Right as it first shot a steam plume in the air on that first day, I ran up the road and watched it with a bunch of people at the lookout point. It was in the distance, but the weirdest thing was that at one point, from out viewpoint, the steam cloud took on the shape of a mushroom cloud. So it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere in Washington. I had said "Damn. Doesn't that look like a mushroom cloud?" and all of a sudden everyone became quiet. We were no longer concenred about Mt. St Helen's, but what we would be witnessing if that had been a nuke blast. It was werid because everyone got real sombre.
What was funny too was that when I first got to the viewing spot there was only one other couple watching it. But within like a minute the whole street stopped and people got out of their cars and watched it. It reminded me of the scene in "Independance Day" when the UFO's first appeared in New York.
I hail from Hawaii, so watching this Mt St. Helens thing is different to me as there is no lava shooting out. Even when ST. Helens blew in 80, at the same time one of the volcanoes on the big Island went off. We would watch the news talk about Mt. St. Helens and say "That isn't a volcanoe. Where's the lava?" I know it is a volcanoe, and I know that it had a big blast, but to us Hawaiian's, it ain't a volcanoe unless it has lava shooting out of it and rolling down a hill, destroying everything in it's path.
