Fireweed

Fireweed is a well-known, and frequently photographed, plant in our area.  And it’s one of my favorites.

In late spring the fireweed stalks start shooting up.  By mid-June, they’re as tall or taller than me.   The top 12 to 18 inches are covered with buds which will bloom from the bottom up.  By August, the top few buds on the stalk are blooming, and we know fall storms are just around the corner.

Fireweed is lovely, adding a bright pinkish purple to an otherwise predominantly green and blue landscape.  It grows everywhere around here.  Filling meadows with a sea of pinkish purple, lining nearly ever path and roadway.

Fireweed is a pioneer plant.  So named because after a fire it is one of the first plants to return.  It reclaims and begins the rebuilding process following disaster. Bringing reassurance that life will return.  Even after total death and destruction.

A couple of our kids and I drove past a fatal car accident on the highway the other night.  We were on our annual drive south through British Columbia on our way down to visit family in the Lower 48 for vacation.  As we wound our way around a bend in the road we came upon flares and flaggers.  Noting only where I was being directed to steer the car, I wasn’t the first to see the wreckage.

“Oh my gosh, Mom!  Is that a car upside down?” asked our worried, 17-year-old daughter, Anna.

I glanced over to the side, still following the flagger’s directions with a nod. There, in the other lane, the lane I should have been driving in, was a vehicle upside down and sheared so that the roof of the car was actually level with the hood.

“Oh my gosh,” I whispered, and then quickly directed the little kids in back to close their eyes “really tight.”

There was a blue tarp covering part of the car.  The other car, not nearly as devastatingly smashed, though still totaled, was jack-knifed in the road with the entire front end of it wiped away.

In a moment, we were through the carnage and on our way again.  Except for a part of us. The part which remained back there at that accident site.

“Mom, somebody had to have died in that car,” Anna said quietly, trying not to draw the interest of the younger kids in back.

I could hear the sadness in her voice, and I agreed.  I said that with the way the car had been crushed down I didn’t see how anyone could have survived that.

A few miles later she broke the silence again.  “I wonder what happened.  Do you think somebody was drunk?”

I said that it could have been.  Or it could have been that a driver was driving too fast, or maybe adjusting the stereo or turning to talk to someone else in the car, momentarily distracted.

She nodded, still looking stricken.

The next two hours, as we finished the drive to our hotel for the night, we didn’t talk about much other than our thoughts regarding the accident we had seen. My heart was heavy with the obvious tragedy.  Wondering about family and loved ones whose day-to-day lives had just been horribly altered.  I thought about what it would be like to be going about your regular routine only to have it disrupted by news of a terrible accident somewhere out on a highway. Your family, whom you thought were returning home, are gone.

I thought about the devastation.  Wondering if the people in the car were parents, whose children were now orphaned.  Or if the people in the car were adult or teenage children, whose parents were now alone. I thought about the destruction that can happen in the blink of an eye.  Just around a bend in the highway.

The next morning, we drove through an area of forest fire.  As we drove through the worst of the smoke, I got to thinking about regeneration.  And pioneer plants.  The hardy species which first take hold after devastation and encourage other less-hardy species to return, as well.  I wondered how it must look to see those first bright green stalks of fireweed shooting up, and then blooming, in an otherwise blackened landscape of charred, dead trunks, and ash.  Those purple blossoms, bursting forth in all their promise, as reassurance that life will return.  Even after devastation.

And I wonder what will serve as fireweed for the family and loved ones of those whose lives ended the other day just around that bend in the highway. Their lives now devastated.  Destroyed by loss.

But there will be fireweed moments.  Little shoots of life, seeming almost insignificant.  But not insignificant at all.  Which will emerge from the ashes and death.  A chance remembrance that brings a smile.  A moment’s laughter mingled with tears.  A second’s lightheartedness from the heavy burden of grief.  At first, these fireweed moments will go unnoticed.  But they’ll continue to grow, and will blossom.   Bursting forth in all their promise.   Reassurance that life will return.

The fireweed haven’t yet started to bloom this year.  But the stalks are growing.  Pretty soon the buds will begin popping out.  And they’ll bloom again.  And again. And again.