From "The New Yorker"

April 16, 2010

Under the Volcano

by Susan Orlean

Volcanic ash is as soft as baby powder, if baby powder were made of microscopic shards of glass. I was living in Portland, Oregon, in 1980, when Mt. St. Helens erupted. The first belch from the mountain sent all of its force and flotsam north and east, away from Portland; the second caught a westerly wind, and the ash drizzled down on the city. The day of the second eruption, I was at the Portland Art Museum, watching the epic, gloomy seven-hour Hans-Jürgen Syberberg film “Hitler: A Film from Germany.” It had been a soft, bright spring day when we went into the theatre. There is an intermission halfway through the film, and as soon as the lights went up the audience stumbled outside, dazed and disturbed, ears rattling from the Wagnerian score, gasping for relief from Syberberg’s puppetry reënactments of Democracy versus Germany, and footage of Goebbels’ charred corpse, and repeated manipulated montages of the Reichstag before, during, and then after its collapse into smoking rubble. Wouldn’t some fresh Oregon air be the perfect antidote! We rushed out of the museum. It was oddly quiet outside. No cars rolled by. No one strolled down the sidewalks. The spring light was fuzzed out, and fat gray flakes drifted down from the whitened sky, landing in dove-colored piles on the ground. A lone pedestrian, his face hidden by a white surgical mask, hurried by, hunched and silent. For a minute, the notion that this was an extension of the film, with all of its meditations on destruction and burned ruin, crossed my mind. Finally, a police car inched down the street, crunching over the ash piles, its loudspeaker blaring a warning to stay inside, to keep your hands off the ash, to not breathe unless it was absolutely necessary. It felt like the end of the world. Another minute passed, and the intermission ended, and we hustled back to watch the rest of the film, to see another near-end of the world.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/susanorlean/2010/04/under-the-volcano.html#ixzz0lOKzfbf6