If Only - Defiance

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News just gets worse. It is probable tonight. Spirit Lake is no more. That's the word from the Forest Service. Survey crews say huge pyroclastic flows of hot ash. Rock and gas have enveloped the lake, turning it into a bubbling cauldron of hot debris. We have reports that Spirit Lake Lodge is totally wiped out.

Those reports are unconfirmed. As for lodge operator, 84-year-old Harry Truman, we can only surmise he has realized his wish to go down with the ship. We understand the area is completely buried beneath 30 feet of mud.

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Paul Johnson: This is the Get Some Podcast studio. I'm Paul Johnson. One story every week. Stories that go where they want. We just follow. If you're here for stories that connect, you're in the right place. Today, we continue our series if only stories where history pivots on a moment where you can't help but

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wonder what if This episode is called Defiance.

It's about Harry r Truman, the old man of Spirit Lake, who became a legend in the shadow of Mount St. Helens. Stubborn, reckless, loyal. He was a man who believed nothing could touch him. Not the law, not the gangsters, not even the mountain. And for this one, I'm joined by a guest storyteller, my son Christopher CJ Johnson.

CJ is going to help bring Harry's story to life. A story of grit, defiance, and the thin line between courage and folly. Okay, let's get into it.

Christopher Johnson: ​Act one, The River. In the spring of 1905, the Elk

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River nearly killed a 10-year-old boy that day. The river planted something in him a conviction that if the river itself couldn't take him, maybe nothing could. It was the beginning of a belief that would follow him the rest of his life , that he was untouchable .

Ivydale was a speck of a town in Clay County, West Virginia. Scattering of weathered homes, a sawmill and a church. No more than a few dozen families in all. It sat by the elk River winding through steep hills, thick with oak and hickory. The land was rough and green up by narrow hollers red clay roads that turned into sucking mud after the rain.

In winter, the ridges closed in with snow. In summer, the air pressed hot and still heavy with the scent of pine and coal smoke. The people were hard stock farmers scratching corn and beans from stubborn soil. Loggers

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felling timber for the mills. Men drawn to the coal mines carved into the hillsides. The work was brutal.

The pay was meager. Families lived hand to mouth in cabins and clapboard. Houses perched along the river. Children walked barefoot. Half the year, women stretched meals with cornbread and fat back. Newberry Truman had drifted up from Kentucky chasing timber work and whatever hauling jobs the outfits could spare.

He wasn't tall, but he carried himself with wiry strength. His jaw set hard beneath the thin mustache. Scots-Irish on both sides descended from immigrants who had settled Appalachia, generations earlier. His voice was rough, weathered like the timber he hauled.

Clay County was rough country, steep bridges, endless oak and poplar rivers swollen each spring with runoff for men like Newberry, it was a place where a strong back

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could earn a living. Timber camps needed haulers. Mills needed log drivers. Coal fields always had a room for another pair of hands. A man might not rise far, but he could keep food on the table, a roof overhead, and maybe if luck held, build a family along the Elk River.

Newberry took to the work quickly, hauling logs, rough cutting boards, learning the rhythm of crews who lived by the whistle of the mill. With what little he earned and with the help of neighbors, he raised a log cabin on a clearing above the river. It was small, rough hewn, but it was his own. On Sundays, the whole community gathered in church, that's where he noticed Rosa Belle Hardman.

Rosa Belle was medium height, lean, but sturdy, chest and hair, braided or pinned back beneath a simple bonnet, a face with sharp Scots-Irish planes. High cheekbones, narrow

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chin, gray eyes that caught everything. Her fair skin, freckled quick under the sun. She was quiet, but strong-willed, known for her Steady singing voice.

quick hands in the kitchen. At church suppers, Newberry courted her. Simply shared hymns, walks along the river evenings on the porch. Talk of hard work and steady futures in time. They married. Two lines of Appalachian stock bound together in October of 1896. Their first child was born in that cabin. A son Harry Truman.

