The Cheese Day Parade makes its way through downtown Toledo last July.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve wrestled with COVID-19 fatigue for a while now. We’re stuck at home watching the number of coronavirus victims rise, unemployment claims soar, and summer celebrations disappear.
What’s most painful is the lack of commencement ceremonies to mark the achievement as seniors throughout the nation complete a dozen years of kindergarten through 12th grade education.
But summer events are gone too. No Packwood Flea Market. No Winlock Egg Day. Toledo Cheese Days. Tenino Oregon Trail Days. Rochester Swede Day. Centralia Summerfest. Mossyrock Blueberry Festival. Morton Loggers’ Jubilee. Cowlitz Prairie Threshing Bee. Southwest Washington Fair. Thurston County Fair. I haven’t heard yet whether the Napavine Funtime Festival will take place. No Spring Community Garage Sale. No Washington Bluegrass Association concert in Chehalis. No more plays at the Evergreen Playhouse. No tours of the Borst Home.
It’s not the first time summer events have been canceled. During the Great Depression, the Southwest Washington Fair suspended operations, and after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, all fairs were suspended as the nation entered World War II. A smaller Lewis County Fair sponsored by Centralia and Chehalis took place in August 1945 before the Southwest Washington Fair resumed in 1946.
And organizers of Toledo’s Cheese Days pared back the event for several years until it finally disappeared for nearly a decade until 1975, when the Toledo Jaycees resurrected the community celebration.
Perhaps when next summer rolls around, people who missed the events will offer more support to those hardy volunteers who dedicate time, energy, and money to hosting celebrations that entertain us every year.
With little to look forward to this summer, I decided to look back.
Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount St. Helens that blasted 3,000 feet off the top of the volcano. Most local residents remember that momentous occasion. I hate to admit that, as a University of Washington student, I slept through the 8:32 a.m. eruption that fateful Sunday. I was enrolled in Geology 101, affectionately called “Rocks for Jocks,” and I never saw our geology professor again the rest of the quarter as he left for firsthand observations of the biggest geological event in local history.
But at the 10-year anniversary of the eruption in 1990, as a reporter for The Daily News in Longview, I interviewed a Weyerhaeuser Co. contract logger from Woodburn, Ore., who was working above the Toutle River when the mountain erupted. I’ll never forget the memories Jim Scymanky shared of the loud roar that sounded like jetliners racing toward him followed by searing heat that engulfed him as the blast sheared off trees, flattened the surrounding forest and spewed hot black ash skyward. Scymanky, who was 36, couldn’t breathe and suffered burns over more than 45 percent of his body. His gloves melted onto his hands.
The four men crawled inside the cab of their truck but couldn’t stand to touch each other. Then they trudged down a logging road toward the North Fork of the Toutle River, seeking a way out of the devastation, but a debris avalanche blocked their route. Evlanty Sharipoff, 41, of Mt. Angel, Ore., left the group to cross a valley that was soon inundated by pyroclastic mudflows. To escape he climbed a hemlock tree, which is where he died from ash asphyxiation. José Dias, 33, also of Woodburn, left his companions and rescuers found him atop a downed log, but he died later from damage to his lungs. Rescuers in National Guard helicopters hauled Scymanky and Leonty Skorohodoff, 30, of Woodburn to safety, but Skorohodoff died a week later from burns and acute pneumonia.
As I interviewed Scymanky, I listened in awe to his story and realized how lucky he was to be alive. A walking miracle.
They were three of the 57 people who perished that Sunday. Six Lewis County residents also died: Merlin James and Ruth Kathleen Pluard, Bucoda natives from Toledo who left for the mountain to check on equipment; John and Christy Killian of Vader, newlyweds who were camping near Fawn Lake; Wally N. Bowers, a logger from Winlock; and Keith A. Moore of Mossyrock.
In the midst of the pandemic, it’s good to reflect on previous disasters that temporarily shuttered businesses, closed roads, and wreaked havoc in the lives and pocketbooks of local residents, including Mount St. Helens and the devastating floods of 1990, 1996, and 2007. We survived then; we can do it again.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.
