The Mountains Will Burst
On destruction, despair, and joy.
To begin, a question: what do you do when the sky is falling?
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In May of 1980 Mt. Saint Helens blew its cap. In mere seconds the mountain lost 1300 feet of elevation, sending billowing avalanches down its slopes and burning hot plumes up to 15 miles into the atmosphere. The most destructive eruption in the history of the United States, its cremating flows of superheated rock, gases, and organic matter would nearly instantaneously take the lives of hundreds of thousands of trees, grasses, and shrubs, over 1000 elk, 200 black bear, and 57 humans: gone, incinerated, buried in its warm blankets of ash.
“In the days immediately following the eruption,” write the editors of The Cascadia Field Guide, scientists flying over the region saw nothing but “moonscape – a sterilized, ashen land littered with the bleached trunks of thousand of trees like so many bones.” Indeed as ash spread worldwide, falling from the sky for weeks after, “they believed recovery would take a long, long time.”
It’s nearing spring in 2025, almost two months into perhaps the largest governmental shift in the history of the United States. I can’t help but feel like one of those flying Cascadia scientists, taking in the destruction of a world they loved. I know things look different from different vantages: many of my neighbors watch the pyrotechnics with some satisfaction and awe. But from my side of the mountain it feels like we’ve lost far more than 1300 feet of hard won progress, far more than 1300 feet of empathy, or care for others: each time I try to face the news, I see nothing but the bleach of so many bones.
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Let me tell you something about our planet — a way it is unique in our Solar System. Like other planets, Earth has a crust that envelopes a large core. Unlike other planets, earth’s crust is broken, like clay pottery, cracked into shards.
And these shards, they move. Buoyed by the more viscus mantle below, each plate shifts at the rate of fingernails growing, jostling like the breakup of lake ice in late spring.
Where they collide, some blood is inevitable. Mount Saint Helens exists in what geologist refer to as a subduction zone. Deep beneath its scorched slopes two behemoth tectonic plates, like floating icebergs, slowly collide. The Juan de Fuca plate – denser – slowly succumbs to the pressing weight of the North American plate, its edges melting as they plunge to earth’s hot depths; this molten material, in turn, rises toward the surface, ready to erupt again in pyroclastic flows and burning displays.
And Mount Saint Helens, what is Mount Saint Helens on the scale of our planet, this blip on our lithosphere, all 200 million square miles, by 100 miles deep? In addition to the North American, 15 principle plates and a host of microplates constantly widen rifts, slip along fault lines, and crumple into mountains. Our earth is home to no less than 46 volcanoes actively erupting as I write, not to mention hundreds of daily earthquakes. Earth’s cracks: ah, how they bleed!
I’m reminded that destruction is less something that comes and goes, and more simply a function of proximity. Need I mention the six major wars and host of minor conflicts, the backstabbing, abuse, injustice and torture that continue as I write these very words? 7,116 people die each hour. We are in the middle of what scientists call the 6th great extinction; estimates suggest that if current trends continue, half of higher life forms could be extinct by 2100.
I begin to face it: we have always lived on a broken and fissured world. Consider the cry of Isaiah, carved into stone, or perhaps cut into an animal hide nearly three millennia ago: “The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers, … the earth is broken up, the earth is split asunder, the earth is thoroughly shaken.”
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On a raised dais in the center of a great museum hall in Naples, Italy you can find the oldest existing statue of the Greek titan, Atlas. Marble, 7 feet tall – dating from just 100 years after Christ’s crucifixion – its naked form depicts this ancient giant, an immortal god condemned to hold up the heavens, lest the sky falls and crushes his descendants, and all humanity. In the artist’s impression Atlas crouches, face strained, under the weight of our celestial sphere, depicted as a globe, our world: earth, sea and thin atmospheric sky.
In times like these, when I face our planet’s gushing cracks, when I see all too clearly its rifts and its faults, I wonder if perhaps the statue is more smoke than marble, a myth kept to keep up our hope. Far from resting on some giant’s shoulders, from here it feels like Atlas long ago gave up. That any cosmic being that supports our fragile planet at some point decided to let the whole thing fall.
So I modify the question. What do you do when you realize the sky is always, and always has been, falling?
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A year or so ago, I went to see the traveling exhibit of the Roman town of Pompeii, a city made famous by its near instant demise under 20 feet of Mount Vesuvius ash. Easily the most striking part of the exhibit is the many mortar casts formed from cavities of the bodies caught in the descending inferno; passing through the centuries how these people faced their end.
I remember the haunting image of the abandoned slaves still chained in place, a stark reminder that human cruelty is not a recent invention. But also what appears to be two parents, shielding a child they must have known they couldn’t save. Many bodies were found face down, but many others face up, or propped up, reaching to help another to the very end. A reminder, perhaps, that bravery too, is an ancient phenomenon.
“To be buried in lava and not turn a hair,” writes Samuel Beckett, “it is then a man shows what stuff he is made of.”
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Last week, in a small back room of our tired, currently pastorless church, we reached, as part of a study on the “fruits of the spirit,” a daunting task: study joy. Why even try, in times like these? Is that not just an ostrich-like escapism, an exercise in privilege, in doing anything we can to look away?
The person whose turn it was to lead the study has been searching for a job for the better part of a year, while trying to care for his ailing mother and saddled with home payments from a purchase made in more optimistic times. “How do we hold together unhappiness, and joy?” he asks.
Due to a typo in the study guide, we found ourselves reading late in the book of Isaiah, as the author processes our broken world: “The Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it; he will ruin its face… my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.” And yet, in the face of this unsettling moonscape, we find these words: “You will go out in joy… the mountains and hills will burst” – not just with lava, but – “into song before you, and the all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”
I’ve wondered before how the mountains and hills of the world might feel about its cracks: forced to exist – formed, twisted, jostled – in a world they cannot control. But reading the words of this ancient scribe, I start to understand. The mountains of this world do more than just belch forth anger. The mountains — though they can’t move a step nor heal a single wound — the mountains: they sing.
Joy, I think, we often pin to hope, or even vision: things with feathers, flitting, fleeting, and quite quiet during a storm.
But maybe that’s not quite it. Joy, it seems to me now, is much less emotion than practice, much less sheltering bird than sheltering hill. Joy, I think, is a lava covered mountain — standing no matter the weather, or the thickness of ash collected on its slopes.
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Since Mount St. Helens’ eruption nearly a half century ago, scientists have witnessed surprising resilience, as life, even in moonscape, finds a way. Who would have anticipated that the hooves of Elk mix ash and feces, and burrowing gophers mix lupine and seeds, which feed each other in astonishing cycles of recovery. The Cascadia Field Guide encourages you to visit, though the mountain still smokes, sending occasional plumes into the sky. “Feel the soft ash crumble in your hands… and see this place,” it concludes. “You will find yourself in a grey land going green.”