In the Midst of Life

1980 TIME TO GO

The Appalachian Mountains in 1896, the year Harry Randolph Truman was born, was a wild, rough place and it was hard to scratch a living out of the rocky soil. In a land of rolling valleys of oak and sycamore, beech and birch, it was natural for generations of Trumans to be woodsmen or loggers, and in later years Harry used the skills learned as a boy to construct the lodge, log cabins, boats and boathouse for the visitors’ centre he built on the edge of Spirit Lake beneath the brooding presence of Mount St Helens, in Washington State, USA.

Truman possessed a daredevil streak and in 1917, lured into the war in Europe by dreams of adventure, he enlisted in the 100-Aero Squadron of the American Expeditionary Force. He learned to drive and to fly, and trained as an aero-mechanic and electrician – all skills that he would use in later life. Under a veil of secrecy the squadron was sent to Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of the Canadian ports shipping troops to France during the First World War. The boat on which he sailed was hit by a torpedo, and although many died, Truman was one of the survivors. His dreams of adventure were replaced by the cruel reality of war.

In France, he worked first as a mechanic and then as a combat pilot. In later years, at St Helens Lodge, he would tell of flying the French biplanes in an open cockpit, ‘a leather cap on my head, a silk scarf round my neck flapping in the wind’. Like many such tales, they improved with each telling.

But war changed Truman, as it did many young men. A friend said, ‘He became a kind of loner, I think. He never discussed the war, he wanted to forget it.’

Truman was demobilised in 1919 and he returned to a very different America. He worked as a mechanic for a Ford dealer, but although always polite and courteous, he kept to himself, and seldom confided in or even mixed with his fellow workers. He seldom revealed his deepest feelings to anyone. It was not until later that they learned that he had married a girl called Helen Hughes during this time and that they had had a daughter.

In 1921, Prohibition, forbidding the sale or consumption of alcohol in the United States, became law. Truman was deeply offended. He had fought for his country, and now that same country was telling him he couldn’t have a drink! He saw it as a crisis that must be opposed. Besides, the humdrum routine of being a car mechanic, for low pay, was proving irksome; bootlegging offered better prospects. In many ways it was the perfect match of man and occupation. He was adventurous, ambitious, and full of initiative. Taking risks, bending the law, was just a well-paid game for him. He became a rum and whisky runner, picking up supplies smuggled illegally into the port of San Francisco, and running it into Washington State. What his wife had to say about this is not recorded! But bootlegging started by small entrepreneurs like Truman soon came to be controlled by organised and ruthless gangsters. With inevitable disputes over territory and money, Truman escaped just a few steps ahead of a gang who were after him. ‘I got in trouble with some big guys. Things got hotter than Hell,’ he said later.

He had to leave rum running and tried several low-profile jobs in which he hoped not to be noticed, but the boys were after him and he could not hide. Eventually, he decided that the wilderness was the only place where they would not find him – and that is how he came to Spirit Lake, beneath Mount St Helens, where he remained for fifty-four years until the mountain blew up.

Spirit Lake was over three thousand feet above sea level, and the land belonged to the Northern Pacific Railroad Company. Truman rented fifty acres from them and the rights to boating and fishing. He built his first cabin on the shoreline in 1926, and life was hard, but he had always responded well to a challenge. Few people could live in such isolation, and, inevitably, his marriage suffered. There were no schools for thirty miles, so his daughter had to live with her grandparents. His wife could not stand the separation so she joined her daughter. Divorce followed.

But Truman stayed. Like everyone, he had to earn a living, and he guessed that the beauty of the area would be a draw to visitors. Slowly, he built a holiday centre – cabins for visitors, a boathouse and jetty – offering fishing, riding, and trekking. The dramatic landscape and the solitude drew people from when the snows melted in spring until the cold of autumn. Winters were snowbound, and then he was alone.

Truman was a tall, handsome man and his carefree spirit, combined with rugged independence, made him extremely attractive to women. He tried marriage again, but the loneliness of the winters, being snowed up for months on end with one man – however attractive – proved too much for the poor woman, and she, too, left him.

Somehow, through the 1920s and ’30s, Truman managed to continue his bootlegging, and he always kept a supply of illegal spirits for his tough, outdoor friends. He also constructed a still, and made good money from selling moonshine (a home brew, distilled into a spirit of rotgut potential). Truman was hardworking, hard-drinking and hard-swearing. ‘That ol’ sinner,’ said a friend after his death, ‘he was just a goddam, hell-bound ol’ sinner. Up there in Heaven he’ll smuggle whisky in one door and ice and shakers in the other, an’ carry on like he always did. Jeez, I really miss that ol’ son-of-a-bitch – sure miss him.’

In 1946 Truman married Eddie. She was the woman for him, and they loved each other deeply. Friends said that he worshipped her. Not only did she seem to enjoy the long, cold winters, she could handle his somewhat tempestuous nature, his hard drinking, and his autocratic ways.

When she died, thirty years later, he was devastated. The loss nearly destroyed him. He ceased caring for himself, or his lodge, or the visitors’ centre. A friend said, ‘If he hadn’t been so tough, it would have killed him right away. But the old bugger was tougher than a boiled owl.’

Truman would walk to his boathouse as dusk set in, the warm evening wind whispering in his face. Trees, hundreds of years old, surrounded the lodge. ‘Bear and cougar, deer and elk grazed in the underbrush, the dense carpet of fir needles silencing any footfall … He could see the wild orchids and shooting-star wildflowers growing between the low bush huckleberries, the beautiful maidenhair ferns and delicate violets, yellow, white and blue. Monkey flowers and kingcups bloomed on the banks of the lake.’[6] Quite often a fisherman would be whipping his line for a cast upstream from the dam. An otter would surface, see the fisherman and dive, splashing the water with its thick tail. As the sun dropped behind the hills, Spirit Lake, the place Truman knew so well, assumed an air of mystery. The light would change, and the snow-capped Mount St Helens would show a different mood before it was swallowed up by purple darkness. The distant snowfields would become incandescent, dimly reflecting a pinkish glow. Then the moon would rise, and the mountain, holding her secrets close, would look as if she belonged to another world.

But in winter the temperature would drop to well below zero for months on end, as snow followed snow and the ice on Spirit Lake froze to five feet deep. Animals and birds would move to warmer grounds, bears would hibernate, and many creatures would die. Storms would come one after another, and the snow would fall six, or eight, sometimes ten feet deep. After every fall, Truman had to climb on to the roof of his lodge to shovel it off, or the weight of snow would have made the roof cave in. The winter months were a constant battle to survive, and Truman turned his talents to trapping and poaching. He had bought in sacks of beans and rice and flour, bacon and salted beef; he had dried fruits and herbs, and stacked wood for the fire.

People who live close to nature have a different take on life from urban dwellers, who think they can control everything. These people recognise the rhythm of life and death in the changing shifts of the natural world. Truman’s years of reflection beside his lake, beneath the shadow of the mountain, had surely formulated his philosophy of life.

In March 1980, Truman was eighty-three years old, fit and strong, but nonetheless old and getting older. Eddie had been dead for five years and he was lonely. He had kept the place going because, if he hadn’t, he would not have survived the winter. He had no enthusiasm for the idea of summer visitors, but that was the business upon which he depended for an income.

On Friday, 20th March, at 3.45 p.m., the ground under his feet shook slightly. He was glad, and thought it was a sign that the spring weather had loosened an avalanche down the side of Mount St Helens.

But scientists at the University of Washington, twenty miles to the north, were not so blase. The seismographs showed an earth tremor measuring 4.1 on the Richter scale, and the location was close to Mount St Helens, which gave cause for real concern. Three days later the earth moved again, measuring 4.4 on the Richter scale, and the quakes were even closer to the mountain. Visitors were urged to stay away, and by the end of March the authorities were considering possible plans for an evacuation. The forest service closed all roads to the area above the timberline. Truman’s lodge was eight miles above the timberline.

On the last day of March, a state of emergency was declared. Rob Smith, an old friend who lived further down the slopes, was having a drink and a quiet conversation with Truman when ‘all of a sudden the whole building seemed like a little cardboard box, rocking backwards and forwards,’ he remembered. They went out on to the porch and saw Mount St Helens spit a plume of ash thousands of feet into the air. Quite soon afterwards, the Deputy Sheriff’s car came screaming up the approach road, his voice booming from the loudspeaker: ‘The mountain’s erupting. Everyone out.’ Rob quickly made ready to leave, but Truman was not prepared to go. Rob went out and returned with the Sheriff. The two men tried every tactic from threat to guile – ‘We’re standing on a dynamite keg with the fuse lit. If it goes up, we will die’ – but they couldn’t persuade the old man to go with them. They left, and Truman was alone.

