c3 March 17, 2005 - March 27, 2005

Submitted by VanillaBeaN on Thu, 03/17/2005 - 11:47.

Driving home from Seattle last weekend, traffic bogged me down until I was uplifted by clean views of three of our local cascade volcanoes - all from the same vantage point, no less. For a girl from the Sacramento Valley, this is still a breathtaking, primordial sight. The individual characters of the mountains impressed me: Hood, with its Fuji-like perfectionism, Rainier, with its weighty, masculine dome, and the battle-scarred St. Helens, her great wound gaping north. She keeps us on our toes.

Last week, St. Helen's 5-mile-high hiccup of steam brought back memories of 1980 -- a much more monumental and dangerous blast. As I craned my head out the window to see the white scalloped cloud rise across the Washington border, I felt connected to the region's history much farther back than a couple of decades, or even a couple of millennia. To witness the work of mountain building is to witness an ancient process that operates on a scale of time and space we can hardly fathom. If you stretch out the timeline long enough, hiccups and even blasts become just a breath, a shift, part of a flow as constant as a river, sure enough to amass our greatest peaks (and shape their unique characters). Still, these erratic events are impressive. The mountain grabs us by the shirt collar to remind us that, though humans are comparatively new additions to the Northwest's natural history, we are still very much a part of that history, including processes that have remained constant for thousands of years. Moreover, this region is still *making* history, not only in the front-page-news sense, but in the scope of geologic time. What an amazing thing to have been offered a glimpse of this process. Enjoy this week's dirt (and volcanic ash hiccoughs :).

Jenny
& the rest of us at Spreading Roots, Spring Forth
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