"In the Blast Zone": A collection of essays on Mount St. Helens

"I stepped out of a helicopter into the dust and mist of the blasted landscape, and I could barely comprehend where I was. Everything was gray ... Muddy geysers erupted ... and the volcano responsible for this chaos was hidden in clouds," writes geologist Fred Swanson, who was in one of the first helicopters to land on Mount St. Helens after its epic eruption on May 18, 1980. As Swanson and others explored the mountain, they were stunned to find hundreds of seedlings thrusting up through the volcanic debris. Over the years, those foundlings were joined by hundreds of additional species, Swanson writes in "In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens," edited by Charles Goodrich, Kathleen Dean Moore, and Frederick J. Swanson (Oregon State University Press, 124 pp., $15.95).

Some had endured by being buried in snowbanks. A few had been on protected ridges on the lee side of the furnace blasts. Some plants, and the first colonizing animals, spiders, arrived on the wind. Others, such as northern pocket gophers, had been underground. They acted as gardeners, churning up the soil and mixing nutrients, which helped seedlings germinate and grow. Now when scientists venture out onto the formerly barren Pumice Plain, the area directly in front of the crater, they find a landscape teeming with life.

Yellow-green mosses cover much of the ground surface, growing under flowers such as lupines and pearly everlasting. Elk congregate at the numerous willow and alder oases. Red-striped garter snakes slither across rocks and toads hop around the springs, where cold, clear water emerges. The oases also provide homes for an odd assemblage of birds, including horned larks, rock wrens, water pipits and warbling vireos.

Ecologists expected none of this. "Most of my preconceptions proved dead wrong," writes Jerry Franklin, an ecologist who has spent most of his life engrossed with the mountain. For Franklin, Mount St. Helens became a laboratory and teacher, which helped bust paradigms of science and, he hopes, of policy in how to manage disturbance landscapes. "Little did I know what the mountain would do during my lifetime, or how profoundly those events would affect my thinking," he writes.

Twenty-five years after the eruption, Franklin and Swanson were part of a crew of more than a dozen writers and scientists gathered at the volcano to consider how the mountain had changed and how it had changed them. The group included poets, a geologist, a journalist, a singer/songwriter, nature writers and ecologists. Together they have produced this new collection of essays and poems about Mount St. Helens — what emerges is an evocative portrait of the awesome power of a volcano to not only reshape a landscape but to reshape a fundamental understanding of science.

Whereas the scientists provide a sense of excitement and new knowledge to be gained from studying the mountain, the nonscientists offer more trepidation at facing Mount St. Helens. "Too terrible to look at, too beautiful to look away. The size and power of the blasted land rolled over me like the shock wave that had vaporized the land," writes Robin Kimmerer, author of the wonderful "Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History." She is not alone. Several contributors comment on their anxiety at being on the mountain, but most ultimately leave with a sense of respect and renewal.

I think that anyone who visits Mount St. Helens will understand such sentiments. To walk on its slopes is to feel both spectacular devastation and astonishing rebirth. It is scary and humbling, and yet powerfully reinvigorating. By bringing together the scientist and the poet, the longtime observer and new visitor, the essays and poems of "In the Blast Zone" provide a welcome and accessible perspective on Mount St. Helens.