Mount St. Helens Exploded Forty Years Ago

Forty short years ago, an explosion devastated SW Washington. Mount St. Helens blew her top off and the ash could be seen for hundreds of miles. Scott Poole, co-author of The Last Tiger Is Somewhere, remembers it well in his poem "70s Summer". 

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70s Summer 
It was summer in the 1970s
and mullet dudes wore tight shorts over sweats
like half-ass super heroes
imitating Rocky.
Everything smelled like hot bark dust
and you could never get those
little brown slivers out of your hands.
There was always somebody’s cousin
swinging nunchucks in the driveway
and when we weren’t having pinecone fights
we ripped the skin from our bodies
by crashing our bikes into each other.
Every day was a baseball in the nuts
and we drank warm strawberry Shasta pop all summer,
staining our white shirts
with red continents we dreamed into beautiful wounds.
Duck shit covered the cement walks
and dead cow bones littered the woods.
Once, I saw a couple of teenagers screwing
while I hid in the top of an enormous oak.
I swam in the postage-stamp-size development pool
until my eyes closed shut, on fire with chlorine
and I ran my banana-seat bicycle
into a bridge and fell in the pond.
The taste of algae still sits on my lips.
Mill Plain Avenue was nothing but two lousy lanes
melting into a ribbon of goo every summer.
I can still see my Steve Austin doll’s
robot eye staring at me
from a Doberman’s mouth like a message from the future.
I used to beat dogs back with my bike pump,
choking with the newsprint stench
from my canvas newspaper bag, all knees and balance
heading to the pee-smelling house to collect three stupid dollars.
Then Mt. St. Helens blew up all over the damn place and I crawled
up on my roof and gaped in wonder
at the lightning-bespeckled gray column of death,
then walked back in the house, woke up my parents
and returned to watching Kids Are People Too on TV.
I caught a steelhead in the Columbia bigger than me
and you could still swim in Battle Ground Lake
and past 124th Avenue was nothing but grass fields
and broken-down barns dying under blackberries.
Nobody wore seatbelts or helmets or sunscreen.
We were all burnt to nothing but
a bunch of red peeling writhing
mosquito-bitten knee-scraped
tube-sock-wearing cul-de-sac kickballers
with giant Goody combs in our back pockets.
We’d go fishing at night when Dad came home
and we brought three five-gallon
buckets of Bluegill back from Lacamas Lake
and dumped them in the development’s pond.
They rippled just under the water
like a midnight-blue blanket of sweat.
I had forgotten these details until
the other day when we drove down 9th past Fircrest Elementary
and I saw a kid struggling to walk
because his pants were cinched around his quads.
I just thought,
“Look at those stupid kids. Who the hell
would be dumb enough to do that?”
Then I remembered standing in the same spot
when I was ten years old with Brad and Brian Sellers
and we all had pulled our shorts down around our legs
and tucked in our t-shirts to cover our asses,
laughing at each other,
saying, “You look so stupid. That’s the dumbest thing ever.”
Then Brad said, “Bet you won’t lift your shirt at the next car.
It could be the world’s first reverse BA. Just think.”
(Brad had a bit of the showman in him.)
“Maybe I will,” I said.
“Do it,” he said.
“Maybe I will.”
“Do it.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
I guess I figured this was my golden opportunity to enter
the rarefied airof the kiddom coolness pavilion.
So I lifted my shirt and flashed my small stupid butt
at the next car coming down the rise.
Now, I don’t know why
I didn’t notice the make and model of the car
but when the car screeched to a halt beside us
I recognized it then.
And there was no mistaking the person who sprang out.
My Mom.
She pointed her finger at me. At first, I thought it was a gun.
Anger shook her body as if she were a tree and somebody
was trying to knock peaches off her.
I don’t think she completed a sentence
the rest of the day.
“YOU . . . NOW . . . GET . . . THERE . . .
BACK . . . TROUBLE . . . KILL . . . CAR . . .
FATHER . . . CAR . . . KILL!”
I wonder how long it took her to recognize
my puny rear end.
Was it instantaneous? Did all those diaper changings,
all those baths, give her a sixth hiney-sense
where she could pick my butt out of a crowd
from a hundred yards away? Was it like radar? Assdar?
Or was there a brief moment when she thought,
“Look at those stupid kids. Who the hell
would be dumb enough to do that?”

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In The Last Tiger Is Somewhere, two poets from the West bring their work together and take apart the news. Recent history gets jigsawed. Current events get skewered. The result is thirty praise songs, fairy tales, guilty verdicts, and mathematical equations. There are prayers here, and new commandments. There are portraits and photographic negatives. And an introduction by Carney and an afterword by Poole form a frame around it all.
Available in July 2020. Preorder now!