I suppose I’ve entered the land of "old-timer" when I recollect where I was when Mt St Helens blew up, 25 years ago today.
I was in my senior year at The Evergreen State College. The day before, on Saturday, was warm and clear, and an old friend, David Grombeck, collected me from Seattle for a day of observing the mountain. He had a spot picked out, up a snarl of logging roads and over some ridges to a spectacular viewpoint. We had gear with us to spend the night.
Although the mountain had been smoking and burping for two months, it was all quiet the day we were there. "Nothing’s happening, let’s head back," we decided.
Our perch was probably outside of the blast zone, I think. Had we stayed, we would have had to have walked out under the total blackness of heavy ashfall. But we would have felt the hot breath of the eruption.
The next morning 
I was in the printmaking lab at school, with the radio on, when the news came over. I hurried back to the appropriately named Ash Apartments at the the edge of campus, rousted my roommates and a friend with a car, and we were off to see the eruption.
I knew the main routes would be clogged, so we navigated back road through Lewis County. We could see the eruptive cloud over the farm fields. We got as far as a highway closure on, I think, Hwy 12, where ash was falling.
That night we sat in a crowded dorm lobby with a television on, watching the news reports. A TV cameraman had taped his escape, under the total darkness of the ash cloud, breathlessly narrating what he could only assume was his imminent demise. That could have been me, I thought.
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