A few years later, their daughter Geraldine. The cabin filled with children's noise, the smell of wood smoke, and the daily struggle of a family in the poor West Virginia Hills. Poverty was constant but they made do,

The cabin, sat just 50 yards from the Elk River. Close enough that Rosa eyed, the water line nervously each spring.

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In flood season, you could hear the river from the porch, a living presence rushing like constant thunder inside. It was one room with a wood stove for heat and cooking a rough pine table. A few chairs.

Newberry had repaired more than once Floors that creaked winter drafts cutting through the cracks. The children's beds were in a loft under the roof beams thin mattresses stuffed with corn husks.

Harry grew up wild. The Elk River was his companion. The woods, his schoolhouse trouble, his constant shadow. Rosa had tried to keep order chores, church discipline, but Harry slipped loose whenever he could. Running barefoot through hollers climbing trees like a squirrel coming home with mud on his face, scratches on his arms, and a grin that dared anyone to scold him.

Christopher Johnson: Neighbors remembered him

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as wiry, restless with eyes that never backed down. He fought other boys for fun or for pride. Fished the banks. skipped rocks, daring the river to take him again at 10.

He already had his father's stubborn streak and a mouth quick enough to talk him himself into or out of most scraps.

Discipline, never stuck. Rose's switch. Stung. Newberry's belt lashed. But each punishment only hardened his defiance. He roamed half feral, gone from morning until dusk, returning only when hunger dragged him back. The one room Ivydale Schoolhouse stood on a rise above the river. Inside children sat shoulder to shoulder, breath misting in winter, sweat sticking in summer, Harry slouched barefoot at his desk.

Eyes fixed, not on the slate, but on the ridge line beyond the window. When called to read, he stumbled through

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grinning. When the younger children laughed, when scolded, he shrugged. Punishment meant little Elk River, always waited outside. By midday, he was restless, whispering, poking, stirring trouble.

Sometimes he slipped out entirely ducking through the back door, gone until supper. The truth was the land raised him as much as his parents did. The river toughened him. The forest toughened him, already taught him that survival came by grit and nerve. He grew up convinced danger was nothing more than a dare, and that he could not be touched by it.

To Harry the river was magic. He'd stand barefoot at the edge watching it curl and shimmer, wondering where it came from and where it went. In his mind, the water carried secrets from hollows high in the mountains, promises from towns he'd never seen. The river was the pulse of Ivydale.

Boys

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fish. Men pulled logs downstream. Women wash clothes in its current, but in spring, the elk was swollen, brown, dangerous. Rosa warned him often that river will take you if you don't respect it.

in April, 1905. The rains came heavy three days straight. The elk rose with fury. leapt its banks tore through farmland, carried off fence posts, hog pens, whole logs. Parents warned their children.

Newberry warned his son. Stay clear of that water boy, but Harry didn't listen. Defiance was already in him. He and a friend dragged a battered canoe to the riverbank. They clambered in laughing and shoved off into the swollen current for a moment. The ride thrilled them. The canoe pitched and spun.

The river roared like it was alive.

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Harry whooped his friend clung, white knuckled to the gunwhales. Then the canoe struck a half submerged log In an instant it flipped. Tossing both boys into the torrent. The water was icy, furious faster than they could think.

Harry gasps swallowed river water clawed at the current besides him, his friend Flailed. By sheer luck, Harry's hands smacked against the overturned canoe. They clung to it, arms wrapped tight as the current swept them downstream. They hit a pile of brush wedged fast pinned there by the torrent. Neighbors saw them.

Ropes were thrown. Shouts carried over the roar. One by one, the boys were hauled to shore. Shivering, scraped raw but alive. The canoe splintered and was carried away, but the boys survived. Word spread fast. By the time Harry stumbled through the door, Rosa was white. Faced with

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fear, Newberry was waiting.

