Bruce Nelson will commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption as he has every other - by putting flowers on the graves of Terry Crall and Karen Varner.
Since that hellish day 10 years ago when he lost his friends in the seconds after the volcano erupted, Nelson has followed the simple annual ritual.On May 18, 1980, Nelson and his girlfriend Sue Ruff saved themselves and rescued another companion by walking for 14 hours through hot ash and fallen trees from their campsite on the Green River, 14 miles northwest of the mountain.
Nelson learned that day that life is a gift. "You don't realize how much you want to live until you think you're going to die," he says.
Nelson is a lean, athletic 32-year-old now, brimming with optimism and a love of the outdoors that the disaster hasn't dimmed. He's married to 25-year-old Traci and has a 15-month-old daughter, Marlaina. He has moved on with his life.
But he can close his eyes and remember as if it were yesterday the black ash cloud that darkened the morning sky, the wave of withering heat, the wind that snapped entire forests to the ground in an instant and turned a lush green landscape into a moonscape drained of color.
"If you talk to me about any part of it, I can see it like a camera," he says, sitting in his living room on a quiet Longview street. "All of a sudden the blue sky turned into a monster. All the timber came down so fast, in the snap of a finger. We fell into the hole where the trees were uprooted. We thought the whole hill had fallen down on us."
Fate was kind to Nelson and Ruff. Trees covered the opening like giant pickup-sticks, shielding them from the holocaust above.
But Varner and Crall's tent had been hit by a tree, and Nelson couldn't find them in the rubble. Two others in their camping party were injured - Brian Thomas, who suffered a shattered hip, and Dan Balch, who burned his hands on a scorched tree.
With their four-wheel-drive rig blocked by fallen trees, Nelson and Ruff trudged through clouds of dust and ash, without food or water, until a helicopter pilot spotted them and picked them up near dusk.
"All day long we didn't know if we were going to live," Nelson says. "It was a whole day of fear. I never found God, but I did pray. It made me feel how strong Mother Nature is. She put us here, and she can take us off."
They returned for Thomas that evening. Balch had been rescued earlier in the day.
Five days later, Nelson guided rescue crews back to the ash-covered, tree-littered campsite, hoping to find Varner and Crall alive.
Instead, rescuers found their bodies still in the tent. And they found Crall's German shepherd and her three pups alive. Nelson kept one of the pups, Dusty.
Nelson and Sue Ruff were married in 1983, but they divorced three years later.
After a stint in Alaska, Nelson is back in Longview, at the same bakery where he worked 10 years ago. He still camps every year on the Green River at a spot where he can look up the canyon and see the old campsite where his friends died.
"It was one of my favorite places to go," he says. "The ground was so thick with moss it was like a carpet."
Nelson has become close to Crall's parents, who are like grandparents to his daughter. But they never discuss the eruption's tragic toll.
With others, however, Nelson speaks freely about that day 10 years ago.
"I don't mind talking," he says. "People should know. I saw something that nobody else has seen."