The Man Who Refused to Leave Mount St. Helens Before It Erupted

Harry R. Truman’s Mount St. Helens Lodge once stood along the shore of Spirit Lake, close enough to the volcano that the area was completely transformed when Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980. The massive landslide and lateral blast buried the lodge site beneath debris and dramatically reshaped the lake itself, raising its water level and altering its shoreline. Because of those changes, the former location of Truman’s lodge can appear to sit in the middle of the modern lake on today’s maps. The original lodge is gone, and the ground where Truman lived out his final days is now part of a landscape permanently altered by one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in U.S. history. Sam Kean described what he thought would have happened to Truman in his book Caesar's Last Breath The last moments of Harry Truman's life would have gone something like this. That close to the blast, he likely heard nothing, though the ground would have rumbled beneath him and thrown him off balance. If he happened to look up, he would have seen something sublime, in the old poetic sense of both awful and awe-full. The mountain face he'd spent most of his life marveling over would have collapsed like a soufflé and then rebounded, with all the gases inside making their break for freedom at once. Given the speed of the black cloud that emerged (up to 350 miles an hour), Truman could have watched it careen down the mountain for maybe a minute - a plume one hundred stories tall and ten miles wide. Its intense heat would have boiled away any nearby snow and twisted those 250-foot fir trees like scraps of plastic in a campfire. When the front roared into Truman's campsite it would have blistered the paint on his pink Cadillac and perhaps burst the tires as the air inside them expanded. Every bottle of Schenley in the cabinet would have exploded like a Molotov cocktail and all the panther pee would have gone up in blue flames. Truman's clothes would have flared and disappeared, and then Truman himself would have sublimed in the scientific sense - transformed from solid to spirit almost instantly. And with a final hiss, he would have risen up into the air, joining the wider atmosphere.