The Whisler Life

So, as mentioned in the last post, the carpet installation happened on Tuesday - well, almost.  Chad and I met Bill at the cabin at 10am and helped clean out the remaining debris from upstairs.  Within half an hour, the carpet installer had arrived, alone.  I have never heard of anyone installing carpet alone, and we assumed that someone else would show up shortly thereafter.  Nope.  Just Martin.  Amazingly enough, he managed to haul, cut, and place all of the padding and carpeting by late afternoon.  Since we work on a generator for power, and the only lighting is by propane lantern, he wasn’t able to finish the installation before the light faded.  He asked to come back the next day (Wednesday) to finish up, which was fine with Bill.  Bill arranged to meet him back up at the cabin (keep in mind it’s almost a 2 hour drive from Portland) at 2pm the next day.  Next word I get is from Bill on Wednesday evening saying that he arrived at the cabin to find a note on the door saying the installers couldn’t get the generator to work (sidenote: there is no cell service at the cabin… nor within about 30 miles, so communication is, let’s just say, difficult).  So Bill had driven all that way only to arrive at an empty cabin, without fully installed carpet.  He was NOT a happy camper!  To make a long story short, we’ve rescheduled for next Wednesday… hopefullly everything will get finished up then!  We’ll keep our fingers crossed!  There are several photos of our adventures on Tuesday - take a look.

This past Tuesday, March 8th, I spent the day up at Bill’s Northwoods Cabin continuing the construction work.  His son Matt is home for Spring Break, and he was also up there helping.  We worked busily all day, everything normal.  Around 5pm, we heard the sirens going off at the nearby volunteer fire department.  Matt asked me if I thought there was a forest fire nearby, and I supposed that could be true, or maybe even a structure fire at one of the cabins.  The siren continued for about 5 minutes, and after that we didn’t give it anymore thought.  We finished our work at the cabin and packed up by about 5:45pm.  As we were making our way back toward civilization (known as the Cougar Bar & Grill in Cougar, WA - and calling it civilization is a serious stretch!), we had a Portland radio station on in the truck.  During the traffic report, the annoucer said that the Portland freeways were at a standstill while people were gawking at the Mt. St. Helens ash/steam plume from the eruption that had occurred about an hour earlier.  WHAT?!?!?  The mountain erupted?!?!?  How could that be?  At the cabin we are a mere 10 miles (as the crow flies) from the top of the mountain!  We didn’t see, hear, or feel anything!  Once we heard about the eruption on the radio, Bill floored the accelerator on the truck to try to get us to the only viewpoint of St. Helens between the cabin and Cougar.  We made it to the viewpoint about 10 minutes after dusk, so it was really too dark for picture taking, but I gave it a shot anyway.  I know that the photo is very unimpressive, but that’s the view we had.  We were on the exact opposite side of the mountain from the eruption and the direction of the prevailing wind.  Bill, Matt and I were considering coming up with some exciting story of danger and escape - but we knew we wouldn’t be able to tell the tale with a straight face!  It just seems like the story should be much better than this since we were probably some of the closest people to the mountain on Tuesday during the eruption… oh well.

P.S. We determined later that the volunteer fire department sirens we heard were in response to the eruption.  Little did we know!