Jaw set belt in hand. You were told he growled told to stay away from that water. Harry stood dripping trembling more from what was coming than the cold. his father's discipline was swift Rosa's sobs, muffled behind her apron but under the sting, another feeling took root.

The river hadn't claimed him. Even his father's belt couldn't shake the sense that he had faced death and walked away. At 10 years old Harry Truman began to carry a dangerous belief that he was meant to outlast whatever the world threw at him. Began to believe he was untouchable. It was a boyhood defiance that never left.



Christopher Johnson: Act two, the Bootlegger

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America was in the middle of prohibition. The 18th Amendment had gone into effect in 1920. Outlawing the sale of alcohol nationwide. The Noble experiment, as its supporters called it was supposed to clean up the country. No more drunken brawls in saloons. No more broken homes. A sober God-fearing America.

But in practice it didn't work. Speakeasy sprouted in every city. Illegal distilleries ran night and day. Smugglers brought Canadian whiskey over the border and rum up from the Caribbean. gangsters made fortunes and enemies in bloody turf wars.

In 1907, when Harry was 11, the Truman's left West Virginia behind grandfather Elijah, his sons Floyd, Marian, and Newberry and all their families, including Young Harry and his little sister Geraldine, pulled up stakes headed

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west. They were chasing timber work in land of their own. They first settled in Washington state.

where they purchased 160 acres out of that forest. The Trumans built houses milked cows, raised hogs and planted gardens. In 1917, Harry married Helen Hughes when he was just 21. They lived near Centralia, a logging town in southwest Washington where Harry tried to settle into steady work. But Harry was never steady. He drifted between jobs, logging, prospecting, odd hauling.

In 1922, Helen gave birth to their daughter, Geraldine or Gerdy. Harry had the wiry build of a logger. He wasn't tall around five seven, but he carried himself with a stocky muscular frame. His face was broad and already weathered with a strong jawline, often shaded by

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stubble. He kept his sandy brown hair cropped short, and his eyes were a restless.

Gray, sharp, mischievous, quick to defy. His hands were large, scarred calloused. A working man's hands. Centralia in the 1920s was a gritty mill. town. Lumber was king,

Saw mills and shingle mills lined the banks of the Chehalis River and rail lines hauled logs in lumber out the town. Streets were noisy with mill whistles, trains, and the constant churn of wagons and trucks hauling timber As for the nightlife, Centralia had it in spades officially. Prohibition had outlawed liquor.

Unofficially, there was no shortage of places to drink. Dozens of saloons that had thrived before 1920 simply went underground Taverns, rebranded as soft drink parlors with a backroom where whiskey was poured into

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teacups gambling dens operated quietly above storefronts, and yes, Centralia had brothels.

Like many timber towns, prostitution was an open secret boarding houses and rooming houses on the fringes of town. Doubled is brothels, catering to loggers, mill workers, railroad men with cash to burn on payday.

















One red light district clustered near Tower Avenue and the railroad tracks. Law enforcement raided occasionally, but as long as businesses stayed quiet, it persisted for Harry Truman. Centralia was both a market and a proving ground. He knew where liquor was moving, which houses and parlors paid cash for whiskey, which roads led him safely back out of town.

For a young married man, Centralia was both an opportunity and frustration. There was honest work. Mills logging, farming, but it was hard, low paying,

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relentless. It was here in a speakeasy parlor. Locals called the timber tap Room that Harry Truman's life began to change.

Harry was 26, restless, broke, talking as usual, a stranger sat beside him. The room was quiet, but for low conversation and the shuffle of cards. He talked small at first logging cars, how hard it was to make a living in the mills. Harry cracked jokes bragged a little. Then this subject shifted. The man told Harry about the runs being made out of San Francisco.

Whiskey smuggled into warehouses on the bay waiting for drivers. Bold enough to haul it North. Hauling wasn't glamorous, but it was lucrative a man could make in one trip. What honest wages took weeks to earn? For Harry? That was all he needed to hear. A truck. Strong nerves.

