|
That morning, my mom and I had gone outside to lay in the sun. It was supposed to get pretty warm that day, and the sky was clear. Our backyard was filled with tall pine trees which limited our view of the horizon, so we didn't notice anything at first. Suddenly, my mom, who is from Nebraska (AKA Tornado Alley) sat up and said "Run inside- get in the basement!" I looked in the direction she was staring, and then I ran like hell. There were dark, churning clouds moving in over the treetops, and within minutes the sky was dark. Mom turned on the TV while I ran downstairs to hide from what we supposed was a tornado. The wierd thing was the silence- no thunder, or loud winds, or even the sounds of birds. Anyway, a minute later mom yelled downstairs for me to come up- it wasn't a storm, but volcanic ash. I was like "Volcanic ash? Wtf?" We wound up getting tons of it, and it took years to clean it up.
I've been through the Mt. St. Helens zone, and gotten pretty close to the mountain. They haven't taken down the old utility poles and trees that were scarred by the blast but managed to stay upright. (They just put in new utility lines next to the old). They all lean in the direction of the blast, and in the distant hills some of the trees are missing their lower branches, while others on higher hills are minus their top branches.
|