the state of sheer.

"i don't get what the big deal is," said my portland friend who watched the 35,000 foot plume mt. st helens sent up earlier this week. she went on about how she hikes all the time, is active outside and generally one with nature. so the enormity of the reaction by the news people and much of the public just didn't click with her.

seems to me it has to do with our collective unbending fixation on disaster. even the possibility of biggie-sized tragedy is so very horrific and attractive. the attention we pay to a single spurting plume of smoke, then, is perhaps a bit overly-rapt. it cannot have so very much to do with any sort of symbiotic love relationship between us and nature, because, generally, our love for her has no legs. (i mean i grew up by the woods, rollicking around with my dogs and building lean-tos with only a penknife and a ball of twine to aid me. now, though, when nature bends down to grant me a moment of awe-some respite, she finds me grateful for exactly as long as it takes to re-direct my attentions back into myself: i’m finished soaking in the gorgeous solstice twilight in the same instant that my cigarette is done; i persistently claim to really like hiking and have gone exactly twice in the last 4 years; the one encounter with wildlife my memory recalls more than any other is the time i saw a marmot poo. ..he thought he was hidden behind a boulder, but i saw it come out.)

so nature gets undersold, typically; but her trump card is natural disaster. very big, bad things that humans have no ability whatsoever to control are gripping. even the hint of such a thing can inspire obsession. a seven-mile-high hint is…is rather gripping, as hints go. as gripping goes, for that matter. and it’s not just for the lack of control; but also for the lack of commonly rational reason behind natural disaster. i don’t mean tectonic-plate-movement rational, i mean why-oh-why-must-this-happen rational. natural disaster is not quantifiable in any moral sense; it is tragedy, stripped down to its simplest elements.

and, you know, within that framework, volcanoes are to natural tragedy what boxing is to sports. boxing, however you may think of it, is as close to pure competition as a sport can get—you square two men off, say “go!” then stand back until one of them falls over. the power lays in the rawness of it. the same goes for volcanoes--in the disaster pantheon, volcanoes are the money shot. earthquakes are quite fine, as tragedies go, but the magic is dimmed by the fact that a fault lives beneath us--there's no face. nothing to personify. ask people what they think of at the mention of the '89 san fran quake and i'll bet 3/4 will blurt, Bay Bridge. (in my own memory, the bay bridge is very much the persona; it bears no small culpability and i can remember, 4 years later, being bitterly nervous as i drove across it.) tornadoes are great, so long as you have a sexy victim combo like dorothy/toto. or, better yet, a bill paxton type to run blindly after the twister, his knuckles white around his palm pilot. again the problem is one of personification; the transience of a tornado--the brevity of its existence--makes any prolonged response to it (anger or awe or despairing wonder) difficult.

but a mountain, a volcano--that’s a face. i come around the corner on a freshly bright sunny day, and there’s Rainier. looking down at me. and even from 150 miles away she is HUGE; even at that distance her silence has a low tenor that emanates oldness and sagacity and a quietly authoritarian, dr. bruce banner-ness. her subterranean growl clearly says: You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry. i always stop for a moment to look at her, even when i'm driving. and my first thought is, my god, you are sheer...sheer beauty, sheer power; sheerness encapsulated. the state of sheer. another thought trails after this one, and it says in its tiny pipsqueak voice, “don’t get mad at us, okay? let’s play nice.”