Reporter Was 8 When The Ashes Came Down

It was my first byline.

I was 8 and my story had a circulation of the same, if you count my mom, dad, sis and the neighboring family of four.

The headline was “Volcaneo,” an early explanation of why reporters don’t write headlines for their stories. The piece was scrawled lightly in No. 2 pencil on the wide-lined penmanship paper used by third-graders to practice cursive. Today it’s yellowing in a scrapbook beside my elementary school class photo from 1979-80.

I read it again this week:

“It all of a sudden got pitch dark at 1 in the afternoon. Ash was coming down. It was scary. Birds were flying into the windows. Many people were killed by the heat, gas and flames. It was horrible and a disaster. The next day all highways were closed. You could not go outside. All schools and places were closed. If you breath the volcano dust in your lungs, you could get very sick.”

The decade before, it was Woodward, Bernstein and Watergate that inspired a generation of would-be reporters. I was drawn in by a mountain that blew up several hundred miles away, then fell to the ground in my back yard, coating my swing set with its soft, white insides.

I remember feeling compelled to chronicle the day, record its strangeness for posterity.

Now, 20 years later, I’ve spent seven years doing that at daily newspapers, still within Mount St. Helens’ reach. I find it amusing that my first crude news brief was inspired by a geologic weather event.

Most reporters hate weather stories. We try to look very busy, or slink to the copy machine in the newsroom’s farthest corner, hoping editors won’t assign us the dreaded story about how fast snow shovels are selling.

But this was different. Nearly a cubic mile of rock was blown to bits with the force of 500 atom bombs. It meant more consecutive “snow days” off school than a third-grader could ever dream of in May.

I still have my mask - a stiff, white industrial faceguard with a yellow stretchy band, which I would not have worn had my father not drawn a funny, smiling puppy face on the front with felt-tip pens.

Twenty years later the reminders are less obvious, but they’re there: The glass jars of ash left in garages year after year. The sugar bowl at my mother’s, which she bought from a local man who made pottery out of the stuff. The striped white layer in the soil where I dug my garden last summer.

It wasn’t just a weather story. When Mount St. Helens blew, she left a little lasting residue on all of us who lived where the wind set her back down. Andrea Vogt was an 8-year-old living and attending school in rural North Idaho when Mount St. Helens erupted.