“Yes, so if you don’t mind…”
But I didn’t even finish asking the question before DeAnn Cosgrove launched into her story. “It happened the day Mount Saint Helens blew up,” she said at once. “Daddy went fishing that weekend and never came home.”
The day Mount Saint Helens blew up. If you lived in Washington State or even anywhere in the Pacific Northwest at the time, those words conjure a day you remember—a beautifully clear Sunday morning in late spring when the mountain—one some Native Americans referred to as “Louwala Clough,” or Smoking Mountain—suddenly roared back to life after being quiet for 123 years. The initial blast caused a huge avalanche and sent up an immense overheated cloud of three-hundred-degree pumice and ash that killed every living thing inside a two-hundred-square-mile area.
“So your father was one of the fifty or so people who died?” I asked.
“The actual number was fifty-seven,” she said. “Daddy wasn’t ever counted in that official number because they never found any trace of him—no sign of him or his vehicle. But Mount Saint Helens is where he had told my mother he was going that weekend—he said he was going fishing on Spirit Lake.”
I had gone camping on the edge of that pristine lake myself years ago—long before the mountain blew up. In advance of the actual eruption—between the time of the first sizable earthquake underneath the mountain in March and when the first big eruption happened on the eighteenth of May—I remembered reading about a curmudgeonly old guy—memorably named Harry Truman—who had told interviewers that if the mountain ever exploded, he’d just go out on the lake in his boat and wait it out. There was only one problem with Mr. Truman’s plan—the lake was vaporized in that initial explosion, and so was he.
It seemed likely to me now that if Anthony David Cosgrove had been anywhere near Spirit Lake at the time, he had most likely met a similar fate. But I remembered, too, that investigators had found traces of many of the human tragedies left behind in the volcano’s aftermath. Etched in my memory were images of eerie shells of burned-out vehicles still smoldering in the devastated wilderness and testifying to the fact that for the people trapped inside those vehicles, there had been no escape.
In the decades since then, though, Mount Saint Helens and the surrounding area have been subjected to an almost microscopic examination as scientists study both what happened back then and what’s happening now. The area where millions of board feet of timber were felled in one cataclysmic blast is now an ongoing laboratory of Mother Nature at work, reclaiming that which she has previously destroyed.
With that in mind, it seemed strange to me that no fragment of Anthony Cosgrove’s vehicle had ever been found. Still, there was always an outside chance that something had surfaced and no one had bothered to notify his daughter. Bureaucracies are notoriously dim when it comes to taking the feelings of individuals into consideration.
By then the baby seemed to have fallen asleep. She held him to her shoulder, burped him, and then went to put him down somewhere out of sight. The process made me wonder a little. I knew that Kelly had nursed Kayla when she was a baby. Kyle, on the other hand, seemed to be a bottle baby. When we had been down in Ashland, I had noticed this and wondered about it, but there are things fathers can ask and things they can’t. This was one of the latter.
When DeAnn returned to the living room, she brought with her a small gold-framed photo of a young man wearing a vintage 1970s hairdo and equally dated horn-rimmed glasses. Grinning goofily for the camera, he held a tiny, red-faced, wrinkly baby—held her awkwardly and carefully, as though he was concerned she might break.
It was one of those standard set-piece types of photos that are part of most families. They’re usually trite, poorly lit, and unoriginal, but they’re wonderful all the same. They testify to the fact that no matter what may happen later—death or divorce, midnight arrests for shoplifting or wrecked first cars—at that point in time, that newly arrived child was a joyfully welcomed addition to his or her family.
“Your dad?” I asked, handing the photo back to DeAnn.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s the only one I have. After he was gone, Mom went through the house and got rid of most of his pictures. This is one my grandmother happened to have.”