to hear his unique memories from that day – of driving through darkness and ash in Eastern Washington, listening to news on the radio, as well as the hunt, decades later, for a mythical lost cassette tape.
They were somewhere east of Moses Lake when the distant sky over the Cascades started to look very strange. Chris says the radio was an old JVC boombox. And fortunately, Barbara Ballew – Chris and Tim’s mom – was something of an amateur documentarian. She pressed “RECORD” and captured several minutes of Bob Swartz as he broadcast live from the KZUN studios east of Spokane.
“You can hear my brother and I saying, ‘Mommy, you’re driving off to the left . . . you’re driving after the right’ with our impossibly high voices,” Ballew said, “part of which was because we were scared, but mostly because we were young kids.”drive off the road and the Granada got stuck alongside the freeway in a ditch.
Barbara Ballew passed away in 2012. When she did, Chris inherited a big box of her old cassette tapes. That jogged his memory – not about Mount St. Helens, but about when he was very young and was first starting to write and record original music. Meanwhile, all that volcanic ash meant that Chris and Tim and their mom and her friend were stuck in Spokane for about 10 days before they could safely drive back to Seattle. But maybe that was something of a silver lining, or at least a way to supplement Chris’s meager cassette tape budget.
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