There is ash falling from the sky.
Way back in the 1990s, years before I fell in love with him, my first boyfriend witnessed several other eighth grade boys throwing fireworks through the video return slot of our local hardware store in Corbett, Oregon. The hardware store was a mainstay of the community, renting videos and selling snacks to high-schoolers and hardware necessities to adults. And although it didn’t burn down completely, the structure was so badly damaged that it never reopened. And it was never torn down either. The shell of it is still standing, slowly deteriorating, on the north side of the Columbia River Highway. Its once-painted siding is gray and the whole structure is buckling, listing to one side. One day, it will completely collapse. It could be tomorrow or in 100 years.
I think the boys were suspended, or had to do community service. I don’t remember. I don’t think my ex-boyfriend was ever punished, but I do know he felt a good amount of residual guilt for years.
The fire is moving west and the air is filling with smoke. The sun is bright pink in the gray sky.
Every year on my birthday, my father likes to tell the story of waiting in line to see The Empire Strikes Back the night I was born.
“Ash was falling on our heads as we waited in line,” he says. I like this story too, although it is slightly disturbing: My birth coincided with one of the most catastrophic events in Northwest history—the Mount St. Helens eruption. It would be grandiose to say it was portentous. It would be dismissive to say it meant nothing. Perhaps the only thing it really means is that one day the mountain was there and then one day it wasn’t. And one day I wasn’t there, and then the next day I was.
My father is an avid photographer, and one of the most iconic photos we have in our family collection is a black-and-white image taken atop a skyscraper in downtown Portland. In the foreground my sister Sarah, a toddler, wipes her blond bangs from her forehead. My little bundled body is in an infant carrier. In the background, behind the safety railing on the building’s deck, a huge mushroom cloud rises into the air. The picture is so fantastical that it looks unreal, fake, like a trick of darkroom photography.
But it is real and the mountain did explode and as my mother told me last night over the phone, “It didn’t end us. It didn’t destroy the economy. Even though we all thought it would. We went on.” And the mountain regenerated and the wildlife came back, and even the fish in the ash-covered lakes returned more quickly than biologists had imagined they would.