Day 67 Beauty for Ashes

When I have to clean out the fireplace the last thing I think about being beautiful is the ashes. Beauty was the farthest from my mind when I changed dirty diapers. Wildfires have burned my state leaving ugly black mars on the mountainsides and valleys.

Several years ago, a fire burned part of the Mesa Verde National Park. Over 23,000 acres fell to flame. Two years later two more fires erupted. There have been twelve major fires since 1906, some far more devastating than others. 

We drove through the park some time after the last four fires that torched the pinyon pines and junipers.  Scorched trees stood ramrod straight in some areas, burn scars and soot staining one side of the tree. In other areas ground scrub was black. No grasses grew.  The fired damaged areas were desolate.


The fires left odd remainders.  One area would have no living vegetation, another area was struggling for green, while another part of the park looked as if nothing devastating had happened at all.

In one of the more recent fires, the Balcony House Complex fire, 450 park acres burned; 2500 acres burned on the Ute lands. Multiple lightning strikes set a number of small fires throughout the park and on Ute Mountain.  Because of the multiple fires, the damage, bad enough as it was, could have been so much worse. Park personnel in previous seasons had cleared a large amount of dry brush and tinder, a move known as hazardous fuel reduction.

Even today, the park is still recovering from the fire damage.

Left: Pottery uncovered after the Pony Fire; Right: Natural matting used to slow erosion

Interestingly, the fire brought some gifts to Mesa Verde. Over 600 new archeological sites were uncovered. Archeologists learned new things about the people who lived in the famous cliff dwellings. The Mesa Verde people built dams and retaining walls to guide water in an early irrigation system and farmed more extensively than previously believed.

The destruction, unwelcome as it was, brought new discoveries, new information, revealed new artifacts.

There are some pine trees that only reproduce when the pine cone is exposed to intensely high heat, such as the kind a forest fire generates.

Sometimes, we have fires in our lives. Devastating events that we didn't see coming. After the shock, clean-up commences and we uncover new strengths within ourselves. Gold, to be purified, is melted under intense heat. Only then can the impurities be removed and the gold refined.

Certain seasons of life produce great stress. Sometimes it takes a while to put out the flames but eventually, things work out for our good, even though it is hard to see anything beautiful in the ashes of what once was.

A friend reminded me today that as much as we resent being laid off, there was a reason that we came together.  She was in a toxic job, I was a barely functioning human who had difficulty stringing a sentence together, another one of us was angry and discouraged having just gone through two lay offs. All of us had stories, paths that brought us together. R and I share a belief that we've been given this time to shore one another up, to be a small support network among ourselves.

We are about three and a half weeks from saying good-bye. I'm leaving three days early, R is leaving the week before that.  The department will be down to three or four people by the day the doors close for good and the site is shut down.

Even though it is sometimes difficult, we are beginning to see some beauty rise from the ashes. We believe that all of us will move on to something better and more meaningful. None of us know yet just what that will look like. 

Like the park archeologists that uncovered more because of the fires, we too are uncovering bits and pieces of us. At times it is a little scary and daunting. The future is a big soot mark that will be cleared away as our pine cone seeds explode under the heat and grow into something fresh and revealing.

Beauty for ashes. What a comfort. What a thing to look forward to.