News
Students help area heal
By Becky Christian
christre@mscd.edu
Almost two years after a fire burned 4,000 acres outside Jamestown in October 2003, people are still re-building their lives.
Metro English professor Sandra Doe, with the help of Metro adjunct professor Lee Christopher, co-founded the Mountain Land Restoration Project after Doe's sister house was almost destroyed in the fire. For two years they have brought a group of students from her Nature Writing class, alumni and community members up the mountain to help restore the land. Last year's group planted seeds that burst from the mountainside where the group came to plant trees this year.
Photo by Becky Christian christre@mscd.edu
Metro student Patrick Hurley, left, and volunteer Jerald Lohr, right, break ground to plant trees Sept. 17 for a restoration project to help the Overland fire area outside of Jamestown. The Overland fire burned more than 4,000 acres in October 2003.
On the morning of Sept. 17, a group toured the burn site before reaching the house of Doe's sister, Nancy Maresh and her partner Judith Blair, which showed the massive extent of the Overland Fire.
"This tree's roots have been completely burnt through and there is a hole all the way through the trunk," Metro student Mark Gaebler yelled from the dead growth.
When the student group arrived they saw a house restored. The deck where lunch was served overlooked mountains with stark slices of dead, scorched trees against a backdrop of living ones. The red flags placed to mark the spots for planting trees stood like tombstones marking the once dead land being taken over by life again.
During a pre-reflection exercise in the morning, Doe explained she has found that when her writing students work so closely with fire and its effects, their writing comes to life and becomes more vibrant and intense. The students are encouraged to set their experience to paper, which Doe and Christopher then compile into the "Burning Papers."
The fire was the result of a clean-up of the Burlington Mine outside of Jamestown. Trees around power lines were not properly cleared away.
"It took every bit of courage I had to leave," Maresh said when she was told she had to evacuate.
She drove to the next mountaintop and watched the fire burn everything, including her home. An ice storm that night put out the flames and as Maresh and Blair drove up the mountain the next morning, they saw blackened trees covered with ice and a valley smothered in fog. Pulling up to what they expected to be an empty space where their home had been, they, instead, saw their house damaged, but standing. Burnt hoses still lay on the ground around where firefighters had fought the fire.
Even in the process of loss there are always signs of life still in existence. As the students in the group traipsed the mountain with bags of potting soil and buckets of water, they saw and experienced firsthand their own ability to offer help and create restoration in the face of death.