Originally published: May 15, 2005

If a screenwriter had written a character like Harry Truman into the script of a volcano movie, it would have been scorned as a contrived and low-budget idea.

But there he was, in the flesh, as chiseled as the bark of an old-growth fir, liquored up by his whiskey-and-Cokes, and defiant right to the day he was entombed by the guts of the mountain whose shadow he refused to leave.

With his ten-dollar name and hell-no-I-won’t-go attitude, Truman was a made-for-prime-time folk hero. He was the proverbial farmer sitting on his front porch, cradling a shotgun and refusing to move when the bulldozers showed up to build a freeway.

Only problem was, this bulldozer wasn’t stopping for anyone.

The 83-year-old Truman, proprietor of the Mount St. Helens Lodge, oversaw a crumbling collection of cabins, 16 or so cats and a fleet of boats rented out in summers. He and his wife, Edna, had built the lodge and cabins. She had died three years earlier and Truman had closed the lodge, which was slowly being taken over, and smelling like, the cats.

Truman’s favorite drink was Schenley whiskey and Coke, and his favorite word was “goddam,” which he used at the rate of nearly one per sentence, unless another profanity intervened. (An interview with the National Geographic’s Rowe Findley, published shortly after the 1980 eruption, has 10 sentences with a total of eight blanks.)