Chance

 

   We just signed up with a new health care plan. Our company said they were losing too much money on our plan so they will be cancelling it at the end of the year. We had to decide if we should go cheap with limited options in a new plan or pay more and have more options that we may never need. Two men from the past faced similar dilemmas. The only comfort in knowing the outcomes of their decisions comes from knowing we're all in the same boat.

   Dilemma 1: On this day in 1806, Prussian general Friedrich von Romberg was holding the city of Stettin in present day Poland with 5,300 Prussian soldiers. Two weeks earlier Napoleon had soundly defeated the Prussian army at the nearby battle of Jena. Napoleon was on a tear, taking over most of Europe. The French were chasing the Prussians back towards Berlin.  At Settin the French demanded von Romberg surrender the city. The day before, another Prussian city had surrendered to the French. A demoralized von Romberg accepted the French terms and surrendered.

   The embarrassing thing for von Rombeberg was that instead of the 30,000 French troops he thought he was facing, the French only had 500 cavalrymen. By the end of the war Prussia had to cede half its territory to Napoleon. There was lots of blame flying around and von Romberg was sentenced to life imprisonment for caving at Stettin. He was too sick for prison and was allowed to die at home. He was an aristocrat after all.

   Dilemma 2: Harry R. Truman (not the president) owned a fishing lodge on Spirit Lake a few miles from Mt. St. Helen's in Washington State. Truman became a national folk-hero for refusing to evacuate in the weeks leading up to the eruption of St. Helen's on May 18, 1980. Today is his birthday by the way. Truman, age 83 at the time of his death, was already known to the locals as a curmudgeon and scofflaw. A large area around the lake and St. Helens had been closed for weeks because geologists believed an eruption was likely. Almost everyone obeyed the evacuation order.

  Truman sincerely believed the threat was overblown. He thought the lake would protect him. He also claimed to have stockpiled a nearby mineshaft with food and alcohol. During the eruption his lodge was covered in 150 feet of volcanic ash. His body was never found. Fifty-six others were killed in the eruption, mostly loggers and campers outside the exclusion zone. Thousands more would have been killed without the exclusion zones that the government put in place. 

   The blast was far bigger than anyone imagined. Due to the volcano, the surface area of the lake is almost twice as big as it used to be and its bed is 200' higher. Spirit Lake is now a protected scientific research area to study ecological recovery, so swimming, fishing, and boating are prohibited, though there are trails around the lake where hikers can ponder their options.

Spirit Lake is 20% covered in logs, down from 70% after the eruption.