#weyerhauser

[countryofthecanyons]

Weyerhouser (grey building lower left behind the mobile homes) is a lumber company that owns one of the big home builders in our area. This is their local supply depot.

[supplyside]

Weyerhauser paper mill - Longview, Washington

[supplyside]

Weyerhauser paper mills and Reynolds metal plant are both located in Longview, on the Columbia River

[litrant]

Ka-BOOOOMMMM!

Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens by Steve Olson (W. W. Norton, $27.95).

Mount St. Helens’ last eruption, in 2010, was a relatively minor one, but that volcano is not finished yet. In fact, the entire West Coast has some volcanoes and seismic faults that aren’t dead--they’re just napping (for more details, read Kathryn Schulz’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for the New Yorker, “The Really Big One”).

Steve Olson’s new book, Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens, is concerned with the top-blowing monster eruption on May 18, 1980, that killed 57 people. He provides a very clear overview of the volcanic history of the mountain, but he also weaves into his narrative the story of Weyerhauser, the gargantuan lumber company that is the world’s largest private owner of timber land, and the personal stories of a handful of the people who died that day. 

No, he doesn’t leave out Harry Truman, but he doesn’t focus on the old man of Spirit Lake, either; this is a very well done general history of a geologic event that had profound economic, social and climate implications, and it also manages to be a good story.

On a side note, though: Can we please stop titling books “the untold story”? It had damn well better be an untold story if it’s worth the time to read it.