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No love for the law. He fit the part that night in the haze of a Centralia speakeasy.

Harry Truman was invited into the world of bootlegging.

Soon after he was on the road, south San Francisco was alive with contraband freighters, offloading crates, under cover of night warehouses along the Embarcadero, stacked with cases of Canadian rye. and Scotch slipped in from overseas. Harry picked up his cargo the way countless mules did. A quiet word, a pointed finger, A loading bay opened in the dark.

He muscled the cases into his Dodge truck. The wood bed groaning under the weight. Then he turned the engine over headed north. The road was brutal. Highway 1 0 1 before it was fully paved. Mud in the winter, dust in the summer,

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narrow curves, hugging cliffs, dropping into forest hollows.

Every mile was a gamble. Deputies setting up roadblocks, rival bootleggers, prowling for easy prey. The chance of a breakdown on an empty stretch of road. But when Harry finally rolled into Centralia, the exchange made it worthwhile. He'd back his truck into an alley behind a brothel or saloon.

men unloaded the cargo quickly. Quietly then came the handoff. Cash folded into envelopes, slid across the truck bed undercover of night. A gallon of whiskey bought for $4 or $5 in San Francisco, could sell for three times that on the Washington coast. One run could put a hundred dollars in Harry's pocket.

Far more than weeks of honest work enough to keep his truck running enough to feed his family. The money was steady, the

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thrill, even steadier for a time. Harry was content to be the mule. Hauling loads north pocketing cash, laughing at the law, but the liquor trade was never simple.

Bigger players controlled the routes. Gangsters from Portland and Seattle carved up territory and mules like Harry were stepping on their toes. At first it was just warnings. A truck vandalized. A word passed through a middleman back off. Then it turned sharper whispers, rumors of hijacking, a sense that his next run could be his last.

By 1926, Harry had crossed the wrong people. Threats came down and Truman packed up his young family and vanished into the woods. They moved east to Spirit Lake at the base of Mount St. Helens. It was part refuge, part hideout. Harry cut timber to build their cabin. Hauled in supplies by wagon,

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stocked the larder with venison and trout.

Helen kept the house as best as she could, raising Gertie far from schools and towns. In the shadow of the mountain. Neighbors remembered seeing the little girl on the shoreline playing while her father worked or trailing behind Harry when he walked the property. To some, it was an odd way to raise a child to Harry.

It was freedom. His family on land, he claimed as his own, beyond the reach of the law and the gangsters who had chased him there. There at the foot of Mount St. Helens, he set up a new life in a new kind of fortress. Among the supplies he hauled into the woods was a 45 caliber Thompson submachine gun, the infamous Tommy gun of gangster lore.

Prohibition would end in 1933, but by then Harry Truman had already beaten the gangsters who had tried to run him out. He hadn't joined them, he hadn't bowed

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to them. He'd outlasted them carving out a refuge where their reach couldn't follow. The boy who had once defied Elk River was now a man armed to the teeth dug into the slopes of a sleeping volcano.

Still convinced nothing in the world could touch him.

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Christopher Johnson: Act three old man of the mountain. In the spring of 1980, Harry r Truman was 83 years old. He had lived nearly half a century at Spirit Lake. He had outlasted prohibition, three marriages, more than one fight with the law. He had watched loggers strip the valleys. Hunters come and go, hikers tramp through the campgrounds.

But the mountain Mount St. Helens, was constant, and now the mountain was stirring In March, earthquakes began rattling the

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cascades. At first they were small tremors that locals brushed off. But soon a bulge swelled in the north flank of the volcano growing a meter a day. Scientists warned St.

Helen's was alive again. Ready to erupt families, evacuated rangers, closed roads, campgrounds emptied. Spirit lake fell silent, but Harry r Truman stayed. Harry looked every bit the mountain man. He had become short and stocky, broad through the shoulders, his middle thickened with age. His face was square, deeply lined, weathered by decades of cascade.

