Story Info
Story Info
Mike Beck
Oso, Washington, USA
2018
Type of Wounded Place
Story & Experience
Signs on the steel gate leading to the memorial kind of say it all: “Grief is the price you pay for love,” “Earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal,” “Always in our hearts.” When I arrived today, June 16, 2018, on the other side of this entry were a half-dozen members of this small rural community that were among the many still recovering from a flooding and mudslide disaster. They were weeding, fertilizing and grooming the 43 evergreen trees planted there: one tree for each of the loved ones—friends and family—who lost their lives in the one square mile area around the memorial. All had died mid-morning of March 14, 2014 when a wall of earth and water came down the Stillaguamish River valley with the force of a 1/2 mile wide wall of 18 wheel semi-trucks roaring along at 60 miles an hour. They asked if I wanted to help. I had flown from Florida to be here in part to do up until that moment what was an unspecified ceremony as my part of the Global Earth Exchange. So I did.
Signs on the steel gate leading to the memorial kind of say it all: “Grief is the price you pay for love,” “Earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal,” “Always in our hearts.” When I arrived today, June 16, 2018, on the other side of this entry were a half-dozen members of this small rural community that were among the many still recovering from a flooding and mudslide disaster. They were weeding, fertilizing and grooming the 43 evergreen trees planted there: one tree for each of the loved ones—friends and family—who lost their lives in the one square mile area around the memorial. All had died mid-morning of March 14, 2014 when a wall of earth and water came down the Stillaguamish River valley with the force of a 1/2 mile wide wall of 18 wheel semi-trucks roaring along at 60 miles an hour. They asked if I wanted to help. I had flown from Florida to be here in part to do up until that moment what was an unspecified ceremony as my part of the Global Earth Exchange. So I did.
Oso, Washington, USA
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