OSU writers team up on book sharing reactions to mountain

“In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens” Edited by Charles Goodrich, Kathleen Dean Moore and Frederick J. Swanson. 2008 Oregon State University Press. 144 pages. $15.95 paper

By BENNETT HALL
Corvallis Gazette-Times

Despite the multitude of warning signs — the earthquake swarms, the preliminary plumes of steam and ash — the May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens caught us all by surprise. Now, nearly three decades after that cataclysmic event, the mountain continues to transform itself, even as it continues to transform our ideas about permanence and change.

Twice I have climbed to the crater’s rim and gazed in wonder at the smoking lava dome slowly heaving itself up from the earth. Now that, too, is gone, chewed up and digested and replaced by a still larger dome in yet another orogenous upheaval.

In July 2005, 25 years after the massive eruption that startled the world, Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word convened 20 scientists, writers and poets for a four-day “foray” to St. Helens. They camped together on a ridge in view of the caldera, exploring the mountain and their own reactions to its enduring paradox: the flow of new life that streams from some of nature’s most destructive forces.

“In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens,” new from OSU Press, records those reactions, along with additions by some longtime observers of the mountain who didn’t make the trip.

Each of the contributors brings something unique to this slim but satisfying volume.

Forest Service ecologist Charlie Crisafulli tells the strange and charming tale of the Northern pocket gopher and the prairie lupine, two survivors of St. Helens’ fury that expanded dramatically after the blast to take full advantage of the ecological opportunities created by the annihilation of thousands of acres of forest and prepared the way for other species to return to the region.

Poet Gary Snyder captures the mountain’s life-death contrasts in his inimitable zen-flash-of-insight style in these lines from “Pearly Everlasting”:

clear to the alpine ridgetop all you see

is toothpicks of dead trees

thousands of summers

at detritus-cycle rest

— hard and dry in the sun — the long life of the down tree yet to go

bedded in bushes of pearly everlasting

dense white flowers

saplings of bushy vibrant silver fir

Forestry professor Jerry Franklin recalls the eruption’s scientific aftershocks, when he and other researchers realized that the mountain had defied all their conventional expectations of universal destruction by revealing innumerable pockets of survival, “biological legacies” that literally planted the seeds of new life — and pointed the way to new resource management techniques.

“Clear-cutting leaves little in the way of biological legacies,” he writes in “Evolutionary Impacts of a Blasted Landscape,” his essay for the book. “Natural disturbances with their structural legacies are providing improved models for forest practices where maintenance of biological diversity and natural ecosystem functions are primary or collateral goals of forest management, such as on our federal timberlands.”

There’s lots of overlap here. The contributors all plough the same ground — the eruption and renewal of Mount St. Helens — over and over. But they keep coming up with different results, different perspectives on the same big picture.

Corvallis poet and essayist Charles Goodrich sums up this synergy in “A Gardener Goes to the Volcano.”

“In our professional lives, we usually adhere to the limits of our respective disciplines — whether geomorphology or speculative fiction,” Goodrich writes. “But here on the mountain we are all exploring the in-between possibilities, the places where fact and metaphor tangle together, where data and story are in dialogue.”

That’s what gives many of the individual pieces in this book their richness and power: the cross-fertilization of ideas and impressions produced by the mingling of minds on the mountain.

The result is a richly textured mosaic of impressions, each one delicately shaded with fine distinctions and informed with newly gained wisdom. With this book, Mount St. Helens demonstrates once again its continuing power to surprise us.

Bennett Hall can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.

Reading

Charles Goodrich, Kathleen Dean Moore and Frederick J. Swanson, the editors of “In the Blast Zone,” will read from the book at 7:30 p.m. Friday in the rotunda of the Valley Library on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis.