Escapees May June 2015 Demo

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Thoughts for the Road By Kay Peterson #1, Escapees RV Club Co-founder and Director “When one perfect thing disappears, something unique, and beautiful in its own way, takes its place.”

Looking back: May/June1990

The doomsayers were having a ball. “It will never be the same,” they said. Spirit Lake was gone. With the river polluted, fishing was at an end. Mudslides had ruined Washington's most popular recreation area, turning it into an ugly, useless wasteland, bereft of trees or animals. Some put their homes on the market, fearing the cleanup would bankrupt the state. Time proved them wrong. True, Spirit Lake is gone, but there is a new lake there. People are again catching salmon and steelhead in the Toutle River. The recreation area abounds with new vegetation and wildlife. And there is the mountain itself. People used to compare its beauty to Mt. Fuji. Now that symmetrical beauty has been replaced by a dome in the center, and the north wall wears a different face. People don’t use the word “beauti- ful” as much as they did. They have replaced it with the word “awesome.” If Mount St. Helens is awesome, the lesson it teaches is one we must also respect: When one perfect thing disap- pears, something unique, and beautiful in its own way, takes its place. Yet we constantly get ourselves upset over changes. We shake our heads and tell each other, “It just isn’t the same now.” We hear a similar rumble of discontent about Escapees. Those members with numbers under 500 say it isn’t like it was when they joined. Those with numbers under 5,000 and 10,000 have the same complaint. Nothing is the same in maturity as it was in infancy. Do we really want it to be? The change most members fear is “too many people.” Some mistakenly think that the terms “more people” and the “wrong kind of people” are synonymous. But “more people” really means more friends and more help in times of crisis. And it also means more places to park and more SKP Co-Ops and more retreats. Yesterday’s perfect rose may be wilted today, but the rose bush lives on. Tomorrow there will be a beautiful new bud. The Mount St. Helens story is a symbol of our belief in the future.

It happened 10 years ago—on May 18, 1980, to be ex- act. There had been plenty of warning. People even made jokes about it. Yet , when the massive explosion came, the magnitude of the destruction caught everyone offguard, and people were no longer laughing. H uge billowing clouds of ash blocked out the sun, turning that peaceful Sunday morning into an eerie darkness that sent everyone scurrying to turn on TVs and radios. Until the ash started raining down over Washington, Idaho and Montana, most people did not know that the long- talked-about eruption had blown 1,300 feet off the top of Mount St. Helens. Only a few actually saw the awesome mile-wide wall of mud as it came crashing down at 50 miles an hour, down the mountain, down the North Fork of the Toutle River, sweeping away cabins and cars, uproot- ing giant fir trees, and knocking down steel and concrete bridges as if they were made with tinker toys. Life came to a standstill. Trains, buses and motorists were blocked by the wall of mud. Airplanes were grounded by ash that covered everything with a gritty, gray grimness. The motels and hotels were jammed with stranded tour- ists. Restaurants and grocery stores ran out of food. People on the streets wore masks over their faces to keep out the smell of sulfur and to keep from breathing the choking ash. Rescue planes brought back nightmarish tales of the devastation. The beautiful lake was gone. Flattened trees covered the land as if someone had spilled a million boxes of toothpicks. There was no sign of life. It was like seeing a different planet—a weird, forbidding no-man’s land. The cleanup was a mammoth chore. While snowplows cleared the highways, rescue teams searched for survi- vors. Four days later, nature joined in the act of healing: A pouring rain washed away the volcanic dust. Life began to return to normal. Stranded tourists went home.

www.escapees.com | May/June 2015 | ESCAPEES . 3

Kay Peterson illustration by the late Anne Harris #1052.