It’s been 42 years since Mount St. Helens erupted. There were warnings, people left — or didn’t leave and died — and people told stories about where they were and what they were doing when the volcano spewed ash over the Northwest. This is my story.

I was a young reporter, just at the beginning of my career in Ontario, Oregon, on the Oregon-Idaho border — a 7-hour drive from the volcano. (If you want to get from Portland to Boise, you will go through Ontario.) It’s a small town struggling to stay alive these days. But back then it was a thriving town, the economic hub for the area’s farmers. Although I hear there’s been somewhat of a renaissance of late — providing services to Idahoans that Idaho prohibits: marijuana, COVID care, women’s health care….

The Argus Observer was a daily newspaper. I covered county government and the courts. And Vale city, because after all it was the county seat, and I was already there anyway. And since I was there, I ended up with the Bureau of Land Management, and for some reason, agriculture. And the sheriff’s office. Why? Because I was already there….

Small towns and their newspapers. They were still healthy then. Now there are whole regions without a newspaper at all — news deserts, they’re called. The fact that we have a name for it disturbs me. A place loses a part of its identity without its newspaper.

But this isn’t about any of that. It’s about being in a newsroom when the volcano blew. And answering the phones. Because it was wild.

One man called to tell us his theory: The eruption was caused by Ore-Ida. (It’s a potato processing company. Well, it’s a lot more than that, but in Ontario, it processed potatoes.) They’d sunk a very deep well recently looking for geothermal water — hot water. And as I recall they found it. It was a controversial well, for reasons I don’t recall. But my caller was convinced that there were all these waterways deep in the earth that were connected. Ore-Ida had tapped into it, and unbalanced the pressure causing the volcano to blow. I think that’s what he said. I thanked him for calling. (This theory actually took off. There were a lot of people who became convinced that Ore-Ida’s well caused Mount St. Helens to erupt. And no matter what experts said, they still believed it.)

Several called to ask anxiously if Malheur Butte was going to blow next. No, I told them, the butte (which looks like a… thumb… sticking up from the flat agricultural lands around it) is the core that’s left after the volcanic mountain erodes away. It can’t blow. Well, couldn’t lava from those connected runs deep in the earth blow up through it and push it out of the way? Well, no…. I was unimpressed with my callers scientific knowledge, and they were unimpressed with my lack of imagination.

And one guy called to tell me that a black stealth helicopter, full of government spec ops soldiers, all dressed in black, had landed in his backyard and forced him to give samples of bodily fluids (and he apologized for talking about them with a young lady). And he didn’t know why except he’d recently been abducted by aliens, and perhaps the aliens had something to do with Mount St. Helen’s blowing? I told him I didn’t know why they would either…. I actually considered calling for a mental health check on him. But the calls kept coming, and he began to seem relatively harmless.

And I learned some things that week that I’ve been thinking about this week, 42 years later, as we struggle to stay a democracy among people who believe Qanon conspiracy theories, deny scientific facts about COVID vaccines, and distrust the government.

One, we’ve always been a suspicious, ignorant, distrustful people. And proud of it, unfortunately. I talked myself hoarse answering calls that week and convinced no one who called in. Of course, the balanced didn’t call in. They read the news and went on with their lives. I hope.

And two? A looming catastrophic event pushed people who might have been only marginally balanced over the edge. There was a fair amount of panic and fear about the volcano. Would it blow again? Would the wind shift, and we would get a layer of ash on our farm lands and crops? What did this mean? Was it the end times? (Sigh.) Those who’s grip on reality wasn’t strong to begin with lost it.

The parallels to today, writ large by social media, make me think. Do those whose grip on reality isn’t all that strong sense a pending doom again? (Right or wrong?) And is the rise of the ignorant, distrustful, anti-science conspiracy theorists due to sensing we are living on the cusp of an environmental disaster? That climate change is real and the earth as we know it is changing? And that feral, survival-driven part of the hindbrain is reacting. We know something is coming. Something bad. And the unstable among us are scrambling for answers. (I didn’t realize there were this many of them, truthfully, but a lot of what I hear and read in social media remind me daily of the fearful and unbalanced who called about Mount St. Helens.)

Or maybe I’m now the marginally balanced one scrambling for an explanation of the disaster I see before us. Maybe. (No alien abduction, however. Or soldiers wanting body fluids. Too bad. Because that would be a hallucination worth having! Hey, I write suspense fiction, all right?)

Anyway, 42 years ago a volcano erupted. And that’s my story about where I was and what I was doing on that day.

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