Thirty years later: The eruption of Mount St. Helens remembered

Michael Lienau (top) returns each year to Mount St. Helens (center), where he and a film crew (bottom) were trapped for three days following the second eruption on May 25, 1980. Team Fitness location closes “If I died, I needed to know if I was going to heaven, or hell. And I didn’t want to go to hell, because that’s what this place was, and I didn’t like it.”

On the 30th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens, filmmaker Michael Lienau of Camano Island is a different man than this scared memory of himself.

He takes a moment, though, to remember what it was like to be part of a film crew documenting the volcano’s destruction, what it was like to be caught in the second eruption and, most significantly, what it means to have survived.

“What we did was crazy,” he said, “but at the time, I’m 20 years old; I’m gonna live forever, you know?”

PHOTO BY JEREMIAH O’HAGAN | STANWOOD/CAMANO NEWS He paused. “Do you want to know the whole story?”

The whole story started when Lienau was a child, and his mother made home movies that made the family seasick to watch.

Lienau wanted to make movies too, but not shaky records of home life – he wanted to use the family’s 8mm Kodak Brownie to shoot “real movies.”

“Fortunately, I had an English teacher who let us write scripts and make movies for extra credit,” he recalled.

One day Lienau was asked to visit the principal’s office, where he discovered someone from the local news waiting to offer him a job. He was 13 years old.

Lienau’s mom loaned him money to buy a 16mm Bolex, and he strung the news of Klamath Falls, Ore., until he was offered a job shooting TV news in high school.

PHOTO BY RUSSELL JOHNSON Two years later, Lienau graduated and started Global Net News. His real goal though, was Hollywood filmmaking.

“I was headed to California,” he said.

But, until then, he could make money in news, where he had connections.

In early 1980, Lienau happened across the weather section of a local paper and noticed a blurb that said seismic activity had been registered on Mount St. Helens, and could possibly lead to an eruption.

“I thought, ‘Eruption!’ and I went out and started filming the initial ash and steam,” he recalled. “But I missed May 18, which was a bummer.”

At least, it was a bummer at the time. In retrospect, maybe not.

On May 18, 1980, the world exploded in a tour de force. Lienau and his friend were eating breakfast in Oregon.

“We had spent a lot of time together waiting for the mountain to blow up,” he said.

As soon as the news came over the television they grabbed their camera gear and drove up to shoot. Calling ahead to a news contact, Lienau was told that a helicopter would be waiting for him at Boeing Field.

Lienau filmed the black ash sifting over Eastern Washington until the helicopter’s engine choked on the thick clouds the pilot was forced into an emergency landing. Lienau rented a car and drove his footage over a closed I-90, the only car on a disoriented and uncertain interstate.

The next night, Lienau’s footage was on the Johnny Carson show and Lienau had a new task — he hired onto a team filming Mount St. Helens from the ground. He headed out with a Canon Scoopic, the 16 mm Bolex of his adolescence, and a distinct lack of respect for his own mortality.

The landscape was monochromatic, Lienau recalled. “We were shooting color film, but it looked black and white.”

Lienau said the most enduring image of his time on the mountain is this colorless aftermath. Where once stood a beautiful mountain, 256 square miles had disappeared into a grimy blanket of silence.

“There was no wind, no birds,” Lienau said.

And, by the end of the day on May 24, 1980, no rendezvous with the helicopter that had dropped them off.

Unable to wade with any speed through thick blankets of ash and trees that lay like pick-up sticks, compass needles rotating in confusion and their radio’s battery drained, Lienau and the others never made it to “the next ridge over.”

They were forced to spend the night at a cold 5,500 feet, and at 2:39 a.m. on May 25, the mountain spilled the world upside down again, sifting fresh, hot fear over Lienau and his companions.

It was at this moment 20- year-old Lienau realized he wasn’t invincible.

“(As cameramen), we spent so much time filming bad stuff happening to other people, but now the bad stuff was happening to us,” Lienau said. The team did what made sense to them.

“We turned the cameras on ourselves, thinking this might be our last will and testament,” he said.

It was, in a way: Though everyone survived, the footage they shot and the experiences they had memorialized, for Lienau, the death of his previous lifestyle.

Missing and presumed dead for three days before an Air Force helicopter found them, Lienau had plenty of time to think, to pray, to prioritize.

In the end, he said, “I’m thankful for this. It totally changed my life.”

Lienau never went to California or pursued Hollywood. Instead, he immersed himself in the task of cataloguing various slices and struggles of life as a documentary filmmaker, eventually going independent. And, for a while, he stayed away from Mount St. Helens, letting the mountain that altered his course fade into the background.

But, of course, it never went away.

“For five years I didn’t want anything to do with the mountain,” Lienau said, “and after that I wanted to learn everything about it.”

Since then, Lienau has shot close to 1,000 hours of footage on Mount St. Helens, completing the documentary “The Fire Below Us,” about the eruption and his own experiences, as well as two other documentaries about Cascade volcanoes and seismic phenomenon.

In addition to answering his own haunting questions, Lienau said he realized someone “needed to tell the human side of Mount St. Helens,” to “put it in human scale and walk around in it.”

Over the years of walking around in the aftermath and eventual re-growth and renewal of the mountain and surrounding areas, Lienau has developed his own perspective of where that human side and scale lie.

Speaking of earthquakes and eruptions, he said, “People view them as disasters or acts of God, but it’s just Earth doing what it’s supposed to do.”

For Lienau, then, the story lies in the interactions between humanity and these inevitable natural processes.

“Mount St. Helens is the most wired mountain in the world,” he said, and from it “we’ve learned a lot about volcanoes.”

In the history of catastrophes, Mount St, Helens is a bit over-rated, Lienau said. There were far more devastating events before its eruption and there have been far worse since, but “this event was important because it has changed the way we view Earth’s geological processes.”

And for some, when they stand at the mountain’s base or hike its ridges, they realize it’s changed the way they view themselves.

Lienau goes back to the volcano every year. Some say he’s obsessed, and maybe he is, but there’s a reason, he said.

“To them it’s history. To me, it’s my life.”