A Grand Unveiling

In between hanging out in Portland and rushing down the coast to hang out in San Fran, I decided to do one last big "sight" one last big "attraction" to add to my photo collection. In 1980, local volcano Mt St Helens blew up, flattening the forest for miles, killing a number of people, spewing vast clouds of ash into the sky turning day to night and laying the seeds for bad movies like Pierce Brosnan's "Dante's Peak." For a long time there has been only half a mountain there, with a big crater where the top went boom, but recently the volcano has started to grow again inside the crater. I just had to see it.

I travelled up there in a minibus with a German goth called Marcel, a British backpacker called Rob, a guy called Larry from Florida and half a cruise boat of tourists from Illinois. As we drove the guide passed back photos of the devastation in 1980 and played recordings of 911 calls from the day of the disaster. Anticipation was building. We entered the "blast zone",about 15 km out from the mountain where everything had been flattened and shattered stumps and trees splintered like matchsticks remained among the regrowth. The ground was not dirt here but ash, with layers of pumice.

Unfortunately the higher we went, the worse the visibility became as what began as an atmospheric mist wreathing among the splintered trees turned into a full-grade pea-soup fog.
It still had its charms, as Marcel the goth pointed out, but for a mountain viewing tour the absence of a mountain kinda stood out. The tour got restless. The guide got apologetic and a bit depressed.

We conferred and decided to wait it out to see if the clouds would break up. Luckily they had a visitor centre up on the ridge that faces the crater, where normally the view would have been. For a while, we amused ourselves with stories of survivors, multimedia exhibits, shattered tree stumps and so forth. Pride of place was a cinema, which showed a movie using what looked like digital reconstructions of the blast based on photographs taken in 1980, followed by some SFX of the fiery wind tearing through trees and then some actual footage. For the finale, which being in America had a LOT of portentous leadup, the screen rolled into the roof and the curtains at the back of the cinema rolled open to reveal windows looking out onto the awe-inspiring sight of....

... nothing. Just pure fog. It was like the Nothing in the Neverending Story.

"It's all gone," someone said, "the whole thing blew up."

"There never was a mountain. It's a conspiracy!"

Eventually, defeated, we drove back down. I will never know how awe-inspiring that unveiling was meant to be. When it happened, I personally LMAO.

No more sights then, unless you include the people on the late night Greyhound down to San Francisco, who were admittedly almost as good value as a trip to the zoo. It was a long bus ride, and I was just on the short 17-hour leg from Portland. There were people who'd been on the bus for 2 days, even one lady the whole 4 days from New York City. This on a bus with no leg room to stretch out, no curtains on the windows so you could sleep at night and an onboard toilet that didn't appear to flush but just sloshed around in the back. I recalled the remark from the hotel clerk in Seattle who said that after four days to New York City, you debussed looking and smelling just like the locals.

San Fran, so cruisy when I came through, is now in the middle of "Fleet Week". That's right, it's when all the navy and the airforce and everyone come to town and are celebrated, and fighter jets roar back and forth over the city like some kind of friendly Operation Shock and Awe. Looking at some of the faces around me when the ear-splitting jets roar over, it might still be too soon for some, hearing low-flying planes in the city.

So much for a cruisy couple of days hanging out in San Fran. With the last of my dwindling resources I am setting off for one more, just one more sight, hiring a car for my last two days and taking it down to Big Sur. Wish me luck, the traffic is gnarly out there...