Mount St Helens was much changed the following day. A crater had appeared on the summit, two hundred and fifty feet in diameter, surrounded by a dirty black ring of ash, disfiguring the purity of the snow. Large fissures, more than a mile long, were visible, and Truman must have been not just awestruck, but tremblingly afraid. Yet it must have been then that he formulated his unshakeable resolve: ‘If that mountain goes, I go with it.’ He was eighty-three years old, his beloved wife was dead, he was lonely and he frequently wondered what he had to live for now that she was gone. He had lived beside that mountain since he was a young, virile man of twenty-nine, and it was as much a part of him as his own hands and feet. His soul was in that mountain, and there was no life for him elsewhere. He would stay.

This resolve, spoken by a man in his right mind, started a bureaucratic and legal battle that was to rage for the next eight weeks. It also brought in the press, which exacerbated the sheriff’s headaches, and was the cause of many sleepless nights.

The West Coast of America is on a known geological fault line, and tremors and small eruptions are quite common. But a dormant volcano, threatening to erupt, was big news, and all the papers wanted a story. When word got round that an old man was living halfway up the mountain and refusing to leave, editors were ecstatic and ordered their reporters to get the ‘human story’.

A ‘no entry’ zone had been marked out by the authorities. Did the reporters take any notice? Of course not! They swarmed up the roads in droves, panting for a good story. When they met roadblocks, they proceeded on foot, cameramen and all, along the forest paths. If the sheriff’s forest rangers ordered them off, they stuck up two fingers and ignored them. Helicopters came in, and so many flew over the roadblocks that, at times, the highway in front of St Helen’s Lodge resembled an air force landing pad.

Truman turned out to be a journalist’s dream. He was old and gnarled, he was fast-talking, heavy drinking, and his language was too ripe to put into print. His views were extreme and his contempt for authority was equal to, or indeed exceeded, that of the average reporter. He also proved to be photogenic. At first he was wary of the press boys, and refused to have anything to do with them. But then he began to see the advantages of their attention. They were a lively bunch, mostly young, full of enthusiasm and daring. Their company was stimulating and entertaining, and Truman was lonely. They all had an amusing tale to tell about how they had got in, how they had fooled the sheriff’s men. The situation was heady for an old man who had spent much of the winter alone, and Truman reckoned he could afford to lavish his entire whisky supply on these men. They all drank a toast to the damnation of that goddam Sheriff and his goddam rules and regulations.

But Truman was not doing all this just to be kind or hospitable. He was a wily manipulator with a well-honed talent for getting what he wanted. For one thing, the reporters helped keep his mind off the situation – one big quake prompted him to say, ‘You know, I’m scared as hell about earthquakes. I just wish it would all stop’ – but, more importantly, he realised the press coverage would be of help to him.

Truman quickly became famous in the Western States, and when the New York Times ran a two-page article on him, complete with quotations and pictures, he became a national celebrity.

For the law-enforcement officials charged with keeping people out of the Red Zone, it was a nightmare. The pressure to interview Truman grew as the quakes and avalanches continued, and lightning bolts, some two miles long, flashed above the mountain. A second crater opened up on the summit and blue flames could be seen leaping into the air. But still the press boys continued to dodge the roadblocks.

Truman made his intentions absolutely clear – he was going to stay at the lodge, no matter what. ‘You wouldn’t pull me out with a mule team,’ he said. ‘That mountain’s part of Truman, and Truman’s part of that mountain,’ it was reported in one paper. To another, he said ‘I tell you; I’m no brave soul. Those goddam quakes scare the living Hell out of me. But hell, I’ve lived here fifty-four years. I might as well stay; I’m not leaving my home now. You know, the people down town, they don’t understand. They think I’m putting on a false front. Well, Jesus Christ, I’m going on eighty-four years old. When you’ve lived fifty-four years in one place and it’s the only home you’ve got, well, you don’t just walk off and leave it. Well, Christ no. People just don’t understand.’

Another paper reported these words: ‘If the mountain does something, I’d rather go right here with it. If I was out of here and lost my home, I wouldn’t last a week at my age, I’d just die, and die miserable too. I’d have nothing to live for at all, and I’d just double up and die. My old heart would stop – if I’ve got one, an’ a lot of people have said I ain’t got no heart.’

