On May 18, 1980, at 8:32 in the morning, Mount St. Helens erupted. At Spirit Lake in Washington State, Harry R. Truman had already made a decision he would not change: not to evacuate.
Truman owned a lodge by the lake. The authorities asked him to leave, but he rejected the warnings and evacuation requests. A TIME article published weeks later reported that he had 16 cats.
On May 17, several people went to visit him. HistoryLink records that some left after six in the evening. TIME reported that they had seen Truman watering the lawn that afternoon. As alerts surrounded Spirit Lake, he was still there, busy with an ordinary task: tending the garden.
The next morning, a debris avalanche gave way to a lateral blast. The volcano also produced pyroclastic flows and ashfall. Truman’s lodge was buried under hundreds of feet of hot rock, earth, ice, and mud, according to HistoryLink. Truman died in the eruption.
The previous afternoon, he was still watering the lawn. Hours later, the volcano had decided the story’s ending.