St. Helens didn't just erupt and then quit. It kept going for a few weeks (and still rumbles and smokes a bit).

A week or so after the first eruption on May 18th, my wife's parents were in town. On a Sunday we were heading from where we live on Capitol Hill (Seattle) to Barbara's cousin's for dinner (he lived in White Center, just outside Seattle's south city limits). We heard on the radio that St. Helens was emitting a substantial amount of ash. Heading south on Interstate 5, just on the southern horizon, we could see a pillar of cloud, "mushrooming" a bit at the top, and blowing eastward. We couldn't see the mountain itself.

Seattle had pretty well escaped the ash-fall, but some of that outpouring on the Sunday we went to my wife's cousins must have blown north, because Monday morning, when I went out to the car (parked on the street across from our apartment building), it, and just about everything in sight, looked kind of dusty. It was a light coating of ash.

Don Firth