Wind, spirit lake sun. The ruddy skin, the heavy creases, the white stubble shadow in his jaw, all of it, told the story of a life lived outdoors. On top of his head, a thin shock of white hair. His eyes pale, blue

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gray, still carried the mischief and defiance of the boy who once taunted the Elk River and the bootlegger who once outran the law, they were eyes that laughed as often as they dared.

Harry. Dressed the same way he had for years. A wool sweater, a collared shirt, dungarees rolled at the cuffs. Socks showing above. Shoes worn soft with age. Nothing new, nothing fancy. Just the uniform of a man who belonged to the mountain.

Big hands, veined and calloused To visitors. He looked like what? He was a relic of another era. Half frontiersman, half outlaw, and wholly at home in the shadow of Mount St. Helens. Harry's love for Spirit Lake went back decades. He had first come in 1926 when bootlegging turned dangerous, and he needed a place to disappear.

What he found wasn't just a refuge, it was home. Spirit lake lay in the shadow of St.

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Helen's cold glacial lake ringed by evergreens. mornings, the water mirrored the snow cap. Peak nights, the air carried fir and wood smoke. The shoreline was quiet except for the call of loons or the slap of a fish, breaking the surface there.

Harry built his world. cleared land cut timber raised cabins with his own hands in time. He turned them into Spirit Lake Lodge. A rough but welcoming stop for hunters, fishermen, hikers, families who wanted wilderness without pitching a tent. He ran boats across the lake, rented cabins, poured whiskey for anyone who'd sit long enough to hear his stories.

But the heart of the lodge wasn't guests. It was the cats. 16 of them. They prowled the property like they owned it. Curling in sunny windows, slipping between the legs of fishermen, cleaning their catch. Harry spoiled them like the children fed them.

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Scraps from his kitchen bragged about how well they kept the lodge free of mice.

He gave them plain names like smoky whiskey, boots, ginger stumpy, and trouble for Harry Spirit Lake was freedom. No bosses. No lawmen. No gangsters carving up territory. Just the mountain, the lake, the cats, and the steady rhythm of the seasons for more than 50 years. He lived there through three marriages, logging booms, and busts winters so deep, the lodge nearly disappeared.

Summers when tourists swarmed the shore. Spirit lake was constant, and Harry loved it fiercely. By then, Harry was already a legend in the Pacific Northwest. Reporters loved him, the grizzled caretaker of Spirit Lake Lodge with his beat up boat and his bottles of whiskey swearing he'd never leave. newspapers called him the old man of the mountain.

Television crews drove up,

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logging roads just to put him on camera, and Harry gave them exactly what they came for. If the mountain goes, I'm going with it. You couldn't pull me out with the mule team. That mountain and that lake are my life. He tooled around in a bubblegum pink Cadillac, the kind of car that looked more at home in Las Vegas than on a mountain road.

He bragged about eating scrambled cow brains for breakfast, washed down with milk, and usually a slug of whiskey. He charmed the media with one liners. With laughter, with profanity, the media turned him into a folk hero. Kids wrote him letters. He wrote back with notes and autographed postcards. One day a visitor stopped by Spirit Lake inside the lodge.

Harry pulled out a stack of envelopes, letters from fifth graders from Grand Blanc, Michigan Harry could barely tolerate children in person, but the letters touched him deeply. They moved him to tears. He marveled at their handwriting, the neat indentations of their paragraphs.

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These kids really care about me, he said, and look how they indent their paragraphs. Those kids are no dummies, but the children hoped in vain, their words did not move him. One asked, do you have a family?

If you do, why not go back to them? I don't think you would enjoy being covered with steaming boiling lava. Another warned, if the mountain erupted, you would be burned and it would hurt and another pleaded. You can replace a house or a lodge or something like that, but you can't replace you. Harry brushed them off.

