirit Lake was buried under one hundred fifty feet of debris. Truman's body was never found either.

Two men. One who understood exactly what was coming and died at his post trying to document it. One who refused to believe it and died inside the landscape he loved. The mountain did not distinguish between them.

The blast zone is still recovering. Elk returned within years. Trees are coming back. The crater occasionally vents steam. Mount St. Helens is not finished.