Page 12 RAIN May 1978 , We woke up that morning early and happy, and lay in bed tasting the first sweet fruits of leisure after a long job finally done. The night before we had finished the last painful task of sanding and oiling the floors of the house we had spent every moment and ounce of energy over the last seven months building. The bone-weary two-hour drive back to Portland for a bath, collapse into bed and dreams of the next morning's final trip with our belongings out to the house were behind us. The phone interrupted our pleasant musings. It was Kip. Our house had burned down. No. It can't be. We were just there twelve hours ago. It was fine. It was solid. It was beautiful. It couldn't just vanish like that. The house has burned up. All of it? Some of the walls are still there, but it's a total·loss. What caused it? They don't know. What has gone haywire with our world? Fred, our neighbor and dear friend on the mountain dies suddenly on the way back to our house in Portland. Now, exactly a month later, our house burns down- the morning after we finish it. No reason, no cause, just gone. Get to the end. Don't take a breath. Go back to ground zero. Now we know how Sisyphus feels. What next? How do you feel when you're bone-weary and just sitting down and someone kicks the chair out from under you? Cheated? Bewildered? ... Exhausted. Sometimes you decide to just lay there a while until you can get the energy to get up. Numbness is a blessing. It keeps the pain away until you can find the strength to deal with it. How do you feel? Numb. In a strange way, lighter and freer. You feel somehow the release of those bondages that each of your possessions has on you. You have unexpectedly the opportunity and responsibility to rethink a lot of things and remake a lot of choices. You really have to begin again. Seven and a half months of our lives-gone-up in smoke. It's not until much later that we really realize that it's no different from any other seven and a half months of our lives, which are equally as gone, yet with fewer satisfactions and rewards. Maybe it's the sense of having to repeat it that weighs most heavily. All that work and ICU "0 c:: cu Q:l e 0 E--o all that love- but now just a rerun. Hopefully we can find ways to turn the rebuilding into a new and also rewarding experience. We follow a logging truck most of the long drive out to the coast. There are rainbows in the spray from its wheels leading us on. Bizarre, but somehow comforting. On the way we think of the things that were there, and say goodbye to each. What things we later pull from the ashes intact have become gifts, and will be greeted with cheers as well as tears. We finally start up the last stretch of road and brace ourselves for what floodgates the reality of the charred hulk will open. It doesn't. Still numb. Kip and Amy meet us. They had to watch it burn- to see Kip's beautiful shingling turn to smoke and be sucked up into the cloud capping the mountain. At least they burned well. Where do you get the strength to pick around in the ashes of a newborn child you have just brought into this world through long months of loving labor? Where do you get the strength to look at the left-behind body of a dear friend? Sometimes you don't have the strength, but those things don't go away. They just wait there until somehow or somewhere you do find the strength. You have to, somewhere. It's hard, but good. Death, tragedy and loss are all parts of life that our society does its best to hide, cushion, mask or deny. You read of tragedies every day in the papers, but it's just the statistics, the outer carcass of what happened. No sense of how people's lives were affected, no sense of what it meant or felt or changed. An always distant-kept, abstract thing. Those realities, though difficult, add some sort of completeness to our lives, and knowing that we have the strength to deal with such things and that we grow through the process is a strength in itself. We hear a truck racing up the road and turn to see a pickup charging in the driveway. They see us, slam on their brakes and back down the road as fast as they came. Looters. My blood boils. Kip says the firecrew warned him to stay at the house just because of th:n. There had been several others.
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