Places in Time | The View from Drew’s
It’s Sunday, May 18, 1980, just after 8 in the morning, and Darren Greenwood and Brian Hart are heading home from the base of Mount St. Helens.
Remembering they were expected to help a relative move at 9:30, the cousins from Kelso had left around 4:30 that morning for Weyerhaeuser’s 12-mile Camp along the South Fork Toutle. They made it to the 5,600 Line — but with a promise to keep, they didn’t linger, and back down they go.
Where Spirit Lake Highway meets S. Toutle and Sightly Roads sits Drew’s Grocery, in business since 1937, a focal point of the town of Toutle. A full-service Shell gas station, food-to-go stop, joined across the street by Diedrick’s and a 76 gas station. Nobody was paying attention to the duo when Greenwood and Hart pulled up.
“On our way down Spirit Lake Highway, we saw people pointing to the mountain,” Greenwood recalled to The Daily News’s Andre Stepankowsky after the eruption. “It was erupting. It looked like an A-bomb going off.”
They snap photos but are unsure whether to stay or take more as the massive cloud pushes higher into the sky; the two head west as cars start streaming toward the mountain.
“If it weren’t for that deadline we wouldn’t have gotten out of there in time,” Hart recalled. “All four bridges we crossed to get out of there are gone.”
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Their photo, in color, later appears in The Daily News’s book released later in 1980.
Back in 2017 during my first visit, we stopped at Drew’s to get some snacks before our trip up to Johnston Ridge. The old Drew’s building, before the fire. First and only “locals” place pitstop, ultimately. After grabbing snacks and drinks, I paused before returning to the hybrid Nissan that would take our sore bodies from the previous day’s failed summit attempt the rest of the way.
Maybe I thought of that photo when I first saw it over a decade earlier, when our geologist family friend passed it along — already in brittle shape by the early 2000s. I made a mental note to snap a photo the next time I was back in these parts.
Nine years later. Same location, new building, but oddly the same feeling. Outside of a newfound addiction to Dutch Bros. Coffee, Drew’s was a nearly everyday stop while heading down 504. Mr. Pibb, jerky, chips. Carbs, protein, raw essentials. And a punchlist item marked off.
The intersection of S. Toutle and 504 looks, no surprise, a bit different nearly fifty years later. Diedrick’s is long gone, and only the old service station at the 76 remains. But here one can stand and picture what one woman told the Cowlitz County Sheriff’s office: the mountain blowing “sky high” that morning, blotting out the sun in a nightmarish scene no viewing of Duck and Cover could have prepared one for.
But on a sunny summer day, it’s the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. More pressing is the delicate dance of pickups coming in and out of the lot. “Do you always drive like a complete moron?” one driver sarcastically asked an older man.
“You bet,” was his curt answer as he headed in.
Sources: Andre Stepankowsky, “Cousins watched peak go,” The Daily News (Longview, Wash.), May 19, 1980; Volcano: The Eruption of Mount St. Helens (Longview Publishing Company, 1980); Devon Haskins, “In little Toutle, the destruction of a family grocery store won’t keep it from serving customers,” KGW, October 21, 2024.
