The first day I climbed Mt. St. Helens was August 13th, 1945. Spirit Lake was far from the cities of the valley, and news came slow. Though the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima August 6 and the second dropped on Nagasaki August 9, photographs didn’t appear in the Portland Oregonian until August 12. Those papers must have been driven in to Spirit Lake on the 13th. Early on the morning of the 14th I walked over to the lodge to check the bulletin board. There were whole pages of paper pinned: photos of a blasted city from the air, the estimate of 150,000 dead in Hiroshima alone, the American scientist quoted saying “nothing will grow there again for seventy years.” The morning sun on my shoulders, the fir forest smell and the big tree shadows; feet in thin moccasins feeling the ground, and my heart still one with the snow peak mountain at my back. Horrified, blaming scientists, and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something like, “By the purity and beauty of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against the cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.

-Gary Snyder

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