Out of the Fire

Butte Fire September 2015                                                                                      Charleen Tyson                                                                                                         

We are just six women, having fun on holiday in Ashland, until we find out there is a huge wild fire in Calaveras County approaching the homes of five of us, a six-hour drive from where we are standing.

We headed home only to be evacuated from our homes.  We were lucky, the wind changed just before getting to West Point; so many were not so lucky.

I personally know only one family who was burned out; they are Lynn Keever and Charlie Campbell.  Lynn and Charlie are jewelers, Crystal Geometrics is their business and along with Lynn’s son, James Keever, made many of their pieces using dichroic glass.  Even if you already know the beautiful creation that is dichroic glass, maybe you’ll like what Wikipedia tells us about it.   “Multiple ultra-thin layers of different metals (such as gold or silver); oxides of such metals as titanium, chromium, aluminium, zirconium, or magnesium; or silica are vaporised by an electron beam in a vacuum chamber.”  With all that going on, it better be something good, and it is.  Oh yeah.

Thoughts of all that beautiful glass lost to use because it was ruined by the wild fire for use in the medium of jewelry, rankled.  Surely there must be some other way to use it.  I asked Lynn if she had thought of using it in some other way, maybe a “beauty out of devastation” sort of thing, but she said she just wasn’t going to go back there.  If I wanted to, she said, I could go collect whatever might be usable. 

My husband and I saw what it was that Lynn did not want to see.  The house was mostly ash.  Ceiling and roof had collapsed onto the bottom floor covering everything in a thick layer of wet ash (it had just rained) and melted asphalt shingles.  We started poking around in what had been the work room, identified by the kilns, still standing. 

Metal containers of colored glass rods stood like wilted bouquets on a window ledge.  An optical glass “diamond” 4 inches tall had shattered inside but retained its overall shape. Metal jewelers tools, saws, glass cutters, pieces of metal that were unidentifiable were crusted black, some with the beautiful glass melted on.  Many of the glass elements to be used in jewelry pieces that Lynn and Charlie had already created were bent like Dali clocks, or intruded upon by the odd screw or nail.

Thin sheets of the glass had been arranged in stacks and will stay stacked forever; they formed amorphous layered shapes that gleamed in the sun.  What can I do with this stuff?  Worry about that later, it’s too beautiful just as it is, not to be given a second chance.

We scrubbed, soaked, picked at, sanded, and admired in the sun the booty we had collected.  Ash had melted into some of the glass, asphalt coated or splattered or welded pieces together; some of all that came off, not all.

Now!  What to do with all this grand stuff!  Yikes!  Perhaps outline the wood grain of a Manzanita stump with narrow strips of the glass, maybe a few of those lovely, almost flat shards on the top…or instead a spray of those wiggly colored glass rods.  How about some mobiles to hang in the sun to be reminded of the glory that is dichroic glass… and to remember what this has all been about for me, bringing something beautiful out of something so bad.