For a long, long time, Elizabeth Rusch didn’t even know Mount St. Helens was in the United States!

Elizabeth Rusch says: “When Mount St. Helens had that huge eruption on May 18, 1980, I was laying on my belly on the itchy blue carpet of our living room in Connecticut. As Mount St. Helens spewed ash and steam in a huge, black, billowing mushroom cloud, I inched closer to the TV screen. I was 13, awestruck, but somehow clueless that this volcano was in our country. I figured it was somewhere really remote, like Greenland.

So when my husband and I moved to Portland in 1997, I was stunned to see the volcano’s lopped-off peak looming over the city. The crater was like a gaping wound that I could reach out and touch.”

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