By Tara Lindis
In Portland, in the lull between winter and spring of my first grade year, a series of earthquakes began. They were small tremors that shook our house or my school. So quick and frenetic - my parents’ fighting or my teacher would stop for the tremor, and continue on undisturbed as soon as it ended, and I’d wonder if it hadn’t happened at all, except for the lights swinging from the ceiling. The local news reported the earthquakes, never more than a magnitude of 4.2, stemmed from the north flank of Mt. St. Helens, where magma was moving towards the volcano, after being dormant since the 1840s. By the end of March, a fracture had split the mountain; a column of steam and ash billowed up into the sky. Ash began to fall like rain, except for when it did rain, and mud fell from the sky. By May, we were watching the bulge on Mt. St. Helens grow as if it were a mole on our own cheek, and the steam and ash rose like a dark disease from within.
In school, we learned that volcanoes erupted hot orange thick lava, while at home, my parents erupted and spewed vicious words and insults, slaps to the cheek, yanks to the hair. They threw dishes across the kitchen and jars of peach preserves at the wall. But St. Helens, we discovered on the Sunday morning of the 18th, erupted ash that darkened the sky across the entire state. Mudslides reached the Columbia River, just north of us. Outbursts continued on into the next day, more tremors, more ash, more mud. It clogged the sewers and puddled in the streets.
My dad was supposed to move out that Sunday, but the moving van canceled. No one could see through the cumulous ash. They continued to fight, my mother angry, as if it were somehow my dad’s fault St. Helens had erupted, as if we all hadn’t seen it coming for months. But we all had seen the destruction coming for months.
School was canceled the next day. The city didn’t want children outside; inhalation was dangerous, the local news said. But my father had gone to work, and my mother had gone to the back of the basement, where the stash of canning jars lived in the cellar. I could hear her throwing jar after jar after jar against the concrete foundation wall, each crash followed by the splatter of glass on the floor.
Outside, with a scarf tied around my face, I took a jelly jar and dipped it into the ash. It had a silky feel and slid through my fingers like flour. I tipped the jar up and held it against the still grey sky. A snow globe of my own making, the grey tantrum of the earth leveled in the glass.
“I was born in this place,” I said to no one, knowing even then that in its desolation, it was home.