THINKING ABOUT HARRY

Mount Saint Helena is a volcanic mountain located in Washington State. It stands in the southwestern part of the sate between the cities of Vancouver and Olympia. In April of 1980, Mt. Saint Helena began to belch out a thick column of black smoke and ash hundreds of feet into the blue Washington sky. As the earth around the top of the volcano began to shake and quiver, scientists, seismologists, and geologists, checked and rechecked their data and seismographs both in their labs and on site. Within days they all had come to the same conclusion. Mount Saint Helens was about to erupt and explode.

The vehicles of the local police, Washington State troopers, Park Rangers, and helicopters relentlessly broadcast warnings as they scoured the area around the danger zone. The Civil Defense and every TV and Radio station in the state interrupted their programming with WARNINGS. Roadblocks with flashing warning signs were set up at every cross road in the area. Every resort, hiking trail, tourist center, and store was closed and evacuated as thousands of people desperately fled the area.

Five miles north of the mountain at a summer resort called Spirit Lake, was the life-long home of the 84 year-old caretaker of the resort named Harry Trueman. Harry refused to leave. His friends, neighbors, police, even his sister could not convince Harry to leave. On National TV on May the 17th, 1980 the grinning face of Harry was seen as he told America, “No one knows more about this mountain than me and it ain’t going to blow in fact it don’t dare blow up on Harry.”

On the morning of May 18, 1980, Harry cooked his breakfast of bacon and eggs and fed the scraps to the 16 cats he cared for at his cabin home. He finished and went outside and began planting petunias along the edge of the lawn he had just mowed. At 8:32 Mt. Saint Helena exploded with a force 500 times greater than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Gases, ash, and molten rock, raced down the mountain at 200 miles per hour leveling everything within 75 square miles. Sixty-one people died that day. Among them was Harry Trueman.

I wonder what Harry thought as he saw millions of tons of rock vaporized before his eyes and thrust ten miles straight up into the atmosphere? I wonder if in that millisecond before the concussion hit him, if Harry regretted his stubbornness and pride. I wonder what went through his mind if somehow he miraculously survived the concussion but gasped in horror as a solid wall of ash and mud, 50 feet high, entombed his cabin, his cats, his petunias and himself. I wonder if he struggled or if he spent those moments thinking about what a fool he had been.

I also wonder if America will regret someday our rebellion against God and His word. I wonder if we will be sorry that we were so stubborn and refused to obey him. I wonder when the chickens come home to roost if we will wish that we had listened to the Holy Spirit and had given Christ the place he should have had in our life? I truly wonder what is in store as the storm clouds gather and America doesn’t seem to care. WEN