On my vacation a couple of weeks ago we decided to take a drive up to Mt. Saint Helens. I’d never been there before and have always wanted to check it out. The eruption of St. Helens in 1980 had quite an impact on me as a child (as it did for anyone who lived in the Pacific Northwest at the time) and I’ve always felt drawn to it for this reason. It was a lot closer than I thought. It took us less than two hours to drive there. Closer than the beach! We visited Forest Learning Center first and wandered around, checked out the exhibits. One thing that I learned while there was that, due to the way the sound waves bounced…