Up in Flames

I haven’t written any blogs since last spring. Part of that is the busy building season of last summer and fall. Part of it was due to laziness in winter (am I running out of excuses?). The other part was due to a tragic accident that occurred here on our homestead when our barn burned down. At 5:00 am on May 5th of last year. I was awakened from a peaceful night of sleep by my wife’s panicked cry: “the barn is on fire.” Dashing outside in my underwear and crocks, I could already see that the barn was too far gone to save. Sometime in the night, we surmised later, the sow had bumped the heat lamp that was over her piglet into the straw where it smoldered and eventually caught on fire. Their side of the barn, by the time I got there was already blazing dangerously and lost. There wasn’t time to get clothes on, or put boots on. An important part of my life was going up in smoke before my eyes. By moving quickly I was able to free the goats and our livestock guardian dog from the other half of the barn. I was also able to reach into my tool area and rescue a few of my more expensive tools. On my last trip in, the heat was so intense that the skin on my legs blistered a bit and the second story started to drop burning debris around me. It was time to give up and do damage control. The sow, which had run out of the barn initially got scared and ran back in, perishing in the flames along with her piglet. We have an awesome volunteer fire department up the valley here, but by the time they arrived, the barn had already collapsed. They were able to help keep the fire contained so that it didn’t spread to nearby forest or to the outhouse or cabin behind it.

The first few days afterwards were a bit of a blur. I remember feeling pretty numb. Some friends were able to take our goats off of our hands as we no longer had a place to keep them. We had an immense outpouring of love from our church and family. Going to church since then, I’ve had a deep awareness for how much our little community cares for me and my family. I remember feeling a aching sort of gratitude at the time. Slowly we got started cleaning up the debris.

If that feels like a lot of details to take in the two opening paragraphs, if it feels a little choppy and scary and confusing then you’ve got a slight sense for what this was like for me and my family. I can’t really begin to describe to you how much of a setback this was for me. We’re building a house right now and stored a lot of our life in the loft of that barn: summer clothes, childhood keepsakes, all my outdoor gear and tools. To see it all vaporize in 45 minutes was an absolute shock. I’ve been wanting to own a homestead and grow my own food since I was in elementary school and I’ve worked long and hard to realize that dream. Looking back over my last few blog posts prior to this one I see so much of my satisfaction and pride in the accomplishment of a dream hard fought for and won. I work with a lot of trauma victims in my practice. Anything from child sexual abuse, to rape, to natural disasters. I’m familiar with trauma symptoms and how they work, but was still taken by surprise by the soul-crushing shutdown that ensued for me. It takes some time to get your bearings and rebuild after something like this. I like to think that I’m a pretty strong and resilient person, but trauma has a way of knocking us all on our asses.

Earlier this winter, I cut down a beautiful birch tree that had been growing next to the barn but was torched by the flames (it’s the one you can see in the foreground of the picture). I felt a lot of feelings as I bucked it into 8’ lengths for the sawmill with the remaining trunk and branches going to firewood- it was a favorite tree of mine. The charred remains of some rope around one of the limbs was all that remained of the swing that my kids used to love playing on. I also had to unscrew a lag screw that used to secure one end of a dog run that we’d tie our dog to at times. Birch trees are so lovely and the ones on our property are quite large by Alaska standards (20” across the butt on some of them). I try not to cut down any more on our property than we need to, but I was heartened to see that the charred tree had sent up some suckers from the base of the stump over the course of the last year. I have a fascination with trees and their various ways of reproducing and hope that maybe we’ll get the satisfaction of seeing one of these suckers thrive. Sometimes when a stump puts off new shoots, the new tree grows much faster because the roots are so far ahead of the game. It would be like a baby coming into the world with a pre-developed set of life experiences, wisdom and support networks. I’ve already milled part of the tree into beautiful treads for the stairs in our house, and I think about it every time I go up or down the stairs. Perhaps that’s a good metaphor for rebuilding - salvage what you can from what you had and mindfully start rebuilding. Those stairs are going to be sacramental in the way that they remind me of our family’s story of grace, pain and resolve to keep going. 

I think the purpose of this blog post was multi-faceted. One part apology for neglecting the chore of blogging, one part meditation on a first hand trauma experience, one part percolation on the process of rebuilding a dream that burned down unexpectedly. Much as we pretend to the contrary counselors are people too and I hope that my thoughts on this experience might benefit a fellow traveler - not as teacher to pupil or expert to layman, but as peer to peer. While you may never experience a fire, each life is going to have a measure of pain and suffering. May your day of pain come with the community support and love that mine had. May your rebuilding include cherished elements of old dreams and exciting new elements.