It started in June with a spark.
The spark found a dry place to take shelter and it grew, and grew. And grew. Before long it was a raging fire, consuming deadwood, undergrowth and everything else combustible that it could find. No one worried at first. Fires are a part of the life cycle of forests, and the National Park Service had a policy of letting them burn themselves out.
But as the fire grew, people started questioning that wisdom. Homes and lives were threatened, and before long the fire had created its own weather system, sucking in air to keep itself going, and triggering lightning strikes that caused still more fires.
That summer more than 25,000 firefighters from across the United States traveled to Yellowstone to contain the fire. By the time the fire drifted quietly to sleep, lulled by the soft winter snows of November of 1988, more than 1.2 million acres in the greater Yellowstone National Park area were in ashes.
As the winter passed, fears grew that the park -- the oldest in the nation -- had been destroyed. It wasn't just a horrible forest fire. It had been a holocaust.
Ashes are the gray ruins of beauty. Stream flowers in your hair and you look as lovely as a dryad in the spring. Streak ashes on your face and you're just filthy. Grass rolls when the wind blows, and trees sway; but ashes just spread, covering everything in a fine layer of bitter.
Ashes mark the end of things. They're the funeral, the dissolution of life's chemistry, the final debasement. Oh, look, it's a pile of ashes! Was this a cedar tree, a house, or Aunt Sally? Can't tell. Move on, move on.
Except a phoenix, when its end comes, will burst into flames, crumble into ashes, and then emerge as its own chick.
Tragic ending. Beautiful beginning.
So it was at Yellowstone. As spring came in 1989 it brought with it an explosion of new life. Ground that hadn't felt sunlight in decades brought forth a new arrangement of plants, fueling an explosion of insects and the birds that ate them. Rivers teemed with fish. Wildflowers and wild grasses burst from soil laden with new depths of carbon, so that herds of grazing animals swelled in number and grew fat.
There is a lesson here.
Today is Ash Wednesday, the day we come together and recall the things that we have endured, together and as individuals.
The consuming fire was intense. It was more than we were ready for, and we thought it would destroy us. When we stood in the ashes left in its wake, we thought it had, and we wept.
Have faith. The ashes are only the beginning. In time we will find ourselves transformed us and made into something more beautiful than we can remember ever being in the past.
Copyright © 2019 by David Learn. Used with permission.