He couldn't imagine leaving the lake, the lodge or his cats. The children saw what Harry could not, that the mountain didn't care about loyalty for those who knew him best. It was no act. Harry was stubborn to the bone. He had survived logging accidents, bootlegging bar fights, the hard solitude of the cascades.

He truly believed nothing could touch him. Not the law, not gangsters,

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not even a volcano. The weeks dragged on. Scientists measured the bulge, watching steam rising higher each day. Evacuation orders. were stricter. Rangers begged Harry to leave. Friends pleaded helicopters hovered over spirit, lake ready to lift him out.

He waved them off. Reporters asked what he feared. He said he feared losing his lodge, his cats, his land in one interview. He claimed the mountain wouldn't hurt him. The lake would rise, he said, but it would put the fire out. Logic didn't matter. Faith did





































On the morning of May 18th, 1980, the mountain finally blew. At 8:32 AM the North flank collapsed in the largest landslide ever recorded. The sound carried nearly 200 miles a boom that rolled across the northwest, even 45 miles away. Streams grew so hot that salmon leapt onto the banks desperate to

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escape.

Near Truman's Lodge, a black plume of ash and gas. A hundred stories tall, rode down the mountain at 350 miles per hour. The heat twisted 250 foot fir trees like scraps of plastic tossed into a fire. The blast flattened every tree around Spirit Lake. It boiled the water.

It buried Harry Truman in his lodge beneath 150 feet of debris. The valley was entombed in sulfur smelling ash, rivers and ridges erased in minutes. Harry was never found. But scientists believe the end came faster than most people imagine. In eruptions like this. Death comes not from lava, but from heat shock.

Christopher Johnson: A surge so violent, it collapses cells before the brain can even register pain. 2000 years ago at Mount Vesuvius, archeologists found victims with no sign of struggle as if life left their bodies in an instant.

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For Harry, it was almost certainly the same. The man who had defied the river, defied the law, defied gangsters.

The man who swore nothing could touch him, died in less than a second before his body ever hit the ash. Harry kept his vow. He went with the mountain, his defiance, the same streak that carried him out of the Elk River. Through bootlegging, through a life on the margins, brought him to rest.

Beneath the very slopes, he refused to leave to the world. Harry became a symbol of stubbornness, of loyalty, of reckless courage. To the people who knew him, he remained what he'd always been unpredictable. Untamable convinced that nothing could touch him, but in the end, the mountain touched him and it killed him.

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Paul Johnson: That's it for our story. This episode belongs in a series we've called If Only If Only Harry Truman had listened to the warnings, if only he had believed the scientists. If only he had left Spirit Lake when he still had the chance, but he didn't. Harry stayed, and when the mountain erupted, he went with it.

His life was marked by defiance, the same stubborn streak that carried him through boyhood, bootlegging, and bar fights, and carried him into the blast. Defiance can be a kind of courage. It can also be a kind of blindness and Harry's story leaves us with a hard truth. Sometimes what we admire in a person is the very thing that destroys them.

Thanks for spending time

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with us. We'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts in the comments because the way we wrestle with these, if onlys is a story worth telling. And if you've got a story you think we should tell, reach out and share a few details. It just might end up in a future episode.

Next week we continue our series if only stories where history pivots on a moment where you can't help but wonder what if. Our next story takes us far from the ash and fire of Mount St. Helens to something much closer to home, A kitchen, and a man named Momofuku Ando In post-war Japan, he faced hunger, scarcity, and despair.

And what did he invent? Ramen noodles. The food of broke college kids.

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The midnight snack of tired workers, a meal that changed the way the world eats. If only he had chosen a different path, your pantry shelves might look very, very different. Get some Is written, produced and hosted by me, Paul Johnson.

Find photos, show notes and past episodes at getsomepodcast.com or on our YouTube channel. If you're enjoying this series, leave a review or share it with a friend. It helps others find these stories. Thanks for listening, and remember, today is the best day of your life. Now go get some

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