Ashes and garbage

I wandered into Portland just after the explosion of Mount Saint Helens on May 18, 1980, about fifty miles northeast of that city. The explosion, the equivalent of a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, threw half a billion tons of ash into the sky, plunging hundreds of square miles into darkness. Ash rained down on the entire region for days.

I got my first gig in Portland washing cars and shoveling the ash from driveways. The first day of sweeping and shoveling I had no mask, just a damp handkerchief tied around my nose and mouth, but my aching lungs made sure I got a mask before the next day.

The cleanup was accomplished in a week or so and I went to a day-labor office and picked up whatever one-off work I could. For the next few weeks I did a little light construction, hauled furniture, went door to door soliciting donations for Greenpeace.

I soon found a full-time job at a small restaurant and coffeehouse, The Wheel of Fortune in Northwest Portland, near where I was staying. I started out washing dishes and mopping floors but soon moved up to prepping fruits and vegetables.

The restaurant's goal was to serve good, cheap vegetarian food, mostly soup, bread, and salads, and I got to take home lots of leftovers (the main reason I always gravitated to restaurant work for short-term money).

The Wheel was founded by a New Age religious movement called The Holy Order of MANS (sic), a mystical Christian sect, which had started on Haight Street in San Francisco in the 1960s. By coincidence, I had stayed in a youth hostel in Seattle owned by the Order.

The Order's street ministry focused on feeding the hungry and otherwise assisting those in need, and The Wheel in Portland was its first "satellite" restaurant outside the Bay Area.

The two dozen other workers at the Wheel were all around my age, in their twenties, and, the city being very cosmopolitan, were from all over the region and Canada and even Europe. I got along fine with all of them and they were exotic to me and I was fascinated to hear them talk about their lives.

Two of my co-workers were only sixteen but were emancipated minors, escapees from the cult their parents had raised both in. The West Coast was fertile ground for cults in general. A few of the other workers were refugees from yet another cult, the Brethren, which was casually referred to as "the garbage eaters," for their common practice of retrieving still-edible food from dumpsters.

The cult (which still exists) was started by an end-times evangelist from Paducah, Kentucky, and required members to cut off contact with their families; food and money and everything else was shared and everyone was expected to prepare for the end of the world. Members lived as vagrants and shunned many of the trappings of modern life, and because Armageddon was a serious matter they were forbidden to laugh or dance.

I became friends with several of my coworkers and always got the impression that those who had been in the Brethren or some other nominally spiritual group had left it not because they no longer believed in its ideals but because there was no joy in it. But they still wanted to live a humble life, still wanted some belief system that would actually walk the walk of the Christian roots of the cults.

At the Wheel I worked under a guy named Mark, who reported to the manager, Brother John. Mark wasn't a member of the Order but Brother John was. Not once did they or anyone else try to recruit me into the Order.

I don't think I would have gone for it in any event, but I could see that my new friends were happy—they had a job to go to every day, a roof over their heads, people their own age to talk to, and simple food to eat and share. The Wheel was a good place for them.

Statistics show that about a third of food produced in America is wasted, thrown out once it's just past its sell-by date or when leftovers aren't appealing. The Wheel tried to reduce that waste by keeping the fare to a few ingredients and donating any leftovers to the homeless, and making sure the staff ate well.

Every cult starts with the germ of a noble idea, before some charismatic leader processes it and rebrands it, until it's as different as stale oleo is from fresh butter. "Garbage eaters" is an ugly term masking a noble idea.

For some cults, the explosion of Mount Saint Helens was just a warmup for the Main Event, the great convulsion promised in the Bible that will cover the whole world in ash. I don't know anyone at the Wheel who thought that, but I'm sure there were some who were just where they wanted to find themselves if it should turn out to be true: living simply, getting along with others, and feeding those who couldn't feed themselves.