Making things happen

... with integrity

Monday November 24, 2003 Volume V Number 49

hen the men assembled in the church parking lot that Saturday, just about a hundred of them with a line-up of pick-up trucks, many of them on lifters, sitting high on hydraulics and monster tires and custom wheels, a troop of boy scouts arrived as well.  They wanted in on the action.

They set up shop out there on the grassy knoll just outside the education building.  It’s the same spot where evacuees huddled just two weeks before and at daybreak, fire swept through the valley below.  It was a beautiful, clear day.  In the distance, a series of ridges, and a backdrop of tall mountains, Palomar Mountain and the Cleveland National Forest to be precise, a panoramic view all the way across the horizon.   Hence the church’s name: Ridgeview.

And on this Saturday morning, buzzing with workers, the Troop gathered with power tools and two-by-fours and bolts and wood trim and metal screen.   One of their number devised a project, suitable for a work-day declared for the purpose of assisting the victims of the Paradise Fire that just two weeks before had passed on either side of the church property.  The smell of ash still in the air, a light California rain soaked the hillsides a day or two before, but the sense of terrible loss was still fresh for everyone.  This work-day would get men and boys to ground zero of some of the worst of it; where homes went up in flames, and where at least two people died.  They would climb up the charred hills carrying waddle and hay bales, setting them in place to control drainage around homes still standing in the burned out valleys and ravines and arroyo.  They would wade ankle deep in ash through the burned out bone-dry creek-bed hauling and then stacking sand bags.  They would clean up the remains of a few burned-out mobile homes and out-buildings.  And the up-close view of a fire’s destructive power, the smell filtered but not eliminated by face masks held in place by elastic bands, would bring home a reality rarely seen by anyone but the victims themselves.  The workers would be touched.  Spiritually moved.  Their perspective broadened.  Their empathies deepened.  Their bonds strengthened.  Their sense of purpose focused.

But the boys of Troop 41 had a different project in mind.  They built sifters.  Each completed frame would be presented to residents of our town who lost a home.  The sifter’s design was simple enough – a rectangular box, with a perimeter of two-by-four lumber, about eighteen-inches by forty-two, bolted firmly into place.  On the back side, they tacked a steel mesh carefully cut to exact size, which would act as a sifting screen.  Homeowners could, with the sifter, fill shovels with ash from the home-site and empty them onto the mesh of the sifter, and then shake the box back and forth.  The ash would filter through, and any remaining objects would remain on top of the steel mesh, and be found.  With this simple little device, designed and built as gifts for those who suffered unthinkable loss, valuables could be located.

And they were.

Rings.  Jewelry.  Ceramic pieces.  Some of these treasures survived the intense heat of the fire.  But they were buried in ash.  Homeowners, after recovering from the initial shock of it all, might have some idea of where on the burned out floor plan something may have survived, but apart from this little sifter, valuables would otherwise be discarded in the clean-up.  The Boy Scouts built the boxes, and then assisted homeowners in the search.  There were some special moments of discovery.

In the days that followed the fire, people did go back, and sift through the rubble and ash.  Some found treasures they will keep forever.

Lynn went back to her parent’s place.  As she walked across the concrete pad now deep in coal and ash and twisted metal, she sifted through the ruins.  As she hoped, she made a stunning find: the wedding ring her father routinely removed every night before going to sleep.  He left it on the bed stand.  And in the race to escape the flames, getting out with his wife and his children and grandchildren, just barely, that ring lay where it always did at night - along with most everything else they left behind. 

She went back alone that morning.  Something told her to search.  She located the spot in the rubble where her parent’s bed and the nightstand must have been, down the hallway beyond the kitchen.  And there she dug into the deep ash.  It took patience.  Persistence.  And then, something hard, and round.  She brushed off the debris, gently blew the dust away, and there in the palm of her hand – her Daddy’s wedding ring.  The gold luster gone.  But the markings unmistakable. 

She found it.

That’s when she started to cry.

I was there when Lynn handed that scorched ring to her mother.  She still couldn’t help herself – she was overcome with emotion.

She knew what that ring signified.  Her mom and dad, John and Brenda, have been though crisis before.  Their marriage survived, and mom and dad had many times been strong for her.  They loved and embraced her children.  The promise they made so many years ago stuck.  Still in force.  She and her brother and her husband and her children were beneficiaries to the contract.  The ring signified all they had.

And the intensity of the fire that took their home robbed that ring of some of its luster.  But it was still the ring.

Preachers make a big deal out of that ring on a wedding day.  They talk about the sizing, and the polished gold, which is pure because of the heat.  It may have an engraving.  It is a circle, and generally the audience is reminded that a circle never ends, so may it be with the love the two share so energetically, so thoroughly, so easily before friends and family on that day of all days.  This is the seal, the sign of a promise made.  Its endurance, a sign of a promise kept.

It was the promised kept part that made Lynn so fundamentally happy the moment she found the ring in the ruins of her parent’s home.

It won’t be on John’s finger again.   But it will be placed in a prominent position once the new home is rebuilt.  It will still symbolize their wedding vow – but now more.  It is a marriage tried by fire.  And found to be durable.

* * * * * * *

It’s Monday morning.  You are a leader.

For John and Brenda, there was no contemplation over what to take that morning at two-o’clock with a fire raging and headed their way.  There was no time for deliberation.  Brenda didn’t even take along a pair of shoes, much less photo albums or tape recordings or wall hangings.  Or treasured valuables.

Someone tipped off the Boy Scouts.  Their project helped many find the things that really do matter.

We all could use a sifter; a little box to help us sort out the treasures from the ashes.

It’s not fair to compare the clutter in our lives to the heavy losses caused by a tragic fire.  But interestingly, most of the survivors will laugh and tell you that much of what they lost should have been discarded anyway.  That there is a new simplicity in their lives.  That starting over is OK.  (What a way to clear out the mess.)

Perhaps we would all do well to run our own lives through a sifter.  Let the stuff that has no real value pass right through and be gone.  The treasures that really do matter, let them be separated out.  Let us reclaim them; hold them up to the light, and inspect their wonder and their value and their beauty.  Let’s hang on to them, and let the rest go.

And in the sifting, find renewal and recommitment and hope.  A load lightened.

Maybe those treasures have suffered damage.

But treasures they remain.

Perhaps more valuable than ever.

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