So, I sat down this evening to start editing photos and putting together Saturday Morning Garden Blogging. As usual, I flipped on the teevee, and the news item was a report on the grounding of airplanes in Europe, due to ash coming from the Iceland volcanic eruption.
I was instantly transported back 30 years, to June 12, 1980 -- the night the Grateful Dead brought Fire on the Mountain to the Portland Coliseum, and we killed the Pinto.
Those of you of a certain vintage may recall that Mount St. Helens became active in Spring 1980, and massively erupted on May 18. I was 21 years old, a student at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Oddly, because of the prevailing winds, although most of the country to the east experienced ash fall, very little came south to Eugene -- we hadn't experienced the hazards of ash.
As soon as the Grateful Dead show in Portland was announced, our merry band of Dead Heads arranged to get tickets. Eugene is about 100 miles south of Portland, so we also had to arrange a way to get up to Portland. My boyfriend's VW bug was not a possibility -- beyond that all of us wouldn't fit in it, it also was extremely temperamental and couldn't reliably make it 100 miles -- we'd tried taking it to a wedding earlier in the year, and didn't arrive in time to make the reception, let alone the ceremony.
However, one of the guys had a Pinto hatchback -- it was tight, but we could get 7 people in it (and it helps that I'm really small). We heard rumblings on the radio that there were rumblings from the mountain, but really didn't pay much attention -- I mean, why would we? Mount St. Helens had erupted several times since the Big One, and it hadn't affected us at all.
As soon as we hit the parking lot of the Coliseum, appropriate chemicals were ingested. We trooped inside -- unfortunately there was assigned, rather than the typical general admission/festival seating scheme more typical of the day and genre of music. Even more unfortunately, "Security" decided it really wanted to keep people sitting in their seats -- gawd forbid that one wanted -- or needed to dance around.
The only way around it was literally around it: given the goodies we'd ingested, and the totally hot performance, standing still was not an option. Instead, we danced round and round and round on a walkway which circled the Coliseum about half-way up. It was a really, really great show.
Right after they finished playing Fire on the Mountain, Bob Weir sidled up to the microphone and said cryptically -- to us anyway -- "well folks, we did it; she blew". Not having the ability to be sure what he said, or make sense of it even if we had heard it correctly, we continued to enjoy ourselves for the rest of the show.
And when we left the Coliseum, it was ashing out -- thick falls of ash, like a snowstorm, coating everything. Suddenly that cryptic comment made sense, and we were enveloped in the result.
Well -- we freaked. We were young, stupid, hyped -- and tripping our asses off. We decided we must, absolutely escape -- we had to get back to Eugene!
So we all piled into the Pinto, and crept out of Portland in the midst of the ash storm.
But the funny thing about volcanic ash is that it's rather like pouring ground glass into an engine. Not a good thing.
And that's how we killed the Pinto.