Mount St. Helens Foray

Few places provide as dramatic a focus for Spring Creek as Mount St. Helens. On a warm July evening in 2005 two-dozen poets, writers, scientists and artists circle around a campfire dug into loose pumice on a windswept ridge near the mountain. The deep carpet of popcorn-sized rock makes for uncertain footing. The mountain's 1980 eruption had reshaped the landscape with no regard for trees, wildlife, people or even well-honed scientific theories.

One member of the group, author Ursula LeGuin, asks if we are in any danger. "Some shaking is possible, but no ballistics are expected in the next few days," replies Lynn Burditt, U.S. Forest Service official. Fred Swanson, a Forest Service geologist and co-organizer of the event, notes that knowledge of the mountain's underground environment is "crude."

Research at the national monument has overturned theories of how nature responds to upheaval, and the Spring Creek group's conversation often turns to scientific surprises. Ecologists describe biological diversity that blossomed unexpectedly after the eruption. They point to populations of western toads that are flourishing here while they are declining elsewhere. They tell of hot gases and rocks that turned Spirit Lake into a microbial stew resembling a pulp mill lagoon and how fish eventually returned. Geologists talk about the plumbing under the mountain and how often it has cracked and heaved in cycles of cataclysm.

In the face of such power, there is also poetry and song. Folksinger Libby Roderick sings "Thinking Like a Mountain" and "If the World Were My Lover." Goodrich reads a Denise Levertov poem, "Open Secret," evoking the power of mountains as metaphors for human aspiration. They watch the full moon rise and roll up a neighboring slope. As moonlight strikes the valley floor behind them, a chorus of coyotes yips and howls. Nighthawks dip and climb overhead.

Beautiful as the scene is, this is no sentimental journey. They are here to work. They trek through the "blast zone" where dark forests, once destroyed, have given way to a carnival of new life. They find pockets of sphagnum moss, Indian paintbrush and penstamen, some of the "biological legacies" that survived the blast, paving the way for diversity by seeding the new landscape. They visit forests that had been left standing after layers of volcanic ash had covered every leaf and branch.

They discuss the differences between human-caused and natural catastrophe — and the meaning of recovery. The point is to think hard and deep about nature's resilience in the face of destruction and to reconsider the ideas that define the role of humans in these natural processes.