John Lennon was shot and killed in December that year, the event made more surreal by my finding out about it from Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football. A few months before that, Mount St. Helens had erupted 150 miles away, and people who had been on the news the day before were now dead, killed by the earth itself. I was terrified that Mount Rainier, a mere forty-five miles away, would be next, burying us all in ash or lava before we even knew what was happening. The thing about “active” volcanos is that they might erupt in two hundred years or tomorrow, making them sub-ideal things for
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