The press loved it, and the newspapers lapped it up, printing rows of dots when the language became too obscene. The public bought the papers and magazines in their millions. Truman was a star. The American people like to think of themselves as robustly independent, like the first settlers, and here was a grand old American backwoodsman, showing them all that the ‘spirit of America’ was alive and well.

Meanwhile, in the courts and committee rooms of Washington State, debate was raging about Truman’s status as the only person remaining inside the Red Zone. Was it lawful? Was he trespassing? Could the evacuation order be enforced? Should he be forcibly removed for his own safety?

The land still belonged to the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, so they enquired if the lease could be revoked in exceptional circumstances; the reply was so long in coming that it wasn’t worth waiting for. The Sheriff checked with local prosecutors about Truman’s legal rights. The lawyers conferred and came up with the conclusion that an independent court would have to decide, and that, in view of the publicity, it was doubtful they could find an impartial jury to hear the case. Therefore, they could not prosecute. Besides, there was no way of avoiding bad publicity, and the lawyer doubted if there was a law-enforcement official in the county who would arrest Truman, even if he was breaking the law.

But was he? He was in his own home, doing no harm to anyone, except perhaps himself. Some bright spark came up with the question, was he sane? If not, he could be certified and removed. But the idea of getting in a couple of psychiatrists to examine him, which would undoubtedly reach the ears of the press, leading to a stream of derisive articles, was too much for the poor Sheriff and the idea was abandoned.

The fact is, Truman was saner and a great deal more intelligent than anyone debating his case. He had always been a cute customer when he wanted something. He said once that ‘the press is more powerful than the law’. Had he foreseen what was likely to happen to him? It would have been no trouble for two hefty young forest rangers to manhandle an old-timer out of his home, into a car or a helicopter. But with the press reporting every move this would have caused a public outcry. Civil liberties, the rights of man, assault – all would have been evoked. Truman knew what he was doing all along. Not from altruism had he exhausted his stock of whisky and rotgut on the press boys. With public opinion on his side, he was safe.

‘Safe’ is an odd word to use if you live in the path of an erupting volcano, but his logic was impeccable. We all have to die, and, whatever the circumstances, it is better to die in your own home than in an unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers. He had said, ‘If I lost my home I wouldn’t last a week at my age. My old heart would stop.’ He was probably wrong, there. In modern America old hearts don’t just stop, and if they do, life will be forced back into them. For Truman, it would have been a nursing home, confined, confused, drugged and defeated. From that, he was ‘safe’.

Truman stayed, and on 18th May, 1980, at 8.45 a.m. Mount St Helens blew and he went with it. A blast of hundreds of millions of tons of rock, ash and magma hurtled into the air at a speed of 900 miles per hour and a temperature of 700 degrees Celsius, then poured down the mountainside. Spirit Lake and the surrounding woodland vanished for ever.

A memorial service was held for Truman a month later at the American Baptist Church in Longview, Washington State. The President of American Baptists took the service. In his commemorative speech he said these words: ‘No one lives his life amid the awesome beauty of Spirit Lake and Mount St Helens without a deep theism we could not readily define. Truman was a man of the seasons – he didn’t resist nature, he respected it – and he was a creature of the cycles nature brings. Wherever he is now, if he can see what is going on here today, he’s saying “don’t you dare cry for me! I did just what I wanted. Go have a good time.”’

I am indebted to Shirley Rosen’s book ‘Truman of St Helens’, published by Madrona Publishers, Seattle, Washington State, 1981, for the information for this chapter.

‘I’m not afraid of dying, not at all, because I know what it’s like. I’ve been there. It was after the birth of my third son, and I had a massive haemorrhage. An artery in or near the vagina had ruptured and fresh arterial blood was literally bursting out of me, like a fountain or a water jet. I felt myself sinking slowly, slowly downward, like a slow spiral. This must have been the blood and the oxygen leaving my body. I couldn’t have moved if I had tried. But I didn’t want to. I was in a tunnel, a big tunnel and I was walking along it towards a beautiful opening or door or something at the end. It was so beautiful, I could never describe it; not an earthly beauty but peace and quiet and beauty, and I wanted to get to it. I was very near. Another few steps and I would have got to it, which is what I wanted. But then I heard a sound and I felt movement; that must have been when they checked the blood flow and started pumping blood into me. And I looked behind me and saw three little children, and I knew I couldn’t go. So I turned around and went back. But, oh, it was so lovely and I so much wanted to get to that beautiful place.’

—Joanna Bruce, MBE

(Jo is my mother’s first and favourite granddaughter)