Ash Year

Like most in the Willamette Valley, I awoke on Tuesday morning to a new reality: a world filled with ash. Somehow it seems sadly fitting for this burnt up year. So much lost to the pandemic — nearly 200,000 lives in this country alone, plus countless events, weddings, funerals, graduations, sport events, most political rallies (do we really miss those?) retirement parties (I did miss that) and so much more. Latest miss, not so much to the pandemic as to the air quality: my father’s 90th birthday party today. Happy Birthday Dad! Recovering from a stroke, Dad is still the strongest man I know, admire and love. At least we still have Zoom, but nothing will replace the family crab boil and a good hug.

And hugs now would do a lot to heal the grief from the loss of where we traditionally gather for that crab boil — the idyllic meadow on the bend of the Little North Fork of the Santiam River we call Elkhorn, now reduced to a bed of ash along with my sister’s home from where she lovingly cared for the property for nearly 30 years. It wasn’t a particularly valuable home by worldly standards, but it had a priceless view of the river. More importantly, laments my sister, just about everything in it had been rebuilt by family members. You can rebuild a cabin, but how do you replace the stencil Mom did around the top of the kitchen walls or the barn you built with your father? At least the concrete bench on the hillside across the river, installed by family in memory of our mother on the first anniversary of her death, should have survived.

In Christian liturgy the season of Lent begins with Ash Wednesday. The ashes placed in the sign of a cross on the forehead represents both the death of Jesus and the repentance of the worshipper. Standing at the site of the destroyed crematoriums of Auschwitz in 1980 with a group of German young adults, I gained a new understanding of, and respect for, ashes as the symbol of death. The pastor who led the reflections at that hallowed site referred to the ashes that billowed from the now tumbled smock stacks for four continuous years, covering the land on which we now stood. It is the ashes of those victims, he said, which makes this ground sacred.

Though the Beachie Creek fire was still miles away, my sister instinctively knew that a Level 3 warning would be too late for her to safely evacuate with her four horses, two cats and a dog. Packing her truck with all those valuables that cannot be replaced, she moved her horses, two at a time, by trailer to the safety of our youngest sister’s home in Sherwood. Mom’s paintings and many other treasures will eventually adorn her next home, wherever that might be.

Others were not as fortunate. The tragedy incurred by the Tofte family just a few miles away from my sister’s home is hard to fathom. With the fire still 15 miles away, the father drove into town to borrow a friend’s trailer to pack up the family’s possessions the next morning. He never got the chance. Driving back home through a road block, he stopped to pick up a shoeless woman in nothing but her underwear, badly burnt, telling her that he was on his way to get his wife. “I am your wife,” she replied.

When the fire engulfed their home early that morning, she loaded their 13 year-old son, her mother (who was waiting for surgery to repair a broken knee) and their dog into the family car and headed out. The first thing to go in a fire on a car are the tires which will melt from the heat. Realizing they were not going to make it, she told her son to grab the dog and run, leaving her mother behind. She had walked three miles on hot asphalt, stripping her burning clothes along the way, when her husband found her. Authorities found their son the next day, behind the driver’s wheel of the burnt out car with the dog on his lab and grandmother in the back. His name was Wyatt. That image of thirteen year-old Wyatt trying desperately to save his grandmother is for me the symbol of the enormous tragedy of these fires that fill our valley with smoke.

And now my home is covered with the ash. It is as if the sign of the cross has been placed on our entire valley, indeed, most of the west coast. Will this also be the ashes of repentance? Will we finally acknowledge and repent of society’s sin that created climate change and which led to this unfathomable and largely avoidable disaster?

Twenty-two years ago this month I stood on top that hillside across the river with my father and four siblings as we scattered Mom’s ashes on the water. For the next year there remained a gray stain on the side of the cliff facing my sister’s front window, until the rains finally washed the final bits of ash into the river. I know, in time, the river will carry the last of this ash away too and the forest will recover, just as will we. In that I take some comfort. For now, the sky remains filled with smoke and I remain haunted by ash as I ponder the sacredness of life it represents, now scattered across this land.

Photo: View from Elkhorn of the Little North Fork of the Santiam River, taken by Steve Bryant.